Chaos and Uncertainty in Afghanistan

 

"There will be no democratic system at all because it does not have any base in our country."

"Our ulema [religious scholars] will decide whether girl are allowed to go to school or not."

Waheedullah Hashimi, Taliban official

"I can manage [to go to the airport] as long as they let me get into a U.K. plane."

"I can't risk my life going there and then coming back. I won't have another chance."

senior Afghan official

Three people were shot dead by Taliban following protests in three cities where Taliban flags were pulled down and the Afghan national flag was raised in defiance. According to witnesses at the scene over a dozen people were wounded as Taliban dispersed a protest in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan. Dissent will clearly not be tolerated by the newly restored Islanic Emirate of Afghanistan. Oh, and the solemn promise to the international community that the Taliban would exact no reprisals and a general amnesty would be in order always had a distinctive whiff of deceit.

 

Women and children sitting on the tarmac at the airport in Kabul on Monday.  Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A man identifying himself only as Wahid in Jalalabad described the incident when protesters replaced the flag of the Taliban with the Afghan national tricolour close to the city's Pashtunistan square. "Living is not possible any more. These youngsters here, I understand they hate the Taliban but changing the flag has caused trouble for all of us in Jalalabad. One of our dear men was killed."

"They can shoot me, I will die for this flag", one young man shouted, as he carried the national flag. The eastern cities of Khost and Asadabad saw protesters gathered and taking down the white flag of the Taliban emblazoned with black Islamic scripture to replace it with the black, red and green banner of the Afghan Republic. Women appeared on the streets of Kabul demanding their rights be respected by the Taliban. Who had, after all, speaking to the foreign press, assured they were prepared to respect women's rights, under the strictures of sharia law.

A presenter for Afghan TV station RTA who had taken her place as usual in the previous two days, was prevented by Taliban members from entering her office more recently. All of this as Taliban spokesmen assured the foreign press that they had no intention of returning to the ways and means of their previous government installment in the 1990s, a time when public floggings and beheadings were carried out routinely as a measure of maintaining public order.

As for the recently unseated Ashraf Ghani now in the United Arab Emirates, President Ghani has issued an assurance that he intends to return to Afghanistan "so that I can continue my efforts for justice for Afghans". On the streets of Kabul, Taliban fanatics launched search parties looking to unearth the presence of government officials and journalists, while at the international airport Western government representatives are frantically attempting to evacuate their nationals, along with Afghans who had worked with their troops and diplomatic missions.

One day after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, thousands of people who were desperate to flee the country rushed to the airport in Kabul. Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The roads leading to the airport are locked in gridlock. Passage is in the hands of the Taliban manning checkpoints. Unless people can make their way through Taliban sentries to the airport, no one will depart the country. Desperate people have taken to attempts at tunneling under or alternately climbing over fences. The Netherlands pointed out that Dutch embassy staff, translators and family members were refused entry into the airport by U.S. troops and as a result missed their evacuation flight. 

 

To maintain 'order', Taliban fired shots into the air, using whips to disperse the crowds gathered close to the airfield's main entrance. The Taliban checkpoints effectively controlling access to the airport, complicating plans to rescue people remaining hidden in the city. The U.S. State Department issued a statement that American embassy personnel had been evacuated to the airport, where the U.S. military was protecting them.

For the thousands of others desperate for refuge from the Taliban's Islamic Emirate, escape attempts appear futile. As one international employee working for a humanitarian group who had attempted to find a way to the airport and access to an outbound flight explained the situation, he was informed no one could exit the country at this point, absent permission from the new government in power.

A U.S. soldier confronting people at the international airport in Kabul on Monday.  Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

"The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on the agreement to draw down our forces, or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat and lurching into the third decade of conflict."

"Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country [after two decades of U.S. training and hundreds of billions of dollars in equipment and resources]."

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

U.S. President Joe Biden

Afghans waiting at the Kabul airport on Monday.   Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Winning the Battles, Losing the War

"As soon as the first [IED] explosion kicked off we all had a gut feeling it was a bad one. Some of them were walking wounded. Some [British soldiers on a dawn patrol in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, July 2009] were helping each other walk back and others were literally in bits."

"I don't want to say they've all died for nothing. We've lost a lot of people for a cause but when we totally pull out it will revert to exactly what it was like before."

"Ultimately when the fighting stops you have a duty to rebuild and it doesn't feel like we have done that."

"It's hard to put into words, but my life will never be the same."

British Rifleman Peter Sherlock, C Company, 2nd Battalion, the Rifles, Sangin District, Afghanistan

"We consider this withdrawal a positive step."

"Afghans can get closer to stability and peace with the full withdrawal of foreign forces."

Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban spokesman

"The Americans must leave Afghanistan and there would be peace in this country."

"We are in a difficult situation. Most people have fled their districts and some districts have fallen."

"Seven districts in Paktia province have fallen and are now under Taliban control."

Javed Arman, Kabul resident

Afghan soldiers guarded Bagram on Friday  Reuters

 

A senior U.S. security official on condition of anonymity stated "All American soldiers and members of NATO forces have left the Bagram Air Base". And the international community if it has any interest in the future of Afghanistan, should be aware that the last foreign troops to leave will as good as flick the switch to total darkness. After 20-in-retrospect-wasted years of scuffling with the Taliban in an effort to push it back and out of contention to once again gain control of the country, the U.S. troop pull=out leaving their main military base of Bagram, effectively hands Afghanistan back to the Taliban.

