The last commander of the Afghan Army’s warning to America

As Lieutenant General Sami Sadat stepped onto a C-17 military plane at Kabul International Airport on August 19, 2021, bloodshed engulfed the country he loved and had spent his life fighting for. Desperate Afghans surrounded the runway, trying to escape the Taliban and the inhumanity that would soon take over as Western forces left. The three-star general in the Afghanistan Army was exhausted, humiliated, quietly nursing a shrapnel wound to his neck and about to make the hardest decision of his life: To leave his homeland behind. Staying would have likely meant death for him and his troops.

He had been fighting day and night for three and a half months to slow the Taliban’s rapid offensive towards the capital as allied forces withdrew. Over two weeks in August, the airport was under siege from terrorists and thousands poured onto aircrafts to evacuate as the U.S. pulled their remaining troops and staff out. At the beginning of the month, President Ashraf Ghani had named Sadat (pictured left) the commander of Afghanistan’s special forces, the country’s most elite fighters. But by the time he had arrived in Kabul the situation was already dire. 

He was tasked with ensuring the security of the capital, but it was too late and Ghani had fled. He lifted off over mountains his father traversed to defeat the Taliban after 9/11, and reflected on military career that saw him rise to become one of the country’s youngest generals. As he flew above the carnage in the windowless plane, he was furious at the actions of President Joe Biden and the U.S. administrations before him. His country had been betrayed. Afghans who fought alongside Western troops were forced into hiding and left to fend for themselves with targets on their backs.

Rights women had enjoyed for 20 years would vanish and children would be stopped going to school. They are faced with barbarism and beatings if they show their face in public. The military he’d led so valiantly were losing a battle almost impossible to win without support. The Afghan Army – who lost 66,000 men over 20 years – no longer had the will to fight because they had been abandoned. Three years after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, the extremists have sent the war-torn nation back 20 years with their oppressive and corrupt policies.

Sadat (pictured) is watching his nation deteriorate from the United Kingdom, where he is living with his wife and two children. He wonders when he will be able to return so he can finally defeat the Taliban, and he is ready. He still has hope that Afghanistan has a future free of the Taliban that he helped force into the mountains during the allied forces’ two-decade stay. Sadat lays out his vision for his beloved country and gives a damning assessment of who is to blame for his its collapse in his book The Last Commander. 

His story is the inside account of how Afghanistan was cast aside, and the pivotal role the U.S. and the West played in its abandonment. Sadat rose rapidly through the Afghan military. He worked in intelligence and served in many senior roles that included the deputy commander of the Afghan ground forces and later the deputy chief of the Afghan National Army. He received training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst – Britain’s officer training college – and in the U.S. and Germany. His early work involved close cooperation with the C.I.A and U.S. forces, tracking down Al-Qaeda in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. It was in conventional combat, leading from the front, where he became a legend in the ranks of the Afghan military.

Now, from afar, he leads the Afghan United Front after reluctantly fleeing the country he served with dedication. He was on the frontlines of the battle with the Taliban for decades, and has since seen them take the upper hand while Afghanistan has turned into an even more dangerous breeding ground for terrorism. The resistance in Afghanistan has made inroads against the Taliban in recent months and has even had successful operations near Kabul. But Sadat says they need support to take back the country, and it needs to come from the nations that turned their back. ‘Direct responsibility lies with the U.S. and specifically with former President Barack Obama and his Democratic successor Joe Biden’, he writes.

He blames Obama for being ‘clearly intent’ on withdrawing from Afghanistan and ‘emboldening’ the Taliban by setting a timetable for getting American troops out. Obama gradually drew down the presence of U.S. forces during his administration, leaving enough to provide support for the Afghan military after stopping combat operations in 2014. Sadat says The Doha Agreement, the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and Donald Trump’s administration, led to the U.S. virtually cutting off communications with the Afghan government. It caused situations, he says, where the U.S. military weren’t authorized to conduct strikes in support of Afghan security forces. The Taliban started to sense that they only had to wait for Americans to leave to achieve victory. Before the 2020 deal was signed, they had not made any significant progress on the battlefield.

The deal was one of the key turning points where the situation for the Afghan army started to go downhill. Sadat says Biden showed ‘withering contempt’ for Afghanistan and didn’t listen to generals who warned him that keeping a military presence on the ground would stop Al-Qaeda and ISIS being able to ‘rebuild’. In 2021, Biden set out a timetable for the last U.S. forces to leave, but he was urged by Gen. Kenneth ‘Frank’ McKenzie – the commander of U.S. Central Command – to keep at least 2,500 troops on the ground to prevent the inevitable collapse of the Afghan military and government. Now the terrorist groups the U.S. wanted to push to the brink of eradication are starting to thrive again, and Sadat believes the risk of attack is increasing by the day. From when Biden was vice president under Obama, he was the most consistent critic of prolonged American involvement in Afghanistan, Sadat says.

He would have cut the number of U.S. troops to just one thousand and limited operations to just special forces raids. Biden, Sadat says, also gave the Taliban a propaganda victory by choosing September 11, 2021, as the date the last soldier had to leave. ‘It was as if Osama Bin Laden had come back to life to ask for this date, so they could celebrate another victory against America’, he told DailyMail.com. The withdrawal was brought forward a month to August because the Taliban was rapidly overrunning the country and making their way towards Kabul faster than the U.S. had anticipated. Sadat says he met with the U.S. officials to try and tell them they needed to hold the capital city, but the Americans said their orders were to head for the airport. Over two weeks during the evacuation, hundreds of civilians died. People fell to their deaths from the planes they were clinging onto in a bid to escape.

On August 26, 2021, an ISIS-K operative detonated a [homicide] bomb at the airport and killed 182 people – 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members. ‘Biden was the a**hole who turned his back and left things in chaos’, Sadat told DailyMail.com. When Biden announced the withdrawal, he stated that the Afghan military was not able to fight for themselves. From 2014 on, NATO and U.S. forces had essentially stopped fighting and left the Afghan forces to hold the ground. Sadat says Biden is wrong. The local troops were winning and increasingly capable, but their ability to fight was taken away.

He admits there were a lot of problems in the Afghan military, including the police and the corruption of the Ghani government that impacted military leadership. But the supply of ammunition was gradually taken away and political pressure on the Afghan government was pushing them to the point of disintegration. They were crippled. ‘For us Afghans, it’s very difficult to counter a narrative that is set up by somebody like President Biden, because every single newspaper and TV channel picks that up and they don’t listen to the Afghans’.

Want more stories like this from the Daily Mail? Hit the follow button above for more of the news you need.