Afghanistan's Security Forces Versus the Taliban: A Net Assessment.

• Author: Schroden, Jonathan

A key question for the future of Afghanistan is if the United States withdraws the remainder of its forces from the country, would Afghanistan's security forces or the Taliban be stronger militarily? According to a net assessment conducted by the author across five factors--size, material resources, external support, force employment, and cohesion--the Taliban would have a slight military advantage if the United States withdraws the remainder of its troops from Afghanistan, which would then likely grow in a compounding fashion.

In the November/December 2020 issue of this publication, Seth Jones examined the ideology, objectives, structure, strategy, and tactics of the Afghan Taliban, as well as the group's relationship to other non-state actors and sources of state support. (1) In concluding his study, Jones considered the implications of the current situation in Afghanistan and wrote that: ... without a peace deal, the further withdrawal of U.S. forces ... will likely shift the balance of power in favor of the Taliban. With continuing support from Pakistan, Russia, Iran, and terrorist groups like al-Qa'ida, it is the view of the author that the Taliban would eventually overthrow the Afghan government in Kabul. (2)

This is a critically important judgment for the future of U.S. policy on Afghanistan, and one that deserves more rigorous attention than Jones was able to dedicate in the concluding remarks of his paper. In addition to Jones' article, there have been numerous recent, detailed works on the Taliban's history, (3) social resources and adaptations, (4) political trajectory, (5) and perspectives on peace negotiations. (6) There are also various U.S. government reports that periodically give a wealth of information on the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). (7) Yet, a formal assessment of how Afghanistan's security forces compare to the Taliban's fighting forces in the context of U.S. troop withdrawals is lacking. In this article, the author therefore seeks to answer the question: If the United States withdraws the remainder of its forces from Afghanistan, (a) would the ANDSF or the Taliban be stronger militarily?

To do this, the author will conduct a net assessment of the two sides' military forces in the projected absence of U.S. forces. In this context, net assessment refers to the practice of considering the strategic interactions of "blue" (friendly) and "red" (adversary) forces through the use of data that are widely available, in order to create strategic insights that lead to decisive advantage. (8) While there are many elements that could be focused on while conducting such an assessment and there is a great body of literature about which are most important, (9) the author examines five here: size, material resources (i.e., money and technology), external support, force employment, and cohesion. The first four are included because they address the fundamental inputs to military effectiveness: people, things, and the ability of people to use those things. The author includes cohesion because it speaks to the will of both sides to fight (10) and because it is particularly important in the context of the war in Afghanistan and efforts to end it via a negotiated settlement. (11) Of note, the author does not consider the possible impacts of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 due to a paucity of reliable data and no clear indication that its consideration would change the results of the assessment. This article now examines each of these factors for both sides, then conducts a net assessment of the five factors, before providing an answer to the central question along with some of the implications.

Size

Taliban

The number of people in the Taliban's fighting forces is difficult to determine precisely, but a variety of sources give an estimate of 60,000 core fighters, give or take 10-20 percent. (12) (b) The most systematic public study of the Taliban's size (from 2017) concluded that the group's total manpower exceeds 200,000 individuals, which includes around 60,000 core fighters, another 90,000 members of local militias, and tens of thousands of facilitators and support elements. (13) These numbers are considerable increases over official U.S. estimates of around 20,000 fighters that were provided in 2014 (14) and illustrate the group's ability to recruit and deploy new fighters in recent years. They also illustrate the Taliban's ability to withstand significant casualties--estimated to be in the range of thousands per year. (15) As a Taliban military commander recently commented, "We see this fight as worship. So if a brother is killed, the second brother won't disappoint God's wish--he'll step into the brother's shoes." (16)

