Why the Afghan Army Folded
America has historically struggled to train foreign militaries.
The United States has spent $83 billion training, equipping, and even paying Afghanistan’s security forces since 2001, a mammoth amount. As the events of the past few days make clear, despite all that assistance, Afghanistan’s military and police have proved incapable of securing the country. Many analysts of the war anticipated the government failing to withstand Taliban assaults, but were surprised by the speed of the collapse, which is both a terrible tragedy for Afghanistan and a failure of American military training programs.
The U.S. history of training foreign militaries isn’t particularly impressive. Reconstruction of the German and Japanese militaries during the Cold War was
