Ashraf Ghani

The American Conservative: The official report on Biden’s Afghanistan disaster places the blame squarely on the U.S. government. The final report of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) confirms what most of us already knew: The collapse of the Afghan army and government was mostly our fault… SIGAR found that the single most important factor in the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in August 2021 was the decision by two U.S. presidents to withdraw U.S. military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves. One former U.S. commander in Afghanistan told SIGAR, “We built that army to run on contractor support. Without it, it can’t function. When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up.”… The other factor that contributed to the demise of the Afghan army was the last-minute wholesale restructuring of Afghanistan’s security institutions. In 2021, amid rapidly deteriorating security, President Ghani reshuffled most of his security officials, often replacing them with fellow ethnic Pashtuns. These leadership changes were part of a broader pattern of politicization and ethnicization (in favor of hometown Pashtuns) of the security sector. Click here to read more (external link).