An Afghan Army general claimed Wednesday that the reason his troops were unable to confront the Taliban was largely due to their sense of betrayal by the United States and President Joe Biden, blaming America for being unable to hold their own country.
“It’s true that the Afghan Army lost its will to fight. But that’s because of the growing sense of abandonment by our American partners and the disrespect and disloyalty reflected in Mr. Biden’s tone and words over the past few months,” Afghan General Sami Sadat wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
“The Afghan Army is not without blame. It had its problems — cronyism, bureaucracy — but we ultimately stopped fighting because our partners already had,” he said.
Sadat recounted the Afghan Army’s three-and-a-half-month campaign to keep the Taliban out of Helmand Province. He said that it was not until President Ashraf Ghani summoned him to Kabul and made him commander of Afghanistan’s special forces that the army ceded control to the Taliban.
“But the Taliban already were entering the city; it was too late,” he said.
"We kept fighting," Afghan Army Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat writes. "But then Mr. Biden confirmed in April he would stick to Mr. Trump’s plan and set the terms for the U.S. drawdown. That was when everything started to go downhill." https://t.co/bZMklQaFqw
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 25, 2021
Sadat stated that the US withdrew critical support from the army, leaving the troops helpless.
“It pains me to see Mr. Biden and Western officials are blaming the Afghan Army for collapsing without mentioning the underlying reasons that happened,” Sadat said. “Political divisions in Kabul and Washington strangled the army and limited our ability to do our jobs.”
“Losing combat logistical support that the United States had provided for years crippled us, as did a lack of clear guidance from U.S. and Afghan leadership,” Sadat said.
Sadat stated that his troops continued fighting and that it wasn’t until Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan that things began to deteriorate.
“It put an expiration date on American interest in the region,” Sadat wrote. “Second, we lost contractor logistics and maintenance support critical to our combat operations. Third, the corruption endemic in Mr. Ghani’s government that flowed to senior military leadership and long crippled our forces on the ground irreparably hobbled us.”
The Biden administration announced its decision to withdraw in April with the goal of leaving by Sept. 11 and began implementing the plan earlier this month with an earlier deadline of Aug. 31. As the US began withdrawing and evacuating Americans and vulnerable Afghans, the Taliban took control of a number of places, including the country’s capital of Kabul, in a matter of days, forcing Ghani to abandon the country.
