Taliban takeover of Afghanistan: implications & next steps for Pakistan

[Dalit]

He will take the tens of millions of dollars from aid money which he kept for himself, and will probably move to London.

London. The only place where absconders, crooks and anti-state elements pretend to live a happy life.

 

[Tomcats]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1426968775220469760

 

[ghazi52]

Commercial flights out of Kabul suspended

All commercial flights out of Kabul's International Airport have been suspended, according to a Nato official.

Only military aircraft are allowed to operate.

It comes as British Airways confirmed it was currently not flying through Afghanistan's airspace.

 

[Bouncer]

i have a question What da fck happened to Afghan Army ? Why no fight or effort to stop Taliban takeover of kabul ?

Will appreciate techincal answers rather than mamboo jambo

its very strange and unbelievable that 300k strong didnt put a fight and that talis just walked in and took over !??

One word: Corruption.

What moral authority did Ghani or even ANA Generals have to ask their men to fight? When the soldier on ground knew that these assholes will just pack their bags and **** off as soon as shit even nears the fan. And this is exactly what happened. All the bigshots are gone.

Why would the ANA soldier fight when the money that's supposed to be his salary is siphoned off at the top and the food that is supposed to feed him at the front line is sold off by his superiors.

So the ANA soldiers on the ground simply said **** it. There are reports of soldiers ditching their uniforms and walking away by the units. Some even got paid by the Taliban for this.

 

[SuvarnaTeja]

i have a question What da fck happened to Afghan Army ? Why no fight or effort to stop Taliban takeover of kabul ?

Will appreciate techincal answers rather than mamboo jambo

its very strange and unbelievable that 300k strong didnt put a fight and that talis just walked in and took over !??

Because US made a decision to leave Afghanistan.

 

[Ace of Spades]

Yes, I have pain because I mourn for them :



And I mourn for the progressives, common people and community minorities who will now either emigrate or go underground or live in misery in the wonderful "Islamic" Emirate of Afghanistan of course co-sponsored by Western governments.



Please read my reply to -blitzkrieg- in post# 35.

Lanada ka musalman of gangaland are mourning over Kashmir as well?

Rapes, murders, state terrorism? as i said; cry a bit louder.

P.S. soon you would be crying over Kashmir as well; if not yet!

 

[Reichsmarschall]

Somehow I get a feeling Taliban had a lot of helping hands in their blitzkrieg.
This is well coordinated commando type of execution.

Yeah that is what i was wondering. It's not possible for illiterate insurgent commanders to plan and execute an operation this brilliantly. This almost feels like one of famous historical military manevry. I wonder who did the thinking for them. Russia and Pakistan?

 

[crankthatskunk]

Wars are fought with grit, determination and purpose.

Not with money and junk training.

 

[terry5]

A tale of two armies: why Afghan forces proved no match for the Taliban

Poorly led and riddled with corruption, the Afghan army was overrun in a matter of weeks

www.theguardian.com

A tale of two armies: why Afghan forces proved no match for the Taliban



Poorly led and riddled with corruption, the Afghan army was overrun in a matter of weeks

• Taliban enters Kabul – live updates

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor
Sun 15 Aug 2021 15.10 BST



The Taliban have 80,000 troops in comparison with a nominal 300,699 serving the Afghan government, yet the whole country has been effectively overrun in a matter of weeks as military commanders surrendered without a fight in a matter of hours.


It is a tale of two armies, one poorly equipped but highly motivated ideologically, and the other nominally well-equipped, but dependent on Nato support, poorly led and riddled with corruption.

The US aid spending watchdog for Afghanistanwarned last month that the US military had little or no means of knowing the capability of the Afghan National Defense and Security forces (ANDSF) when required to operate independently of the US forces, despite spending $88.3bn on security-related reconstruction in Afghanistan up to March 2021.

It found the US military to be persistently overoptimistic about Afghan military capability, even though it had no reliable evidence to make that assessment, and said the departure of thousands of US contractors, agreed by the US with the Taliban in 2020, “could significantly impact the sustainability of the ANDSF, in particular their ability to maintain aircraft and vehicles”.

The watchdog had, it said, repeatedly warned about “the corrosive effects of corruption” within the force. With its reliance on advanced equipment, and with widespread illiteracy in its ranks, the force could not reliably maintain its strength and combat readiness.

Of the $88.3bn spent, the watchdog said: “The question of whether that money was well spent will ultimately be answered by the outcome of the fighting on the ground, perhaps the purest monitoring and evaluation exercise.”


The report’s clear warnings are likely to be reviewed by US Congress as it seeks to understand why such vast spending on training the Afghan military has led to a collapse to the Taliban in a matter of weeks, leaving western politicians shocked and bemused.

It also raises the question of why the Biden administration ever thought it was safe to leave Afghan forces on their own after a decades of dependence on the US for key skills, including air cover, logistics, maintenance, and training support for ANDSF ground vehicles and aircraft; security; base support; and transportation services. The US president said as recently as 8 July that there was no likelihood of Afghanistan being overrun.

At the same time, the level of Taliban attacks were increasing. In each three-month period since 29 February 2020, the date of the US-Taliban agreement, there were significantly more enemy-initiated attacks than in their corresponding quarters the previous year.

