From NPR:
The Afghan Army Collapsed In Days. Here Are The Reasons Why.
August 20, 20214:04 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
By Tom Bowman and Monika Evstatieva… The leaders were not only corrupt. Some of them were illiterate.
“They don’t know how to write. They don’t know how to read,” Frotan said. “How to be professional soldiers and leadership is very, very important.”
The lack of education led to basic problems with tasks such as maintaining equipment, from rifles to vehicles, to ordering spare parts.
And not knowing how to write meant these leaders couldn’t even read the maps properly. NPR was with an Afghan army unit six years ago when it was shooting artillery rounds at the Taliban. It was off by a kilometer because it couldn’t figure out the proper grid coordinates.
Not only that, but Frotan says commanders often had trouble filing simple paperwork to give soldiers time off.
“They don’t have enough knowledge, so they cannot make a good schedule for their vacation,” Frotan said. So with no proper time off, that meant burnout among the troops, which led to high attrition rates.
Years ago, a U.S. general told us that not only couldn’t many of the Afghan officers read or write, but they couldn’t count. He said the Americans at times would draw a large rectangle in the dirt, telling the officers they needed enough soldiers to fill that space.
Renaissance military officers had to learn about squares and square roots to calculate how many men they needed for a particular battlefield formation. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago, the experienced soldier, is furious that Othello passed him over for the job of his second-in-command in favor of the less battle-hardened but more mathematically sophisticated Cassio:
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine,
A fellow almost damn’d in a fair wife;
That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric,
Wherein the toged consuls can propose
As masterly as he: mere prattle, without practise,
Is all his soldiership.
I recently wrote about the revolution in better ways of thinking that Europe underwent over the last 750 years. Evidently, that didn’t reach Afghanistan.
