Why did an Afghan government the US built up for decades collapse in days?

Less than six weeks before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s presidential palace in Kabul, President Joe Biden insisted a Taliban takeover of the country was “highly unlikely,” citing the strength of a U.S.-trained military that he appears to have vastly overestimated.

“The Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban,” Biden told reporters on July 8. “It is not inevitable.”

The president also flatly rejected the suggestion Americans could wind up fleeing the U.S. embassy in Kabul in scenes reminiscent of the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. As military helicopters departed the embassy Sunday, that prediction also turned out to be incorrect.

“The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army,” Biden had said. “They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”

Biden remained publicly confident that a government and military the U.S. had spent hundreds of billions of dollars building up and supporting over the last 20 years could hold off the Taliban. However, leaked intelligence reports indicated U.S. officials believed the Taliban might march into Kabul within weeks or months after American troops withdrew.

Even those projections turned out to overstate the competence and commitment of Afghan security forces, which ultimately collapsed in a matter of days, often without putting up much of a fight. The civilian government also crumbled quickly, with President Ashraf Ghani escaping to Uzbekistan Sunday to avoid “a flood of bloodshed.”

“The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated," Biden said Monday afternoon in his first remarks on the Taliban takeover. "So what's happened? Afghanistan's political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight... American troops cannot and should not be fighting and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

The Taliban’s conquest of the country had been building up since Biden affirmed in April that he intended to end U.S. military engagement regardless of conditions on the ground. The militants began seizing provincial capitals in early August, and it took them a little over a week to reach Kabul as victories mounted.

“On Aug. 5, the Taliban and their al-Qaida partners did not control a single province,” said Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “In 11 days, they took control of the large majority of provinces in Afghanistan.”

Biden inherited a commitment from former President Donald Trump to get all American troops out of Afghanistan by May 1, but he delayed that deadline until Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that spurred the U.S. into its longest war. He completed most of that effort ahead of schedule, and he is now scrambling to send up to 7,000 troops back in to ensure the safe evacuation of Americans and Afghans who had worked with them.

“They totally blew this one,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told CNN. “They completely underestimated the strength of the Taliban. And Jake, they didn't listen to the intelligence community, because every time I got an I.C. briefing assessment, it was probably the grimmest assessment I have ever heard on Afghanistan.”

Some Democrats and former advisers to President Barack Obama have voiced similar criticisms, with even some who supported the decision to withdraw troops questioning the planning and timing. Ryan Crocker, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan, called Biden’s response “a self-inflicted wound.”

On ABC’s “Good Morning America” Monday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan acknowledged the speed of the country’s collapse was “unexpected,” but he still defended Biden’s Afghanistan policy. He also asserted the administration would not send significant numbers of troops back into the country to battle the Taliban.

"What the president was not prepared to do was enter a third decade of conflict, flowing in thousands of more troops, which was his only other choice, to fight in the middle of a civil war that the Afghan army wouldn't fight for itself," Sullivan said.

It remains to be seen how much of the Biden administration’s miscalculation in Afghanistan resulted from an intelligence failure and how much was wishful thinking by senior officials. However, experts who study the region say the swift resurgence of the Taliban and the surrender of the U.S.-backed government were foreseeable results of an unconditional American withdrawal.

“When U.S. forces started leaving this spring, the last stable leg to the Afghan government collapsed and all parties, from government officials in Kabul to soldiers in the field and local leaders, essentially went their own way,” said Will Walldorf, a professor at Wake Forest University and author of “To Shape Our World For Good: Master Narratives and Forceful Regime Change in United States Foreign Policy.”

According to William Wechsler, director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, the U.S. took on two enormous challenges in trying to rebuild Afghanistan after toppling the Taliban in 2001: creating a single centralized government in Kabul to oversee a country that never had one before and developing a whole new military force from the ground up.

“We have always failed when we've tried to build another country’s conventional military at scale when the country itself hasn't made its own full national political and economic commitments to do so,” Wechsler said.

Defending the withdrawal in July, President Biden pointed to the raw numbers of Afghans trained by the U.S. and its NATO partners over the last 20 years. He asserted hundreds of thousands of members of the defense and security forces would continue to receive funding and equipment to maintain a formidable operation.

“We provided our Afghan partners with all the tools — let me emphasize: all the tools, training, and equipment of any modern military,” Biden said. “We provided advanced weaponry. And we’re going to continue to provide funding and equipment. And we’ll ensure they have the capacity to maintain their air force.”