Yet a week before Biden said Afghanistan would not be overrun, it was reported by the independent Afghan Analysts Network that the Taliban had captured 127 of the 420 district centres, about 25% of the total, and by 21 July, Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said the figure was more than half. In June, he said, it had been only 81. It was noticeable that some of the districts falling were in traditionally anti-Taliban areas.


The additional problem was a central government facing a severe fiscal crisis precipitated by the loss of customs revenues and declining aid flows. Many officials complained that they had not been paid for months.

Fear was a further factor. As momentum swung towards the Taliban, fostered by Taliban social media, the speed of events became fuelled by fear of revenge and personal scores being settled under cover of a takeover, particularly in a large city like Kabul.

The Afghan government provided no counter-narrative.

By then the US retreat was well under way and near irreversible; its withdrawal was more than 90% complete by 5 July. The process included 984 C-17 aircraft loads being transported out of Afghanistan, more than 17,000 pieces of equipment being turned over, and 10 facilities, including Bagram airfield, being handed over to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defence.

Sigar said $88.3bn had been allocated up to March for security-related reconstruction, compared with $36bn for governance and development, yet it discovered the Pentagon had always always found it “extremely challenging” to evaluate the fighting and administrative capacity of the ANDSF.

It started its multibillion-dollar training of Afghan forces in 2002 and three years later took control of training both the police and military, so US military trainers have had nearly two decades to ready the Afghan forces for a Taliban insurgency.

At the outset, the US began transforming the Afghan National Army from a light-infantry force to a combined-arms service with army, air force, and special forces element.

The Sigar report found that from 2005 the US military had been seeking to evaluate the battle-readiness of the troops they had been training, but by 2010 acknowledged that its monitoring and evaluation procedures “failed to measure more intangible readiness factors, such as leadership, corruption and motivation – all factors that could affect a unit’s ability to put its staffing and equipment to use during actual war-fighting”.

The assessment mechanism changed again in 2013, but in 2014, with few signs of progress emerging, it was decided that the assessment reports should become classified. The focus shifted from battalions to command headquarters.

The report also found a disjunction between what generals told Congress and what lower level officers reported. Sigar reports, for instance, that in March 2011 testimony to Congress, Gen David Petraeus – then the commander of the International Security Assistance Force – claimed that “investments in leader development, literacy and institutions have yielded significant dividends” for the ANDSF, that Afghan forces were taking on significant combat roles against the Taliban, and that Afghan local police units were increasingly limiting the Taliban’s ability to intimidate communities”.


Many other US generals made similarly optimistic claims. But other reports indicated “the absence of success on virtually every level”.

In a 2012 Armed Forces Journal article, Lt Col Daniel Davis, who spent a year in Afghanistan speaking with US troops and their Afghan counterparts, wrote that his observations “bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by US military leaders about conditions on the ground”.

The Sigar report also lambasted the tendency for politicians and senior military to look for good news. It says there is a “natural desire for good news to pass on up the chain of command”.

“In the words of one former senior military official: ‘As intelligence makes its way up higher, it gets consolidated and watered down; it gets politicised. It gets politicked because once policymakers get their hands on it, and frankly, once operational commanders get their hands on it, they put their twist on it. Operational commanders, state department policymakers and Department of Defense policymakers are going to be inherently rosy in their assessments. They will be unaccepting of hard-hitting intelligence.”

 

[Maarkhoor]

i have a question What da fck happened to Afghan Army ? Why no fight or effort to stop Taliban takeover of kabul ?

Will appreciate techincal answers rather than mamboo jambo

its very strange and unbelievable that 300k strong didnt put a fight and that talis just walked in and took over !??

They are bumch of pedophiles.....can't fight with anyone.

 

[Cash GK]

i have a question What da fck happened to Afghan Army ? Why no fight or effort to stop Taliban takeover of kabul ?

Will appreciate techincal answers rather than mamboo jambo

its very strange and unbelievable that 300k strong didnt put a fight and that talis just walked in and took over !??

For that you need to understand their jerga system which is run by elders. Elders always have last saying there. If you understand their jerga system then you don't have ask this question.

 

[PakSarZameen47]

What will this all mean for Pakistan? Loy Afghan/Pashtunistan dream is over for good or are we still at risk of this?

 

[Muhammed45]

 

[Foinikas]

I hope they just leave 1 American alive

Agreed...and the west is much worse at corruption...except they do it speaking eloquently with a suit and tie on

No trust me,the West is much worse at corruption. At least you don't have to build almost everything all over again. Look at Afghanistan,they gave them trillions to fix their country from zero and 20 years now they couldn't even make Kabul look like a modern city. It looked more like a 1970s north African town.
Where did the money for education go? Where did the money,like someone else said above,for roads go? No investments,no buiseness plan and no real army or national security. The vast majority were badly paid conscripts who had cared about finding weed.
No discipline,no dedication. But then again,dedicate your life for what? For a country run by corrupt leaders and tribal warlords who found a funds to grab? They never had a vision for Afghanistan's future. They only wanted to grab money and leave the country when they wouldn't get anymore.

At least the old leaders of Afghanistan in the 60s and 70s had some vision.

 

[pak-marine]

For that you need to understand their jerga system which is run by elders. Elders always have last saying there. If you understand their jerga system then you don't have ask this question.

I think talibans are a bunch of fanatic medevil crazy barbarians however what I think about talibans is not important my question was related to afghan national army where did they vanished