This article appears in the Jerusalem Post today, 11 May 2021
On April 14, 2021
President Joe Biden announced that he was abandoning the timetable for
withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan that his predecessor, Donald Trump, had
agreed with the Taliban. He had decided
that the process of withdrawal would continue, but at a slower pace. The new deadline for its completion would be September
11, 2021 – the 20th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the United States.
The Taliban were unimpressed with Biden’s symbolic gesture. They marked their objection to his unilateral abandonment of the earlier agreement with a surge in violence and a car bomb in Logar province which killed nearly 30 people. Then on May 3 at least seven Afghan military personnel were killed when the Taliban set off explosives smuggled through a tunnel that the group had dug into an army outpost in southwestern Farah province. On May 6 they captured the vast Dahla Dam in Arghandab. The Afghan defense ministry says security forces have been responding to attacks by the Taliban in at least six other provinces.
Experts say that the Taliban, despite losses estimated in the tens
of thousands, is stronger now than at any point since 2001. With up to 85,000
full-time fighters, it controls twenty percent of the country. It is this continuing power of the Taliban
that is behind objections in Washington to Biden’s policy. Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
has warned of "huge consequences" of Biden's decision to withdraw American
troops. Her fear is that the Taliban
could take over control of Afghanistan, resulting in a new civil war.
She is not alone. Many foreign
policy experts in Washington, both Democrat and Republican, feel that the US
should continue to deploy its military – among them Condoleezza Rice, secretary
of state under President George W Bush.
She too has warned about the risks of withdrawing troops and the consequent
threat of terrorism.
A possible expansion of
terrorist activity also concerns retired General David Petraeus, who commanded
US forces in Afghanistan and later ran the CIA.
Petraeus worries the Taliban will continue to gain ground militarily and
allow terrorist groups to operate, while the US and NATO will have lost the
platform that Afghanistan provides for counter-terrorism campaigns.
"I'm really afraid,”
he said, “that we're going to look back two years from now and regret the
decision.”
According to BBC
reporters the Taliban see themselves as a government-in-waiting. They have a
sophisticated "shadow" structure, with officials in charge of
overseeing everyday services in the areas they control. They refer to
themselves as the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan."
There is no escaping the truth, painful though it may be. The
Taliban – the hardline Islamist organization swiftly identified by US
intelligence in the wake of the 9/11 attack as linked to al-Qaeda and shielding
its leader, Osama bin Lada – has emerged unvanquished, if not unscathed, from
its twenty-year struggle with America and its allies. The group has withstood counter-insurgency
operations from three US administrations backed by NATO in a war that has
killed more than 6,000 US troops and contractors, over 1,100 NATO soldiers,
and an estimated 73,000 Afghan fighters and police officers.
Back in 2001 it took
Washington less than a week to determine the source of the deadly terrorist
attack it had sustained, and on September 18, 2001 then President George W Bush
signed legislation authorizing the use of US forces against the
perpetrators. The US launched military
operations in Afghanistan on October 7 by way of a series of air strikes
against Taliban military sites and terrorist training grounds.
Intensive and sustained efforts by the US, boosted in December 2009 by then President Barack Obama increasing US troop numbers to 100,000, may have weakened, but it failed to deter, the Taliban’s sustained resistance. Their demand was for the withdrawal of all foreign troops. On June 22, 2011 Obama, maintaining "We are starting this drawdown from a position of strength," announced that 10,000 US troops would be withdrawn by the end of 2011 and an additional 23,000 by the summer of 2012.
From the moment US
President Donald Trump took office in 2017, he pledged to put an end to the
conflict and achieve Obama’s aim of bringing the American forces back home. It took two years of secret back-channel
negotiations before peace talks began on February 25, 2019. Abdul Ghani Barada,
the co-founder of the Taliban, was at the table.
This extraordinary arrangement between the world’s leading power and a hardline extremist Islamist movement was greeted with optimism by President Trump. "I really believe the Taliban wants to do something to show we're not all wasting time," he said.
However the agreement was far from watertight, and months of wrangling followed. President Joe Biden took office with many details still unresolved – among them evidence that the Taliban was prepared to break its ongoing ties with al-Qaeda, and that it was actually prepared to enter a political arrangement with the Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani.
Who are the
Taliban?
The group emerged
following a 10-year occupation of the country by the Soviet Union. The USSR had invaded in 1979 in an attempt to
keep Afghanistan within its sphere of influence, but a decade of guerilla
warfare conducted by Sunni extremists eventually led to Soviet troops withdrawing
in February 1989.
A year or so later a new
hardline Sunni Islamist group calling itself Taliban (“students” in the Pashto
language), began to emerge. They swiftly
became a formidable military machine, and towards the end of 1996 they captured
the Afghan capital, Kabul. By 1998, the
Taliban were in control of almost 90 percent of Afghanistan.
Initial support from
some of the population quickly faded as the Taliban imposed hardline Islamist
practices, such as amputations for those found guilty of theft, and public
executions of adulterers. Television, music and cinema were banned, and girls
aged 10 and over were forbidden to attend school. Meanwhile, they continued to wage their
two-handed war – against the
US presence in the country on the one hand, and the Afghan government on the
other. That war persists.
The Taliban are a ruthless extremist terrorist organization hell-bent on securing control of Afghanistan. To achieve their objective they have consistently demanded the evacuation of all foreign troops. Biden is kindly obliging. No wonder experienced voices in Washington and beyond are raising objections.
Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post on-line, 11 May 2021:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/afghanistan-has-biden-taken-a-wrong-turn-opinion-667792
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