This commentary is by William J. Wolfe, a retired Burlington police corporal and former commander of the Gardez Regional Police Training Center in Afghanistan.
As the world watches the utter collapse of the Afghanistan government, one has to wonder where this failure of leadership began on both the American and Afghanistan sides.
We can blame President Trump, as the Biden administration is doing. Or we can look further back to the Bush-2 administration where a misguided president thought it was smart to take assets from Afghanistan and send them to fight a war in Iraq. Bush was not a student of history. History is rife with examples of leaders who decided to fight a two-front war. And lost.
Before this decision was made, the Taliban in Afghanistan was on its last legs, hiding in the mountains of our “ally” Pakistan during the winter. You remember Pakistan, the country where Bin Laden was given shelter?
By 2006, these gains had slowly started to change. Instead of retreating to the mountains during the winter, the Taliban had continued fighting through the season. This was a tipping point.
The failure of the Afghan government is no surprise to those of us who were there at that time. The first “elected” president, Hamid Karzai, was incompetent and was being controlled by our leaders in Washington. That was part of the problem.
All Washington heard from its leaders, military and political, in Afghanistan was filtered through rose-colored lenses. The information they received in D.C. was so sterilized, President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had no real idea how the strategic landscape had changed.
I was in-country to assist in the training of the Afghan National Police and Border Patrol. We received 500 new students at the police academy every eight weeks to train to fulfill these roles. These were good people who just wanted to provide security to their country and families.
They received rudimentary training, but in the training cadres’ opinion, too much time was wasted on superfluous courses and not enough time was spent on training them for combat.
This was not the USA type of environment for cops. This was a real war zone. But, when these concerns were raised by us, the trainers, our bosses in Kabul didn’t want to hear it. They were part of the “See no evil. Hear no evil. Do no evil” collective. Along with the U.S. State Department.
The Afghan security police/military combination was led by inept individuals who would routinely steal part of their subordinate soldiers’ pay. This totally destroyed any morale the younger troops had and eroded their will to fight.
No one listened and nothing changed and the outcome in 2021 was predictable. Even in 2005. It seems the only ones who are surprised by this abject failure are the ones who weren’t there. Or the ones who ignored it in military leadership roles.
Politicians will use Afghanistan as a political bludgeon to attack their “enemies.” Perhaps they should all look in the mirror to see where the real failure started.
