Last year, ISIS took Mosul. It still holds Mosul. Earlier this week, the Taliban took the northern Afghanistan city of Kunduz. Yet they’re already on the verge of defeat, reportedly about to lose the city they took just days before:
Afghan troops punctured the Taliban’s grip on the northern city of Kunduz Thursday, pushing into the center of the city as part of a U.S.-backed counter-offensive aimed at restoring public confidence in the country’s beleaguered military.
Four days after Taliban militants seized control of Kunduz, Afghan Special Forces started the operation late Wednesday night. By 4 a.m. Thursday, Afghanistan’s interior ministry claimed the city was back under the control of the government.
That claim could not be independently confirmed, however, and fighting between Taliban militants and government forces continued throughout pockets of the key Afghan city with shooting from people’s homes and in alleyways, witnesses said . . . As the sun rose, television footage from the city showed Afghan troops once again stationed in the main city square. An Afghan soldier could be seen removing the Taliban’s white flag and replacing it with an Afghan flag.
One should always take Afghan claims of success with a grain of salt, but there’s little question that the degree of resistance to the Taliban in Kunduz is several orders of magnitude more significant than the resistance in Mosul, where ISIS fighters routed the Iraqi Army, the Iraqis fled, and they haven’t come back. What’s different about Afghanistan? Is the Afghan army inherently more capable than the Iraqi Army? While I only have first-hand experience with Iraqi troops, my friends and colleagues who’ve worked with both armies have uniformly said that they prefer fighting alongside Iraqis. While others no doubt have different opinions, the people I know shuddered at the thought of working with Afghans.
The key phrase in the story above is “U.S.-backed counter-offensive.” It is simply remarkable how much more effective our allied forces are with even minimal-to-moderate on-location American support. While our forces have been stripped to the bone (less than 10,000 remain in the country), we still have enough to provide effective close air support, and an allied army that enjoys effective American air and ground support is an infinitely more effective force than an allied force fighting on its own. Just ask the Iraqi Army at Basra in 2008.
The war in Afghanistan will grind on, but the Kunduz counter-offensive reaffirms the tragedy of our Iraq withdrawal. Had we stayed, the Iraqi Army would have been a different army, even with a much-reduced American military presence. With the United States out of the picture entirely, it became what everyone knew it would become — a corrupt, decadent instrument of sectarian politics, completely impotent in the face of a determined foe.