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OpinionAfghanistanIt has taken 20 years to prove the invasion of Afghanistan was totally unnecessarySimon JenkinsWestern involvement in the country was a post-imperial fantasy that has led to the current ghastly situation Mon 16 Aug 2021 09.37 EDTLast modified on Mon 16 Aug 2021 11.57 EDTThe fall of Kabul was inevitable. It marks the end of a post-imperial western fantasy. Yet the west’s reaction beggars belief. Call it a catastrophe, a humiliation, a calamitous mistake, if it sounds good. All retreats from empire are messy. This one took 20 years, but the end was at least swift.The US had no need to invade Afghanistan. The country was never a “terrorist state” like Libya or Iran. It was not at war with the US; indeed the US had aided its rise to power against the Russians in 1996. The Taliban had hosted Osama bin Laden in his mountain lair through his friendship with the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. At an immediate post-9/11 “loya jirga” in the southern city of Kandahar, younger leaders pressed the mullah to expel Bin Laden. Pakistan would probably have forced his surrender sooner or later. After the 2001 invasion the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded that George Bush “punish and get out”. Yet neither Bush nor Tony Blair listened. Instead they experienced a rush of blood to the head. They commandeered Nato, which had no dog in the fight, and began “nation building”, as if nations were made of Lego. It would be an age, said the political scientist Joseph Nye, of the “velvet hegemon”. For reasons never fully explained, Blair declared a “doctrine of international community” and pleaded for Britain to be in the first bombing run over Kabul. He then sent Clare Short as the minister for international development to stop the Afghans growing poppies. Afghan poppy production soared to an all-time high, spreading from six to 28 provinces, probably Britain’s most successful farm product of all time. Opium floated the Taliban back to power.When I visited Kabul in 2006, I had heard nothing but bombast about what already seemed a doomed venture. A British army of 3,400 volunteered to suppress resurgent Taliban rebels in Helmand. The defence secretary John Reid promised that only “remnants” of the Taliban remained and that “not a shot needed firing”. His general, David Richards, said it would be “just another Malaya”. Seven year later, British troops left defeated and the Americans took over before also being defeated. The local Pashtun are masters at humiliating outside powers.From then on, retreat was only a matter of time. What is happening now is ghastly. Twenty years of dependency on lavish western taxpayers means that soldiers, interpreters, journalists, academics and aid workers are seeing friends threatened and killed. Years of assistance and training is at risk. A reputed trillion dollars of American money has been wasted. Britain alone has wasted £37bn. How many times must it be drummed into British heads that the British empire is over? It is dead, finished, outdated, not to be repeated. Yet Boris Johnson has just sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Britain has no need, let alone right, to rule other countries, to “make the world a better place”. No soldier need die for it, let alone 454 British soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. The best Britain can now do is establish good relations with a new regime in Afghanistan – in liaison with Kabul’s neighbours Pakistan and Iran – to protect at least some of the good it has attempted to do this past 20 years. The world is not threatening Britain. Terrorism does not need state sponsors, nor will it be ended by state conquest.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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The Taliban’s offensive in Afghanistan has shifted the Central Asian playing field on which China, India and the United States compete with rival infrastructure-driven approaches. At first glance, a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan would give China a 2:0 advantage against the US and India, but that could prove to be a shaky head start.
The fall of the US-backed Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani will shelve if not kill Indian support for the Iranian port of Chabahar, which was intended to facilitate Indian trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia. Chabahar was also viewed by India as a counterweight to the Chinese-supported Pakistani port of Gwadar, a crown jewel of Beijing’s transportation, telecommunications and energy-driven Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The Hazaras of Afghanistan Face a Threat to Survival
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The United States facilitated Indian investment in Chabahar by exempting the port from harsh sanctions against Iran. The exemption was intended to “support the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan.” However, due to stalled negotiations with Iran about a revival of the 2015 nuclear agreement, the US announced in July — together with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan — plans to create a platform that would foster regional trade, business ties and connectivity.
The connectivity end of the plan resembled an effort to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It would have circumvented Iran and weakened Chabahar but potentially strengthened China’s Gwadar alongside the port of Karachi. That has become a moot point with the plans certain to be shelved as the Taliban take over Afghanistan and form a government that would be denied recognition by at least the democratic parts of the international community.
