Two different items popped up today that tweaked my interest regarding Afghanistan, and both have to do with the whitewash that the Biden Administration is conducting regarding their ignominious exit from the country.

America’s departure from the country was perhaps the most embarrassing foreign policy disaster since the Iran Hostage Crisis and/or the evacuation from Saigon in 1975. It’s not like there is a dearth of horrible foreign policy disasters to choose from, but the video of Afghans falling out of the sky after having lost their grip on transport planes is simultaneously disgusting and pathetic.

John Kirby saw no chaos in Afghanistan… pic.twitter.com/1DT4AJwKQN

— Matt Couch (@RealMattCouch) April 10, 2023

Recently the Biden Administration released a report on the fiasco and unsurprisingly blamed the whole thing on Donald Trump. Because of course, they did. Biden, after all, is the Smartest President Ever™ and a foreign policy expert.

The report itself was embarrassing in its dishonesty, and poor John Kirby looked like a fool defending the administration’s performance and the accuracy of the report. He even claimed to be proud of the performance.

Spokesman John Kirby: "There's a lot to be proud of" on Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal.

"There was a lot that went right, and a lot of Afghans are now living better lives." pic.twitter.com/qwqmg4DZaP

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 6, 2023

So I shouldn’t have been surprised to read this report from Task and Purpose that gives the lie to yet another claim by the Biden Administration regarding the state of Afghanistan prior to the whole House of Cards collapsing.

Throughout the withdrawal and ever since the Biden Administration had claimed that they were confident that the Afghani military could hold back the Taliban due to the large size and American training of the Afghan military. They claimed 300,000 men at arms were ready to fight to hold back the barbarians at the gate.

Well, not quite.

Re: the Biden administration's claim that there were 300,000 troops in the Afghan forces, John Sopko tells lawmakers, "I don't know who is telling" them that.

"Nobody we talked to ever said that that number was near there."

Context from @JeffSchogol: https://t.co/82OUiH3WSI

— Haley Britzky (@halbritz) April 19, 2023

The real number was much, much lower. As many as 80% of Afghan troops existed only on the books. The rest were “ghosts” who existed only on paper in order to siphon off the military aid dollars that the United States was pouring into the country, and the Americans had been told that this was the case.

Everybody knew the military was a shell, not a fighting force. The Air Force depended upon Americans, the Army was filled with ghosts, and the police were corrupt and uncountable. It was a graft machine, not a military.

Afghanistan’s former finance minister Khalid Payenda told the Afghanistan Analysts Network that at least 80% of the ANDSF were ghosts, estimating that the Afghan government had between 40,000 and 50,000 troops at the end.

Meanwhile, Atta Mohammad Noor, governor of Balkh Province, estimated that the Afghan military fielded between 50,000 and 100,000 troops in the final days of the Afghan republic.

“The ANDSF’s actual force strength has been highly debated,” the SIGAR report from February found. “A definitive figure has been impossible to provide because DOD relied on inadequate systems and often manual methods for tracking ANDSF personnel.”

The military was actually smaller than the Taliban forces they were expected to fight, and had far less morale, especially after being abandoned by the Americans.

Surprise!

The Biden Administration is not the only one with jurisdiction on investigating what happened. For more than two decades there has been a SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) tasked with trying to ferret out all the corruption. Needless to say their reports have been largely ignored, but they have been tracking things as they happened.

Well, the Biden Administration has shut down all the information flow to SIGAR, and the Inspector General is pissed.

Inspector General John Sopko torches the Biden administration for their "unprecedented" refusal to cooperate with investigators over Biden's botched Afghanistan withdrawal pic.twitter.com/nkbTCW6ndy

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 19, 2023

When Democrats were in control of Congress they participated in the whitewash, of course, but with Republicans in control of the House they are trying to dig in.

But, as you would expect, the administration is stonewalling. Doing so is illegal, of course, but that hasn’t stopped them. They have control of the information and are determined to keep holding back and feeding the public lies.

They knew Afghanistan had only about 40-50,000 troops in the real world, but keep on insisting that there were 300,000. After all, that is what we were paying for, so why not pretend just a bit longer?

After all, “there’s a lot to be proud of” in our Afghanistan withdrawal. No chaos at all.