Taliban Blitz Afghanistan
By Nayyer Ali MD
Almost 20 years after being expelled from power, the Taliban find themselves in charge of Afghanistan once again. The US-backed government collapsed with stunning speed once it was clear that the US was really leaving.
The Taliban had bided their time for the last several months waiting for the US withdrawal to complete. Meanwhile, they carefully cultivated local Afghan police and army units and convinced them to switch sides and lay down their arms once the Taliban began offensive operations. This side-switching has a long history in Afghan civil wars, with Afghanis jumping to whoever looks to be the winner rather than fighting to the bitter end. The end result was that the Afghan military collapsed far faster than even the US intelligence analysts expected.
Much has been made of the fact that the US spent 2 trillion dollars and 20 years and still could not defeat the Taliban. The numbers are bit massaged, they include 500 billion dollars in interest payment on borrowed money for example, but the point is that the US did commit significant resources and time to the effort. But Taliban could not be defeated as long as it had safe havens in Pakistan. However, a modest long-term US footprint could keep it contained. Trump made an impulsive decision to sign a surrender deal, and Biden chose not to undo it.
Besides staying in Afghanistan for another 10 to 20 years, the only other route to avoiding a Taliban victory would have been forcing Pakistan to turn off the insurgency. But Pakistan has been running an insurgency in Afghanistan for over 40 years based on its own self-interest, a consensus shared by liberals and military types the whole time. While few Pakistanis would want to be ruled by the Taliban, that was not the point of Pakistan’s policy. Pakistan tried the same strategy in Kashmir in the 90’s, and tied down 500k Indian army personnel who still could not defeat that insurgency. It only ended in 2002 after the attack on Indian Parliament when India mobilized and convincingly threatened war. Pakistan turned the insurgency off in a day.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded the US do the same thing to Pakistan in 2009 when he met with Vice President Joe Biden, but as Steve Coll reported in his book “Directorate S”, Karzai was rebuffed when Biden simply stated “Pakistan is 50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States”. Coll also reported that then Chief of Army Staff General Kayani offered to turn off the Taliban insurgency to Karzai in 2010 in exchange for Karzai basically cutting all ties with India and realigning the Afghan military with Pakistan, even to the extent that Pakistan would train Afghan officers. But Karzai rejected that offer as he preferred to be part of an anti-Pakistan alliance with India. In the end it was the corruption of the Afghan state that sealed its doom without the moral and air support of a modest force of US personnel.
What happens now to 37 million Afghans? Do the Taliban try to reimpose the regime of 2001? Back then Afghanistan had no institutions. No banks, no airports, no internet, no cell phones or even landlines, no universities, no newspapers, no TV or radio etc. Since then much has changed. There are 40,000 Afghan girls currently in university. Female literacy is still abysmal but has risen to 30%. The Taliban of 2001 were tribal illiterate Pashtuns who knew little of the wider world. But the Taliban leaders and their families today have lived in Islamabad and Karachi for 20 years, and while Pakistan is not a hotbed of liberalism, it is a much more sophisticated society where women hold important public roles and almost no one wears a burqa. Have these customs rubbed off on the Taliban?
Economically, Afghanistan has been a ward of the international community with much of its GDP coming in the form of aid dollars and spending by contractors and soldiers on the local economy. Opium is the main export. Will the Taliban shut down the opium trade? Meanwhile, is the power going to go out for most of Afghanistan, as 80% of its electricity was imported from neighbors and paid for in dollars? The US has frozen the Afghan gold reserves and foreign currency reserves currently being held at US institutions; these amount to several billion dollars. It is likely that Pakistan will recognize the new Taliban government quickly, but what about the rest of the region? For that matter what about the US and Europe? If the Taliban remain a pariah regime, there is little hope of actual reconstruction or development, instead the economy will likely shrink dramatically in the next 12 months.
Some Taliban figures have given public statements suggesting they are not going to reimpose the harshest aspects of their rule back in the 1990’s, but it is too early to tell right now what they really intend. Much of the technocratic expertise in Afghanistan is going to flee West if it has not done so already. To win control and to rule effectively are two entirely different things.
For Pakistan, it is a triumph of its foreign policy approach for the last 25 years. An Afghanistan ruled by a government that is not aligned with India has been a key interest of every government that Pakistan has had. Also, one that makes no claims on Pashtun-majority regions of Pakistan. In the past, some Afghan leaders have made such provocative statements. The Afghan regime had also supported the TTP and Baloch separatists in the last decade as a way of pressuring Pakistan, but that strategy has turned out to be a total failure. What is uncertain is whether the Taliban victory will have some unintended consequences for Pakistan. Will there be significant refugee flow, especially if harsh Taliban rules are put in place forbidding girls being educated and women working? Will the TTP (Pakistan Taliban, ideologically akin to the Afghan Taliban but having the goal of overthrowing the Pakistani government) draw inspiration or even support from the Afghan Taliban victory? Will an impoverished and imploding economy drive Afghanistan back into fragmentation and warlordism over the next few years?
For the US, the Afghan situation had moved off the front pages almost a decade ago. Most Americans couldn’t locate Afghanistan on a map or explain why the US had forces there. While the withdrawal has generated some bad optics being played on television and social media, the average American doesn’t care. The primary purpose of the Afghan war, the destruction of Al-Qaeda and the killing of Osama Bin Laden in response to the 9/11 attacks was accomplished 10 years ago. To get out now and leave the major regional powers with the problem of putting Afghanistan back together, is strategically sensible, and explains President Biden’s willingness to see Kabul fall.
