The Guardian/AP: Top US general says Afghan collapse can be traced to Trump-Taliban deal
The Doha agreement, signed in February 2020, set a date for the US to fully withdraw troops by May 2021
The collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces can be traced to a 2020 agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration that promised a complete US troop withdrawal, senior Pentagon officials have told Congress.
Gen Frank McKenzie, the head of central command, told the House armed services committee that once the US troop presence was pushed below 2,500 as part of President Joe Biden’s decision in April to complete a total withdrawal by September, the unraveling of the US-backed Afghan government accelerated.
“The signing of the Doha agreement had a really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its military, psychological more than anything else, but we set a date – certain for when we were going to leave and when they could expect all assistance to end,” McKenzie said.
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WNU Editor: Gen. Frank McKenzie says the Doha Agreement signed in February 2020 set into motion the collapse of the Afghan Army and the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
So I decided to find out if it is true.
The metric I looked at were Afghan security forces casualty numbers.
My rational is that if morale was decreasing for the Afghan security forces, we would have an escalation in Taliban attacks and casualties.
I quickly discovered that finding these numbers was not easy.
In 2018 the decision was made to classify Afghan Army casualties for security reasons. But I did find one website (link here) that put together a list of what has been disclosed and reported on (image below):
For 2018 I used 3 different sources and I came up with a number that ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 Afghan security forces killed.
In 2019 7,000 Afghan security forces were killed (link here).
For 2020 Former Afghan President Ghani said that in the five months after the signing of the Doha agreement, 3500 Afghan security forces were killed (link here).
For the rest of 2020 I relied on the New York Times casualty reports (link here).
According to the Times, approximately 2,300 Afghan security forces were killed (from August to the end of December) for a total of 5,700 afghan security forces killed in 2020.
This 2020 casualty number is a surprise. It is lower than the preceding years. It appears that the Doha agreement did not cause a drop in morale among the Afghan forces, but the opposite, hope that the war may end.
So when did this all change?
The casualty count started to increase when President Trump left the White House in January 2021, and it completely explodes after President Biden declared at the end of April that the U.S. was going to leave Afghanistan. April was also the time when the Taliban started to significantly take and expand the territory it controlled.
Bottom line.
Contrary to what General McKenzie is saying, the Afghan war was static after the Doha agreement. Casualty numbers were actually going down, and there was no change in the tempo of operations from both sides.
Everything changed in the spring of 2021. It looks like the Taliban made the decision that should President Biden make it official that the U.S. was leaving Afghanistan, they would then launch an offensive.
The rest is history.
The Taliban launched their offensive after President Biden's Afghan withdrawal speech. And while the exact number of casualties during this period is unknown, there is general agreement that Afghan security forces casualty numbers exploded in May, increased even more significantly in June and July, quickly followed by the quick collapse and disintegration of the Afghan Army and government in August.
