CO-DEPENDENT NO MORE:

Why is the Afghan National Army collapsing? On a tactical and operational level, the answer is simple: the Afghan National Army has never severed its umbilical cord to U.S. logistics, air support, and intelligence gathering, even though the main mission of U.S. forces in the country since 2014 has been to prepare the national army and police to operate independently. Without these assets, government forces simply cannot stand up against a highly-motivated, well-supplied enemy like the Taliban.

Over the last three years, the vast majority of the government's ground forces have been tied down manning a vast network of bases and outposts, many of which they inherited from the Americans. These units are generally regarded as of low quality and even lower morale, and they suffer from a very high desertion rate, even when not under pressure from Taliban units. They have been rarely used in offensive operations, because they typically break and run under fire.

Kabul has had to rely almost exclusively on the Afghan National Commando Corps to retake key towns, secure key lines of communication, and even to hold down key defensive positions. The Commando Corps soldiers undergo a rigorous 14-week training regimen akin in many ways to the training regimen used by U.S. Army Rangers and Marines. All volunteers drawn from the regular army, the Commandos have exhibited an admirable esprit and resilience, and were often successful in defeating Taliban forces, until quite recently.

But they have been bearing an overwhelming burden in the struggle to contain the expansion of territory under the control of the insurgency for about five years now. By 2017, a Department of Defense study found that the Commandos, a force of 20,000 in an army of about 300,000, were responsible for conducting 70 to 80 percent of the actual fighting in the country. According to the U.S. government's Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a watchdog agency, the number of missions assigned to the Commandos in the first quarter of 2021 was nearly double that of the last quarter of 2020.

Now, the Commandos are beginning to fail, as a result of exhaustion and the gradual disintegration of support units in the regular army they require to function. Early on the morning of June 16, a reinforced platoon of 50 Commandos ousted the Taliban from the district center of Dawlat Abad in the northern province of Faryab. The unit had been in heavy combat for 50 straight days. A few hours after the Commandos took the district, a large Taliban force returned and began an assault from multiple directions. Frantic calls for reinforcements from the Commandos went unanswered, despite the fact that a unit of 170 Afghan regular soldiers had been assigned to reinforce the initial strike force. Nor could the Afghan air force, maintained largely by American contractors who have now left the country, provide the Commandos with any air support.

"There is a much more fundamental problem with the Afghan army than its inability to conduct successful military operations independently. "

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