ANDSF

Afghanistan's security forces have an authorized total end-strength of 352,000 personnel. (17) (c) Yet, the country has never been able to fll all of those billets. As of July 2020, the Afghan Ministry of Defense (MOD)--which includes the army, air force, and special operations forces (SOF)--had 185,478 personnel. The Afghan Ministry of Interior (MOI)--which includes a variety of police forces--numbered 103,224. This gives a total of 288,702 security force personnel, or 82 percent of total authorized end-strength. (18) (d) While analysts have greater confidence in these numbers now than in the past as a result of a new biometric manpower system in Afghanistan that was implemented to address the phenomenon of "ghost soldiers," (19) (e) they nonetheless represent an upper bound on the true size of the fighting force--they are merely the number of flled billets. A 2014 study of the Afghan army found that its force structure was about 60 percent combat personnel, (20) but the number of soldiers showing up for duty each day is even lower (since some soldiers are always sick, on leave, etc.). One official U.S. reference quoted an on-hand percentage of about 90 percent. (21) Using these figures together (and subtracting the roughly 8,000 personnel in the Afghan Air Force (AAF) (22)) gives an estimated on-hand army fighting force of about 96,000 soldiers. The Afghan police are a much leaner force,with only about 11 percent as administrative and support personnel for the 89 percent that are patrolmen. (23) Assuming a 90 percent onhand rate for the police as well gives about 83,000 patrolmen. All told then, the ANDSF are likely felding a fighting force in the vicinity of 180,000 combat personnel each day.

Material Resources

Taliban

There is no consensus on the Taliban's yearly revenue total. Official United Nations, government, and some independent estimates range from $300 million to $1.6 billion per year, (24) with the United States estimating that up to 60 percent of these totals comes from Taliban involvement in the drug trade. (25) These numbers are disputed, however, by David Mansfeld's detailed work on illicit economies and drug production in Afghanistan, which suggests that the Taliban's share of drug proceeds is significantly less than popularly understood and therefore the group's annual revenues are much less as well. (26)

What is clear is that the Taliban have for years generated some amount of funding from the drug trade (e.g., via taxes and protection payments), (27) whether on opiates, (28) hashish, (29) or more recently, crystal methamphetamine. (30) In recent years, the Taliban have also greatly diversified their portfolio of funding sources. (31) The most notable expanded source is illegal mining (e.g., precious stones, (32) talc, (33) and rare earth minerals (34)), which some reports now put near or at the same level of revenue for the group as drugs. (f) The Taliban also actively tax the areas they control (e.g., on infrastructure, utilities, agriculture and social industry (35)), and generate additional revenue from smuggling, (36) extortion, (37) kidnapping for ransom, (38) and private donations. (39)

The Taliban have traditionally relied on some degree of centralization of revenue collection, such as that from formal taxation, alongside a redistributive resource model. (40) But in recent years, the group has given local commanders more leeway in generating revenue (e.g., via war booty) and expending resources to maintain its war machine. Recent interviews with Taliban recruitment officials and commanders suggest that the group does not pay its fighters regular salaries, but rather covers their expenses: "we take care of their pocket money, the gas for their motorcycle, their trip expenses. And if they capture spoils, that is their earning." (41)

The Taliban have also, in recent years, increasingly benefitted from overruns of vulnerable Afghan security force checkpoints and installations, which has afforded them a wealth of armaments mostly procured by the United States, including armored vehicles, night-vision devices, Western rifles, laser designators, and advanced optics. (42) And while the Taliban have been using commercial drones to conduct aerial surveillance for years, they have only recently begun routinely weaponizing them for attacks against ANDSF positions. (43)

ANDSF

Over the past five years, the ANDSF have been funded at around $5-6 billion per year. (44) The United States has provided about 75 percent of this funding via the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (ASFF) and has generally dictated how that money is spent, with another $1 billion or so coming from international partners and the Afghan government contributing roughly $300-400 million more. (45) In fiscal year (FY) 2020, Congress appropriated $1.6 billion for the Afghan Army, $1.2 billion for the AAF, $728 million for Afghan special security forces (ASSF), (g) and $660 million for the police. (46) International donors provide funding for the ANDSF either bilaterally or through one of two multilateral channels: the NATO ANA Trust Fund or the Law and Order Trust Fund Afghanistan. (47)

These sources of funding cover all of the expenses of the ANDSF, though...