China
Like other Afghan neighbors, neither Pakistan, Uzbekistan nor China are likely to join a boycott of the Taliban. On the contrary, China last month made a point of giving a visiting Taliban delegation a warm welcome. Yet recognition by Iran, Central Asian states and China of a Taliban government is unlikely to be enough to salvage the Chabahar project. “Changed circumstances and alternative connectivity routes are being conjured up by other countries to make Chabahar irrelevant,” an Iranian source told Hard News, a Delhi-based publication.
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The Taliban have sought to reassure China, Iran, Uzbekistan and other Afghan neighbors that they will not allow Afghanistan to become an operational base for jihadist groups. This includes al-Qaeda and Uighur militants of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP). The Taliban have positioned themselves as solely concerned with creating an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan and having no inclination to operate beyond the country’s borders. But they have been consistent in their refusal to expel al-Qaeda, even if the group is a shadow of what it was when it launched the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
The TIP has occasionally issued videos documenting its presence in Afghanistan. But it has, by and large, kept a low profile and refrained from attacking Chinese targets in Afghanistan or across the border in Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese province in which authorities have brutally cracked down on ethnic Turkic Uighurs. As a result, the Taliban reassurance was insufficient to stop China from repeatedly advising its citizens to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. “Currently, the security situation in Afghanistan has further deteriorated … If Chinese citizens insist on staying in Afghanistan, they will face extremely high-security risks, and all the consequences will be borne by themselves,” the Chinese foreign ministry said.
Pakistan
The fallout of the Taliban’s sweep across Afghanistan is likely to affect China beyond Afghan borders, perhaps no more so than in Pakistan, a major focus of Beijing’s single largest BRI-related investment. This has made China a target for attacks by militants, primarily Baloch nationalists. In July, nine Chinese nationals were killed in an explosion on a bus transporting Chinese workers to the construction site of a dam in the northern mountains of Pakistan, a region prone to attacks by religious militants. This incident raises the specter of jihadists also targeting China. It was the highest loss of life of Chinese citizens in recent years in Pakistan.
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The attack occurred amid fears that the Taliban will bolster ultra-conservative religious sentiment in Pakistan that celebrates the group as heroes, whose success enhances the chances for austere religious rule. “Our jihadis will be emboldened. They will say that ‘if America can be beaten, what is the Pakistan army to stand in our way?’” said a senior Pakistani official. Indicating its concern, China has delayed the signing of a framework agreement on industrial cooperation, which would have accelerated the implementation of projects that are part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
Kamran Bokhari, writing for The Wall Street Journal, explained: “Regime change is a terribly messy process. Weak regimes can be toppled; replacing them is the hard part. It is only a matter of time before the Afghan state collapses, unleashing chaos that will spill beyond its borders. All of Afghanistan’s neighbors will be affected to varying degrees, but Pakistan and China have the most to lose.”
The demise of Chabahar and/or the targeting by the Taliban of Hazara Shia Muslims in Afghanistan could potentially turn Iran into a significant loser too.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
TalibanReturn of Taliban in Afghanistan could accelerate rise of terror groups, top US general warnsChairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, reportedly issued warning to congressional leaders Sunday morning Ed Pilkington in New York@ More
Biden administration‘This is manifestly not Saigon’: Blinken defends US mission in AfghanistanUS secretary of state rejects parallels between chaotic scenes unfolding in Kabul and the humiliating fall of Saigon in 1975 Ed Pilkington in New York@ More
Ten provincial capitals in Afghanistan have fallen to the Taliban in just a week, while fighting continues in four more. US military officials now believe that Kabul, the Afghan capital, could fall in one to three months.
It is horrific to watch the death, destruction and mass displacement of thousands of terrified Afghans and the triumph of the misogynist Taliban that ruled the nation 20 years ago. But the fall of the centralized, corrupt Afghan government propped up by the West was inevitable, whether this year, next year or 10 years from now.
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US President Joe Biden has reacted to America’s snowballing humiliation in the graveyard of empires by once again dispatching US Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to Doha, Qatar, to urge the government and the Taliban to seek a political solution. At the same time, the US has dispatched B-52 bombers to attack at least two of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals.
In LashkarGah, the capital of Helmand province, the bombing has already reportedly destroyed a high school and a health clinic. Another B-52 bombed Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan province and the home of the infamous warlord and accused war criminal Abdul Rashid Dostum, who is now the military commander of the US-backed government’s armed forces. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that US Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships are also still operating in Afghanistan.
The Fall of the Afghan Army
The rapid disintegration of the Afghan forces that the US and its Western allies have recruited, armed and trained for 20 years at a cost of nearly $89 billion should come as no surprise. On paper, the Afghan national army has 180,000 troops. In reality, most of them are unemployed Afghans desperate to earn some money to support their families but not eager to fight their fellow citizens. The army is also notorious for its corruption and mismanagement.
