Conversations on Strategy Podcast – Ep 7 – Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III, Dr. Todd Greentree, Dr. Conrad Crane – Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces

The rapid collapse of Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in August 2021 was widely anticipated and due to its structural constraints and qualitative decline from 2018–21. This article provides a targeted analysis of ANDSF operational liabilities and qualitative limitations, referencing often overlooked statements by US and Afghan political and military officials, data from official US government reports, and prescient NGO field analyses. The painful ANDSF experience illuminates several principles that must be considered as US policymakers turn toward security force assistance for proxy and surrogate military forces in conflict with the partners of America’s emerging great-power geostrategic competitors—China and Russia.

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Keywords: Taliban, collapse, security force assistance, Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), Doha Accord

Episode Transcript: “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III, Dr. Conrad C. Crane, and Dr. Todd Greentree. Lynch is the author of “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces” (“Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces”), which was featured in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Lynch is a distinguished research fellow in the Institute of National Strategic Studies (Institute for National Strategic Studies) of the National Defense University. A retired Army colonel with Afghanistan tours, Lynch publishes frequently on Afghanistan.

Crane is currently a research historian in the Strategic Studies Institute of the (US) Army War College. A retired Army officer, Crane holds a PhD from Stanford University

Greentree is a former US foreign service officer. Currently, he is a member of the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University, and he teaches at the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico.

Thanks so much for making time for this today. Tom, would you please just give us a brief synopsis of your article?

Thomas F. Lynch III

Yeah, hi, Stephanie. Thanks for having me here, and great to be with, uh, Con and Todd. I thought it was a good time to publish something that reviewed the history of why it was not surprising that the Afghan national military wound up where it is. And so my article kind of goes into that, focusing in three substantive areas. First, it’s to define the fact that the Afghan military was never designed by the US and its partners to stand alone. There were critical capabilities that it would have required to stand alone against an autonomous insurgency with external patrons that were never present and could not have been expected to be present. Second, I thought it important to chronicle the fact that the important linkages between the Afghan military and, particularly, American support military structures—these were already pulling apart as early as 2018—not in the last year, not subsequent to the Doha Accord (Doha Agreement) of February 2020, but have been pulling apart pretty visibly for those that were paying attention, starting at least in 2018. So I kind of go through what those were as well. And then, finally, I offer here this notion that it is a myth that the Afghan national military fell apart unexpectedly at the end.

There were a number of government organizations, government agencies, military leaders, as well as nongovernment agencies on the ground that were reporting flaws, particularly in the morale that were very, very visible starting in 2018 and became acute subsequent to the Doha Accord (Doha Agreement)—that was an accord between the United States government and the Afghan Taliban. The government of Afghanistan was not a party to that. And, indeed, the accord that we signed in February of 2020 really committed the United States to withdraw and committed the Afghan government to negotiate with its enemy, the Afghan Taliban.

And the Afghan Taliban, in response to that, gave several promises. They made a formal promise not to attack American and coalition forces, but not to stop attacking Afghan government or Afghan military forces. And indeed, this put the Afghan military forces formally in a place where they had been—at least, informally, since 2018—as the monkey in the middle without the organic, qualitative ability to fight a qualified and capable Afghan Taliban insurgency, but with the knowledge that the United States had a clock ticking, and we were going to get out, and they were going to be left alone. And therefore, it made great sense that they were already bartering and bantering behind the scenes to cut the best deal they could for them and their families and, therefore, to collapse rather quickly once the United States military was fully out of the country and the Afghan Taliban had not politically reconciled with the government of Afghanistan.

Host

Con, you say our approach to security assistance in Afghanistan was flawed in the very beginning by a problem with advising and assisting. Will you expand on that, please?

Conrad C. Crane

Sure, glad to. My point is this: Since World War II, the United States has made a common mistake in its attempts to advise and assist as we always try to create indigenous security forces that are modeled like us. So we end up with a force that is heavily dependent on firepower, requires extensive sustainment that they really cannot do, which is one of the points that Tom brings up. We create forces that can’t really be maintained or sustained if we’re not there.

A new twist in the model has been also an overreliance on elite units. Sir William Slim, in his excellent memoir on World War II, Defeat into Victory (Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945), has a part where he really criticizes the creation of elite units because they take the best troops out of conventional forces and dilute the quality of those conventional forces. In Afghanistan, we did the same thing. We quickly created an Afghanistan special forces and took the best troops out of the conventional forces, which were much more important than the special forces group we set up. We also had a similar problem with the air force. We gave them the right aircraft, the Super Tucanos, which are much more appropriate and much easier to maintain than sophisticated jets. But at the same time, we set them up as a separate air force. I actually did some consulting with the leadership on trying to fix the problems of the air force, and the air force may have been configured to support the ground forces, but they wanted to fly independent missions like they had B-52s.

And also it became the bailiwick at the Afghan elites. So between this idea they were gonna be an independent air force and the elite attitudes, it made any kind of joint operations almost impossible. I mean, a better model would have been US Marine Corps instead of US Air Force . . . have a Air Force was tightly tied to ground forces that independent. But you had the same thing in Vietnam. We tend to repeat these same problems with the way we structure these indigenous security forces.

Host

Tom, what are your thoughts here?

Lynch

First, as Con notes, there’s this issue we have post-World War II of trying to make ‘em look like us. But when we don’t make ‘em look like us—and there are many instances where we didn’t, to include going back with the South Korean forces prior to the North Korean attack in 1950—we tend to limit things where we think we have innate ability and where we want to constrain that side from having that ability for fear that they have a different political agenda. So in the case back in the 1940s, early 1950s with the South Koreans, we were concerned that South Korean leader Syngman Rhee would use souped-up artillery and American-style aircraft to go attack the North, which we didn’t want to happen unt il after the North attacked first. We also—early on, in South Vietnam—limited the design and things we provided them because we didn’t want them ranging north and going after the Chinese, for example, and provoking a war there.

Here is a highlight in the article. There are two other things that influence the design of the Afghan military forces to, as Con says, look like us, but not all the way to the high end, which is back to my point about them not being able to just stand alone to provide their own security against neighbors in a dangerous neighborhood. The first of those is our concern over costs. We’re concerned that if we give them too much high-end stuff, it’s gonna be too expensive, too difficult. And so, as Con mentions, sometimes, we look beyond that, but other times, we find ourselves constrained by that. And I argue here that’s what we were with the Afghan national security forces, particularly in the 2000s—and we were back and forth and back and forth about “Give ‘em more.” “No, give ‘em less.” “No, we can’t afford it. So let’s us use our equipment that allows for these things that we don’t want the...