Photo: AP Photo
The final collapse of the twenty-year Western mission in Afghanistan resembled the American withdrawal from Saigon. Just hours after the Taliban entered the capital city of Kabul on August 15, a mass of terrified people, translators, NGO activists and other collaborators of the Western occupation forces stormed the airport
Less than a month before the 11th anniversary of the September 2001, XNUMX, attacks on the US, a plume of smoke rose above the US Embassy in Kabul as staff hastily burned documents, then removed the Stars and Stripes flag before leaving and being transferred to the airport by military helicopter . Quite humiliating scenes were created there for the administration of US President Biden, who was monitoring the situation from Camp David.
Just a few hours after the Taliban entered Kabul, a mass of terrified people, translators, NGO activists and other collaborators of the Western occupation forces broke into the airport. Hundreds of them managed to climb the semi-open ramp in an attempt to break into the US Air Force C-17 plane which, with about 640 people already on board, was traveling from Kabul to Qatar. The crew did not stop the plane in time and three people died after falling from the underside of the plane they were clinging to. The US military fired into the air, and some sources say the soldiers killed two armed men.
The Pentagon tried to avoid just such a "Saigon" image of the capital when it urgently sent 3.000 American soldiers to Kabul to evacuate 4.000 American diplomats and officials. Diplomats were instructed to destroy sensitive documents before evacuation, as well as all slogans and insignia that the Taliban could burn for advertising purposes upon entering Kabul.
The Taliban's final offensive
Ben Barry, a former brigadier in the British army and now a senior associate at the British Institute for Strategic Studies, tells the BBC that it is difficult to write a better plan than the one that the Taliban stuck to in the end. The focus of Taliban attacks was on the north and west, rather than their traditional southern strongholds. They also seized key border crossings and checkpoints, siphoning off much-needed customs revenue from the cash-strapped government. In recent days, the Taliban have captured the second and third largest cities in the country, Ghazni and Herat, and on Friday, August 13, Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province.
They have stepped up targeted killings of key officials, human rights activists and journalists.
It is more difficult to define the strategy of the Afghan government, whose ministers have been arguing. It was reduced to unsuccessful attempts to win over tribal leaders with whom the Taliban worked more successfully, to the removal of generals and promises that the government would recover all the territory taken by the Taliban, and they rang hollow.
On August 11, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani arrived in the northern capital of Mazar-e Sharif, in the richer and more industrially developed north near the border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, to discuss the formation of an anti-Taliban coalition with the leader of the Tajiks in the north of Afghanistan, Atta-Mohamad Nur and Marshal Abdul - Rashid Dostum, the leader of the Uzbeks. Dostum was once a communist ally, later an ally of the Taliban, and after the fall of the first Taliban government in 2001, as a NATO ally, he ruled Mazar-e Sharif (in December 2001, he showed his loyalty by massacring 2–3.000 Taliban and Arab prisoners, under the approving from the point of view of intelligence personnel).
On Saturday evening, August 14, 2021, the course of events was the opposite: the Taliban entered Mazar-e Sharif practically without firing a shot, and an hour later, Afghan forces left the city in a hurry, completely blocking the road with jeeps, and headed for the famous Friendship Bridge over the Amu River Darya, which connects Afghanistan with Uzbekistan (now called Termez-Hairaton). In 1989, the last units of Soviet troops crossed that bridge when they were leaving Afghanistan.
Deep conspiracy
The leader of the Tajik community, Ata-Mohamed Nur, explained the abandonment of Mazar-e Sharif by the knowledge that all government and military equipment was transferred to the Taliban, as a result of an organized and cowardly conspiracy. "They organized a conspiracy to capture Marshal Dostum and me, but they failed," he tweeted, and then sent a message that a similar fate threatened Kabul, because "the conspiracy is very deep."
Ata-Mohammed Nur and Marshal Dostum reportedly managed to go to Uzbekistan, where 700 Afghan soldiers were transferred, among whom 158 soldiers and civilians arrived on foot by crossing the border river Amu Darya. The Uzbek Air Force shot down an Afghan plane whose pilots ejected. 22 Afghan military planes and 24 military helicopters made a forced landing at the Termez airport, in the south of Uzbekistan, according to a statement from the State Prosecutor's Office of Uzbekistan.
Fall of Jalalabad
After Mazar-e Sharif, the Taliban forces captured the last large city that was not in their hands - Jalalabad, and the fate of Kabul was sealed, where about 250.000 refugees, mostly women and small children, poured in. Washington's estimates that Kabul would hold on for maybe 90 days were proving more wrong every hour. However, contrary to expectations, there was no Taliban attack on the Afghan capital, no street fighting, and no attack on the presidential palace, where the final drama of President Ashraf Ghani's government took place behind the scenes.
