Afghanistan deadline

[Skybird]

And then I saw this on TV today, an interview with a former Afghan commando fighter. He said this, and I try to quote by the German dub as precisely as I can remember:


"The Taleban advanced to our position and began shooting at us. So of course we surrendered and left our equipment and weapons to them."


I marked the words I have big issue with. In the TV snippet, the young man talked with great naturalness as if what he described was the most reasonable and natural and obvious thing to do. I was most perplexed and found his completely non-competitive attitude - well, surreal.



Zero fighting spirit, not the smallest hint of a mindset that he would even have considered to resist, to set up a fight. No sense of duty, commitment, nothing.



Many reports we get from Afghanistan that it is like this everywhere: the Taleban do not even need to fight much and break resistence. They show up and mostly the Afghan army units seem to immediately surrender. That there are storng ethnical and regional identity feelings and sentiments of people for certain regions and tribal origins, of course does not help if such people then get sent to regions they have zero roots in. By numbers, the army is around 300 thousand, the Taleban are said to be in the range of 70000 to 200000. Thwe Fghan army on aper is SUPERIOR, and has air dominance. Also, the afghan army got one and a half decade of Western training, and is superior in weaponry and platforms. And still the Taleban cut through the country like a hot knife cuts through soft butter.



This illustrates better than anything else what worth it has had to invest all those years and all that money into training and equipment. I mean we have had feedback from insiders and military advisors that moral and sense of committment is non-existent, that many recruits are social loosers and outcasts who already got chased away from their villages, and that one could not get this Afghan army to form a real disciplined and hardened fighting spirit. Western trainers have unofficially complained about it time and again. US ones. British ones. German ones.



To see this kind young man, a commando special soldier by his uniform emblems!, so innocently explaining why he thought it was the most natural thing to not set up a fight and just hand over his weapons and surrender, was - well, it was unreal. I was baffled.