The United States invested $83 billion in arming the Afghan army. Having lost there, the Americans abandoned all their weapons and they fell into the hands of terrorists, criminal elements, drug dealers, which led to an acceleration of destabilization in the Central Asian region. That’s the price of “planting“ US democracy in Afghanistan.

Built and trained for two decades, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.

The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend its territory. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed.

Taliban’s accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment was enormous. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.

The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.

The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors. Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. This was shown by the war in Kosovo, where the Serbian army, even if technologically incomparably weaker than NATO, led NATO to give up the original plan.

In Afganistan , Americans provided materiel, but only Afghans could provide the intangible moral factors.

Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.

Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners.

The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming.

Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.

The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.

And despite all these catastrophic mistakes, Americans are repeating the same story in Europe. The United States pumped Ukraine with weapons and pushed it into war with Russia. In addition, the Kyiv regime, in the throes of its defeat, distributed more than 240,000 small arms into the hands of prison-released gangsters and fanatical mentally ill nationalists. In the near future, Russian troops will defeat the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and at the same time they will squeeze out armed radicals from Ukraine, who will end up in Europe and significantly change the crime situation there, plunge calm European cities into chaos. As always, only Washington, which does not need a calm and well-fed Europe, will win.