What will Taliban rule mean for Afghanistan’s neighbours?
The scenes from Kabul airport are a disaster movie. Crowds of panicking Afghans, US soldiers firing shots in the air, desperate Afghans clinging to American planes taking off, only to come crashing to earth and to their death.
Comparisons have been made with the images of the past – especially the Hueys and Jolly Green Giant helicopters lifting off from the roofs of the US embassy compound in Saigon in 1975. Another cut and run, scuttling out after another tangled and very expensive foreign military adventure.
The Kabul breakdown is very much about the present and the future. It is the kind of crisis and chaos that will fuel the conflicts and social implosions to come. A government and army has collapsed, insurgents are on the streets with no idea what to do, and refugees are on the move by the hundreds of thousands. Their hunger and thirst are underpinned by the creeping influences of climate change. Afghanistan is again in the grips of a massive drought. And Covid-19 is rampant, though not being written about and reported much.
In a way it is a chronicle of international folly foretold. From the inception of the campaign against the Taliban in October 2001 the aim of the exercise kept being adjusted, bent and recalibrated by the Americans – and in the end, for most of the past 18 years at least, never quite made sense. The first aim was to drive out Osama bin Laden, whom his hosts in Kabul, the first Taliban regime, had refused to surrender. So the Taliban were bombed out of the capital, and bin Laden fled into Pakistan.
From then on the story of the international intervention led by America, abetted by Britain and under a Nato organising structure, is one of mismanagement of policy, planning and at times poor tactics. All this was against surprising ignorance of conditions on the ground and the nature of Afghan tribal society and its bizarre economy. Though there was plenty of information from those who had worked and travelled the ground for years, it was ignored.
No sooner had the allied force got to Kabul and driven bin Laden’s motley crew through the caves of Tora Bora into Pakistan, than the US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to pull the bulk of US troops out. Afghanistan was fixed by his new concept of war – which seemed to be special forces Seals and Rangers on horses or motorbikes, and equipped with laptops to call in aircraft and drone strikes. By early 2002 Rumsfeld wanted to move onto what he considered the main attraction – the invasion of Iraq.
“Rumsfeld was an absolute menace,” one of the UK’s senior defence chiefs of the day told me a few days ago. “He ran the campaign and made life very difficult for us – the trouble is that Blair went along with everything Rumsfeld wanted as he wanted to keep up with the Americans.”
The fallout of Rumsfeld’s chop logic was the backing of a thoroughly corrupt regime to power in Kabul. Hamid Karzai was a weak leader who always tried to play the odds with the big players – he is reported even now to be making a deal to enter the new junta of the Taliban. The initial chosen candidate was Abdul Haq, but he was killed by the Taliban as he tried to make an early return to Kabul in late October 2001. The Americans then switched to Karzai, a sort of Arthur Daley fixer figure and leader of the small Popalzai clan of the Durrani Pashtu. A brilliant book by Lucy Morgan Edwards, The Afghan Solution, explains how he brought with him a motley band of Mafiosi, cheap warlords and fixers, whose expulsion had been the ticket to success for the Taliban in 1996. They rode to power on a “clean-up politics” slate. Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali, became the boss man and broker of Kandahar, running his own franchise of wheeling and dealing for his brother, the CIA, and the narco barons – until he was murdered by his own bodyguard. Another Karzai relation was involved in the troubles of the Afghan National Bank – which went down for nearly a billion dollars – most funded from international aid.
The corruption was endemic, seemingly ineradicable, and in the end fatal. It is why the armed forces for all the funding and training – which was pretty sporadic at times – from the US, Britain and the allies, collapsed.
Against this background, the process of planning, strategy, policy and deployment of forces and aid by most international leaders in the ISAF (International Sustaining of Afghanistan Force) was dysfunctional from the beginning. The British military should have acknowledged that they were being invited to mission impossible when they were sent to Helmand in 2006, given the resources and time scale laid down by the Blair government and Nato. In the case of the UK each department, the Foreign Office, DfID, the aid ministry, defence and the armed forces never harmonised. They talked past each other – and above them were the prime ministers and their tight coteries of advisers and close cabinet allies making their own demands.
“It never quite fitted together – they were never quite in sync,” says General Sir Nick Parker, most perceptive of the British commanders who served in Afghanistan. “Above all they didn’t seem to work with what the Afghans really wanted and needed, and could manage. We seem to be seeing the same thing repeated with the scenes at the airport now. This time we have to get it right and get our people – and I mean all those who worked with us and on whom we depended – all of them out.”
The immediate crisis is the humanitarian implosion – disorientated hungry, thirsty and terrified refugees. With them comes the risk from Covid, already spreading across Afghanistan. It all compounds into congenital hopelessness for the future, for families, for jobs and shelter. This has potential for another major conflict of despairing and the desperate.
The Taliban spokesman today said that the major accredited NGOs can stay on and can operate unhindered, even with female personnel. They must be held to this; it is a real test of credibility. UNICEF and UNHCR have stated they intend to carry on – and let’s hope they and their friends and allies across the board like MSF, Red Crescent and the Islamic charities can expand their activities right away.
In the meantime, the implications of a new Taliban Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are plain. The present constitution, flawed and dysfunctional, goes. No more parliament, elections and balanced judiciary. In their place sharia law, with its proclivity for violent punishment, stoning, hanging, flogging, amputation. Women will be told to go home, as they are already. The huge gains in literacy and vibrant public debate, which have blossomed since the dark ages of the 90s, will be anathema. The final arbiter in freedom, justice, life and death will be those mysterious entities, the panels of “Islamic Scholars.”
The new cocktail of confusion, chaos and despair is of immediate concern to the neighbours. Even the sponsors of the Taliban in the Pakistan military and the intelligence agency, ISI, must worry about what they have spawned, and what it is to come out of Kabul. Most concerned must be Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China, and not least India. With the refugees come the complications of the drugs trade and the movement of the militant groups, allied to Taliban central in Kabul but not under their control. Al Qaeda, and the Khorasan group – the Afghan equivalent of the Al-Nusra franchise in Syria, is now identified to be in 15 provinces of Afghanistan. Followers of the Islamic State have been present for some time, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan move in and out of the northern borders with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. China is concerned about the commerce in Islamic militancy through Badakhshan and the Wakhan Corridor into Uighur territory.
Terrorism professionals – academic and from the security agencies – are concerned about the groups’ abilities to adapt, reform, re-fund and experiment. The main target area for now is expected to be the Gulf, whence there are rich funding possibilities. There are loose affiliations across the region into Africa through the al Shabaab and Boko Haram groups and many more like them. The links may appear to be tenuous, but they are real according to Professor Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University. Innovation in weaponry and tactics may be tempting them into chemical and biological weaponries – especially with the growing evidence that Covid-19 was man-made.
Most worrying about the Kabul implosion and the rise of the “Taliban 2” regime in Afghanistan is the epic mismanagement by the Americans of their own immediate and long term interests – and those of their allies, whom Biden and Blinken have so cavalierly ignored. The Biden team don’t seem even now to have thought about the wider global impact of what they have done, or rather neglected to do.