“Ghost soldiers” for Kabul? Ex-minister puts the disaster in Afghanistan in a completely new light

The Taliban captured all of Afghanistan in August.

An ex-minister has now revealed: The Afghan army, which was supposed to stop the advance, was much smaller than claimed.

London / Munich - According to a former minister of the country, the Afghan army only had a fraction of the soldiers allegedly under arms before the Taliban * came to power.

After the decision to withdraw all US * and NATO * troops from Afghanistan *, the Taliban captured the country in just one month.

The Afghan army, which for two decades was primarily trained and equipped by the US, but also by other NATO troops, should actually have prevented this.

Afghan ex-minister: Corrupt practices responsible for rapid collapse

But it collapsed on all fronts, including in the capital Kabul.

With almost no clashes, Taliban forces gradually took all the provinces and finally the capital, Kabul.

They posed in front of the cameras in the presidential palace.

The province of Punjir, which had never been controlled by the Taliban before, also fell into their hands.

The resistance organized there could not withstand the Taliban forces either.

But how did it come about that the Afghan army, consisting of around 300,000 soldiers, collapsed at breathtaking speed and left the field almost without a fight to the Taliban?

Afghan ex-finance minister Khalid Payenda has the answer.

In an interview with the

, he revealed new facts about the Afghanistan disaster and blamed "corrupt practices" by officials for the collapse.

Afghanistan's ex-finance minister: Afghan army was never as big as claimed - "ghost soldiers"

According to Payenda, documents issued at the time about the numerical superiority of the Afghan security forces over the Taliban do not correspond to reality.

Accordingly, there were at most a sixth of the alleged 300,000 soldiers and police officers, said ex-finance minister Khalid Payenda of the

.

The reason for this was the corrupt practices of officers who had received funds from the central government in Kabul for the “ghost soldiers”: “You asked the chief in this region how many people (soldiers) you had and based on this you calculated the wages. “The number of soldiers was always exaggerated in order to get more money, according to Payenda.

In addition, escaped and deceased soldiers were not deleted from the documents.

The commanders would keep these soldiers' bank cards and take their salaries, the ex-finance minister claimed.

This, too, has evidently led to the number of Afghan soldiers being shown much higher.

Afghanistan's former President Ghani was not corrupt, says ex-minister

However, he defended former President Ashraf Ghani against allegations of corruption.

He does not think that Ghani has behaved "financially corrupt", the ex-minister said.

He rejected to a large extent allegations of corruption within the former Ministry of Finance, which he headed.

The ministry did not participate in the exaggeration of the number of soldiers: "To a certain extent, I am of the same opinion, but absolutely not in this matter."