For months now, U.S. leadership has been working with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani to stand up a new “territorial force” to fend off Taliban elements on the local level. The new security force would consist of “self-defence units of locally recruited men serving in their own villages… to stabilise areas cleared by regular security forces and establish law and order,” as The Guardian puts it.
It’s no surprise that the state of affairs in Afghanistan isn’t what the Department of Defense hoped for as the U.S. enters its 16th year of war with the Taliban, but a new analysis of the $70 billion spent trying to shore up the Afghanistan National Security Forces, paints an even more dire picture: The U.S. has failed miserably at building up Afghan security forces.
