Biden Didn’t Tell You the Truth About Afghanistan

There’s more to Afghanistan than what you’ve been told. It’s not just a humanitarian crisis, but one at whose heart lies failure, deception, and cowardice. In telling you the Afghan army was well equipped for war, Biden didn’t tell you the truth. In telling you no one expected the Taliban would take over as quickly as they did, Biden blatantly lied. In telling you the Taliban was able to sweep through Afghanistan at light speed because the Afghan army didn’t have the will to fight, Biden completely left out a large part of the story.

And I’ve chosen my words there consciously. Biden, at times, was misrepresenting assumptions as fact. Other times, he chose not to tell you the whole story. And finally, when it came to no one expecting the swiftness with which the Taliban took over Afghanistan, he downright lied. Make no mistake — there were no intelligence failures here. This was a deliberate attempt on Biden’s part to spin the narrative, cover his own tracks, and find someone else to blame for his own failures.

When push came to shove, as the Taliban took over more and more of Afghanistan, the Afghan army was anything but ready for war. Ben Solomon, a Vice News journalist who was on the ground in Afghanistan, pinned the surrender on the Afghan military being underfed, under-supplied, exhausted, and out-gunned. And yes, Ben’s statement only stands true for the specific soldiers he saw, albeit a relatively large number. But there’s evidence to suggest what he saw holds true across the board.

Abdul Basit, writing for AlJazeera, states that Afghanistan’s defense and interior ministries were rife with corruption; meaning funds, ammunition, and food supplies would get stolen before they ever reached Afghani soldiers. Patrick Cockburn, writing for the Independent, claimed: “Trillions of dollars were spent by the US in Afghanistan, but Afghan soldiers were often short of food, ammunition, fuel and could not even get defective weapons replaced.” He, however, in stark contrast to the West, blamed the lack of basic necessities on corruption at the American end.

Nevertheless, and to make matters worse, as Basit argues, Afghan commanders would steal money by submitting funding requests for soldiers who hadn’t even signed up for the army. And he continues to argue that, in the midst of all this, “… ANDSF personnel were kept unpaid and retained on duty without permission to leave and see their families for months.”

So not only were the Afghan soldiers underpaid, underfed, and low on ammunition — there weren't that many of them to begin with. Over 118,000 of the “300,000 strong” Afghan army were actually police officers.

An army that was only further weakened once America had withdrawn vital logistical support for the Afghan air force. Not only did it pull its own planes out, it also called back 16,000 civilian contractors who were responsible for maintaining Afghani helicopters. So, as you can imagine, when they actually needed those helicopters, they couldn’t fly.

And it gets worse. Not only did Biden leave out such crucial context, it’s possible he never knew how “good” the Afghan military was to begin with. CIA’s former Counterterrorism Chief for South and Southwest Asia, Douglas London, who worked on Afghanistan for the Trump administration and for Biden when he was a candidate, said the following:

“… the Department of Defense was unwilling to objectively evaluate the resolve and capacity of those they trained, equipped, and advised to resist a forthcoming Taliban offensive…”

America’s aid spending watchdog for Afghanistan went a step further. Not only did it state that it was almost impossible for the U.S. military to know whether the Afghan military could function without it, it was, despite that fact, “persistently overoptimistic” about its military capability.

There’s evidence to suggest the watchdog was right. Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank and a former federal official, stated that Afghan soldiers were “constantly overburdened” and “taking excessive casualties.”

So, now that you have the crucial bit of context that Biden left out, is it fair to say the Afghan military simply didn’t have the “will to fight?”

I’d argue, no. Not only weren’t they ready to fight, they were faced with an enemy that never dies. Literally — never. A fact evidenced in Ian Fritz’s account, who spent 600 hours eavesdropping on the Taliban in order to provide threat warnings to allied forces. He describes the Taliban’s ability to motivate each other to fight indefinitely as unmatched. And he couldn’t be more right. Despite twenty years of occupation and the fact that over 50,000 have been killed by Western forces, the Taliban have ended up right where they started — at the helm of Afghanistan.

But even then, and despite Biden’s accusations, members of the Afghan military are fighting the Taliban, attempting to taking the country back district by district.
Which leads us to a logical question: why would Biden have bothered with victim-blaming in the first place? The answer might have something to do with the fact he had voluntarily taken on responsibility for the events that had unfolded — and failed to deliver.
Back in June, at the G7 summit in Britain, Biden had assured allies that U.S. security enablers would be present in Afghanistan during the withdrawal of NATO forces. Why? To keep Kabul safe. That never happened.