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The army and the beleaguered and vulnerable police forces that man isolated outposts and checkpoints around the country are plagued by high casualties, rapid turnover and desertion. Most troops feel no loyalty to the corrupt US-backed government and routinely abandon their posts, either to join the Taliban or just to go home. When the BBC asked General Khoshal Sadat, the national police chief, about the impact of high casualties on police recruitment in February 2020, he cynically replied: “When you look at recruitment, I always think about the Afghan families and how many children they have. The good thing is there is never a shortage of fighting-age males who will be able to join the force.”
But a police recruit at a checkpoint questioned the very purpose of the war, telling the BBC’s Nanna Muus Steffensen: “We Muslims are all brothers. We don’t have a problem with each other.” In that case, she asked him, why were they fighting? He hesitated, laughed nervously and shook his head in resignation. “You know why. I know why,” he said. “It’s not really our fight.”
Since 2007, the jewel of US and Western military training missions in Afghanistan has been the Afghan commando corps or special operations forces, who comprise only 7% of Afghan national army troops but reportedly do 70% to 80% of the fighting. But the commandos have struggled to reach their target of recruiting, arming and training 30,000 troops. Poor recruitment from Pashtuns, the largest and traditionally dominant ethnic group, has been a critical weakness, especially from the Pashtun heartland in the south.
The commandos and the professional officer corps of the Afghan army are dominated by ethnic Tajiks. This community consists of the successors to the Northern Alliance, which the US supported against the Taliban 20 years ago. As of 2017, the commandos are estimated at only 21,000. It is not clear how many of these Western-trained troops now serve as the last line of defense between the US-backed puppet government and total defeat.
The Taliban’s speedy and simultaneous occupation of large amounts of territory all over the country appears to be a deliberate strategy to overwhelm and outflank the government’s small number of well-trained, well-armed troops. The Taliban have had more success winning the loyalty of minorities in the north and west than government forces have had to recruit Pashtuns from the south, and the government’s small number of well-trained troops cannot be everywhere at once.
US Fighter Jets
But what of the United States? Its deployment of B-52 bombers, Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships is a brutal response by a failing, flailing imperial power to a historic, humiliating defeat.
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The US does not flinch from committing mass murder against its enemies. Just look at the US-led destruction of Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. How many Americans even know about the massacre of civilians that Iraqi forces committed when the US-led coalition finally took control of Mosul in 2017? This came after Donald Trump, while campaigning in 2015, said that the US should “take out the families” of Islamic State fighters.
Twenty years after George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld committed a full range of war crimes — from torture and the deliberate killing of civilians to the “supreme international crime” of aggression — Biden is clearly no more concerned than they were with criminal accountability or the judgment of history. But even from the most pragmatic and callous point of view, what can continued aerial bombardment of Afghan cities accomplish, besides a final but futile climax to the 20-year-long slaughter of Afghans by tens of thousands of American bombs and missiles?
The intellectually and strategically bankrupt US military and CIA bureaucracy has a history of congratulating itself for fleeting, superficial victories. The US quickly declared victory in Afghanistan in 2001 and set out to duplicate its imagined conquest in Iraq two years later. Then, the short-lived success of the 2011 regime change operation in Libya encouraged the US and its allies to let al-Qaeda affiliates loose in Syria, spawning a decade of intractable violence and chaos and the rise of the Islamic State (IS).
In the same manner, Biden’s unaccountable and corrupt national security advisers seem to be urging him to use the same weapons that obliterated the Islamic State group’s urban bases in Iraq and Syria to attack Taliban-held cities in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is not Iraq or Syria. First, fewer Afghans live in cities. Second, the Taliban’s base is not in major cities, but in the rural areas where the other three-quarters of Afghans live. Despite support from Pakistan over the years, the Taliban are not an invading force like IS, but an Afghan nationalist movement that has fought for two decades to expel foreign invasion and occupation forces from their country.
In many areas, Afghan forces have not fled from the Taliban, as the Iraqi army did from IS in 2014, but joined them. On August 9, the Taliban occupied Aybak, the sixth provincial capital to fall, after a local warlord and his fighters reportedly agreed to join forces with the Taliban.
That very same day, the government’s chief negotiator, Abdullah Abdullah, returned to Doha for further peace talks with the Taliban. His American allies must make it clear to him, his government and the Taliban that the US will support every effort to achieve a peaceful political transition.
