The Afghanistan Debacle
Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)
All,
With the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at hand, it is time to admit the truth:
With the return of the Taliban and the freeing of thousands of IS-K and al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan ...
... Our war on terrorism has suffered its greatest defeat since 9/11 2001.
Below and attached is an essay on our Afghan troubles.
As a warning, it is long: 20 pages and length.
To help you read it, it is broken down into 19 sections so you can read 1 or 2 and quit or skip around or read the whole thing - or delete this.
Semper Fi, Mike
THE 2021 AFGHANISTAN DEBACLE
Everyone knows that the Unites States departure from Afghanistan was as complete a debacle as possible. But what happened, why, and what does it mean?
What follows is a history that seeks to inform and help explain this tragedy and show why we now are in serious trouble.
It is a self-inflicted wound that need not have happened and this mess is NOT going away.
I. Preliminaries: The Situation in 1979
It all began on Christmas Eve December 1979 when the then-Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. A great war followed with Soviet-backed Afghans battling religiously-inspired Mujahadeen based in Pakistan.
Since this was the height of the Cold War, the United States took an active interest in Afghanistan for the first time in its history. Here is what we found: Afghanistan has never been a unified or modern country as we understand the words.
There had been a king until 1973 and that was followed by socialist state. But it was all eyewash as centralized rule never reached far beyond Kabul.
Afghanistan has been a confederation for centuries comprised of regional rulers allied with the local merchant class and religious leaders. They are unified variously by ethnicity, religion and local tribal bonds. That is key in understanding everything that happens there.
The system is impervious to change. At best it has been given a façade of modernity. While we ensured government officials were ostensibly elected after we arrived post 9/11, the large majority remained under the control of the regional rulers. That was and remains where local power is held.
Notably, in the Pashtun tribal areas (41% of the population) local governance took on a more structured form termed pashtunwali with councils or jirghas holding great sway. This edge in unity explains why the Pashtuns dominated Afghanistan for the last three centuries. But the unity is not rock solid. There are three major Pashtun tribal federations and the largest, the Durrani, are further divided into four semi-autonomous sub-tribes.
Ensuring the nation remains factionalized and poor, the terrain is rugged and the weather fierce. Further, the land offers up no generous resources save the poppy plant used to create opiates – a cursed blessing as most of its wealth stems from the illicit drug trade.
Those tough factors meant a stagnant economy, high unemployment, and widespread poverty for decades before 1979 and to appreciate how impoverished the country was, at that time the United States’ GDP was a staggering one thousand times larger than that of Afghanistan.
After the Soviet invasion, things got worse – a lot worse.
II. The Resistance to the Soviet Invasion, 1979-1989
To the great surprise of Moscow, the Afghans defiantly and strongly fought them and by the early 1980s the strongest Mujahadeen groups began to form alliances but they were weak and their efforts uncoordinated.
In 1984, the Pakistanis with American urging brought the leaders together in Pakistan to either form a united front or lose our support. In practice the tactical support was provided by Pakistan’s ISI who worked with the CIA but the CIA always was kept at arms’ length – the ISI ensured the CIA did not provide direct independent support.
This 1984 alliance became known as the Peshawar Seven (P7) and the make-up of the P7 is important, it consisted of six Pashtun resistance groups, only one, the Jamat-i-Islami, consisted of Tajik fighters, and all followed Sunni Islam. The P7 members were led by traditional regional powers such as the Hekmatyr and Haqqani clans.
The P7 received significant funding and support from the Saudis, China, and the CIA in coordination with Pakistani’s ISI. Once again, the Pashtun dominated affairs and that coalition eventually defeated the Soviets who completely withdrew in February 1989.
The role of China has been underappreciated. Beijing is no newcomer to the country. After the 1973 Marxist coup, China provided foreign aid to and took an interest and invested in Afghanistan. And China will continue to play a role.
The P7 were by no means the only mujahadeen organizations. There were the Shi’a Islamic Movement, Tajik Islamic Party, Uzbek National Islamic Movement, Hazara Shi’a Islamic Unity Party and Pashtun Islamic Union Liberation.
The most important non-P7 group was the Afghan Service Bureau al Mujahadeen al Arab (MAK). MAK was not a fighting organization but procured monies and Arab fighters for the various mujahadeen forces, especially the P7.