The unraveling followed on Sunday evening, August 15, when the AP agency reported that the Taliban were preparing to send an appeal from the presidential palace announcing the revival of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (this is how the Taliban call their unrecognized state, which existed from 1996 to 2001). until XNUMX). At the end of that confused day, TV footage emerged showing several Taliban with the obligatory assault rifles on their chests roaming the rooms of the Arg presidential palace, the historic seat of power in Afghanistan, taking down Afghan flags and replacing them with their own.
The end of the twenty-year American mission
America's 15-year mission in Afghanistan finally collapsed that Sunday, August XNUMX, when President Ashraf Ghani fled. Russian media reports that he transferred to the helicopter in a convoy of four cars, which were loaded with so many valuables that all the money he took could not fit in the helicopter. The image may be exaggerated, but it is not uncommon in descriptions of regime collapse. The London "Times" writes that President Ghani's flight shows that the American henchman was never fit for the job and that no one seems to know what to do next. Even the ministers of his government were not informed that the president had fled, like the minister of education, who told the BBC that she did not know what her fate and the fate of her family would be.
According to experts interviewed by the Petrograd "Kommersant", such a quick outcome could also be the result of tacit agreements between the United States, the Taliban and Pakistan, which, according to that speculation, is in charge of watching over Afghanistan. The existence of such agreements is indicated by the many unusual surrenders of government units to the Taliban, almost without a fight, first in nearly 200 rural districts, then in 30 Afghan cities and, finally, in Kabul. "The sudden withdrawal of the United States from the previously promised air support to the Afghan security forces on the battlefield is in the same vein," Andrey Serenko, director of the analytical center of the Russian Society of Political Scientists, told Kommersant.
Baradar and the "mythical idea"
Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban leader released from a Pakistani prison at the request of the US less than three years ago, is mentioned as the undisputed winner of the 20-year war. Born in Uruzgan province in 1968, he fought in the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980s, and when the country descended into civil war between rival warlords in 1992, Baradar set up a madrasa in Kandahar with his former commander and son-in-law, Mohammad Omar. During the five-year Taliban regime, Baradar held a number of military and administrative roles, and by the time the US invaded Afghanistan, he was deputy defense minister. The CIA tracked him down in Karachi in 2010 and in February of that year convinced Pakistani intelligence to arrest him.
However, in 2018, Washington's position changed and Donald Trump's Afghan envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, asked the Pakistanis to release Baradar so that he could lead negotiations in Qatar, based on the belief that he would settle for a power-sharing deal, which one former US official called “ some kind of mythical idea". In February 2020, Baradar signed an agreement with the US in Doha, which the Trump administration hailed as a breakthrough for peace, but which now appears to be only a stage for the complete victory of the Taliban. Power-sharing talks between the Taliban and Ashraf Ghani's Kabul government were to follow, but failed. Baradar and the Taliban waited for some time for the Americans to leave and prepared the last offensive.
CNN, citing a source familiar with the negotiations, reported that US Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad asked Taliban fighters not to enter Kabul until American citizens were evacuated. As helicopters circled over Kabul to evacuate the Americans from the "green zone", the streets were jammed with cars as people tried to flee the besieged city, where an attack by the Taliban was expected.
"The Economist" writes how books are being hidden in Kabul, how women without burqas have been looking for shops where they can buy them, and how many, when they realized the Taliban were coming, ran home to destroy evidence of their ties to Westerners or the Bisha. government. In the fog of war, there were news or rumors, such as the one where the Taliban had flogged a woman who wore white shoes because they considered it an insult to their flag, that some of the women among the 250.000 refugees on the streets of Kabul claimed to have fled because some the Taliban asked to give them daughters to marry them.
Afghan government forces melted away, looting broke out, and a few hours later the Taliban claimed their men had entered Kabul in panic and lawlessness as necessary to restore order. With automatons on their chests, they paraded around the city, as important as they were. They were forbidden to roam, but sporadic gunshots could be heard in the city.
The atmosphere was reminiscent of Lalin's saying: "Let there be war, if only liberation does not come!"
"Franchise Owners"
On August 17, the Taliban announced a general amnesty for government officials who, as reported by the AFP agency, were ordered to continue working. The Russian agency TASS reports the news of the Afghan agency Kaama press that women demonstrated in Kabul demanding that some of the positions in the future government be assigned to women. According to the agency, on August 17, the Taliban with weapons in their hands were less visible in Kabul, where traffic on the streets became more lively and public transport was restored. The head of the Taliban military commission, Mulavi Yaqoob, in an audio address, ordered his subordinates not to enter the private homes of Afghans, primarily in Kabul, and that no one should take anyone's car because the process of vehicle re-registration will begin later. It is claimed that the Taliban have arrested some criminals who are robbing civilians under the guise of Taliban members. The new government announces that educational institutions are still open to men and women, but that they are not working in Kabul. According to the same source, the Taliban asked the group of female doctors to continue performing their duties.
