'We kept fighting': Afghan soldier recalls political failures behind Kabul disaster

Experts and veterans dispute President Biden's claim that Afghans lacked the will to fight the Taliban

Afghan troops during a military operation in Helmand province, in June last year. Photo: AFP

On the afternoon of August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, Ahmad Javid, a 37-year-old soldier in the Afghan security forces, was preparing to head north to test a new weapon system that his unit had finished training on the day before.

“It was specialised training given to a chosen few of us on new equipment acquired by the military. It was supposed to help us get an upper hand in the battle against the Taliban,” he told The National, speaking from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan.

“But then our commander came and told us to hand over all our weapons and uniforms. He said the Taliban had taken over Arg [the presidential palace] and the president had fled the country. We had lost the war,” Javid said, his voice quivering with emotions.

With a sense of disbelief and betrayal, Javid, along with some of his colleagues, refused to accept defeat. They handed over their weapons but kept their uniform and flags, and left their base towards an uncertain future in hiding.

“I told my commander that neither you nor I have been trained to surrender. We are trained to fight till the last drop of blood in our veins,” he said.

Final Taliban offensive

Similar scenes were unfolding across the country. As the Taliban completed their takeover of Afghanistan, thousands of soldiers were being asked to surrender. Their erstwhile foreign allies were completing a chaotic withdrawal from what had become America’s longest war.

US President Joe Biden appeared on national TV the following day, announcing that the Afghan military had collapsed.

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he said, adding that the US did everything they could to support the Afghan forces but they failed anyway, “sometimes without fighting”.

“We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future,” he said.

In April 2021, Afghan forces controlled 129 of the nearly 400 districts in the country, but their area of control plummeted to a mere 73 districts by July 23, according to Long War Journal, a US defence analysis website.

As President Biden suggested, many of these districts were indeed handed-over to the Taliban without a fight.

However, many former soldiers, commanders and security experts strongly disagree with President Biden’s assessment that blames Afghan soldiers for their defeat.

“The ANDSF [Afghan National Defence and Security Forces] did not wholly collapse in a matter of days,” Johnathan Schroden, director of CNA’s Countering Threats and Challenges Program, pointed out in a recent paper, which analysed the four months of security breakdown, influenced by various internal and external factors.

“The ANDSF’s collapse — while it occurred over the course of nearly four months and was surprising to serious observers even on that timeline — had been years in coming,” he wrote.

No exit strategy

Contrary to President Biden’s claims, the US did not give the Afghans everything they needed, Mr Schroden pointed out, listing three major aspects where the US failed: ensuring logistical self-reliance for Afghan forces, timely reinforcements and leadership development.

“The most important thing they could have done was identify backfill solutions for the contracted maintenance that was keeping the Afghan Air Force and the ANDSF vehicle fleet operating. The US waited too long to begin thinking about and working on solutions to keep contracted maintenance support going and then withdrew too quickly without having identified any such solutions,” Mr Schroden said in an interview with The National.

Mr Schroden, among other security experts, had advocated for a six-month extension to the original March withdrawal deadline.

“It was for the express purpose of having a longer window to identify new contract solutions and to focus on preparing the ANDSF for the withdrawal. Instead, the Biden administration chose to withdraw all of those capabilities—without replacement—in two months,” he added.

According to Mr Schroden, the ANDSF’s failure had many fathers. “The weakness of the ANDSF’s posture and its low morale are attributable to Afghan political and security leaders, as is the government’s abysmal failure to devise and implement an effective counter-strategy as the Taliban campaign unfolded,” he said.

Javid strongly agreed with Mr Schroden’s assessment.

“The Afghan security leadership was very politicised and made a lot of mistakes, starting with the appointment of an inexperienced youth to a senior position,” he said, referring to Hamdullah Mohib, the National Security Advisor in the Ghani government who was often criticised for lacking credentials to serve the military.

“As someone trained in warfare, we noticed how his lack of strategic insight or understanding of war would translate into approaches that were very wrong,” he said. “For example, we never understood what was the purpose of tactical withdrawals. We withdrew even from the safe districts we controlled instead of consolidating our hold,” he pointed out.

Mr Schroden argued that the US administration was already familiar with issues facing Afghan forces. “Prior to President Biden’s decision to leave, the United States had failed to adequately address these weaknesses — and in the case of air power, it had consistently made decisions that exacerbated them,” he said.

The US’s rapid withdrawal is also attributed to the sudden fall of the Afghan capital, after it was deserted by the Afghan president. In October, US Secretary Antony Blinken revealed that the US government had a plan to transfer power to the Taliban, but it fell through when President Ghani fled the country.

Without enough troops, the US was not in the position to secure the capital, Mr Schroden said. “The US was down to around a thousand troops… and had the US tried to take control of and secure Kabul, it would have required a sizable influx of new troops and would have been at odds with the Taliban,” he said.

“In hindsight, I’d say that by mid-late June, it was already too late. The first major loss of districts occurred in the last half of June, after which the dominoes were falling so steadily that it would have been hard to reverse them. But also because by that point the US had withdrawn 80 per cent or more of its capabilities from Afghanistan,” he explained. “If the US was going to intervene seriously to stop what was unfolding, it would have had to do so by early June at the latest,” he said.

During his first night as a fugitive in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Javid, who was otherwise known to his friends as a “cold-hearted and emotionless person”, wept as he had never before.

“This was my childhood dream—to serve my country as an army officer. Ever since I was growing up in the refugee camps in Pakistan where I watched Pakistani soldiers in uniform protect their country, I wanted to do the same for my country” he said, choking back tears. “Biden says we didn’t fight, but we did. I refuse to accept that the Afghan soldiers did not fight. We kept fighting, even when their own soldiers stopped fighting,” he said.