Tag: Taliban
Stevenson’s army, August 19
– WSJ says Afghan pilots flew to Uzbekistan.
– GOP divided on Afghan refugees.
– Sarah Chayes says US civilians made key mistakes over the years in Afghanistan.
– MIT study says Chinese hackers disguised as Iranian to hack Israel.
PS: Charlie has added the following:
– CJR discusses the Taliban’s “spin machine.”
– A former Air Force intelligence guy tells what the Taliban talked about.
– Facebook tells what gets the most views.
– I do agree with this AEI analyst’s arguments against a separate Cyber Force.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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It isn’t going to be easy to choose what to do
Tony Cordesman offers a set of “negative” policy options for the US in dealing with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan:
- Threaten to attack any terrorist groups that launch attacks outside Afghanistan.
- Withhold recognition of the new government.
- Pressure other states, including Afghanistan’s neighbors.
- Cut off the aid that funded some 80% of the former government’s operations and security efforts.
- Introduce yet another mix of sanctions to exert maximum pressure.
But he thinks incorporating in addition a more “positive,” conditional approach would be more effective. These boil down to “carefully planned and executed” diplomatic recognition and economic aid. Peter Galbraith likewise argued on BBC today that diplomatic recognition should be considered, not because the US approves of the Taliban takeover but because it could enable more rescue of people who want to leave. Without consular officers in Kabul, getting people out is going to be difficult, mainly because of US bureaucratic requirements. An embassy might also be able to exert some influence on Taliban behavior, provided of course that Washington gets iron-clad security guarantees for the Americans returning to Kabul.
The financial cut-off has already begun. Taliban access to Afghanistan government accounts in the United States has been blocked and scheduled dollar cash transfers suspended. The next big move may be suspension of IMF and World Bank activities. The kind of targeted sanctions in fashion these days–focused on the personal finances and travel of miscreants–is mostly ineffective with the Taliban, since they presumably are too smart to keep their savings in dollars and uninterested in international travel.
The threat to attack international terrorist groups hardly needs reiteration. The problem will be identifying and locating them. Past cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan had little real impact. Even the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan did not destroy Al Qaeda, which has burrowed in to many different countries even if it hasn’t been able to mount attacks on the US for most of the last two decades.
Afghanistan’s neighbors are likely beyond pressuring: Pakistan because it is delighted with the Taliban victory and Iran because it is already profoundly unhappy with it. Russia will suck up to the Taliban until they either support terrorists inside Russia or in the stans that are its northern neighbors. China will likely be a bit more cautious, fearing the Taliban might just care about the treatment of the Uygurs, or even support tererorist attacks, from across the short border with Xinjiang. The commercial temptation for the Chinese will be great, as Afghanistan has appetizing mineral deposits, but the risks will loom large.
So the diplomatic option starts to look good when you realize how limited the other options are. But its feasibility depends on how the Taliban treat the Afghan population, especially women, minorities, journalists, and people who supported the effort to build a democratic states for the past twenty years, either directly or indirectly. There is a reason the Taliban are making friendly noises about women’s rights and amnesty for those who fought against them. They are savvy enough to know that surviving this time around depends on not offending international sensibilities too dramatically.
But the Taliban are not pluralists. They will not tolerate competition for power, even in the limited forms it existed under Presidents Karzai and Ghani. The Taliban are totalitarians who intend to govern by their own, fundamentalist, interpretation of Sharia. We know well what that meant 25 years ago: little or no education for women, abuse of minorities, no elections, no press (much less freedom of), catastrophically poor health care, and heavy reliance on drug trafficking for income. It is difficult to picture any organized opposition to Taliban authority, which they claim comes not from the people but from God.
There is a hint of insurgency in the Panjshir valley, the majority-Tajik center of resistance to the Soviets and the Taliban in the 1990s. You can expect the Taliban to be merciless in cracking down there, when the time comes. Taliban forces have already fired on demonstrators in Herat and Jalalabad. We’ve seen in Hong Kong and Belarus how autocracies can succeed against popular, nonviolent rebellion. The Taliban are likely to make the Chinese and Belarusians look like softies.
The Taliban are still allowing the evacuation of thousands of people from the Kabul airport. No one should be fooled: this is ridding them of many of their most capable, internationally well-connected, opponents. At some point, they will decide enough is enough and either start blocking access–there are reports that is already happening, especially to women trying to get to the airport–or demand the US and other Western powers start paying for the privilege.
Our options are limited. Diplomatic recognition could bring an onslaught of domestic US criticism. It isn’t going to be easy to choose what to do.