The British "Guardian" reported that many in Kabul do not believe the former insurgents' promises to give amnesty to those who worked for their old enemies, as well as others, such as women's rights activists, who sought a different future for Afghanistan. "They should trust us!", repeated the Taliban spokesman, who was trying to present the winners in a better light.
The Taliban now look like absolute winners, but it is far from clear how they will curb the triumph of the victors, and who the real victor is. Namely, Dr. Mike Martin, a former Pashtun-speaking British army officer who followed the history of the conflict in Helmand, warns in his book "Intimate War" that the Taliban are not a single, monolithic group, but "closer to a coalition of independent franchise owners which are loosely - and most likely temporarily - connected to each other".
He notes that this was also true of the Afghan government, which was dominated by local factional motives. After all, Afghanistan's shape-shifting history illustrates how families, tribes, and even government officials have switched sides—often to ensure their own survival.
It remains to be seen whether predictions that the Taliban could include representatives of minorities in their Islamic government will come true. The population of Afghanistan, by the way, consists of 42 percent Pashtuns (the Taliban are Pashtuns), 27 percent Tajiks, nine percent Hazaras, nine percent Uzbeks, four percent Aymaks, and three percent Turkmens.
A tale of two armies
In many media, there were questions without a clear answer as to how the Taliban conquered Afghanistan so quickly, what assessments were made by the intelligence services, etc. The Taliban were estimated to have around 80.000 troops, poorly equipped but ideologically highly motivated, compared to the nominal 300.699 troops serving the Afghan government, yet the entire country was effectively overrun within weeks as military commanders surrendered without a fight. in a few hours.
According to an estimate by the US Counter-Terrorism Center at West Point, the core Taliban units numbered 60.000 fighters. With the addition of other local militias and supporters, that number could exceed 200.000. Even if there are so many of them, they are not enough forces to conquer Kabul, which now has about six million inhabitants.
According to some estimates reported by the Guardian, the army loyal to the Afghan government was well-equipped but dependent on NATO support, poorly led and, with widespread illiteracy in its ranks, riddled with corruption. The watchdog of US aid spending for Afghanistan warned last month that it has always been "extremely challenging" for the Pentagon to assess the combat and administrative capacity of the Afghan military given repeated warnings of the "corrosive effects of corruption".
From 2002 to March 2021, America spent $88,3 billion to rebuild and train Afghan security forces (ANDSF). Congress and Western politicians, shocked and bewildered, will need time to understand why such heavy spending on training the Afghan army led to a collapse in the conflict with the Taliban within weeks.
88 gambled, 978 billion dollars spent
"Politico" writes that for years one could hear excessively optimistic assessments of American officials who obscured and in some cases deliberately hid evidence of deep-rooted corruption, low morale, and even ghost soldiers "which existed only on the payrolls of the Afghan Ministry of Defense and Interior".
"Le Temps" (Lausanne, Switzerland) writes, citing a senior American military source, that Afghan officials have been increasing the number of "phantom battalions", perhaps to increase American accounts and feed widespread corruption, and that according to an unnamed Western diplomats working in Kabul, "there were 46 'ghost battalions' of 800 men each."
According to the US Department of Defense, total military spending in Afghanistan (from October 2001 to September 2019) reached $778 billion. In addition, the US State Department – along with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other government agencies – spent $44 billion on reconstruction projects. That means total spending between 2001 and 2019 was $822 billion, but that doesn't include any spending in Pakistan, which the US has used as a base for Afghanistan-related operations.
More money went to the army than to reconstruction. Since 2002, the US has spent about $143,27 billion on reconstruction in Afghanistan, another $36 billion on governance and development, while smaller amounts have also been allocated to counter-narcotics and humanitarian aid. According to a 2019 study by Brown University that looked at war spending in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US spent about $978 billion (their estimate also includes money set aside for fiscal year 2020).
Since the start of the war against the Taliban in 2001, 3.500 coalition soldiers have died, of which more than 2.300 are American and 450 British. An additional 20.660 American soldiers were injured in action.
Afghan women may have to wear the veil again, but the bodies of dead American soldiers will no longer arrive in black plastic bags to their grieving families, London's "Times" sarcastically concluded.
The mirage of the good war
The Times summarizes in one text: the speed with which the Taliban has advanced shows that all 20 years of patronage and attempts to support Afghanistan's weak and corrupt government have failed. The answer, then, is not how strong the Taliban is, but how prone the ruling structure in Afghanistan was to fall.
