Afghanistan. There Was Never Anything to Save.

 


Our 20 year fool's errand. 

The country's last finance minister before the Taliban return has given an interview to BBC. Khalid Payenda says his country fell, not to the Taliban, but from corruption within.

Mr Payenda, who resigned and left Afghanistan as the Islamist group advanced, said records showing that security forces greatly outnumbered the Taliban were incorrect.

"The way the accountability was done, you would ask the chief in that province how many people you have and based on that you could calculate salaries and ration expenses and they would always be inflated."

Khalid Payenda told the BBC that most of the 300,000 troops and police on the government's books did not exist.

He said phantom personnel were added to official lists so that generals could pocket their wages.

Payenda estimated the Afghan National Army never fielded more than 50,000 troops and many ordinary soldiers never saw their pay. Many reached accommodations with the Taliban and evaporated as the Talibs launched a lightning offensive to seize Kabul catching even allied commanders unprepared.

In the early days a staffer from the Senate foreign relations committee gave testimony that establishing a stable, democratic Afghanistan was impossible without purging the dual scourges of warlordism and tribalism. That was a prescription that could never be met.

Instead of suppressing warlordism, Hamid Karzai (himself a warlord) and the Americans decided it was easier to give them positions of power within the Afghan government than risk having to face them in an armed insurrection. In other words, we drank the hemlock from the git-go. After that it was Kabuki theatre.

Afghanistan is perhaps the most tribal nation anywhere. It consists of 14 ethnic groups dominated by Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazari, Turkmen and Baloch. Those are the top 14, the tribes listed in the constitution. There are others. 

It's 97 per cent Islamic of which 90 per cent is Sunni and Shiites (mainly Hazari) represent the remainder. Sunni Islam is associated with the US embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and every King, prince, sheikh and emir in the Gulf States as well as the radical madrassas they fund. Thanks to Pakistan they even have the 'Islamic Bomb.'

There are more than 40 languages spoken in Afghanistan. The most commonly spoken language is Darsi, a dialect of Persian (Shiite) Farsi. Darsi is the lingua franca. Pashto, the tongue of the Pashtuns, al Qaeda and ISIS is spoken by just 47 per cent.

For the West, the Afghan war, start to finish, was a fool's errand.  Across the western forces, ISAF, I can't think of one general from any of those countries who had the courage and decency to speak the truth.  Neither could our various heads of state.  The finger pointing that broke out on the fall of Kabul that was dark farce, nothing less or more. Hell we still had generals claiming the Afghanistan we built could have been saved. All we needed were more troops.

Remember this. The next time one of these conflicts breaks out, we're going to be sending our kids to war under these same generals. 


Comments

  1. Owen GrayNovember 10, 2021 at 12:52 PM

    Many fools -- and lots of money to be made.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibNovember 10, 2021 at 2:20 PM

      A great deal of blame lies with our generals, Owen. Guys like Hillier who talked their way into fighting wars they knew neither how to win nor how and when to leave. They seem to be quite gifted, however, in peccadillos.

      Delete

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