Top, left to right: Bill Roggio, Husain Haqqani, and Javid Ahmad. Bottom, left to right: Abdul Matin Bek and Metra Mehran

 

Afghanistan: One Year after US Withdrawal
By Elaine Pasquini

Washington: Husain Haqqani, the Hudson Institute’s director for South and Central Asia and former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, hosted an online panel on August 14 to discuss the situation in Afghanistan one-year after the Taliban’s return to power. 

Since the US and allied forces withdrew from Afghanistan, questions still linger about the necessity, timing and execution of the withdrawal. Haqqani posited that while the Trump administration may have committed an error in signing an agreement with the Taliban, the Biden administration “transformed fully into disaster” in the way the disengagement was executed.

In the meantime, the Taliban’s return to power has been disastrous for the Afghan people. The economy has collapsed, ethnic and religious minorities are persecuted, and women and girls have lost their basic rights.

“President Biden used to say when he was vice president…‘We can’t keep troops in another country just to protect the women of that country, otherwise we’d have to have troops in many, many countries,’” Haqqani recalled. “It was an oversimplification. How the Taliban treat the women of Afghanistan reflects their core belief system.”

Prior to President Biden’s announcement that the US would be withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban were not cooperating, Abdul Matin Bek, chief of staff to former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and a member of the negotiating team that ended the conflict, related. But after Biden announced the withdrawal, everything changed. “The next day the Taliban were smiling, celebrating,” he said.

After returning to Kabul from Doha, Bek said, “We never took withdrawal seriously. There were mixed messages coming to us. If we were smart…we should have realized the Americans were leaving.”

It is “naïve” to think the Taliban will change and engage meaningfully, he continued. “I believe that engagement will have no positive outcome for Afghanistan, for the region, for America.”

In Bek’s view, the only thing left for Afghans is “armed resistance” against the Taliban, who are “taking the country to a civil war and they are fragmentizing the society further.”

“My recommendation would be to work with Afghan people, the former army, women and civil rights activists,” he said.

Javid Ahmad, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and Afghan ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 2020 to 2021, noted: “Basically, the Taliban are in charge now and that is the grim reality we need to deal with.”

 With many Afghans starving, facing soaring unemployment and an uncertain economic and political future, along with the Taliban becoming increasingly oppressive, the US faces the dilemma of how to respond. 

For any US “engagement” with the Taliban to be productive, “it is important to find common language with the Taliban ideologues and their clerics, especially those in Kandahar pulling the strings and commanding greater legitimacy and greater control, Ahmad said. The US has little visibility into the inner workings of the regime in either Kabul or Kandahar. “We have very little credible insight, if any, into the actual decision-making process of the clerical leadership,” he said.

 Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of Long War Journal, cautioned against negotiating with the Taliban.

“We shouldn’t engage with them because any money we give them for aid is going to…be used by them,” he warned. “I agree that the answer here is supporting the resistance. That is the only hope the Afghan people have.”

In Panjshir, “the Afghan military resistance is forming, and we should support it,” he recommended. “It needs to be Afghan-led and Afghan-driven. They clearly know how to fight the Taliban better than the US does.”

Roggio understands Americans’ fatigue with the war. “It was 20 years of failed policy of political, military and intelligence leaders being deceptive of the US mission there,” he argued. “I did understand the desire to disengage but…you should not have done it the way President Biden did it. He literally pulled the rug out from the Afghan military and the Afghan government.”

The US and NATO built an Afghan military that was wholly dependent on US support, maintenance, weaponry, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and once the US withdrew those combat enablers, it was just a matter of time before the Afghan military was going to fail, he continued. “It was sickening to me to hear President Biden say things like ‘the Afghan people, the Afghan military won’t fight.’ They were prepared to fight. More than 50,000 Afghan soldiers and policemen died fighting the Taliban,” he said.

Prior to the US withdrawal, various Afghan officials continually told Roggio they’d been assured by the US State Department, Defense Department, the CIA or even Trump or Biden administration officials that the US “would not abandon” them.

Reflecting on the past year, Metra Mehran, a fellow at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and co-founder of the Feminine Perspectives Movement, said that Afghans, especially women, are now stripped of their human dignity and have no access to education, employment or freedom of movement. “We are the only country on earth where girls cannot attend secondary schools,” she emphasized.

 While Afghans are ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse, that diversity is not represented in the government. Also, aid inside Afghanistan goes mostly to Taliban fighters, not to women or minorities, she said.

 “What I am proud of is that women in Afghanistan are not silenced,” Mehran said. “They face guns. They know the consequences of imprisonment and torture, but they are on the streets demanding their rights.”

 She pointed out that around the world “there are red carpets for the Taliban,” while Afghan women are ignored. “I want the people of the world to start respecting the women of Afghanistan,” Mehran stressed. “They are a very strong resistance force now and we need to realize it and recognize it.”

 (Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)