Spoiler Alert: Ukraine is not Afghanistan (part 1)

Eric Balough
War In Ukraine
Published in
5 min readMay 3, 2022

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US Embedded Tactical Trainer (ETT) in Afghanistan (Source: NPR)

This may come as a shock to some, but Ukraine is not Afghanistan (if you are here and reading this, you probably already know that). While this is a statement of the grotesquely obvious, it seems to need repeating for the pundits who are marveling at the success of US/NATO training efforts in Ukraine after the spectacular collapse of the US/NATO-trained Afghan National Army last summer.

The comparison between the training missions not only betrays a complete misunderstanding of those missions, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the countries and their cultures. Further, most pundits who have offered explanations as to the collapse of the Afghan National Army (ANA), don’t even get that right. So how can one expect that comparisons between the two missions have any validity in the first place?

Let’s start with the similarities

US and NATO trainers spent a great deal of time in both Afghanistan (20 years) and Ukraine (roughly 8 years), and both countries received weaponry manufactured in the West.

The end.

Oh wow… that’s awkward… this makes for a short article.

So I suppose to add a little more depth to this, we’ll need to discuss the NATO Training Mission in Afghan (NTM-A) and why it failed in Part 1 of…

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Eric Balough
War In Ukraine

Former infantry officer, and current military analyst. Lover of coffee, dogs, Jeeps, hockey and my family.