AFGHANISTAN TODAY – STRATEGIC AND SOCIAL ISSUES

On the cusp of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, al-Qaeda’s closest allies, the Taliban, are back in power in Afghanistan. How did we get here?

To understand this needless, self-created disaster we must understand how events have unravelled over the last two years. This can be summarised in several steps.

The “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America” was signed by the Trump administration and the Taliban on 29 August 2020.

Even the title is bizarre, flawed, and sadly ironic. US and Taliban negotiators spent months working out the name alone. The Taliban were refusing to remove the term ‘Islamic Emirate,’ and the US was not willing to acknowledge it. Hence, the odd title. The deal itself was the culmination of ten rounds of negotiations spanning more than a year.

The agreement had one significant demand of the Taliban: “to prevent the use of the soil of Afghanistan by any group or individual against the security of the United States and its allies.” The Taliban interpreted the agreement as not being required to prevent terrorism against the West. The bottom line is there was nothing in the agreement that prevents the Taliban from hosting anti-Western terrorist groups.

With the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan complete along with a chaotic and flawed Western departure, the spotlight of the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan needs to fall on its architect, the American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad who had been tasked with two parallel goals. Firstly, secure a peace settlement between the Afghan government and Taliban and use pressure to achieve this. Secondly, ensure the US commitment to withdraw from Afghanistan remains on track.

Almost three years ago, Khalilzad was made the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation. On paper, he appeared the natural choice to try and achieve a lasting peace between the Ashraf Ghani government and the Taliban. Khalilzad was born in Afghanistan and as an ethnic Pashto who understood the nuances and fault lines of Afghan culture. However, the news was not welcomed by most Afghans.

Khalilzad’s Doha deal also gave the Taliban some legitimacy and enabled them to strategically stall with their vague promises whilst using the opportunity to back the Ashraf Ghani government into a corner, so much so that Kabul’s reservations resulted in them being branded as the spoilers.

One controversial and consequential aspect included the Taliban forcing the Afghan government to release hundreds of Taliban prisoners, courtesy of Khalilzad who whilst acknowledging it was a hard decision also stated it was necessary for the “desirability of peace”. However, defying the Doha deal, the freed Taliban fighters soon returned to battlefield and began murdering Afghan civilians and security forces.

In an effort to show the Biden administration’s fidelity to the Doha Agreement, Khalilzad was retained as the US Special Representative. However, the Taliban relentlessly continued committing violence against both Afghan security forces and civilians.

Al-Qaeda has issued a message congratulating the Taliban on their victory in seizing Afghanistan. Keep in mind that Al-Qaeda core, al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), and other affiliated groups are embedded throughout the Taliban.

Over half of Al-Qaeda videos are filmed in the Pakistani territory belonging to the Haqqani network. Time will tell whether the Taliban will really betray al-Qaeda in a way that would be noticeable, such as handing over or killing its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

For the Taliban, violence is leverage. Thus, it won’t give it up. And now it’s exploiting that clout to strengthen its position. They have shown repeated bad faith

Many oppose the agreement’s provisions because it is not a deal for peace but, rather, a deal to remove the United States from a conflict without a viable strategy to prevent Afghanistan from turning into a cesspool for terrorism once again.

“Winning” in Afghanistan could never have happened when the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations’ most important “partner”, Pakistan, was singularly dedicated to US failure in state-building and defeating terrorism in Afghanistan, despite the lucrative remuneration it received.

Principally, the Taliban are the Pakistani military’s strategic asset, and their presence in Afghanistan provides “strategic depth” and thwarts the Afghan aspirations of Pashtunistan, which is the reunification of the Pashtun people divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan, courtesy of the colonially created Durand Line.

The Pakistani military was never going to give up the Taliban project just because they were told after 9/11, “You are either with us or against us.”

This Doha agreement put no real pressure upon the Pakistani military to stop its agenda, and thus, it will not. The flaws in the deal must be shared across the West, as no other country had tried to highlight the concerns and pitfalls of what will now transpire in Afghanistan.

