Afghanistan & Egypt in the time of the plague

[netllama]

Afghanistan was lost the moment that he first troops arrived 20 years ago. We learned nothing from Vietnam, nothing. The Taliban didn't conquer the place. They bought it off. Afghan soldiers hadn't been paid in months and were short food and ammo. When the Taliban offered money to split, they took the cash. Under the circumstances, so would I. Now, I despise Trump, but he got one thing right. "No more stupid foreign wars."

Even if we learned nothing from Vietnam (and I don't dispute that most of the lessons have not been learned), we learned nothing from the Soviet occupation of the very same country.  I recently read an interesting thought piece about why the Afghan military collapsed so spectacularly.  Much of it is exactly as you wrote here, lack of funding, but its also bigger and more fundamental than just that. 

There was literally no Afghan military prior to the NATO (and American) involvement in the country in 2001/2002.  We attempted (and failed) to build a military from nothing, and the model that we used was our own.  This was a fundamental failure of hubris.  Americans like to believe that we have the best military the world has ever known.  That is quite likely true (or at least was true for some portion of the last few decades).  However, it seems that few, if any, understood what actually made the American military so effective.  Sure, the training is critically important, but as numerous leaders & dictators have learned over the centuries, "an army marches on its stomach".  Keeping a military well supplied, with working supplies, arms and equipment is a non-trivial effort (much more so in modern times).  It requires not just money, but also competent logistics and other personnel.  We could have given the Afghans every gun, tank & plane in the world, but without the ability to maintain all of those weapons, long term, it was useless.  At one point in the past year, the Afghan Air Force had just one working fighter jet in the entire country.  They lacked the supplies, parts and skilled labor to keep up with required maintenance & repairs.  In a country with incredibly corrupt leaders, much of the funds ended up lining pockets, or getting diverted to who knows what.

Even more critical was the lack of foresight that trying to build another American military in a country that didn't have the the supply chain & maintenance prowess that the US military relies upon was doomed to failure from the start.  The Taliban doesn't have a global network of maintenance & logistics contractors ensuring that they have everything they need to function.  We should have built an Afghan military that was agile, nimble & self reliant enough to match the Taliban's tactics.  I'm not saying it would have ensured a different outcome, but it definitely could not have ended any worse than what we have today.