Formed in 1980 by Abdullah Azzam, in 1984 a new face appeared, Usama Bin Laden (UBL). By the late 1980s, UBL was one of the groups most important leaders and as a provider of monies and fighters, UBL formed friendships within many of the Afghani mujahadeen groups, especially in the Islamic and National Revolution Movement, one of the P7 factions.
As the war drew down and victory apparent, Usama bin Laden oversaw MAK’s reinvention as al Qaeda in 1988. UBL, who always operated as a lone wolf, gained undisputed control of al Qaeda the next year when Abdullah Azzam was assassinated in Peshawar.
A second important non-P7 faction was the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). Formed in 1986 in Peshawar and headed by Ayman al Zawahari, it was built around surviving members of an earlier Egyptian Islamic Jihad that had been crushed by the Egyptian government. After the war, the EIJ returned to its focus of overthrowing the Egyptian government and moved to Sudan. Al Qaeda under UBL remained in close touch.
III. The Importance the P7
I listen to the debates that go on over whether Afghanistan was a failed or successful insurgency. The speakers (with a few exceptions) fall into two categories: Guys who fought the war at the pointy end of the spear or academic-policy types who are chained to their theory and doctrines.
Yes, at the tactical and to a good degree at the operational level, the war was fought using counterinsurgency tactics, techniques, and procedures. But at the strategic level, Afghanistan was never an insurgency and the P7 explains it all.
The P7 and their descendants were critical in defeating the Soviets and they largely determined the fate of Afghanistan in the years that followed. That role remained intact during the 20 years the Americans were there and still continues to this day.
The Taliban now may reign supreme in Kabul but their continued rule still depends on the support of the remnant P7 and other regional warlords.
If you follow their actions from the start of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 to the very present, everything makes a lot of sense – more sense than any other method of approaching the problem too include seeing it as an insurgency.
IV. 1989-1995: The First Precipitous US Withdrawal and the Rise of the Taliban
By 1989 the Soviets had enough and quit. Deeming the Cold War battle over, the United States and the other world powers walked away. The pro-Soviet government in Kabul controlled the capital and little else. The regional warlords returned from Pakistan and reestablished their fiefdoms.
Afghanistan, bereft of anything resembling a central government, descended into chaos and civil war. At the local level, the old regional leaders who ran the P7 reasserted their power as a law unto themselves. With their common enemy gone, they began warring amongst themselves.
By the early 1990s, only six of the P7 were left as the Islamic Revolution Movement of Afghanistan broke apart. But one its leaders, Mullah Omar, began to recruit former mujahadeen in madrasas (religious schools). They formed an army under his leadership and came to called the Taliban which is Pashtun for student. While initially concentrated in and around Kandahar, the Taliban soon became a nationwide force to reckoned with.
V. Pakistan in the Middle
When the Americans walked away in 1989 they not only left the Afghans but also the Pakistanis in the lurch. Pakistan had to find someone to work with, to have some sort of ally, in the mess called Afghanistan.
Islamabad was relieved not to have the Soviet Red Army breathing down its neck along the Afghan border but the lawless wreck that became Afghanistan was only a marginal improvement.
Knowing the Machiavellian intrigues that drove the P7, the Pakistanis saw the new, devout, motivated, and somewhat disciplined Taliban as the best alternative. They reached out to Mullah Omar and the two agreed to work together in common cause. By the mid-1990s, the support of the Pakistanis made the Taliban the most powerful military force in Afghanistan.
Outside its own extremist factions who were pleased with the Taliban’s progress, the Pakistanis did not fully appreciate the monster they had helped to create.
VI. 1996: The Taliban Victory and the Road to 9/11
With his religious fervor in full bloom and Pakistani support to his rear, Mullah Omar decided he could have it all. In the late summer of 1995 the Taliban offensive to conquer Afghanistan kicked off and by September 1996 they had taken Kabul. Absent the winter months of 1995-1996 that shut down operations, the Taliban conquest only took a few months. It was an impressive feat.
But missed by many, success largely was due to Afghanistan’s fragmentation. The Taliban sweep across Afghanistan was not gained through military might alone but by either coopting or making deals or forming alliances primarily with the remnant P7. Mastering that game of ever-shifting loyalties was the key to victory.