What the West is set up is not future peace but future instability. It’s a real indictment that the television show Homeland has a greater understanding of the power politics of the region than Western bureaucrats.

Another issue is women’s rights, given that under Taliban rule (1995-2001), women were not allowed to work, attend school, or engage in any meaningful activities outside their homes. In 2019, the Taliban chief negotiator Sher Mohamad Stanakzai said they have not changed their ideological views. He refused to accept that al-Qaeda was behind 9/11 and accused the U.S. of creating ISIS.

Sirajuddin Haqqani said in his deeply disturbing New York Times op-ed that “All Afghans have equal rights, rights of women granted by Islam.” In case it’s not clear, Haqqani is separating men and women as if women are not part of the first phrase.

It’s also what the Taliban said back in the 1990s—a carbon copy. Therefore, the Taliban are reiterating that women will have no role in politics and civil society, especially as the Taliban doesn’t believe there is room for civil society in their version of Afghanistan.

Empowering women in Afghanistan post-9/11 had been one of the most potent success stories, as a bulwark against misogyny also combats radicalisation and terrorism. Women’s empowerment directly challenges male supremacy, which often seeks to institutionalise domestic violence.

Terrorism is at least as much about male violence as ideology, suggesting that angry young men are attracted to extremist ideas that appear to “justify” their violence. Entrenched Taliban misogyny can often appear disguised as religious piety, whereas in reality it is anti-feminism and endorses the right to control women.

Millions of children, including girls, have been educated. Where infrastructure is limited, there are mobile libraries bringing books to children. According to 2020 figures from the US Agency for International Development, out of the approximately 9 million children enrolled in school in Afghanistan, 40 per cent are girls, with around 100,000 attending higher education institutions.

Afghanistan’s economy has grown by 8 per cent annually since 2001. Infrastructure projects have seen rapid development. Women have played a key role in this progress, with what’s now known as the Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry having been established in 2013.

Healthcare in Afghanistan has vastly improved across the last two decades, with the average life expectancy rising from 42 in 2002 to 65 in 2021. Independent media, banned under the Taliban, has expanded significantly in Afghanistan in recent years. Many of these brilliant journalists and media professionals are women.

Civil society has enabled culture, art and film to grow and establish roots. Afghanistan also has a cricket team that can compete with the best globally. In 2010, the Afghanistan national women’s cricket team was created. The country has won two Olympic medals since 2008; under the Taliban regime, Afghanistan was prohibited from participating in the games because they banned women from competing.

Now, the Taliban have demanded that all girls over the age of 15 and widows younger than 40 should be married to the insurgent fighters, by force if necessary. Since the Taliban were toppled from power in 2001, a generation of women has grown up in Afghanistan whose only knowledge of them was in books.

Instead, Western values have been imprinted on an entire generation including gender equality, civil society, independent media. Now, this young generation of Afghans will be confronted and controlled by the returning Taliban entities whose beliefs will conflict with this aspiring generation.

Under the Taliban, Afghanistan will once again come to resemble a hotbed of terrorism as it was in the 1990s when civil war and extremist forces came to dominate the country’s politics. It’s important to remember that despite the challenges Afghanistan continues to face, since 2001, when the country was starting from ground zero, millions of Afghans have returned home and began rebuilding their communities. Millions of children, including girls, found their ways into schools.

People will start caring when young, impressionable people from the West start travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan for terrorist training, as they did from the 1990s to 2007. There will be a new wave of Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs), but the West will be unable to deal with it because the abandonment of Afghanistan will have already been completed.

The burden will then fall on the law enforcement and intelligence communities to deal with the impact of the reverse flow of the FTFs. This will be severely impacted without a footprint in Afghanistan directly impacting on the ability to gather intelligence.

