Afghanistan: Taliban Support, Resistance & Evacuation - Don't Believe Everything You Read & Hear, Part 1
A lot of important, nuanced information flies under the radar in a chaotic scenario. Some key points to take on board
The kaleidoscope of fast-moving events unfolding in Afghanistan gives a picture of chaos, confusion and uncertainty. Are the Taliban in control of the entire country? Do they have staying power? Will we see serious armed and civil resistance? Is the evacuation a total screw-up or is it coming together? I worked the Afghanistan account in the U.S. State Department and spent an entire career dealing with conflict, failed states, refugees and evacuations. Here’s my insider’s perspective.
Cliches, Stereotypes & Kipling
First, be careful what you read in the media and how to interpret what’s being reported. What strikes me about news reporting on Afghanistan is just how solipsistic much of it is. This is nothing new. After all, most of us are outsiders looking into alien cultures and events. But the news audience will inevitably get a partial and slanted perspective on what’s going on, what’s truly important and what’s not. And let’s not forget, the media acted largely as cheerleaders twenty years ago when George W. Bush made the decision to intervene.
Duncan Greene, a Brit who is a special advisor to Oxfam, lays this out in an entertaining yet spot-on fashion:
First, the opening. All good articles about Afghanistan start with a few lines from a poem by British imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling. You know the one, “the women come out to cut up what remains, blow out your brains, blah blah blah”.
Afghanistan has been repeatedly destroyed by the British and US empires, but your readers are much more interested in the soldiers from those empires who died there. You will therefore use the 19thC British imperialist term “Graveyard of Empires” or variations.
When referring to any evil or atrocity committed by the US (or British or Canadians, etc.) against Afghans, you will use words like failure, mistake, blunder, error, or (a new and good one) debacle.
And so on.
Pashtun Redneck Country
There’s some great, eye-opening reporting that doesn’t get top billing but deserves attention.
NYT’s Kabul bureau chief Adam Nossiter reports some facts that aren’t popular with many Westerners, but which are essential to know if one is to have even a partial grasp of what motivates Afghans, including rural support for the Taliban:
Outside powers are fighting one war as visitors — occupiers — and their erstwhile allies who actually live there, something entirely different. In Afghanistan, it was not good versus evil, as the Americans saw it, but neighbor against neighbor.
The United States thought it was helping Afghans fight an avatar of evil, the Taliban, the running mate of international terrorism. That was the American optic and the American war.
But the Afghans, many of them, were not fighting that war. The Taliban are from their towns and villages. Afghanistan, particularly in its urban centers, may have changed over 20 years of American occupation. But the laws the Taliban promoted — repressive policies toward women — were not so different, if they differed at all, from immemorial customs in many of these rural villages, particularly in the Pashtun south.
“There is resistance to girls’ education in many rural communities in Afghanistan,” a Human Rights Watch report noted soberly last year. And outside provincial capitals, even in the north, it is rare to see women not wearing the burqa.
Rural Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, tend to welcome the sharia-based rough justice that the Taliban dispense as well as their abjuring corruption, which riddled the now defunct Afghan government from lowly cops to ministers. Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Gani Baradar, reportedly got an enthusiastic welcome upon his return to Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city and birthplace of the Taliban.
Resistance: Real or Fleeting?
There’s been insightful, though sketchy reporting on resistance to Taliban control. Images of brave citizens in cities marching in the streets waving the Afghan government flag capture our attention. And reports that Tajik commander Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary mujahid, Ahmad Shah “Lion of the Panjshir” Massoud, assassinated by al-Qaeda just before 9/11, has announced his armed opposition and has the potential to make Taliban control less than complete.
Adam Nossiter and his colleague Carlotta Gall, in “Budding Resistance to the Taliban Faces Long Odds,” report claims by Massoud’s people that “he has already attracted thousands of soldiers to the valley, including remnants of the Afghan Army’s special forces and some of his father’s experienced guerrilla commanders, as well as activists and others who reject the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate.” Other reporting states that Massoud and former Afghan V-P and fellow Tajik Amrullah Saleh are in negotiations with the Taliban for a peaceful outcome.