Without coming to terms with and winning over the remaining P7, the Taliban victory would have been impossible.
Mullah Omar’s rise to power attracted the attention of old friends. By the mid-1990s, al Qaeda had moved to the Sudan to work with the EIJ. The two terrorist organizations grew close and sometime around 1998, the EIJ merged with al Qaeda. That year they decided to move to more fertile fields – in Afghanistan.
Once there, UBL and Zawahiri planned, directed, and oversaw the execution of the 9/11 2001 attacks on the United States. Mullah Omar and the Taliban gave them every measure of encouragement and support.
The P7 interrelationships again came into play. Many had no interest in al Qaeda and its global jihad. They blew off al Qaeda to focus on Afghanistan and their domains. But others, like the Haqqani, became friends of al Qaeda and were the Taliban’s most loyal allies.
When 9/11 came it shook the Taliban’s power base across all of Afghanistan and the regional reverberations did not stop there.
VII. Pakistan in the Middle Again
When 9/11 occurred the Pakistanis suddenly found themselves between a rock and a hard place … a very hard place.
It was unthinkable that Islamabad would turn its back on the Taliban or even many of the P7 who had kept a shared great enemy, the Soviet Red Army, from outflanking its borders. It was equally unthinkable to turn its back on the United States in the wake of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks.
But Pakistan was wary. The Taliban’s reckless embrace of al Qaeda had created a nightmare scenario for Mullah Omar and major headache for Pakistan.
Yet when it came to Afghanistan, the Americans proved an unreliable ally from 1989 through 9/11 2001. The Pakistanis knew that America were steadfast after 9/11 but about the future? They again might suddenly quit the region as they had done in 1989 and likely at the worst possible moment.
And Islamabad also knew well its own internal tensions between progressives and Islamic fundamentalists, fractures that reached into the government, military, and ISI. Going forward Pakistan would hedge its bets, keeping lines open with the Taliban and the remnant P7 as well as the government in Kabul and the Americans.
VIII. What was Our Post-9/11 Strategy?
As far as Afghanistan was concerned, the strategic objective was simple and never changed: Eliminate terrorists and prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base for future terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies.
We obtained that objective in 2002. The United States went in militarily in October 2001. It was followed by NATO and other allies unified under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). By early 2002 the Taliban had been vanquished and what was left of al Qaeda hiding in Pakistan, to include UBL.
Cementing the victory into the future, by 2002, of the six remaining P7, four had come over to our side along with the entire Northern Alliance.
Only Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami and Haqqani’s Hezb-e Islami Khalis remained allied with the Taliban. That is how we gained and kept our side in power.
Our success was so rapid and complete in 2001-2002 that we soon faced mission creep. This “creep” has best been summed up as nation building and embraces the unsustainable objective of molding Afghanistan into a model and likeness of a modern Western free market democracy like the United States.
Very few actually advocated such a bold scheme. Instead we got there as mentioned above: We crept inch-by-inch into an impossible mission.
By 2002, Afghanistan was flooded with NGOs as well as a host of other organizations all eager to help. And since we were there, it was unavoidable that we would train the security forces we were fighting side-by-side with.
Then the list just continued to grow: While we were at it, why not improve the roads, electrical grid, and the rest of the infrastructure? And, what the heck, let’s improve governance too!
Soon we were in really deep – far deeper than anyone wanted or expected. Afghanistan became a text book example of mission creep.
IX. Where We went Wrong
Avoiding mission creep is inevitable if you do not carefully define your strategy and learn how to say “No.” You also have to know who to say “Yes” to. In Afghanistan that meant keep in the majority of the P7 on our side – that was how we kept the Taliban out and prevented Afghanistan from becoming an international terrorist base camp.
As for all the mission creep problems, here is where we erred: If NGOs and others want to do things that is fine, but the United States neither has to ensure success nor underwrite the cost of non-mission essential activities.
As important, we needed to understand how the country worked, where the baseline was, and define non-mission essential success as making things “better” even if “better” is unacceptable by our standards.
That did mean helping the Afghan security forces and US AID did have a mission.
