Honesty seen in an Afghan General’s op-ed piece from
Business Insider (NY Times origin) with this headline:
“Afghan general says
army was ‘betrayed by politics’ and blames Trump, Biden, and Afghan leaders for
losing the war to the Taliban”
As the Afghan army faces criticism for losing to the
Taliban, Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat argues that the Afghan Army was “betrayed by
politics and presidents” in his NY Times op-ed.
First, watch this 2:30 background video on Sadat:
Highlights and his specific points are below (organized to fit the blog):
As the Taliban swept across Afghanistan, the Afghan armed
forces capitulated and crumbled. The Afghan army has been criticized for
failing to fight back, but Sadat argues that his troops were “betrayed by
politics.”
For example when President Joe Biden said on August 16, the day after the Taliban reached Kabul: “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
Sadat, said there is more to it than that, offering another perspective on the army's defeat, writing: “We were betrayed by politics and presidents.”
He further argued that Afghan forces have fought bravely over the past two decades of war, in which more than 60,000 Afghan security force personnel died.
In an interview just days before the Taliban took the Afghan
capital, Sadat told AFP news: “I know we are going to win. I know
this is our country that the Taliban are failing, that they will fail sooner or
later. The final days of fighting were surreal. We engaged in intense
firefights on the ground against the Taliban as U.S. fighter jets circled overhead,
effectively spectators. My soldiers heard the planes and asked why they were
not providing air support, morale was devastated.”
The general said that even after he was called to Kabul, his
soldiers continued to fight until they no longer had the support to continue,
at which point they were forced to retreat.
Sadat further wrote: “I'm not here to absolve the Afghan
Army of mistakes (acknowledging that there are many failings), but the fact is,
many of us fought valiantly and honorably, only to be let down by American and
Afghan leadership.”
He said that the Afghan military collapsed because President
Donald Trump's February 2020 deal with the Taliban: “Doomed us by putting an
expiration date on American interest in the region, and that emboldened the
insurgent forces. They could sense victory and knew it was just a matter of
waiting out the Americans. Then when Biden decided to uphold the deal in April
2021 that was when everything started to go downhill. Biden's full and
accelerated withdrawal only exacerbated the situation because it ignored the
conditions on the ground. The Taliban had a firm end date from the Americans
and feared no military reprisal for anything they did in the interim, sensing
the lack of U.S. will, and that led the Taliban to further ramp up its efforts
to retake the country.”
Sadat said his troops faced as many as seven car bombings a
day in July, but “they still stood our ground.”
Sadat said that another
critical factor affecting the Afghan military's ability to fight, even as the U.S.
insisted that the Afghan forces had the capability and capacity to fight and
defend their country, was the loss of contractor support for the aircraft,
high-end ammunition, and real-time intelligence-gathering resources.
He also wrote: “There were also problems within Afghanistan
that contributed to the army's defeat. There was only so much the Americans
could do when it came to the well-documented corruption that rotted our government
and military that left troops without adequate food and fuel supplies, creating
a situation that destroyed the morale of my troops.”
Sadat also criticized President Ghani, who fled Afghanistan
as Taliban forces reached the capital city. He said that in his rush to escape,
the president effectively eliminated any chance of negotiating an agreement
with the Taliban that might have made it easier to maintain control of the city
and facilitate evacuations.
My 2 Cents: Sadat is a
proven leader that nations wanting to help the Afghan’s regain control of their
country from the Taliban might outta check him out, and later support. He seems
fit for the job.
Good story on him. Stay
tuned.
Thanks for stopping by,
No comments:
Post a Comment