On 3 February 2021, the bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group report released has painted a bleak picture of what will happen to Afghanistan if the United States withdraws its remaining 2,500 troops prematurely. It warns that transnational terrorist groups will rebuild capabilities that were destroyed following the US-led invasion and be operational again to attack US soil within two to three years.

It is often forgotten that Afghanistan experienced a period of relative security after the Taliban’s defeat post-9/11 and that a Taliban-led insurgency did not emerge until 2005. However, by mid-2002, the George W. Bush administration was turning its attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. With Afghanistan neglected and the United States distracted by the ill-fated Iraq War, the Taliban reorganized with the Pakistani military’s support.

A Western exit from Afghanistan needed to be contingent on the Taliban ending ties with terrorist groups and ceasing their violence against the Afghan people. At the same time, it was critical that Pakistan be held accountable for how it meddles in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. However, neither was done.

Instead, President Joe Biden ignored the advice he was given and instead ordered a unilateral, arbitrary and complete departure from Afghanistan, and now the country will become the terrorist sanctuary it was when the 9/11 attacks were planned. Potentially the situation is worse than it was in the 1990s.

US President Joe Biden’s decision to use 11 September 2021 as a withdrawal date was a propaganda gift to al-Qaeda and its allies, as well as its rivals like the Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-KP). It is difficult to understand why the Biden administration chose a date that strengthens a jihadist narrative of resistance and perseverance in the face of the so-called “crusader occupation.”

After releasing the symbolic error of the departure date, Biden brought forward the exodus to 31 August 2021 claiming, “the terrorist threat has metastasized beyond Afghanistan.” Biden was adamant that al-Qaeda’s capacity to plot more attacks on the United States from Afghanistan had been permanently extinguished.

American and NATO casualties had been very low since then-President Obama ended combat operations at the end of 2014, even before direct talks between the US and Taliban commenced in 2018, and the costs of the reduced US presence were much lower. Yet support from remaining US and NATO troops enabled the Afghan army at least to preserve a form of stalemate.

The Afghan government had control of its most populous cities, and the Taliban were unable to advance on them. The coalition departure had a direct and psychological impact on the Afghan military. The parallel withdrawal of about 10,000 contractors also affected the ability to maintain aircraft and equipment.

The Taliban strategy had been planned well in advance and was calculated with stealth in mind. They first developed a double envelopment strategy to secure all border-crossings followed by northern Afghanistan, seizing terrain, destroying specific enemy forces, and interdicting enemy withdrawal routes. This ensured the Kabul government didn’t have a safe rear to fall back to and would prevent a Northern Alliance 2.0. The second stage was encirclement, with the final stage to take Kabul.

It was clear the day the Taliban were handed an unconditional Western withdrawal that they’d have absolutely no incentive to talk peace with the Afghan government. They knew they had won. The fall of provincial capitals in Afghanistan created a snowball effect. As they captured towns and cities, the Taliban also seized weapons, gathered intelligence, released fighters from prisons—as well as murderers and rapists who’ve joined them—from jail, all to strengthen its hand for further conquests.

Unfortunately, it is only now as Afghan cities are occupied by Taliban forces that we will reflect upon what has been achieved in the country in the past twenty years. Afghanistan was never going to be Germany, South Korea or Japan. It needed the opportunity to develop its own unique culture in the twenty-first century, which the West painstakingly helped achieve.

The sacrifices of our troops, who have given their blood for an honourable outcome in Afghanistan, demanded that the West should not amount to abandoning the country, nor end up endorsing what our enemies in the region wanted. Sadly, that is what has happened.

No one wants “forever wars,” but an irresponsible exit is just as inadvisable. We needed to pause, look to history, and move forward with caution instead of sleepwalking into another disaster. Sadly, that is exactly what has been done. Now as the Taliban puts the West under pressure to leave by 31 August 2021, there is a realistic prospect that thousands of our allies who are entitled to be given safe passage from Afghanistan will be abandoned there, at the mercy of the Taliban.