So where was the Afghan leadership that U.S. officials kept saying was the key to stemming the Taliban’s advance? The answer is that it didn’t exist. For years, commanders of the Afghan National Army and National Police — the elements most critical to securing the country — failed to lead, often stealing the salaries and fuel that their forces needed to be effective, and more recently failing to even provide their forces with edible food.

What’s more, the United States government has known — and publicly stated—this fact for years. In an official 2008 assessment of the war, the Pentagon stated that Afghanistan’s government “is hampered by … a lack of sufficient leadership and human capital.” Fast forward to 2020, when the DOD’s most recent assessment acknowledged that “improving the quality of leadership at all echelons remains the most challenging issue” for the country’s security forces.

If DOD knew in 2008 that Afghanistan had weak leadership, why was this still the most critical problem 12 years later? Why didn’t we produce the leaders to effectively use the forces and equipment that Afghanistan had so much of? The answer lies in the way DOD thinks about developing leadership in foreign forces, which has two flaws. First, the U.S. military tends to view leadership as a capability, akin to intelligence or command and control, as opposed to an intangible human quality. Second, the U.S. military sees leadership as something to be personally cultivated in individual members of a partner nation’s military, as opposed to something that can be produced at scale by building institutions. Had the United States taken an approach to leader development that didn’t have these problems, it would not have found itself calling at the 11th hour for Afghan leadership that did not exist.