The New Syndrome
But the United States must not keep bombing and killing civilians to provide cover for the Afghan government to avoid difficult but necessary compromises at the negotiating table to bring peace to the long-suffering, war-weary people of Afghanistan. Bombing Taliban-occupied cities and the people who live in them is a savage and criminal policy that President Biden must renounce.
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The defeat of the US and its allies in Afghanistan now seems to be unfolding even faster than the collapse of South Vietnam between 1973 and 1975. The public takeaway from the US defeat in Southeast Asia was the “Vietnam syndrome,” an aversion to overseas military interventions that lasted for decades.
As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we should reflect on how the Bush administration exploited the US public’s thirst for revenge to unleash this bloody, tragic and utterly futile war in Afghanistan. The lesson of America’s experience in that country should be a new “Afghanistan syndrome,” a public aversion to war that prevents future US military attacks and invasions, rejects attempts to socially engineer the governments of other nations, and leads to a new and active American commitment to peace, diplomacy and disarmament.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
AfghanistanUK media unite to urge visas for Afghan reporters at risk from TalibanNewspapers and broadcasters send open letter to Boris Johnson raising safety fears about locals who did vital work for the west
Open letter warns of brutal Taliban reprisals against Afghan reporters
Emma Graham-HarrisonWed 4 Aug 2021 14.59 EDTFirst published on Wed 4 Aug 2021 12.10 EDTA coalition of British newspapers and broadcasters has appealed to the government to expand its refugee visa programme for Afghans, to include people who have worked for UK media over the past 20 years.In an open letter to the prime minister and foreign secretary, more than 20 outlets outlined the vital need for a route to safety for reporters whose work with British media could put them at risk of Taliban reprisals.“There is an urgent need to act quickly, as the threat to their lives is already acute and worsening,” the letter said.“If left behind, those Afghan journalists and media employees who have played such a vital role informing the British public by working for British media will be left at the risk of persecution, of physical harm, incarceration, torture, or death.US media came together to make a similar appeal last month, unifying outlets as diverse as Fox and the New York Times. The Biden administration has since expanded its visa programme for Afghanistan, to cover people with links to the US media, and US-funded aid projects.The signatories to the British letter represent an equally broad coalition. They include broadcasters Sky and ITN (which makes news for ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) and all major British newspapers from the Guardian, the Times and the Financial Times to the Daily Mail and the Sun, and weekly magazine the Economist.The National Union of Journalists and press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders have also put their names to the demand for a path to safety for journalists with UK links, modelled on the visa route for military interpreters.The letter was sent to Boris Johnson and the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, who did not immediately respondThe Labour leader, Keir Starmer, promised his party’s backing for the effort to expand protection to Afghan journalists.“The Labour party strongly supports this campaign. These brave Afghans helped the British media report news of the war to the world. They stood up for media freedom and democracy, values that we rightly champion around the world,” Starmer said.“The UK must not abandon them. We urge the government to do the right thing and provide these Afghan journalists, support staff and their families sanctuary in the UK.”Afghans who worked as reporters, translators or “fixers” – multi-skilled journalists who do everything from research to driving for foreign correspondents from outside the country – have been vital to public understanding of a war that has claimed hundreds of British lives and cost billions of pounds.That work, and their links to the UK, also created unique security risks for them. Afghan reporters say their reporting is regularly cited in insurgent threats.The letter notes that the UK government’s own panel on press freedom “recommends a visa programme for journalists at risk in their home state”.The Taliban have for years targeted journalists in campaigns of assassinations and intimidation, which intensified last year, when a wave of attacks in urban areas picked off reporters along with human rights workers, moderate religious scholars and civil society activists, as they went about their daily lives.Helmand-based Elyas Dayee, a key contributor to much of the UK media coverage from the province where most British troops served, was killed in a bomb attack claimed by local Taliban commanders. Other victims included three women who worked for Enekass TV in eastern Afghanistan, gunned down on their commute.The threats have become even more urgent since the Taliban launched a military campaign in May that has swept through the country.They have seized more than half of rural Afghanistan and are threatening several major cities. The group have carried out targeted killings after taking control in some areas, and journalists fear they are likely to be on hitlists.The body of the Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Danish Siddiqui was multilated while in Taliban custody, after he was killed near the southern town of Kandahar last month.Underlining the gravity of the current security situation in Afghanistan, the US has started airlifting out former employees even before they finish their visa process, and UK military officials are appealing for a broader visa programme.TopicsAfghanistanTalibanSouth and Central AsiaUS politicsJournalist safetynewsReuse this content More
