Mark Kimmitt
The rout of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, or ANDSF, will go down in history as one of the greatest military defeats of the past century. Like the Iraqi Security Forces in 2014 and the French Army in 1940, these forces melted away in the face of numerically inferior forces and—France excepted—forces equipped with far inferior equipment. By any quantifiable measure, these armies should have easily held off the Taliban, ISIS, and the German Army. Instead, the French Army collapsed in seven weeks, the Iraqi Security Forces evaporated from the battlefield within days of the ISIS attack from Syria, and the recent Taliban offensive took less than eight days from the capture of Kunduz to the capitulation of Kabul.
