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Chaos in Kabul: The Rise of the Taliban August 17, 2021

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Metaphor Online , trackback

The Taliban in Afghanistan

Since its ouster in 2001, the Taliban has maintained its insurgency against the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan and the Afghan government. As U.S. troops have withdrawn in 2021, the group has rapidly expanded its control, positioning itself for a return to power.

Introduction

The Taliban is a predominantly Pashtun, Islamic fundamentalist group that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when a U.S.-led invasion toppled the regime for providing refuge to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The Taliban regrouped across the border in Pakistan and has led an insurgency against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul for nearly twenty years.

In 2020, the Taliban signed a peace agreement [PDF] with the United States and entered into power-sharing negotiations with the Afghan government. However, little progress has been made in the intra-Afghan talks. Meanwhile, as the United States withdrew its troops in the country as part of the deal, the Taliban launched an offensive that has more than tripled the number of Afghan districts under its control. Analysts warn that an expanded civil war and more civilian casualties are likely if power-sharing talks remain stalled.

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Does the Taliban pose a threat?

Many experts say the Taliban threatens Afghan democratic institutions, citizens’ rights, and regional security. The group has withstood counterinsurgency operations from the world’s most powerful security alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and three U.S. administrations in a war that has killed more than 6,000 U.S. troops and contractors [PDF] and over 1,100 NATO troops. Some 47,000 civilians have died, and an estimated 73,000 Afghan troops and police officers have been killed since 2007. Tens of thousands of Taliban fighters are also believed to have died.

The Taliban, which has between fifty-eight thousand and one hundred thousand full-time fighters, is stronger now than at any point in the last twenty years. As the United States has withdrawn its remaining forces from Afghanistan, the Taliban has increased attacks on civilians, seized control of critical border crossings, and dramatically expanded its presence throughout the country. In July 2021, the group controlled an estimated 54 percent of Afghan districts, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Long War Journal, a U.S.-based publication that has covered the U.S. fight against al-Qaeda and other militant groups since 2007; just months earlier it controlled only 20 percent. By midsummer 2021, sixteen of the country’s thirty-four provincial capitals were at risk of falling under Taliban control.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has documented a steep uptick in violence and has warned that 2021 could see the most civilian casualties since the agency started keeping records in 2009. It documented 5,183 civilian deaths and injuries [PDF] in the first half of 2021, significantly higher than the total killed or injured during the same period in prior years. Women and children made up a larger proportion of casualties than ever recorded by UNAMA in the first half of a year. Of the many armed groups involved in clashes, the Taliban was responsible for the highest percentage of casualties, at nearly 40 percent. Targeted assassinationsand improvised explosive device attacks accounted for many of the casualties. Civilians were also caught in the crossfire between insurgents and government forces. Afghan government forces also caused casualties. No casualties were attributed to international forces.

International observers remain concerned that the Taliban supports terrorist organizations, particularly al-Qaeda. The United States invaded Afghanistan after it refused to hand over bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Many U.S. security experts remain concerned that under the Taliban’s rule, Afghanistan would remain a safe haven for terrorists who could launch attacks against the United States and its allies.

In its 2021 report, the UN team that monitors the Taliban said the group still has strong ties with al-Qaeda. The Taliban has started to “tighten its control over al-Qaeda by gathering information on foreign terrorist fighters and registering and restricting them,” the UN experts report. But it remains unclear, they say, if the Taliban will follow through on its commitment under the U.S. peace deal to prevent an international terrorist attack emanating from Afghanistan. The Taliban continues to provide al-Qaeda with protection in exchange for resources and training. Between two hundred and five hundred al-Qaeda fighters are believed to be in Afghanistan, and its leaders are believed to be based in regions along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. U.S. authorities reportedly think that al-Qaeda’s chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is in Afghanistan [PDF], though in 2020 there were unconfirmed rumors that he had died. Up to 2,200 members of the Islamic State Khorasan are also thought to be in Afghanistan.

