Miscalculating Afghanistan : The Past Assuming the Future

"I stand squarely behind my decision."

"If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. "

"American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves."

U.S. President Joe Biden

Afghan passengers wait to leave the Kabul airport on August 16, a day after the Taliban captured the city [Wakil Kohsar/AFP]

Chaos is total in Kabul as the capital -- as expected but within a shorter time-frame than even the most pessimistic of analysts could have expected --  fell into the hands of the Taliban, swiftly declaring themselves the new government of Afghanistan. Afghans lost no time leaving the city, where thousands had entered earlier desperately fleeing from surrounding towns, villages and cities as they were first taken by the Taliban, hoping to find refuge and safety in the country's capital city.

As soon as the Taliban entered Kabul, Afghans streamed out of the city, walking the desperate distance to the Hamid Karzai international airport at Kabul where planes from international destinations were landing to evacuate their nationals as diplomatic missions emptied their embassies, planning to fly their citizens to safety back home. Afghans hoped that they too would be included in the evacuation process. Many of whom had worked with, had collaborated with, NATO member-countries as interpreters.

Most countries had indicated, after all, the responsibility to provide a safe haven to those Afghan nationals who had worked alongside them, including those locally engaged to work at the embassies, all of whom had the certain knowledge that they and their families would become targets of the Taliban. Some so desperate to escape that they ran after planes taxiing along runways, clinging to the planes and at lift-off, falling to their death.

 

Hundreds of Afghan people run alongside a U.S. Air Force plane, with some climbing on it, as it moves down a runway at the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on Monday. (The Associated Press)

Their eventual fate is known, it has been acknowledged that those Afghans wherever they live in the country, wherever foreign troops were stationed, who worked as base cleaners, administrative clerks, interpreters, in any capacity whatever, were slated for revenge attacks by the Taliban whose fearsome reputation for atrocities escaped no one's notice. With that knowledge, in the expectation that it would yet take time before the Taliban succeeded in taking the country in its entirety, foreign governments fiddled with administrative niceties rather than flying those vulnerable Afghans and their families out to safety and absorption abroad as immigrant.

 

Thousands of people packed into the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Monday, rushing the tarmac and pushing onto planes in desperate attempts to flee the country after the Taliban overthrew the Western-backed government. Here, people climb atop a plane as they wait at the airport. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)

The Taliban leadership initially claimed it had no interest in entering Kabul until it had completed the process of forming a transitional government. That declaration was soon upended, by the decision to physically occupy the city, sending in the 'fighters'; the purpose of which it was explained was to "prevent chaos and looting". Both of which, needless to say, are hallmarks of the Taliban mode of operation; the chaos they sow ensures that opposition will melt away out of raw fear, and the plundering is the Taliban reward.

 

Taliban fighters take control of the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, after the president fled the country on Sunday. (Zabi Karimi/The Associated Press)

 

There was no opposition when the Taliban reached Kabul's outskirts. Both the national police and the Afghan military melted out of sight, evaporated, left for greener pastures they might defend -- or not. With no defences, no opposition, no problems, the country fell to the Taliban just as Iraq fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant when Iraqi security forces panicked and fled, leaving ISIL to establish and enlarge its caliphate at will, just as the Taliban are now doing; returning the past to the future.

"I don't want to be owned by anyone. I want to stand on my own two feet. I love my country and we are the next generation of Afghans taking a step into the modern world."

"I went to work this morning and there were no police or soldiers at any of the usual checkpoints and no one in the office so I came home."

"The streets were full of people trying to get home to their families. No one knows what to do."

"I am afraid I will be kidnapped, imprisoned and raped for being a soldier. I am afraid for my future and for my family."

Kubra Behroz, 33, mother of two, officer cadet member of the Afghan National Army

Women who joined the Afghan National Army amid a western backed campaign now fear the Taliban will kill or rape them for being soldiers Kubra Behroz, who served in the Afghan National Army,

 

She became an officer cadet in 2011. It gave her pride as a woman and an Afghan to work alongside men as a member of her country's national army. She felt her life had a purpose and that purpose was to help protect her country and her people. Other recruits, Pashtun males, regarded her with amused contempt. The Taliban is comprised of Pashtuns, the majority ethnics of the country, though they are now encouraging other ethnic groups to join the Taliban. When Hamid Karzai was president, he spoke of the Pashtuns, the Taliban as his 'brothers'.

She fears for her future with good reason.  When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan twenty years ago, women were not permitted to exit their homes without a male guardian accompanying them, and the women were expected to wear burqas with full face coverings. Girls were not permitted to attend school. During the presence of foreign troops, NGOs and institutions in Afghanistan, schools were built for all children to attend school. The Taliban burnt them down. 

Women were not permitted to work. Hospitals were for men only. Women could only attend hospitals meant for women, and female surgeons too, even in the operating room, were forced to wear full burqas. The Taliban now solemnly declare in the absence of any opposition to their conquest of the country, that girls will be permitted to attend school, that women will not be forced to leave their jobs. Afghans know differently from their own experience. Owners of beauty parlours have painted over their windows; music shops have boarded up doors and windows, destroyed their equipment.

At work Kubra Behroz and her female co-workers have been warned by their male colleagues that they are in extreme danger, taunting the women. "They say the Taliban will cut off our heads if they find us", said Behroz whose brother, a soldier who was wounded in the fighting in Ghazni province last week, informed her of two women having been beheaded who had been police officers four years earlier. Reports are circulating of Taliban soldiers raping women and young girls, declaring 'marriage'.

When a senior Taliban was interviewed he insisted that everyone would be treated well, women would not lose all their recent gains, under Sharia. The very Islamic laws that permit such 'temporary' marriages that rape is viewed as. A girl or woman who is raped is expected to 'marry' her rapist by custom and tradition, or face being ostracized as one whose behaviour 'shames' her family and community.

Even at the best of times, when women were released from the fanatical strictures of the Taliban in their adherence to sharia law, Behroz faced ample violations of her human rights. Ever since she joined the military she has suffered violence of one type or another, from threats to home invasions. While at work her home was ransacked. More recently threats and anonymous phone calls are more frequent: "They speak in Pashto and then Dari and tell me they know how to find me", she said.

People crowd the tarmac of the Afghan capital's airport on Monday, trying to flee the country as the Taliban took control after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on the weekend, conceding that the insurgents had won the 20-year war. (AFP/Getty Images)