Tariq Ali, a British writer and journalist of Pakistani origin, in an article in "New Leftist Review" under the title "Afghanistan: mirage of the good war", vividly describes how there has rarely been such an enthusiastic display of international unity as that which welcomed the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Support for the war was universal in the offices of the West, NATO member governments rushed to confirm - "all for one". Blair traveled the world touting the "doctrine of the international community" and the possibilities for peacekeeping and nation-building in the Hindu Kush. Every media network – with BBC World and CNN at the forefront – became her megaphone. For the German Greens, as well as for Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, the influential wives of the American president and the British prime minister, it was a war for the liberation of the women of Afghanistan. For the White House, the fight for civilization. For Iran, the impending defeat of the Wahhabi enemy.
Three years later, as the chaos in Iraq deepened, Afghanistan became synonymous with the "good war", legalized by the UN and supported by NATO. For American Democrats, it was the "real front" of the war on terror. With varying degrees of conviction, the occupation of Afghanistan was also supported by China, Iran and Russia; although in the case of the latter there was always a strong element of malicious glee (here Tariq Ali uses the German term Schadenfreude). Soviet veterans of the Afghan war were fascinated to see their mistakes being repeated by the United States, in a war even more inhumane than the one fought by their predecessor.
True, as Tariq Ali writes, there was relief in Kabul when the Taliban's Wahhabi emirate was overthrown, the end result of which was a ruthless social dictatorship, although there was less rape and heroin production was limited under Taliban rule, in a country that was burdened by foreign and civil wars since 1979. In 2001, the Taliban government fell without a serious fight. Islamabad, officially committed to the American cause, has forbidden any frontal confrontation.
Some Taliban fanatics crossed the border into Pakistan, while a more independent faction loyal to Mullah Omar took to the mountains to fight another day. Kabul was undefended; a BBC war correspondent entered the capital before the Northern Alliance.
A spectacle of shattered hopes
What many Afghans then expected from the government that would succeed the Taliban was a similar level of order, but without the repression and social restrictions. What they were presented with instead was a melancholy spectacle that dashed all their hopes, writes Tariq Ali.
The problem was not a lack of funds, but the very Western project of state-building, building an army capable of suppressing its own population but unable to defend the nation against outside forces; civilian administration without control over planning or social infrastructure, which is in the hands of Western NGOs; and a government whose foreign policy is in step with Washington's. It had nothing to do with the reality on the ground.
Dissatisfaction was fed by the behavior of the new elite. Colleagues of President Hamid Karzai, protected by soldiers of the international security force in Afghanistan, ISAF, have built large mansions overlooking piles of sprawling slums in Kabul. The American-Afghan architect describes how Kabul was ruthlessly transformed: from a modern capital to the military and political headquarters of the invading army, to the besieged seat of power of the puppet regime in the so-called to the "green zone"... Nevertheless, there have never been so many pronounced inequalities before.
Unemployment in Afghanistan was around 60 percent, and maternal, infant and child mortality is now among the highest in the world. The opium harvest increased, and the "neo-Taliban" grew stronger year by year. Funds for reconstruction disappeared into the pockets of friends or went to pay Western consultants on short-term contracts. The police were more predators than protectors. The social crisis was deepening...
The elite staff of 10.000 NGOs, writes Tariq Ali, have turned Kabul "into the Klondike during the gold rush" by building office blocks, raising rents, cruising around in armored jeeps and spending staggering sums of other people's money, mostly on themselves. They only took orders from some remote agencies, but the same was true of the US military, NATO, the UN, the EU, and the supposedly sovereign Afghan government.
The wrong concept of "nation building"
In short: even according to the assessment of Western experts and institutions, "nation building" in Afghanistan was flawed in its very conception. "So far, it has produced a puppet president, whose survival depends on foreign mercenaries, corrupt and abusive police, a 'dysfunctional' judiciary, an advanced criminal class and a deepening social and economic crisis," wrote Tariq Ali in 2008.
Thus, the United States joined the ranks of its predecessors, including Great Britain in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. These historical examples do not make the American experience any more acceptable. In Afghanistan and Iraq, for that matter, the Americans not only did not learn from the mistakes of others, but also did not take into account their own mistakes, made a few decades earlier in Vietnam.
London's "Financial Times" writes that the Afghan collapse reflects not only the failure of the military and intelligence services, but also the failure to build a more functional state in 20 years. The original purpose of the post-11/XNUMX invasion was to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for further attacks. And the country threatens to once again become a base for jihadists, writes "Financial Times".
There are reassuring, if self-deceiving, assumptions that the Taliban are nationalists and that, sooner or later, they will drive out international Islamists such as members of ISIS or Al Qaeda...
Some observers now point out that the restoration of Taliban rule, however bloody and repressive, may be less dangerous than its alternative - a slide into full-scale civil war. But not only the suffering population of Afghanistan, but also the United States and its allies will now have to live with the consequences of what happened. The stream of refugees has already formed.
"Time" number 1598, 19 August 2021.
Read daily news, analysis, commentary and interviews at www.vreme.com
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