And while the strategic objective in Afghanistan did not change, changing reality can alter how the objective is reached – as we would find out in 2007.
And here is our greatest mission creep error: The goals of nation building and keeping the Taliban and terrorists at bay could and did work against each other in Afghanistan. What some naively saw as a win-win symbiotic relationship actually created a win-lose dynamic.
This is the problem in a nutshell: To thwart the Taliban and terrorists we depended on winning over regional leaders (like getting the majority of the P7 to fight with us as we did in 2002).
But nation building in a Western sense meant concentrating power and authority in Kabul at the expense of those very regional leaders.
You can see the dilemma: We could not secure our strategic objective by undermining the semi-autonomous regional powers.
We needed to do four things: (1) Maintain the regional system that existed when we arrived in 2001. (2) Create a system of supporting our local allies. (3) Let the government in Kabul rule Kabul and (4) let Kabul work out its relationships with the regional powers as best it could.
But the “nation builders” continuously undermined those imperatives.
In 2002, we had an unbeatable Afghani coalition with us. We took it for granted and discounted its importance as the years passed.
X. A Note on Corruption
As part of the “nation building” mission, we waged a campaign against Afghanistan’s “corruption.” We failed and much to our own fault.
Even in legitimate areas of the economy, what Westerners deem corrupt was the only way of doing business in Afghanistan. To understand, here is one aside followed by the central point.
As an aside, what is an unethical or immoral practice?
If we look, we will see that culture matters. In Muslim nations, like Iraq and Afghanistan, charging interest is not just judged unethical but a sin before God but we considered ethical and moral. We should keep that in mind when we call Iraqis and Afghanis corrupt.
That leads to the critical point: In those countries, monies are to be shared with those who made it possible. To them, one who receives such a blessing has obligations.
This is not like Chinese Communist Party corruption where you have to bribe officials to get things done. In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, it is seen as proper and a sign of respect to give the local leaders a part of the proceeds.
Depending on the region, either the leadership takes one large sum and then distributes the monies to underlings or the recipient of the windfall goes around to fulfil the obligations. Either way the obligation is met. That is how things have been done for as long as anyone can remember.
And the system is not wide open. In Iraq, the general rule was that the obligation stood at 10% of the money. If more was taken, it was seen as greed and corruption.
We failed to make that distinction and in turn failed accept the “obligation” reality. That blinded us to identifying and going after the “real” corruption.
And now, back to the war.
XI. Surging to Afghanistan (2007-2014)
In 2005, al Qaeda declared that the war in Iraq was “the greatest battle of Islam in this era.” Unfortunately for the holy warriors, by 2007 the majority of Iraqis had come over to our side and al Qaeda’s radically-inspired insurgency in Iraq dying.
Recognizing defeat, that year al Qaeda decided to cut its losses and began to surge its resources away from Iraq and towards Afghanistan.
It was a smart move. The Bush administration only had about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2006 just before al Qaeda began its surge. Al Qaeda also coordinated its surge with the Taliban. That shifted the balance of forces and by 2009 the security situation in Afghanistan began to seriously deteriorate.
That led to the 2009 surge of US forces during the Obama administration. By the end of 2009 troop levels reached 67,000 soldiers and in 2010 it hit the 100,000 mark.
By this time, al Qaeda was in deep crisis. Back in 2006, its badly weakened forces in Iraq were subsumed by the Islamic State (IS). But “renaming” did not materially change things. After a brief period of growth in the Mosul area, IS in Iraq too went into decline. After is leader was killed, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi took the reins in 2010.
Then in May 2011 Usama bin Laden was killed and IS in Iraq seemed doomed but a reprieve arose from an unexpected quarter.
In early 2012, Bashir Assad in Syria brutally crushed a non-violent political uprising that ushered in civil war. Al Baghdadi and his IS fighters entered Syria and recruited thousands of followers. With his new army, al Baghdadi formed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in 2013 and went on offense.
While that was bad news for Syria and Iraq, the surge in Afghanistan had succeeded. The United States began to end its ground war in Afghanistan. By 2012 there were 77,000 troops and the last US ground combat units were gone by 31 December 2014.