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The future will be nasty, brutish and long
The collapse of the Afghan security forces is pretty much complete. They opted not to fight, rendering the hundreds of billions that the US has spent on them over almost two decades worthless. “By, with, and through,” the Pentagon’s mantra for how it goes about security assistance, has amounted to naught.
The same cannot be said however of US civilian assistance. While no doubt pundits will be talking for years about how hopeless it was to think that Afghanistan could be made into a thriving democracy, significant social, economic, and political process was made. Until this week, Afghanistan was a relatively open society with lively and partly free media, education not only for men but also for women, vastly improved health conditions, sharply increased per capita income (which has stagnated for the past five years), and a government that owed its existence to not very fair or entirely free elections. Civil society in Afghanistan was robust. The country’s low scores on various governance and economic indices were due largely to the Taliban insurgency and corruption, which had reached dreadful levels.
Can any of the limited progress be preserved in a renewed Taliban regime?
Today’s Taliban are saying that girls and women will be able to go to school and work, which they weren’t permitted to do under the Taliban in the 1990s. The official Taliban line is amnesty for former government officials and troops. Their current hesitation in entering Kabul may cause some to hope that they will be more restrained than last time around.
But there are reports from some provinces that revenge killings and assassinations are already occurring, as are forced marriages. The Taliban have not renounced hudud punishments, which include cutting off hands and feet as well as stoning to death. The Taliban would be foolish to fight their way into Kabul, as that would cause a good deal of destruction and ruin their international bona fides. It will be far better for them to negotiate a handover of power that enables them to claim some sort of legitimacy other than by force of arms. The Taliban have definitely gotten savvier about their image in Western media.
But international attention won’t last, and they know it.
The Taliban are still totalitarians: they do not abide opposition, they do not respect human rights, and they won’t share power for long. If we can anticipate future performance from past behavior, there will be no parliament, only some sort of high council of religious leaders. Accountability and transparency will be minimal. Civil society will be squelched. Free media will be closed. Drug trafficking will be rife. Other economic activity will be marginal. Minorities will not only be discriminated against but abused and murdered.
There has been a good deal of concern about the thousands of Afghans who have worked with the US military, mainly as interpreters. But the numbers of Afghans at risk due to their cooperation with the Americans is much greater than that. It includes a couple of thousand who worked at the Embassy, many more thousands who have worked on US-funded development and governance projects, and still more thousands who took seriously the opportunity to organize civil society organizations to press for various causes that will no longer be permitted under the Taliban. If all of them were to leave Afghanistan, prospects would dim further. Those who stay–either because they can’t get out or because they have the courage not to–aren’t likely to last long.
I could be wrong about all of this. We’ll have to wait and see. But my guess is that the future will be nasty, brutish, and long.
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Biden was right and wrong
Afghanistan is falling to the Taliban much faster than most anticipated. So was President Biden right to get American troops out of harm’s way, or was he wrong to abandon friends and allies?
Right
The great virtue of his decision is apparent: the remaining 2500 or so American troops in Afghanistan, along with the diplomats and other officials, were in danger. Twenty years of American support, equipment, and training had not turned the tide. The Americans were doing little fighting, but the Afghan security forces were declining in effectiveness. There was little or no reason to believe that they would improve and considerable reason to doubt that they could continue to hold the Taliban at bay. Enlarging the US presence in Afghanistan would have been foolhardy. It is hard to give credit for a tragedy averted, especially when a different tragedy (for Afghans rather than Americans) ensues, but that is what Biden deserves.
Wrong
Abandoning the Afghans to the Taliban puts a lot more than 2500 human beings at risk. Even if every single one of the translators and others who helped the Americans is evacuated, thousands of Afghans will die, hundreds of thousands will be displaced, property, careers, and lives will be ruined. A relatively open society will close once again: women will be cloistered, media shuttered, health facilities closed, and education devalued. People who believed in democracy and the rule of law will be lucky to escape the country. Many will be killed, imprisoned, or at the least disempowered.
If you are truly a humanitarian, then it doesn’t matter to you whether the people who suffer are Americans or Afghans. Nor does it matter whether they believe in democracy and the rule of law. They are entitled to a life with dignity. They won’t get it with the Taliban back in power.
Odds are that the Taliban will welcome back (clandestinely if not openly) Al Qaeda or even the Islamic State, which otherwise will present a risk to their rule. While Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are in no position today to represent a big international threat, a few years of rebuilding on Afghan soil could make them a threat once again. You can discount that threat because it is years off, but what is your discount rate? Will you be unhappy if international terrorists return to attack the US in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years?
