but i label that as the base reason for what we ve seen happen. you ve been trying to answer the question, how did we lose this war? you said corruption was part of the problem. as is well known, the effectiveness of soldiers and police suffered because government officials or military commanders pocketed their pay, hoarded their ammunition, and diluted rosters with ghost soldiers. a stronger explanation was that the police and soldiers did not want to put their lives on the line for a government that was corrupt and prone to neglect them. i mean, that is a pretty strong statement. check out the taliban taking over the palace this weekend. as the president of afghanistan fled, as we see these images, the afghan people, did they not feel a connection to their government? so in many places, the connection to the government was thin and it is troubled by corruption. some other factors such as the one i mentioned.
military. the united states did not seem to realize that the afghan government simply did not have legitimacy. remember, the last election in afghanistan, only 1.8 million people took part in the vote. that s out in a country of 39 million people. so narrow legitimacy. the second part is the afghan army was clearly something of a sham, a house of cards. who knows how many ghost soldiers were there, in other words, commanders marketing the pay of people they claimed were soldiers on the books. but all we know is that this was not an army. we were the united states was diluting itself with met tricks that made it look like washington was making progress without anyone really examining whether that progress was real or was a progress on paper so that everyone can congratulations themselves they checked the boxes. well, it s incredible and your insight always so valuable. biden is so frustrated that u.s.
as you know from afghanistan history, resisting occupation is something that s been a part of their history, and that helps motivate people to do things. it helps define what it means to be afghan. i don t think this is terribly hard to understand. this is a characteristic of many countries but it s certainly evident in afghanistan. so when it came to who s going to fight toe to toe the longest, who s going to stick it out the longest, the taliban often had the edge. that s kind of a base reason. there s some more things that have happened over the past two weeks or so that go into addition to that, but i d label that as the base reason for what we ve seen happen. you have been trying to answer the question, how do we lose this war? in politico, you say, corruption was part of the problem. as is well known, the effectiveness of soldiers and police suffered because government officials or military commanders pocketed their pay, hoarded their ammunition, and diluted rosters with ghost
vanished. i remember reporting on soldiers in 2010 and hearing these stories about ghost soldiers, commanders would pad out unit numbers and get the salaries and pocket it. there was a lack of motivation and moral and air support went away, drone support, ground sup support. there is one other factor that needs mentioning, though. the taliban is ideologically driven. tha they desire, their wish is to die in battle in gjihad. that s not the case with most of the afghan army. they want to go home to their 60,000 of them died. without u.s. support they saw writing on the wall. such important context as we try to absorb and take in what is happening after this 20-year war in afghanistan with the taliban regaining control. michael holms, thank you for your insight. the biden administration bristoling at reminders it vowed
gap between what they have been told their country was doing over the last 20 years and what their country was actually doing? wars always involve propaganda. but the level of absolute fiction of this war, despite the wealth of access to information, is unprecedented for the united states. and you can see this, for example, even in the kinds of impacts of war, so we re sold these statistics about how many afghan soldiers there are. about how many schools there are, and in many cases, it was revealed these are ghost schools, these are ghost soldiers, that there is massive corruption that s happening. and despite a lot of that exposure, you didn t necessarily see that reflected, for example, with what american officials were reporting to congress, what they were telling the american public. some of the things they often used to build justification for the war were the needs of women and girls while at the same