The Afghan gov't overthrown by Taliban never existed - ex-soldier
Former US soldier discusses how myths, bad data, desire for promotions, corruption and waste underpinned the Afghan war.
“They believed it because they had to; they couldn’t bring themselves to admit that this might not be real, it was just a sham,” said Graham Platner, who served in Iraq and then Afghanistan as a US soldier, and later as a security contractor. “Military officers are not trained to admit that maybe we can’t do this.”
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Platner reveals the deeply troubling levels of corruption, waste and myths that underpinned the US role in Afghanistan, and explains why the country fell to the Taliban in just a few days.
The Taliban captured their first provincial capital of Zaranj on August 7, and by August 15 they were in Kabul after President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country. US forces had left Bagram Air Base in early July, roughly a month before the Taliban offensive gained momentum and swept over the country.
Platner came to Afghanistan with high hopes in 2010. He’d been in Iraq, and would ultimately serve for eight years with the US Infantry. He came to Afghanistan with the surge of US troops that was supposed to turn around a war that had already dragged on for a decade.
“My unit was deployed in November 2010 as part of the Obama surge to move troops into the country to conduct counter-insurgency the right way,” he said. “I believed it before I left.”
Platner had seen mistakes in Iraq, and believed that Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the International Security Assistance Forces, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, his predecessor, were saying the right things about Afghanistan.
McChrystal said “that we would now drive on the road like we are part of the Afghans, and walk more and get out of our trucks,” remembers Platner. “And as an infantry sergeant who believed counter-insurgency could work, I wanted to do this, and I was excited to go and fight in an army that was going to take seriously this strategy that I had fully bought into.”
Then he saw how things really were. While the generals said the right things and lower-level US officers believed it and tried to get it done, “everyone in between doesn’t want to do any of this.” He sketches a pattern of officers being asked to quantify their successes through the number of missions and number of engagements carried out meeting Afghans. As officers wanted promotions, they were incentivized to put in big numbers, but not necessarily accomplish anything real on the ground.
“How do you quantify making Afghans happy?” Platner asks. “It is immeasurable and you need metrics, like killing this many enemy, and spending this much money, and this many combat patrols. It doesn’t matter what you did.”
WHILE THE US Army sought to get good “stats” on what was happening to pass up the chain of command, the Afghan army and police were largely an army only on paper. In northeast Afghanistan, where Platner was a rifle squad leader, he spent most of his time living with Afghan National Police, who were supposed to be performing paramilitary operations as well. The Afghan army in his area was being advised by the French Foreign Legion. He says this was in the Ghorband District not far from Kabul.
While the US brigade moved around a bit, his role in training Afghan police provided an insight into the failures across Afghanistan at the time.
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/the-afghan-govt-overthrown-by-taliban-never-existed-source-677178