XII. A Successful Road Forward and the Importance of Bagram Airbase (2015-2020)
With its ground combat war over, ISAF led by the United States would secure Afghanistan’s future in a reduced advisory and support capacity. The war in Afghanistan in 2015 entered a new phase with the Afghanis leading the battle against both the Taliban and the new-old enemy that entered the battlefield that year: al Qaeda’s successor, the Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K).
That dual threat of the Taliban and IS-K defined the war going forward.
The situation was much better than what occurred during the Soviet effort. In 1989, the Afghan Army under Soviet tutelage was under 40,000 troops facing some 200,000 Mujahadeen. In 2015, the Afghan Army was 130,000 strong and backed up by another 80,000 other security forces while the Taliban and its allies had some 75,000 fighters.
Most significantly, there was never a day during the entire1979-1989 period when pro-Soviet Afghan forces led the fight against the Mujahadeen while from 2015 onwards, the Afghan security forces led the fight against the Taliban and IS-K.
Tactically and operationally, the war would continue to be waged along counterinsurgency lines. To keep the Taliban in check when it launched periodic offensives, the Afghan Army relied on two pillars of strength: It would commit either air power or highly mobile strategic reserves made up of its best units or both.
This where Bagram airbase revealed in importance.
Air support was provided by a combined US and Afghan force concentrated at the strategically located Bagram airbase. This was crucial as the Afghans (1) did not have enough air capability to go it alone when the Taliban launched a strong offensive and (2) did not possess the logistical ability to sustain its own air forces. American support was essential.
Critically, Bagram also was the base of operations to deploy the strategic reserve. These soldiers went in to hot spots to provide a tactical punch but their presence also reinforced the idea that Kabul had the back of the troops fighting in isolated areas. That psychological boost helped form the glue that held the army together when under pressure.
And last but not least, Bagram was our operational intelligence center and the staging area for US special operations forces to locate, fix, and destroy terrorists in Afghanistan.
Finally, let us not forget the Afghan people. Our small but powerful footprint not only reduced American casualties. It mitigated the suffering of the Afghan people by bringing stability that allowed things to get at least a bit better year after year.
That basically was how the war was waged after 2014 and it worked.
Defeat was not inevitable.
XIII. Why is Afghanistan quickly Overrun Time and Time again?
The Taliban came to power in a lightening campaign in 1995-6. It lost power in an even more rapid timeframe in 2001-2 when the United States followed by NATO and ISAF went in. Then in 2021, the Taliban again swept the nation in a blink of an eye.
Amazing but understandable. Here is how it rolls:
Take 2001. Because the Taliban ruled through a loose alliance of locally independent factions, the bonds were precarious. Once the United States, NATO and other allies under the ISAF entered Afghanistan, whatever unity that had existed was dissolved.
As noted above, even before the Taliban, the P7 had been reduced to six and by early 2002, four of them had joined us along with the Northern Alliance.
Our victory was function of three factors. First, as Marine Corps General Mattis pointed out, the Afghanis gravitate to the “strongest horse” and that meant ISAF.
Second, the Afghani factions play a long waiting game where only survival counts. Their loyalty is always conditional and when conditions change they can switch sides with great alacrity. We saw that in 1995-1996, 2001-2002 and 2021.
Third, the United States was not seen as an enemy. That we stood by the Afghan Mujahadeen in their war against the Soviets created important good will and trust that the Americans built on after 9/11. It meant many were willing to enter into talks with the Americans with the aim of working together cooperatively.
And that unchanged dynamic explains why the Taliban could very easily be toppled again in the near future and why IS-K may again use Afghanistan as a base to wage its worldwide jihad to include terror attacks against America and its allies.
XIV. Breaking an Army
On 8 July 2021, President Biden told the American people that “The Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” He was right but only if the United States kept its presence and backed our Afghan allies.
Without that, the risk that the Afghan Army would break became real and to get an army to break, even a very good one, requires one thing: Hopelessness.
This was essential in Afghanistan because one thing is clear: While the Taliban are deadly and competent they are not great soldiers. In just over 13 years of fighting (2001-2014), the Taliban never overran or overwhelmed even one small US rifle platoon – a feat that Germans, Japanese, North Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers achieved many times over. The Taliban do not measure up to our past foes.
What makes the Taliban dangerous is their absolute savagery. That primordial terror factor defines their success. They torture and murder without a moment’s hesitation and that meant every person an Afghan soldier loved or cared about was at mortal risk.
