“Every nation has a choice to make,” President George W. Bush on the day that bombs began falling on Oct. 7, 2001. How U.S. leaders deliberately misled the public about America’s longest war
Saturday, August 14
Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong.
The near-collapse of the Afghan army in the space of just a few stunning weeks is prompting the military and Washington’s policymakers to reflect on their failures over the course of nearly two decades.
To many, the roots of the disaster go back to the war’s earliest days, when the Taliban was first driven from power and the United States, still reeling from the shock of the 9/11 attacks, set about building a government in Kabul.
Some two dozen prominent Afghans met in Bonn, Germany, with officials from the U.S. government, NATO and the United Nations to form a new Afghan government crafted in the image of the United States and its European allies.
“You look at the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and it was trying to create a Western democracy,” said Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010.
“In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.”
I stand by my theory that when the US military work was finally tested -- nd we got to see how well they had actually built and trained the Afghan army after all these years and dollars -- it all fell apart so fast because the US military honestly never thought the Afghans would be called on to defend themselves.
I think military assumed they'd have a permanent force stationed there to provide support. The forces fell faster than we thought, not because America planned a poor withdrawal -- be honest and see what is happening... -- but because without the US there holding their hands, the Afghan army was never going to fight successfully for their country and the US military was playing us all along...
Think of it like spending 20 years pumping federal money into a new and improved rebuilt school district where the teachers doing the training insist on no tests for all those years, and then, when their pupils are actually called upon to stand and deliver... well we wouldn't accept those results in education, why do we in the military? Somebody failed in promising what we were paying for them to deliver, and it wasn't the withdrawal, which only showed up the failure of the American-trained Afghan forces.
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