Biden and Milley gave wrong estimates of Afghan army

 Washington Examiner:

President Joe Biden and Gen. Mark Milley misled about the size of the Afghan army in the months leading up to the fall of Kabul, citing numbers that did not take into account things such as casualties, capture, and capitulation.

Biden said Monday, “We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong, incredibly well-equipped, a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.”

He made similar claims about the size of the Afghan military during his July 8 speech .

That number is misleading, however.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released a report on July 31 which noted that, as of the end of April, 300,699 Afghan National Defense and Security Forces personnel were enrolled in the Afghan Personnel and Pay System but only 182,071 of them were Afghan National Army members, including Afghan Air Force, while 118,628 were actually part of the Afghan National Police, which reported to the Interior Ministry instead of defense.

Moreover, the watchdog emphasized, “ANDSF personnel strength reported for this quarter does not reflect the loss of personnel to casualties, surrender, capture, or fleeing to other countries that occurred during the Taliban offensive from May through July.”

Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also got the size of the ANDSF wrong during Senate testimony on June 17, claiming that “right now, the government of Afghanistan is holding and they have approximately about 325,000 to 350,000 person security force — army and police force.”

Those numbers were inflated, at minimum, by 25,000 to 50,000 — although, as SIGAR pointed out, the numbers were likely even further off than that due to the then-ongoing collapse of the Afghan forces.

A 2021 report on “The Military Balance” by the International Institute of Strategic Studies contended that Afghanistan had only 171,500 members in the army and 7,300 in the air force, according to the Washington Post, and that Afghanistan had 99,000 “paramilitary” forces — its national police.

And a new report released on Tuesday by national security analyst Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said, “the actual combat ready core of Afghan Army forces was very small, grossly overburdened with combat assignments, and forced to fight at unsustainable levels” and that “these problems were compounded by dependence on active U.S. intelligence, combat troop support, airpower, and contractors.” The report added: “Only a small fraction of the 182,071 personnel supposedly in the Army and Air Force could be used effectively.”

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Were they lying to themselves as well as the country when they gave the misleading figures?  Either way, they both have lost even more credibility and they both should be removed from their positions. I suspect Cordesman is closer to the mark and he should be called as a witness in hearings on the Biden debacle.  When someone like Milley is so wrong about the combat effective troops he is either getting bad information or not analyzing the true strength.