Several experts, including sympathetic Afghans, hold little hope that the 32-year old Sandhurst-educated Massoud and his force can hold out indefinitely in their Panjshir Valley redoubt, being completely surrounded by Taliban forces and with lines of communications and supplies cut off.
I was a close observer of Massoud, Sr., and his tenacious Tajik mujahidin when they bloodied Soviet forces in the ‘80s, liberated Kabul and acquitted themselves well against the Taliban in the ‘90s. Whether the Tajiks can pull off similar victories now is an open question; they may well come to an accommodation with the Taliban whereby the latter will grant them autonomy in return for nominal obeisance to the new rulers in Kabul. Watch this space.
Evacuation: Method to the Madness
As we watch with fascination and with our fingers crossed the dramatic evacuation of Americans, Afghan allies and others from Kabul, we largely have taken on board the media’s reporting and politicians’ claims that the Biden team’s handling of the effort has been a total mess. I beg to differ (somewhat).
In an excellent piece today, NYT reporter David Leonhardt observes,
I’ve also noticed a naïveté about some of the commentary on Afghanistan. It presumes that there was a clean solution for the U.S., if only the Biden administration (and, to a lesser extent, the Trump administration) had executed it. The commentary never quite spells out what the solution was, though.
There is a reason for that: A clean solution probably did not exist.
And he’s right.
The choice really boiled down to fighting a “100 year war” versus a messy exit. Biden chose the latter.
I have a fair amount of experience in “noncombatant evacuation operations” (NEO), having helped evacuate our Kabul embassy in 1989 and been involved in detailed contingency planning, in close coordination with the U.S. military, for other posts.
The extreme scenario for NEO is when the host country’s security elements either disintegrate or are hostile - precisely the situation in Afghanistan today. A 203-page JCS document lays out in detail the doctrine for carrying out NEO. A key element is use of force against hostile forces: “Commanders at all levels should exercise caution to use only the force necessary to provide for the successful defense of evacuees and complete the mission.” This is very tricky. Should a Taliban fighter fire a sling shot, a U.S. Marine may not retaliate with, say, an M2 .50 caliber machine gun. But should a hostile fire his AK-47, a Marine would be fully justified in returning fire with his M27 automatic rifle. And NEO are done jointly between the military and the State Department. All personnel have a role, or multiple roles. At two posts in danger zones where I served, for example, I not only had my embassy executive functions, but was also authorized issuance and use of a weapon, having been previously tested and qualified.
Fortunately, U.S. officers at the Kabul airport have negotiated an agreement with Taliban counterparts to allow the U.S. to carry out evacuation for a limited period with no interference. The result is some 87,000 evacuees as of this writing, or about 19,000 per day, an extraordinary achievement.
In my previous piece on this, I expressed cautious optimism about the evacuation. And I still do. No end of conflict scenario ends clean. They are messy. And mustering the massive airlift, evacuee processing and logistics involved for Kabul on an extremely short time frame takes equally massive effort. As national security advisor Jake Sullivan stated,
When you are trying to position assets to go in and secure an airfield in a city that has been taken by opposing forces with a government that’s collapsed, your contingency plan is going to hit head on with reality, and there are going to be complexities and challenges and difficulties, and you work through them.
Where the Biden team can be faulted is in failing to anticipate the rapid demise of the Afghan government - despite a “dissent channel” cable from two dozen Kabul-based U.S. diplomats to Secretary Blinken warning of such an outcome.
The news media and politicians, Democrats as well as Republicans, were quick to declare the administration’s planning and execution of the evacuation a fiasco. Future retrospective analyses will provide a clearer view.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
Very interesting; any bio on the son? Does he have the right skills and leadership for such a force? Thanks.