How was the Taliban formed?

The group was formed in the early 1990s by Afghan mujahideen, or Islamic guerilla fighters, who had resisted the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–89) with the covert backing of the CIA and its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI). They were joined by younger Pashtun tribesmen who studied in Pakistani madrassas, or seminaries; taliban is Pashto for “students.” Pashtuns comprise a plurality in Afghanistan and are the predominant ethnic group in much of the country’s south and east. They are also a major ethnic group in Pakistan’s north and west.

The movement attracted popular support in the initial post-Soviet era by promising to impose stability and rule of law after four years of conflict (1992–1996) among rival mujahideen groups. The Taliban entered Kandahar in November 1994 to pacify the crime-ridden southern city, and by September 1996 seized the capital, Kabul, from President Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik whom it viewed as anti-Pashtun and corrupt. That year, the Taliban declared Afghanistan an Islamic emirate, with Mullah Mohammed Omar, a cleric and veteran of the anti-Soviet resistance, leading as amir al-mu’minin, or “commander of the faithful.” The regime controlled some 90 percent of the country before its 2001 overthrow.

The Taliban imposed a harsh brand of justice as it consolidated territorial control. Taliban jurisprudence was drawn from the Pashtuns’ pre-Islamic tribal code and interpretations of sharia colored by the austere Wahhabi doctrines of the madrassas’ Saudi benefactors. The regime neglected social services and other basic state functions even as its Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice enforced prohibitions on behavior the Taliban deemed un-Islamic. It required women to wear the head-to-toe burqa, or chadri; banned music and television; and jailed men whose beards it deemed too short.

How has the world responded to the Taliban?

Over the past two decades, governments and international bodies joined U.S.-led efforts to oust the Taliban and bolster Afghanistan’s government, democratic institutions, and civil society in the following ways:

Military force. U.S. troops quickly overthrew the Taliban after they invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. Since then, the Taliban has waged an insurgency against the U.S.-backed Afghan government. The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan peaked at around one hundred thousand in 2011. In the 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement, the United States committed to withdrawing all U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan if the Taliban carries out commitments that include cutting ties with terrorist groups. President Biden has said he plans to have all troops removed by August 2021. NATO assumed leadership of foreign forces in 2003, marking its first operational commitment outside of Europe. At its height, NATO had more than 130,000 troops from fifty nations stationed in Afghanistan.

Sanctions. The UN Security Council first imposed sanctions on the regime for harboring al-Qaeda in 1999 and expanded the sanctions after 9/11. They target Taliban leaders’ financial assets and ban them from most travel. The Security Council also imposed an arms embargo on the Taliban. The United States and the European Union introduced additional sanctions.

Democratic reforms and aid. Months after the U.S. invasion, UN member states committed to supporting Afghanistan’s transition away from Taliban rule. The United States and NATO spearheaded reconstruction efforts. Dozens of countries also provide assistance to Afghanistan, with 75 percent of the government’s public expenditures currently covered by grants from international partners, according to a 2019 World Bank report. During a conference in 2020, donors pledged a total of $3.3 billion in aid.

Investigation. The Taliban is now under investigation in the International Criminal Court for alleged abuses of Afghan civilians, including crimes against humanity, carried out since 2003. U.S. and Afghan forces are also being investigated for alleged war crimes.

 

How the Afghan Army Collapsed Under the Taliban’s Pressure

By Max Boot, CFR Expert

August 16, 2021 4:45 pm (EST)

    

Despite having larger numbers and better equipment than the Taliban, Afghan forces were never strong enough to sustain government control in the absence of U.S. firepower.

 

A reporter asked U.S. President Joe Biden in July whether a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was inevitable. “No, it is not,” he said, pointing to the presence of three hundred thousand “well-equipped” Afghan security personnel.

Little more than a month later, the Afghan military completely collapsed. It lost control of much of the country, often without putting up a fight, and allowed the Taliban to take over. Near the end, provincial capitals fell with dizzying rapidity. On August 15, Taliban fighters marched into Kabul.
 

