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The incentives seem misaligned when we reward our collaborators for failure. We spent decades and tens of billions of dollars training the ANA only for them to surrender practically without a fight. Giving them the prospect of an escape route to the US likely weakened their resolve rather than strengthening it. It also doesn't seem like the sort of behavior you'd expect from people who genuinely believe they will be executed or harshly persecuted by the new government.
I can see making an exception for rare cases that demonstrate remarkable courage or character as a PR strategy, but extending it to just about any collaborator is completely misguided.
If the incentives seem misaligned, that implicitly requires a perspective and understanding of what aligned incentives are. How much do you want to bet you can provide a set that others here couldn't trivially poke holes through?
You say that giving them a prospect of an escape route likely weakened their resolve. Why should their resolve to support the occupiers be any firmer if you, the occupier, make a policy that there is no escape? It should be rather obvious why that is creating an even greater incentive to not collaborate in the first place, which is what you the occupier need, and why this is a major incentive to side with the resistance whose mantra for decades was 'when the foreigners leave, we will still be here.'
Which, historically, was the winning strategy. Which is why the Afghan clans regularly played both sides, with family members on both sides of the conflict, so that if/when the GIROA failed they had family on the Taliban side who was willing to cover for them if they capitulated. It was the people who had undertaken acts of significant support of GIROA, often at foreign behest, whose families couldn't cover for them.
Yes, people are unlikely to fight to the death for you if they have an escape route. They are also unlikely to fight to the death for you if they do not have an escape route. This is because they are more likely to not fight for you in the first place, and even if they do are more likely to defect earlier on.
If your incentive strategy is moving the defection point even further up in the timeline, it should be visible why this is an even worse alignment of incentives.
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