US Military Failed in Training, Advising, Equipping Afghan Forces: Pentagon Watchdog

The U.S. military failed to properly train, advise, assist, and equip the Afghan military, according to the Pentagon’s watchdog.

This assessment comes as watchdog representatives from the Defense Department, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) testified before the House Oversight Committee on April 19 about the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

According to Defense Department Inspector General Robert Storch, who testified before the committee, the U.S. military let down the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in multiple ways. These remarks were from his written statement to the committee.

He said that one way, as laid out in a 2017 Pentagon Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report, was through an “insufficient level of training for those advising” the Afghan Ministry of Defense (MoD) as they “delayed progress toward building the internal controls capability of the MoD and its subordinate commands.”

The OIG “evaluation determined the train, advise, and assist efforts needed to focus on [the] further development of inspection planning, executing, and reporting to build the capacity of the Afghan MoD” in order to reach what the OIG said were “transparency, accountability, and oversight milestones.”

Storch noted that the Afghan Air Force (AAF) was incapable of operating without U.S. and coalition support despite the training it had received from those partners.

“An August 2019 evaluation found that this training did not meet operational objectives, which meant that the AAF was not independently capable of coordinating airdrops to resupply Afghan ground forces or undertaking efforts to minim