It is how the Taliban planted the seed of hopelessness in the Afghan Army: Make soldiers fear for loved ones. The Afghan Army was not cowardly. After allying with us, they suffered over 50,000 battle deaths and several times that number wounded.
They consistently fought and routinely fought well – until hopelessness set in, until they felt abandoned by Kabul and the Americans as they watched their two pillars of strength collapse: air power and help from the strategic reserve.
When we precipitously quit to include abandoning the heart of our support centered on the Bagram airbase, the Afghan air force was crippled. Without American contractors providing logistical, maintenance, and other support, the Afghan air force could only sustain routine combat operations. Once the 2021 Taliban offense got underway, the system overloaded and failed.
Washington’s assumptions began to go south. Over-the-horizon US airpower could never match the sortie rate or response time of attack aircraft based at Bagram and over-the-horizon airpower was useless in airlifting critically needed Afghan army strike forces.
With the loss of air power, there were insufficient elite mobile forces to carry the load and with the loss of their air mobility even those available could not always get to where they were needed most. It was a cascading sequence of being overwhelmed and that fatally undermined morale.
Once that happened, the soldiers looked elsewhere for hope and at that moment the makeup of the Afghan security forces came to the fore. With the exception of the greater Kabul area, Army recruits came from warlord areas. Similarly, local security forces were composed of police (who did the bidding of the local warlords) and the militia (which often were the warlord’s armed soldiers).
As the majority of the Army came from the countryside, their ties to local warlords remained. It was not critical when things went well but as the security situation deteriorated this summer, those ties took on increased importance.
The death blow came as various warlords switched over to the Taliban. The tipping point was reached this summer – when too many local forces abandoned Kabul – and hopelessness swept the Army. It was not a fear of dying in battle but of a victorious Taliban’s terrible retribution.
At that point, the recruits from the countryside took their way out: Go join the home team. When soldiers found out that their local leader switched sides and Kabul could not help them, they deserted and entered the local forces that now fought with the Taliban.
That was how it played out. That was how the Afghan Army was broken.
XV. The Bitter New Reality
Our only strategic mission was to ensure Afghanistan did not become a base for international terrorists to target America and its allies. To do that we needed a presence that was both physical and a served as a symbol of America’s resolve.
Operationally, our military presence had two missions:
(1) To support and assist in building confidence and steeling our Afghan allies and the Afghan security forces.
(2) Through our intelligence gathering and special operations capabilities, to neutralize terrorist threats to the United States and its allies as they arose.
Our poorly thought-out withdrawal doomed both those missions. The decision to completely withdraw from Afghanistan was never primarily a national security decision. To the contrary, it flew in the face of sound national security strategy.
Staying ensured the Taliban and IS-K remained marginalized. By quitting, we compromised what had been our sole strategic objective since 9/11 2001.
It was never a choice of endless war or full retreat. We successfully ended the ground war on 31 December 2014. The adopted solution that was in place was effective and prudent. We were not locked in an endless war in Afghanistan.
But we quit and now have to face a new reality: The ability to achieve our strategic objective for Afghanistan in the future is not good.
The reason is simple: Our military footprint in Afghanistan prior to quitting was carefully designed to kill the rebirth of a violent Islamic extremist terrorist bases. Until the unwise 2021 withdrawal, we possessed a tailor-made force centered at Bagram airbase force ideally positioned to deal with that threat.
That no longer is the case. Incredibly, we abandoned Bagram before establishing a replacement regional base of operations. Nothing better highlights how rashly our withdrawal was executed than that failure.
The price we are now going to pay for giving the Taliban and Islamic State freedom of action across the globe will come at a high price.
Now that Bagram is lost, going forward we must rely on less ideal and more inappropriate options. We saw that several weeks ago in the deployment of the USS Reagan battle group that was overtasked and ill-suited to defeat a terrorist threat in a landlocked region. We also witnessed how vulnerable we have become during the bloody evacuation from Kabul.