It was no easy decision
President Biden has said the decision was easy. It should not have been. While he may have imagined that the Afghan security forces would hold, he should have known that there was a possibility of collapse. He also knew that there would be a real possibility the Taliban would not fulfill their commitment to disallow international terrorism.
Biden may have imagined that other countries closer to Afghanistan would step in to save the day. Iran has a great deal to lose from a Sunni extremist regime on its border that will depend on drug trafficking. China and Russia do too. While Pakistan has supported the Taliban, despite Islamabad’s denials, the Pakistani Taliban may gain renewed momentum from the change of regime in Kabul. All of these nearer neighbors have more at stake than the US, but none of them has been ready to shoulder the burden so long as the Americans were doing it for them. Nor is it likely they will do so now.
Bottom line
I don’t think the US presence in Afghanistan was sustainable, for two reasons: domestic US opposition was growing and the Taliban were gaining ground. Biden should have found a more fruitful exit with a better chance of preserving at least some of the gains of the past two decades. President Trump set the process of withdrawal in motion, but Biden had an opportunity to improve on the deal his predecessor unwisely cut. He’ll pay the political price for that at home, though it may not be a high one. Afghans will pay a much steeper price.
You can be right in one dimension and wrong in another.
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Stevenson’s army, September 13
-About 8000 US troops are being deployed to help in what the Pentagon refuses to call an evacuation from Afghanistan.
– AEI’s Fred Kagan says Biden could have stopped the Taliban
-In the Atlantic, a retired Army colonel says US training of Afghan forces was flawed.
-Speaker Pelosi says House staff can now earn more than Members.
We’ll have an exercise in week 2 where you get to decide on the jobs and pay for a House office. Here’s more background from CRS.
-The Guardian profiles Biden’s head of legislative liaison.
-Venezuelan government and opposition are talking.
– FP profiles new Chinese ambassador to US, who used to work for UPI.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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It’s all over but the shouting, in Kabul or not
It is hard to keep up with the Taliban advance in Afghanistan, which has now engulfed at least 12 provincial capitals and perhaps two-thirds of the country. The Afghan National Army (ANA) is collapsing in many places. Civilians who can are fleeing to the capital. Civilians who can’t are suffering dreadful Taliban depredations. There will soon be little left of the hard-won progress on women’s rights, relatively free media, improved health care, and property rights. The Taliban will take what they want, destroy the hospitals and clinics, dictate to radio and TV, and drive women into hiding. Their is no sign that their years out of power have moderated their extremist views.
The American withdrawal unquestionably precipitated this debacle. It was poorly executed and far too fast for the limited ANA capabilities. President Biden, who says he doesn’t regret it, will take the rap, but it was President Trump who agreed to it. Taliban promises have proven empty. They have not negotiated seriously with the government delegation in Doha and they have not broken with Al Qaeda. They may still do both, but only if the government forces are able to block their advance. That is unlikely.
It would be wrong however to conclude that everything would have been okay had the Americans stayed. The Taliban were already gaining territory before the American withdrawal. The ANA might well have collapsed, even if more slowly, had American support continued. A longer “decent interval” might have allowed for more negotiation in Doha, but the ultimate outcome would likely not have been a lot better than we are likely to see now.
What are we likely to see now? The Taliban will want to secure as much of the country as they can. The only big question is whether they will try to take Kabul by force. They could conceivably conclude it would be better not to do that, in hope of capturing some international aid, or avoiding international opprobrium, in the aftermath. But if they spare Kabul, they will still want President Ghani out and some sort of transitional regime friendly to their cause installed. There is no hope that the negotiations in Doha can produce better results than the military situation on the ground, which is catastrophic from Ghani’s perspective.
Western countries are busy threatening the Taliban with isolation if they continue the offensive. That is pointless. The Taliban don’t care about isolation from the West, which they assume will not provide assistance in the aftermath. The countries whose attitudes will count for the Taliban are the neighboring powers, especially Pakistan, Iran, China, and Russia. Pakistan in particular has a lot of clout, because it provides the Taliban with safe haven, but Chinese or Russian aid might carry some weight as well. It will be interesting to see if the Taliban avoid atrocities against the (Shia) Hazaras, in order not to provoke Iran. It will also be interesting to see if the Taliban continue to maintain friendly relations with Al Qaeda and even allow it to use Afghanistan again as a platform for international terror.
President Ghani is calling on civilians to arm and resist the Taliban, including the warlords whom he has rightly tried to marginalize in recent years. Even if he did not try to summon support, the prospect of insurgency against Taliban rule is real. That will make their behavior in victory more abusive, not less. They will want to squelch any armed resistance as quickly and decisively as possible. No one should doubt their level of brutality.
It’s all over but the shouting, in Kabul or not.
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