US myopia, Pak collusion help Taliban return to Afghan ‘Islamic Emirate’

The inevitable has happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban has returned to power.

The seeds of the return were sown, way back, on the intervening night of March 19-20, 2003, when the United States launched its invasion of Iraq.

The Bush Administration’s decision to turn its sights on Iraq and its president Saddam Hussein, barely a year and five months after it led a multinational force into Afghanistan, was the first fatal error.

Outraged at the Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the US was mandated by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to launch a counter-attack on the then Taliban government which was harbouring the main accused Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban was clear in its stance that it would not hand over bin Laden to the Bush administration. The radical Islamic government in Kabul under the Taliban had fraternal relations with Al-Qaeda and did not want to betray the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

Also read: Afghan President Ghani leaves for Tajikistan as Taliban takes over

In October 2001, the US-led international forces invaded Afghanistan and within days ousted the Taliban from power. Once this was done, US President George W Bush basking in the praise over the quick operation, started the process of finding a successor government to the Taliban.

It was widely expected at the time that the US would focus on not just neutralising the Taliban but also ensure that the Islamic group would forever be consigned to history. Either the US underestimated the hold of the Taliban or in a state of hubris miscalculated the rootedness of the Islamic group in Afghanistan.

By taking its eye off Afghanistan and opening a new war front in Iraq, the US diluted its plan and bit more than it could chew. For Iraq, after the ousting of Saddam Hussein, turned out to be another quagmire. Not just that, in this enterprise, the US did not have the UNSC sanction and even today it is widely considered to be an illegal invasion.

To justify its move to Iraq, the US focussed its energies on that country and let go of Afghanistan. It installed a puppet government in Kabul, stationed minimal troops (110,000 at its highest in 2010-12) which were spread thin across the vast country while expecting other countries in the coalition forces to do their bit.

No doubt the US had successfully dislodged the Taliban government from power. The Taliban was dispossessed from its political hold in urban centres around the country but in the rural hinterland, they remained, lying low strategically. This meant that at no point in the last 20 years did the US-led forces eliminate the presence of the Taliban from across the country.

Also read: Taliban’s peace vows float but people fear a brutal run in Afghan

If the American focus had remained fixed on Afghanistan, the gains could have been consolidated along with the installation of a more moderate government in Kabul. This could have been achieved by using all the non-military help from the rest of the world including from the social sector to try to wean away people from the extreme Islamic ideology of the Taliban.

It must be remembered that there was massive sympathy for the US from most of the world, especially in the West in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban too was morally caught on the wrong foot and eventually lost its hold over power in Afghanistan. These advantages could have been leveraged easily by Washington to press home a substantial makeover in the political makeup of the average Afghan, especially in the rural areas. But that was not to be.

If the US scored a self-goal by diverting its attention to Iraq, another factor that successive administrations in Washington could never handle effectively was Pakistan.

During the period of the earlier Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US had used Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to back the Mujahedin with arms, money and military training to resist the invading army. In the process, the Pakistan intelligence wing ISI and the country’s military got involved with the Mujahedin, developing a deep relationship.

The Taliban was formed from among the Mujahedin, fully backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States. In fact, up until the 9/11 attacks, the US had a working relationship with the Taliban.

After the 9/11 attacks, when the US did an about-turn in its perception of the Taliban and asked Pakistan to do the same it was not possible for the then government of Pervez Musharraf to fully comply. The simple reason was that the Taliban and the Pakistani deep state shared an organic relationship.

Though Musharraf made sympathetic noises and appeared to acquiesce with the US diktat, in reality, he played both sides – oftentimes angering Washington and also the Taliban.

Also read: No work, no outing: Afghan women bear brunt of oppressive Taliban

Over time, it became clear that Pakistan had managed to safeguard core Taliban interests by providing a haven to its fighters within its own country. To keep up appearances, the Pakistani police arrested a few Al-Qaeda leaders and took on the Taliban in parts of Waziristan on the Afghan border.

The US, despite its close ties with Pakistan and treating it like a vassal state, was unable to force it to help neutralise the Taliban. Despite the angry statements and even cuts in military aid to Pakistan, the Taliban remained. In attempting to follow the US, Pakistan antagonised the Taliban resulting in their violent attacks across the country including the infamous Peshawar school massacre in 2014, resulting in the killing of 149 students.

The job of the US in raising a moderate military under the Afghan government in Kabul too never took off. When the Taliban was ousted from power, the Americans went after everyone and anyone linked to the Islamic group. Strategically, it proved to be disastrous as even the Taliban’s military wing melted into the countryside leaving Afghanistan with absolutely no indigenous army, leave alone a larger military set-up.

This had to be built from scratch. And, as the world has witnessed in the last few weeks, the level of training and commitment has proved to be no better than that of boy scouts.
Most surrendered to the advancing Taliban, some fought hard and died while the rest either walked over to the side of the Islamic group or disappeared among the common people.

Also read: US forces to man ATC, to deploy 6,000 troops at Kabul airport

The Taliban’s return would not have been possible without support from the common Afghans. On this too, the US goofed up by alienating Afghans by indiscriminately using drones to attack suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters. Some estimates place the number of drone attacks at around 13,000. In the process, scores of innocent Afghans (numbers range from around 4000-10,000) were killed. And their simmering anger would have drawn them towards the Taliban.

In effect, the new edifice that the US had tried to build in Afghanistan by pouring in something in the range of a trillion dollars starting with the government, the army and crucial infrastructure has come to naught.

Washington has largely to blame itself in more ways than one for the turn of events and witness, with ignominy, the Taliban’s cakewalk into Kabul’s presidential palace.