A US-created and -trained terrorist army?

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, that's not such a far-fetched thought.

Numbers coming out of Afghanistan often are scary but try wrapping your head around this one - 123,500.

After a roller-coaster decade of training by the US-led coalition, that's the number of soldiers and policemen who will be turfed from Kabul's foreign-funded security payroll as the coalition goes through the pretence of a dignified exit from what has become the US's longest war.

As bottom-line budget tightening, these cuts will be welcome in coalition capitals. But they will be even more welcome as an army of well-trained, battle-hardened fighters for the insurgencies and militias that are busily carving out territory, even before the departure of coalition forces from Afghanistan.

. . .

In its determination to equip Afghanistan with a sophisticated military and police machine, the coalition is close to having stood up a combined force of 352,000. But the failure to establish a government whose writ extends much beyond the suburbs of Kabul leaves any such security force ripe for the recruitment as foot soldiers for gangsters, warlords and insurgency commanders as their ambitions collide when the foreign forces have packed up.

That this weekend's NATO summit in Chicago would be considering aid cuts for Kabul that will shrink the Afghan security establishment by 123,500 seems likely to hasten that shift to the dark side.

And here's more to think about. Who among the current security personnel are likely to be shunted - those loyal to any vestige of central authority or those owing allegiance to village heavies? And once back in the village, what will be more appealing - swaggering with a gun for the local overlord or backbreaking work in the poppy or wheat fields?

. . .

Never mind that Afghanistan will be more dangerously poised for self-destruction than it was in the aftermath of the retreat by Soviet occupation forces in 1989.

The West walked away from Afghanistan then. And notwithstanding all the undertakings to the contrary, the risk is that it will do it again . . . or be so half-baked in its attempt to give an appearance of not walking away, that it might as well do just that.

There's more at the link.

There was never going to be a military solution in Afghanistan, as I've pointed out many times before.  Tragically, the US has now compounded its initial error in maintaining an occupying force in Afghanistan by creating this ready-made army of well-trained, and now thoroughly disillusioned, soldiers and security personnel.  During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the USA first armed and trained Mujahedin fighters, then abandoned them and that country after the Soviet withdrawal.  This gave rise to the Taliban and its eventual alliance with Al Qaeda, with consequences we remember all too well.  In the same way, the current withdrawal process is likely to produce problems in and beyond Afghanistan that will plague our children, and perhaps our children's children.

When will we ever learn?


*Sigh*


Peter