Afghan general says army was ‘betrayed’ by politics and blames Trump, Biden, and Afghan leaders for losing the war to the Taliban

• As the Afghan army faces criticism for losing to the Taliban, one general is defending it.
• Gen. Sami Sadat argues that the army was "betrayed by politics and presidents."
• In a New York Times op-ed, he blamed Trump, Biden, and Afghan leaders for the army's collapse.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

As the Taliban swept across Afghanistan, the Afghan armed forces capitulated and crumbled. The Afghan army has been criticized for failing to fight back, but an Afghan commander argues that his troops were "betrayed" by politics.

"American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves," President Joe Biden said on August 16, the day after the Taliban reached Kabul.

Gen. Sami Sadat, a three-star Afghan general who led the 215 Maiwand Corps, says there is more to it than that, offering another perspective on the army's defeat.

"We were betrayed by politics and presidents," the general wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, arguing that Afghan forces have fought bravely over the past two decades of war, in which more than 60,000 Afghan security force personnel died.

Sadat served on the front lines in Lashkar Gah, one of the last cities to fall to the Taliban, before he was called to Kabul by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to command the special forces and secure a capital that was already on the verge of falling.

In an interview just days before the Taliban took the Afghan capital, Sadat told AFP: "I know we are going to win. I know this is our country, that the Taliban are failing, that they will fail sooner or later."

Describing the fighting in his column Wednesday, with no need to maintain optimism for the sake of morale, he painted a much bleaker picture.

"The final days of fighting were surreal," Sadat wrote. "We engaged in intense firefights on the ground against the Taliban as US fighter jets circled overhead, effectively spectators."

"Overwhelmed by Taliban fire, my soldiers would hear the planes and ask why they were not providing air support," he recalled. "Morale was devastated."

The general said that even after he was called to Kabul, his soldiers continued to fight until they no longer had the support to continue, at which point they were forced to retreat.

'Let down by American and Afghan leadership'

"I'm not here to absolve the Afghan Army of mistakes," Sadat wrote in his op-ed, acknowledging that there are many failings. "But the fact is, many of us fought valiantly and honorably, only to be let down by American and Afghan leadership."

He said that the Afghan military collapsed because President Donald Trump's February 2020 deal with the Taliban "doomed us" by putting "an expiration date on American interest in the region" and emboldened the insurgent forces.

"They could sense victory and knew it was just a matter of waiting out the Americans," the general said.

When Biden decided to uphold the deal in April 2021, "that was when everything started to go downhill," he continued, explaining that "Biden's full and accelerated withdrawal only exacerbated the situation" because "it ignored the conditions on the ground."

"The Taliban had a firm end date from the Americans and feared no military reprisal for anything they did in the interim, sensing the lack of US will," he wrote, arguing that this led the Taliban to further ramp up its efforts to retake the country.

He said his troops faced as many as seven car bombings a day in July. "Still, we stood our ground," Sadat said of the Afghan army.

Sadat said that another critical factor affecting the Afghan military's ability to fight, even as the US insisted that the Afghan forces had the capability and capacity to fight and defend their country, was the loss of contractor support for the aircraft, high-end ammunition, and real-time intelligence-gathering resources.

There were also problems within Afghanistan that contributed to the army's defeat, he said. "There was only so much the Americans could do when it came to the well-documented corruption that rotted our government and military," Sadat wrote.

He said that politics allowed leaders lacking military experience to rise through the ranks in the army while other acts of corruption often left troops without adequate food and fuel supplies, creating a situation that Sadat said "destroyed the morale of my troops."

He criticized Ghani, who fled Afghanistan as Taliban forces reached the capital city. He said that in his rush to escape, the president effectively eliminated any chance of negotiating an agreement with the Taliban that might have made it easier to maintain control of the city and facilitate evacuations.

Reflecting on the collapse of the Afghan forces and the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, Sadat wrote: "This was a military defeat, but it emanated from political failure."