By James Pethokoukis

In congressional testimony last September, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the Afghan army’s sudden collapse caught the Pentagon “by surprise.” President Joe Biden put it this way after the fall of Kabul: “We paid their salaries. . . . What we could not provide was the will to fight.”

The latter quote kicks off “Failing to Provide Public Goods: Why the Afghan Army Did Not Fight” by economists Rohan Dutta (McGill University), David K. Levine (European University Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), and Salvatore Modica (Università di Palermo). And as the researchers (DLM from here forward) point out, Biden’s statement was more insightful than he probably realized. DLM: “What Biden and many others fail to understand is that there is a causal connection between paying the salaries of the Afghan Army and the fact that they lacked the will to fight. Our goal in this article is to explain why that is so and why it need not have been so.”

And in the course of explaining why paying those Afghan salaries was unhelpful, DLM turn to “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of Britain at the start of World War I: “In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly.”

But that sort of peer pressure was absent in Afghanistan, which turned out to be a big problem. According to the model created by DLM, “the payment of salaries by the United States substituted for a peer enforcement system” and thus reduced the “incentive for collective action to encourage volunteers to join the army” — and not just join but also be willing to fight against an army governed by social incentives, the Taliban.

 Then the US decided to bug out: “When the salary payments were withdrawn, we might expect that it would have been replaced by a peer enforcement system — but there was no time for this. Hence, it was best to surrender right away and not, for example, allow the relatively small number of commandos who were ready to fight to do so.”

But weren’t other elements also a big factor in the Afghan army’s collapse? The researchers highlight three other explanations: (a) the corrupt Afghan government, (b) the removal of US air support, and (c) the fact that while it was young men doing the fighting, it was women and older men who would most benefit from the fighting. DLM respond:

[None] of these things are peculiar to Afghanistan. In the case of Vietnam, where the [South Vietnam army] did fight, it is equally true that the government was corrupt and that the United States stopped providing air support. Moreover, it is hard to think of any war in which those who fought were not young men — a group that typically has the lowest relative benefit from victory. The stay-at-homes, be they women or older men, tend to benefit the most. More broadly, while support for the Taliban was strong in opium-producing areas, they were opposed in most other areas, and self-organization in the absence of salary subsidies is not implausible.

And as the researchers then note:

In this context it is worth pointing out that the United States did not pay soldiers’ salaries in South Vietnam but only provided subsidies in the form of training and equipment. . . . The bottom line is not entirely negative — either for nation building or for NGOs. It is not that help cannot be provided, but care must be taken that the help provided does not undermine the provision of effort through collective action and social norms. Hence, providing military training and equipment will generally result in greater defense, just as providing computers and training to charitable organizations can do the same.

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