08 Aug 2021, 13:11 PST, 3rd Edition
Sunday Morning Think Piece: "Why Afghanistan Failed... ":
Today Afghanistan fell to a far inferior force than the well-equipped Afghanistan National Army.
Afghanistan fell today for the exact same reason why Vietnam fell, why Korea is now two nations instead of one led by a government in South Korea, and why non-white troops fighting for the American government either lost battles or performed poorly in every war since the American Civil War. That reason is due solely to American racism. White commanders not only poorly train non-white troops, white commanders insist that they, and not non-white battlefield commanders on the ground are the best capable of leading non-white troops.
The Afghan Natl Army, just like the Army of South Vietnam, was never able to hold its own because local, battlefield command was led by white officers who believed only they understood combat against a native enemy. Very rarely were South Vietnamese officers allowed in Vietnam to decide how a battle was to be fought against the VC or the NVA. Daily clashes occurred between the President of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, and American generals who preached, prodded, threatened to withdraw equipment or support if a battle or engagement was not micro-directed by a white American officers. Time and again Vietnamese officers were forced against their judgments, grounded in the experience of their native culture, to follow the instructions of a white American officer, and their advice was over-ruled by white officers to be naive, if not grossly incompetent.
Battles between black American units and white Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War almost always ended terribly for the Northern side, and horrifyingly for the blacks in blue uniforms, because white officers, some of whom were reluctant to allow their black soldiers to shoot white Confederates, provided terrible training, reluctance to take the offense, or leadership designed to fail so that they could blame black performance on "cowardice" or "treason".
During WW1 thousands of black soldiers arrived in France having never fired a rifle during their inferior Stateside training because white's leading the American Army determined that teaching a black man how to shoot a rifle was tantamount to re-creating the spirit of Nat Turner in each black recruit. It was not until black soldiers arrived in Europe to be segregated from white American soldiers for service with French Army units were blacks provided real rifles just before a battle. And even then French commanders had to demand that they, and not white American officers, be allowed to provide actual pre-combat training and, in many instances, immediate battlefield leadership because too many white American officers still found it objectionable that black soldiers be allowed to shoot white Germans. One American officer put it this way: "I don't want my n**gers getting use to shooting white men over here because they will go back home with that experience and shoot our Klansmen."
During the Vietnam War Martin Luther King held several meetings with President Lyndon Johnson to demand that the US Army allow more black soldiers to become officers. Parents of black soldiers wrote King hundreds of letters describing how white officers in Vietnam were deliberately exposing black troops to unnecessary battlefield dangers. It was not until late 1969 when some units were receiving black OCS officers that black performance on the battlefield in Vietnam grew demonstrably. Alexander Kosygin, after personally observing a battle in the Vietnam Highlands between a large number of black American soldiers and NVA troops remarked, "If I had ten divisions of those blacks I could take over the world."
Afghanistan fell, and fell quickly, because the Afghan Natl Army, like the South Vietnamese Army, was never trained to fight on their own under only their own officers, with only Afghan artillery and air units in support. When white Americans departed, leaving Afghanistan soldiers with Afghan officers who had been conditioned for two decades to fight only under American micro-direction and support, they quickly failed because the white leadership and support they had been over-trained under ceased to exist. The soldiers of the Afghan Natl Army will now become soldiers of the Taleban, and they will perform better because their officers will be themselves and not Americans.
America has the technology and the weaponry to win wars, but those superior elements are of little value in other nations where white superiority in mind, not battle, prevents native armies to make decisions on their own.
The American Civil War was almost lost on many occasions for the same reason Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were lost, and why Korea is divided. It took white Northerners four years to decide to fully engage against a more determined white Southern Army. It was not until white generals such as William Tecumseh Sherman came into command years after a string of timid, white generals refused to take aggressive and ruthless action against an Army of terrorists and insurrectionists that Northern battle progress was made. Sherman held no punches. His 'March to the Sea' destroyed the Southern Army. (Adolph Hitler, only a corporal during WW2, studied W.T Sherman and applied a20'to the sea' offensive in France. Instead of making Paris the same goal of WW1 German generals, Hitler made the Atlantic Ocean his goal. France was defeated in weeks without a single 'trench warfare' prolongation that failed during the First War.)
A new Civil War is being talked about in the US today only because whites who lost the first Civil War are again proving themselves to be more ruthless and destructive than the timid whites in the Majority party. The timid and cowardly betrayal of American whites who resist exerting force and determination to demonstrably oppose and, by any and every means, end the effort by Insurrectionists to take over the US government by dismantling the election system and install leaders not dissimilar to Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin or Benito Mussolini will inevitably lead to a second Civil War... fought between armed civilians.
Presidents and politicians do not win wars. War-winning falls chiefly to the responsibility of the US Army which, after WW2, has failed to produce truly qualified battlefield leaders. Presidents and Congress can only provide the Army with the men and materiel needed for victory. It is up to the Army to provide the right men to lead its forces to victory.
After WW2 a study conducted by the Army itself determined that battlefield successes during WW2 were solely due to selecting the right men to receive officer commissions. And the study determined and The Citadel, rather than West Point, was judged to have produced a far higher number of leadership-qualified officers who succeeded on the battlefield. But refusing to accept this reality only led West Point to continue recruiting students based on their High School GPA's rather than any demonstration of real-life leadership ability, despite the fact that the study referenced a decision made by Congress in 1830 to shut down West Point for its failure to produce even 'a few good men'. West Point survived only because no other tool was available to properly train officers. Officer Candidate Schools after WW2 followed West Point's lead in too often selecting inferior leaders who happened to be academic achievers and not natural leaders.
The loss of Vietnam and the blame-game that evolved pointing fingers at who was responsible for the failures to-date in Vietnam led then Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland to conduct another study. The Army War College in 1972 concluded that the overall loss of Vietnam was chiefly due to officer and non-commissioned officer incompetence, racism and corruption, noted under the heading of poor "professionalism"... ills that continue to exist to this day in the US Army and the four other Branches, including the US Coast Guard and the new Space Force. Presidents do not win or lose wars. The US military wins or loses.
Afghanistan, like Vietnam, Korea and Iraq were lost not because the WH failed to provide the military all it needed to win. These losses were solely due to the military failing to do a better job of training and leading its forces better than our enemy led its forces. The Afghanistan National Army was designed to perform as a poor relation to the US Army. Because the US Army failed to win in Afghanistan, why should anyone reasonably believe the Afghan Army, trained by the US Army, would do any better?
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