Some U.S. forces will remain in Afghanistan as part of a "rational drawdown with allies", it seems, and to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul. But for how long? The Taliban, set to regain control and oust the U.S.-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani will have no tolerance for an ongoing presence of U.S. troops for any reason, and the presence of an American embassy in Kabul will be viewed as unhelpful, an irritant meant to be expunged.

It was from Bagram air base that the air war and logistical support for the Afghan mission was co-ordinated. Over 3,500 members of international forces lost their lives in Afghanistan, answering their nations' call to duty in support of their American allies in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The number of deaths of allied troops exceeding the number of deaths resulting from the 9/11 attacks by close to 50%.

According to one Western diplomat located in Kabul, the U.S. and its NATO allies had "won many battles, but have lost the Afghan war", as good a summation as any of the immense energy, finances and human life the prosecution of the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda cost the international community. And to what avail? All the advances Afghan society gained during those decades in equality for women, economic support, health services, education for children including girls, lessons in the rule of law and democratic action, lost.

New York City firefighters arrived at Bagram surrounded by the Hindu Kush mountains that sheltered Osama bin Laden from the search for justice by bringing a primary terrorist before an American court of law, to symbolically bury a piece of the World Trade Center there mere days after the Taliban fled the oncoming allied forces in search of the elusive Osama bin Laden.  The "black site" detention centre was operated out of Bagram air base.

 

A piece of World Trade Center rubble was buried in the frozen ground of the base in December 2001   Reuters

 

The base hosted a sprawling fortified encampment absorbing the huge international military force, offering gyms and a cafe and fast-food outlets; a touch of 'home' in an alien land under duress. The base, on desertion, will become the official property of the Government of Afghanistan. Eventually to be handed over to the Taliban. And that piece of the World Trade Center will be trashed along with the memory of the international soldiers that sequestered and operated out of for two decades.

General Austin Miller, top U.S. commander in Afghanistan "still retains all t he capabilities and authorities to protect the force" while a minuscule proportion of it remains stationed in Kabul. General Miller informed journalists that civil war for Afghanistan was "certainly a path that can be visualized", Taliban fighters swooping into districts while foreign troops departed. Not only can it be 'visualized', it can also be expected, a brief preliminary to total takedown of the Afghan government.

President Biden evidently had no use for advice from his own generals hoping to hang on until such time that a political agreement was reached between the Taliban and the Kabul government of President Ashraf Ghani. He has been hung out to dry, to twist in the wind of change, along with the people of Afghanistan who realistically can 'visualize' their oncoming future, a return to the dismal misery of the recent past under Taliban Islamist rule.

The Taliban have left their signature everywhere even as negotiations were in process, lest people forget what they once experienced and will once again undergo, by staging suicide attacks even in high-security areas in Kabul, as well as anywhere else in the county where they deemed a message was overdue. The death toll of Afghan soldiers and the national police was another reminder that their days were numbered as well. Any Afghans known to have been of assistance to the kafirs had best exile themselves.

 

These wounded Afghan soldiers were rescued by helicopter north of Kandahar last month   Getty Images

 

"Afghans are going to have to decide their future, what they want", President Ghani was advised last week by President Biden in Washington. As if. In acknowledgment President Ghani responded that his job now was to "manage the consequences" of the U.S. withdrawal. The death knell of any vision of democracy in the country, of peace and stability, of gains made by women and girls, who can now expect they must be fully tented in burqas at all times; no laughing, no music, no dancing, no employment, no life.

As part of the agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban the withdrawal gained the U.S. a promise from the Taliban leadership that international terrorists will never again to permitted to operate from Afghan soil. Islamic State is on Afghan soil, as is al-Qaeda, all in good health, which makes three terrorist groups operating on Afghan soil, all of whom do not regard the United States with any level of affection.

Oh yes, the Taliban reiterated to the Americans their commitment to negotiate with the Afghan government. In talks taking place in Doha, Qatar, which have to the present made little progress, and will make precisely no progress in recognition of the government of Afghanistan as valid, since plans are that it will be forfeit the minute the all-clear is given for the Taliban to take complete charge. Both pledges by the Taliban to assuage the guilt of the U.S. over abandoning Afghanistan are rubbish. And both parties know it is face-saving and self-serving.

"We urge an end to violence, respect for the human rights of all Afghans and serious negotiations in Doha so that a just and durable peace may be achieved", stated the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan, giving assurance that the United States was firmly committed to provide security assistance of $3 billion in 2022 to benefit the Afghan government's security. The smokescreen of betrayal.

But of course Afghanistan has an obligation to look after itself. It cannot and should not be under the direct protective wings of foreign militaries. Afghanistan has throughout its long history been invaded and occupied, a centre of jockeying by world powers for control of trade routes and entry to markets waiting to be conquered. Afghans have always resisted occupation by foreign powers. Their future is occupation by oppressive religious fundamentalist terrorists.