XVI. Despite Washington Beltway “spin,” have no illusions about the Taliban
Here is just a partial list of Taliban atrocities past and present:
a. When they were in charge before, Taliban activists threw acid in the faces of young girls who insisted on going to school. Since returning to power, the Taliban already have banned schooling for girls beyond sixth grade and closed girls’ schools in some provinces (coeducation has always been banned – except at the university level).
b. As implied above, the lives of women will be terrible. This will take a myriad of forms. One is prohibiting women from holding positions of leadership. Another is ordering villagers to surrender unmarried and often underage daughters who are forced to marry adult Taliban fighters.
We are already seeing places under Taliban control where all working women have been fired. That almost certainly will be followed up by beatings, other torture and possibly death sentences for these “sinful” women who did not know their place.
In a throwback to the Middle Ages, publicly stoning women who dated men without Taliban permission (which they define as adultery) was popular from 1996- 2001. A return to stoning is just around the corner.
And since taking power in 2021, women in some places have been prevented from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a male family member.
c. Kidnapping for ransom is sport for the Taliban. They make money and get to rape and torture the victims as an added benefit. That will not stop.
d. When the Taliban captured a village that fought them, Taliban soldiers were allowed to loot, rape, torture, and kill inhabitants as punishment and to send a message to others not to resist. Methods included bayoneting babies and shooting women in the belly to watch them writhe in agony. Nice guys, huh?
e. The Taliban also are infamous for robbing and mutilating corpses of enemy fighters: Gouging out eyes, cutting off body parts, what have you.
The list just goes on.
f. Even seemingly minor things have grave consequences. Music is again being banned and a famous singer recently was shot in the head for his transgressions.
g. Beheading or applying more creative forms of execution of anyone identified as LBGTQ is a given.
h. Randomly shooting Hazara men, women, and children because they are Shi’a – not Sunni – is not considered a crime.
i. There are numerous reports of the Taliban summarily executing Afghan soldiers and government officials.
j. And there are just as many reports of Taliban searching for and arresting family members of soldiers and government officials – their fate might never be known.
k. Why? Because the last time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, tens of thousands of people they arrested simply disappeared.
And do not forget that Taliban founder Mullah Omar and al Qaeda founder Usama Bin Laden were like brothers and there is credible evidence that the two families intermarried to tighten the bonds even further. Nor have the Taliban’s loyal ally, the Haqqani, lost interest in aiding and abetting IS-K.
Finally, remember 9/11. The Taliban provided al Qaeda with a military base, training areas, weapons, munitions, and other equipment without which the 9/11 attacks could never have happened.
It is madness to think that working with the Taliban will lead to the destruction of IS-K.
The Taliban rulers of the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are butchers masquerading as “fighters.” There is no honor in working with these oppressors.
I understand that in the exigency of war my enemy’s enemy’ can be a useful temporary ally …
… Anyone who legitimizes the Taliban dishonors themselves and their country.
XVII. Afghanistan’s Dismal Future
The future for the Afghan people could not be bleaker as the situation will be many times worse than when the Taliban took power in 1996.
Back then the rise of the Taliban meant imposition of their extremist form of governance in Kabul and their home territory. For the people living there, life was repressive and if you crossed the Taliban, the potential consequences were brutal beyond description.
But the Taliban never secured the entire country. Rebellious factions, most notably the Northern Alliance, still held off Taliban rule. More importantly, local ruling clans centered on surviving P7 factions maintained autonomous power in their regions and were more cooperating partners than subordinates to the Taliban leadership in Kabul.
That relationship still remains in place today. The Taliban hold Kabul and their home provinces while most of the country is controlled by autonomous or semi-autonomous allies.
Take the old Northern Alliance formed around the non-P7 fighters: the Shi’a, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara Shi’a and the Pashtun Islamic Union Liberation. Today, the Taliban have a tenuous hold on the old Northern Alliance lands but as the Taliban’s economic and political weakness becomes clearer, resistance may again grow strong.
Further threatening Taliban power, based on what was cited above, their methods of (mis)rule have not fundamentally changed since 2001. They may be a bit more polished, more diplomatic, and better at hiding atrocities, but they are as repugnant as ever and perhaps more so.
From 2002 forward there never was a poll in Afghanistan that gave majority support to the Taliban. In fact the opposite is true: A majority consistently rated the American presence as a positive factor and only a minority ever expressed support for a return of the Taliban.
