Watchdog: US troop pullout was key factor in Afghan collapse

WASHINGTON — A government watchdog says decisions by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan were the key factors in the collapse of that nation’s military. Lawmakers pointed to two key examples: U.S. intelligence believed that the Kabul government would hold on for months against the Taliban, and more recently believed that Ukraine’s forces would quickly fall to Russia’s invasion. “Outcomes in a war like this, an outcome that is a strategic failure — the enemy is in charge in Kabul, there’s no way else to describe that — that is a cumulative effect of 20 years,” Milley said, adding that lessons need to be learned, including whether the U.S. military made the Afghans overly dependent on American technology in a mistaken effort to make the Afghan army look like the American army. “When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up.” More broadly, the SIGAR report said that both the U.S. and Afghan governments “lacked the political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary to reconstruct an entire security sector in a war-torn and impoverished country.” Neither side, it said, “appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges.” As a result, it said, the Afghan military couldn’t operate independently and never really became a cohesive force.