Despite that training, U.S. military leaders had made dire predictions about the capabilities of the Afghan forces, both publicly and privately. Some had urged Biden to increase the footprint of U.S. forces in the country indefinitely, and others argued for a more gradual withdrawal dictated by the Taliban’s adherence to an agreement to reduce violence and negotiate peace.

Still, top administration officials maintained the status quo they inherited—an uneasy stalemate with the Taliban with a few thousand U.S. troops on the ground—was unsustainable. Reneging on the commitment to leave, they claimed, would have triggered renewed hostilities with an emboldened militant army, requiring a redeployment of many more soldiers into active combat.

“Like it or not, there was an agreement that the forces would come out on May 1,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Had they not, had we not begun that process, which is what the president did, and the Taliban saw, then we would have been back at war with the Taliban. And we would have been back at war, with tens of thousands of troops having to go in.”

The Biden administration’s hasty efforts to head off further conflict with the Taliban—including an unannounced late-night evacuation of Bagram Air Base—appear to have dampened the already-flailing morale of the Afghan military. Without the promise of U.S. tactical and military support, Bowman said they likely had little incentive to stand their ground.

“One cannot overestimate the psychological blow to Afghan forces from what they perceived fairly as an American abandonment,” he said.

The downfall of the Afghan military was not necessarily as sudden as it seemed. Media reports indicate it was the result of months of savvy planning and maneuvering by the Taliban, as well as entrenched corruption, mismanagement, and discipline problems in the security forces that had been allowed to fester for years.

According to The Washington Post, Taliban leaders began negotiating deals with low-ranking government officials early last year, around the time the Trump administration committed to withdrawal. They secured surrenders in rural villages first and then moved onto districts and eventually provincial capitals.

“The Taliban took over Afghanistan without winning a real battle,” Wechsler said.

A 2017 report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction assessed that the Afghan security forces would likely deteriorate after an American withdrawal. There was no indication the military improved substantially since then, even as the Taliban continued reconstituting its strength.

“Despite U.S. government expenditures of more than $70 billion in security sector assistance to design, train, advise, assist, and equip the ANDSF since 2002, the Afghan security forces are not yet capable of securing their own nation,” the report stated.

According to Walldorf, some of the obstacles hindering the development of a functional military were deep-seated and would have been difficult to overcome. The country had no unifying identity and centuries-old divisions percolated under the surface, while the Taliban faught for a clear, cohesive vision of an Islamic theocracy.

“There has been rot at the center of the Afghan state and military since the beginning of the U.S. occupation,” he said. “Endemic corruption meant that an every-man-for-himself mentality set in across the government and military from the start.”

Bowman stressed the Afghan troops did fight back in some provinces, and special forces moved around the country trying to brush back Taliban advances. However, those offensives left what remained of the military weakened and scattered, unable to provide a more coherent defense as the Taliban swept toward Kabul with unexpected speed in recent days.

Once the Taliban began capturing provinces without much visible resistance, convincing soldiers to lay down their lives defending the remaining territory only became harder. Many simply walked away from their posts or accepted payoffs from the Taliban rather than fighting.

“Momentum is a powerful thing in war,” Wechsler said. “Enemy momentum combined with the perception of abandonment always destroys morale — and then militaries break, flee and turn. It’s a story as old as warfare itself, but one that the U.S. government clearly underestimated in its analyses on Afghanistan.”

The White House and its supporters have cited the rapid capitulation of a government the U.S. propped up for two decades as proof that getting troops out before more American blood was shed was the right call. They questioned whether an Afghan government that could not mount even a perfunctory defense of its capital city could ever have survived on its own.

"One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country," President Biden said in a statement Saturday.

Some experts disagree with the assessment that the Afghan power structure was doomed to collapse sooner or later. According to Bowman, the government could potentially have retained its grip on control with minimal U.S. intelligence and military support.

“The bottom line is, they held for 20 years,” he said.

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The Biden administration determined continuing to dedicate those resources to Afghanistan no longer served U.S. interests, even if officials recognized the failure of the government was a potential outcome. The fact that it happened so quickly, Walldorf suggested, is evidence that the White House critically misjudged both the power of the Taliban and the weakness of the Afghan forces.

“Despite skepticism about the strength of the Afghan government and corruption, it seems the administration may have been deluded into thinking U.S. efforts at two decades of nation-building were more successful than they really were,” he said.