Through raw violence, the Taliban now rule a country that does not want them. That is the political nightmare the Taliban have to live with.
Economically things will be even more devastating than in 1996. At least in 1996, the Taliban brought a degree of peace and stability to the country. Things did start to get better and the Taliban benefited.
Not so in 2021. Today, the Taliban just destroyed an economy built on integration with progressive free-market democracies. Things are already getting worse.
To survive, the Taliban will seek monies through (1) narco-trafficking, (2) international aid and (3) going to Beijing. Let us look more closely.
(1) Exploiting Afghanistan’s narco-trafficking monies will be harder than it may seem as the current illegal drug profits are already accounted for. The Taliban will not be able to simply seize the poppy crop and illegally sell the opium and keep all the proceeds for its own purposes.
It will have to go to war or strike a deal with ruthless and powerful international drug cartels who will fight to keep their share of the drug money. Either way, it could be ruinous as it will open the Taliban up to global sanctions if it does not comply with international norms in fighting the illegal drug trade.
Oh yeah, and either way expect a lot more opiate-based fentanyl to cross the border, enter our communities, and kill our kids.
(2) As for foreign aid, the Taliban will try to blackmail the international community by letting its people suffer. This game was perfected by Saddam Hussein. He starved and denied children health care until the international community provided aid that he redirected to prop up his regime.
The Taliban will play the same heartless and cruel game.
(3) The only way the Taliban will get money from Beijing is by becoming a vassal of China. Where industrialized free-market democracies poured in $ billions to help Afghanistan every year, Beijing will do the opposite: Exploit Afghanistan’s mineral wealth to send $ billions to China.
In return, the Taliban will get pennies on the dollar and best be grateful. It will be a betrayal of the Afghan people but the Taliban’s moral compass broke decades ago. The rich irony in this is hard to overstate: The ultra-God worshipping Taliban are going to become money-grubbing whores of the Godless Marxists in Beijing.
Even with all that, the Afghan economy is not just going to decline but collapse.
With the United States and our allies gone, Afghanistan now has entered the greatest economic depression in its history. The Taliban will bear responsibility for that. And it is not just the private sector as the majority of the government’s budget also came foreign aid. Governmental services are now also going to vanish.
Those economic and social failures are the Taliban’s Achilles’ heels.
Afghanistan has a young population. Ever since the United States went in 2001. The Afghanis have enjoyed the nation’s highest standard of living and most effective education system ever. That has now disappeared and the Taliban will be held responsible.
But the danger is greater. The various factions that allied with the Taliban in 2021 soon will find that in doing so they killed the goose that laid the golden eggs – they terminated the foreign aid “obligation” revenue stream that filled their coffers for the last 20 years. That resentment too be will be directed at the Taliban.
When the economic collapse is combined with their oppressive method of rule, the hatred that is going to be directed at the Taliban will be immeasurable and resistance to their rule inevitable.
The future of Afghanistan is dismal indeed.
XVIII. Biden’s Feeble Retaliation
On 26 August 2021, an Islamic State in Khorasan suicide bomber killed 11 Marines, their Navy Corpsman and a US Army staff sergeant along with a far greater number of innocent Afghan civilians.
President Biden’s “retribution” response was a sham. When Afghanistan collapsed, the Taliban freed thousands of al Qaeda and IS-K prisoners. They are now re-engaged in their war with the United States and we have failed to instill fear in them.
Do the math: We lost 13 killed in action with more wounded and then add in some 180 Afghan men, women, and children killed in the attacks and all their wounded.
Our response? We take out a bomb-making building and a couple of suicide vehicles. So, the score is about 200 lost to at most 10 IS-K jihadis killed?
The Islamic State will take those results all day long … forever. They call that victory and it makes them eager to do it again and again and again.
Going forward, Taliban and IS-K terrorists are going to party like it's 1999.
XIX. Conclusions
Our 2021 Afghan political-military failed at every level.
This represents the most complete military defeat in the history of the United States of America.
Unlike Vietnam where Hanoi was not going to carry the war into the United States after 1975, our enemies in Afghanistan are just getting started. Thanks to our blunders, America is more unsafe than at any time in over two decades.
Our war on terrorism has suffered its greatest defeat since 9/11.