How did the $83 billion U.S. effort to train and equip the Afghan military go so wrong? Why didn’t the Afghan military fight harder to stop the Taliban?

Fatally Demoralized

The answer could be found in Napoleon Bonaparte’s maxim: “In war, the moral is to the physical as ten is to one.” Quite simply, an Afghan military that over the past twenty years had learned to rely on U.S. support for airpower, intelligence, logistics, planning, and other vital enablers was fatally demoralized by the U.S. decision to abandon it. An Afghan special forces officer told the Washington Post that many Afghans saw the troop withdrawal deal that the Donald Trump administration signed with the Taliban in February 2020 as “the end” and that the United States “left [the Afghan military] to fail.” As a result, he said, “Everyone was just looking out for himself.”

Trace the History
The U.S. War in Afghanistan

It’s possible that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani thought his government would receive a reprieve from President Biden. But in April, Biden announced that the remaining three thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan would be withdrawn by September 11, 2021. Not only did those troops depart, but so did eight thousand allied troops and eighteen thousand contractors that the Afghan forces relied upon to operate their air force and for logistical support. In recent months, the Afghan military was unable to provide vital supplies such as food and ammunition to outposts scattered around the country. Some Afghan units, particularly the elite commandos, fought hard nearly to the end. But seeing the writing on the wall, most troops chose to cut deals with the Taliban, surrender, or simply melt away rather than risk their lives for a hopeless cause.

U.S. Military Mistakes

The fall of Afghanistan rightly raises serious questions about the mistakes the United States made during its twenty-year effort to train the Afghan military. The U.S. armed forces will need to process lessons learned, and there will need to be a great deal of critical self-examination. The U.S. training effort had many shortcomings, such as deficiencies in language and cultural knowledge and lack of expertise in training police rather than soldiers, which hurt local-level security. In addition, the U.S. effort concentrated too much on teaching tactical infantry skills while neglecting the kind of higher-level expertise in logistics, planning, training, and command and control that is needed to maintain a military force.

An Afghan army soldier stands next to a heap of barbed wire.
Afghan security forces quickly lose control of the country amid a Taliban offensive in August 2021.Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

   

The U.S. training effort was also hindered by factors beyond its control, including the lack of education in one of the world’s poorest countries and the pervasiveness of corruption. As a police officer in Kandahar recently told the New York Times, “We are drowning in corruption.”

 All of that corruption meant Afghan troop numbers, such as the one cited by Biden, were vastly exaggerated. The Washington Post’Afghanistan Papers project found that of the 352,000 soldiers and police counted as members of the country’s security forces, only 254,000 could be confirmed by the Afghan government. Commanders not only created “ghost soldiers” to pad their payrolls but also skimmed the pay of serving soldiers and failed to deliver necessary supplies, the Post reported. To a large extent, that corruption was enabled by the United States’ free-spending ways. U.S. attempts to fight corruption were, by contrast, half-hearted and ineffectual.

Who’s to Blame?

Many now criticize the U.S. military for building an Afghan force in its own image—heavily reliant on airpower and technology that the Afghans could not maintain by themselves. The criticism has some validity, but there is a logic to the U.S. approach: The Afghan forces were far too small to defend a far-flung nation of thirty-eight million people, and no U.S. administration wanted to fund a larger force. There was no way to maintain a security-force presence across such a vast country without supplying outposts by air. Once U.S. troops and contractors abruptly pulled out, the Afghans simply lost the ability to keep their military machine functioning, and the military disintegrated.

Although it’s easy to blame Afghan troops for not fighting harder, it’s important to remember that more than sixty thousand Afghan security-force members were killed in the past twenty years—that’s twenty-seven times more than U.S. fatalities in the war. While some three thousand U.S. advisors remained in the country, the Afghan military still controlled every city. It was the U.S. pullout that brutally exposed the shortcomings of the Afghan forces and precipitated the military’s collapse.

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