The Taliban and Bowe Bergdahl
Mike Walker, Col USMC(retired)
The Taliban
The current controversy over the safe return of Bowe Bergdahl has led to a lot of talk about the Taliban. Too much of it is based on a very poor understanding of the relationship between the Taliban and the Afghan people.
Let me try to set the record straight and bluntly so.
People who support the Taliban support a violent and radical hate group. That is the truth, period and end of story.
Background
After the Afghan-Soviet War ended in 1989, the country fell into chaos as the seven key mudjahedin groups that had defeated the Soviets (informally called the “P-7”) split apart and those Afghans who fought with the Soviets somehow held on to power in part of the country. That disunity plunged the nation into civil war.
The Taliban, roughly meaning religious students in Pashtun, came together after the war in 1994 under Mullah Omar and were able to rapidly gain control over most of the country by 1996.
Coalition Forces overthrew the Taliban regime in late 2001 for supporting al Qaeda training and planning for the 9/11 Attacks. If you do not remember, the Taliban invited al Qaeda into Afghanistan in 1996 and al Qaeda’s military arm became 055 (Arab) Brigade of the Taliban army. The Taliban have been al Qaeda’s longest and strongest ally.
The Afghan people oppose al Qaeda by a margin of 81% against versus 6% who support it, according to a 2006 World Public Opinion poll. That disconnect alone shows the vast gap between the beliefs of the Afghan people and the Taliban.
After the Coalition surge into the Taliban heartland began (Kandahar and Helmund), sympathy for the Taliban plummeted rapidly, falling to 29% by 2011, according to Asia Foundation.
At the same time, support for U.S. troops in Afghanistan continued to rise, with 68% of the Afghan people in support according to an 11 January 2010 BBC report.
Ironically, the Afghan people liked having U.S. troop in their country in much higher numbers than the American people wanted our troops in Afghanistan.
The drop in Taliban support also reflected the 2010 change in Taliban tactics of targeting civilians, a move that led the Afghan people to blame the the continued fighting on the Taliban over Coalition Forces by a ratio of 2 to 1 by 2011.
Reuters noted the weakness of the Taliban in having no influence in stopping the recent 2014 elections, an election that Mullah Omar ridiculed and his Taliban boasted they would derail. They failed.
Reuters published this Afghan twitter posting: “This is how people vote to say death to the Taliban.” What the Taliban want is not what the Afghan people want.
Opposition to the Taliban can also be seen in those fighting against them.
Of the aforementioned P-7 who defeated the Soviets, four groups are part of the current Afghan government and fighting WITH USin Afghanistan, the other two, Hezb-e- Islami under Hekmatyar is opposed to our presence in Afghanistan as is Hezb-e-Islami Khails, now referred to a the Haqqani Network.
The last group, Islamic National Revolution Movement, broke apart after the war and that is where Mullah Omar comes from.
Another amazing statistic is the breakdown of the number of combatants. Look at this comparison of the last year that Soviet ground forces fought in Afghanistan compared to our last year:
– Back then:
Afghans against the Russians: 150,000 to 250,000 Mudjahedin
Afghans fighting with the Soviets: 25,000 Afghans
– Today
Afghans against the Coalition: 30,000 Taliban/Haqqani/Hekmatyar
Afghans fighting with the Coalition: 200,000 Afghans soldiers
The Soviets suffered ten times the number killed, seven times the number wounded, and fifty times the number fallen due to illness.
Soviets/Afghan allies lost over 600 tanks versus zero for the Coalition, over 1,500 APC’s versus less than 10 for us; lost over 450 aircraft, to include over 300 helicopters shot down, versus less than 15 US helicopters and no fixed wing aircraft shot down.
Why are the Taliban so Hated by the Afghan People?
When the Taliban took power:
a. Women were forbidden from holding jobs outside the house and girls were banned from school. After we tossed them out of power, Sabrina Saqib, a member of the Afghan Parliament, later stated: “Women came back to life after the Taliban.”
In frustration, the Taliban reverted to horrific tactics such as throwing acid in the face of little girls walking to school. The purpose was to intimidate families into keeping the girls both illiterate and at home.
b. Under the Taliban’s dreaded Department of Vice and Virtue, the punishment for most crimes was death, carried out by public beheading or being shot in the back of the head at Kabul’s Ghazi Soccer Stadium. Stoning of women for adultery was also “popular.” The Taliban used to show these barbaric practices on national television.
The Taliban claimed it was religiously “virtuous” for people to attend the slaughter.
The crimes? Besides murder, "evils" such as prostitution, adultery, homosexuality, and religious offenses such as converting to Christianity all fit the bill. Lessor crimes, like being a moneychanger, bought on the amputation of hands or feet, usually carried out a few feet from in front of the goals. Sickening.
Today, the stadium is a place of peace and once again used for sports.
c. The Taliban proved to be racist butchers and their hatred of anyone who was not Pashtun played out on the battlefield. If a Pashtun village resisted during their march to power in the 1990s, the people were treated humanely by and large.
If the villagers were not Pashtuns, every house was destroyed, the crops razed, and suspected enemy resisters shot out of hand with the corpses scalped and mutilated on many occasions.
When the Taliban took Kabul, all non-Pashtun peoples were fired from government jobs across the country.
Every Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek and members of other ethnic minorities know that a return of the Taliban means a return to a savage apartheid state.
d. In 2001, The Taliban destroyed the sacred Buddhas of Bamiyan statues that had been built in the 6th century, when some Afghans had been Buddhists. For over a thousand years, Islamic Afghan rulers had protected or at least ignored the site but the hate-filled and intolerant Taliban under Mullah Omar blasted them apart with dynamite.
Conclusion
Is it any wonder that another poll found that only a little over 10% of the Afghan people (and just 30% of the Pashtuns) wanted the Taliban to return to power?
Supporting Mullah Omar and the Taliban because they are “good” for the Afghan people is the equivalent of praising Adolf Hitler and the Nationalist Socialists because they were “good” for the German people.
That is morally and ethically unconscionable.
People who support the Taliban support a violent and radical hate group. That is the truth, period and end of story.
Semper Fi,
Mike
