By Scott Taylor
Now that the last U.S. air force plane has departed the Hamid Karzai International airport in Kabul, western analysts and pundits remain shell shocked at the Taliban’s lightning overthrow of the Afghan regime.
More accurately, military experts are wondering how the Afghan security force, with a payroll strength of 350,000 U.S.-trained personnel, and equipped with an arsenal valued at over $100 billion could simply dissolve without a fight.
U.S. President Joe Biden and the U.S. intelligence community had all banked on the Afghan government forces holding back the Taliban for six months to one year after the American troop withdrawal.
This window would have allowed the U.S. to get their people out of Afghanistan, but more importantly it would have dimmed the western media spotlight.
With western media out of the country and no U.S. soldiers involved, the ultimate fall of President Ashraf Ghani’s government would have garnered but a couple of paragraphs on page 17 of the world news section of Canadian newspapers.
Instead, Ghani and his not so loyal security forces easily read the American playbook. Knowing there was no long term future possible, Ghani did not attempt to rally his troops for one final face-saving last stand in Kabul.
Instead, Ghani proved himself to be a corrupt thief to the bitter end. He grabbed a reported $160 million and fled to the United Arab Emirates.
With Ghani gone, the Afghan security forces had no reason to continue showing up for work.
They also know the value of weapons, ammunition and armoured vehicles. They would have been foolish in the extreme to employ their vast arsenal against the Taliban in order to simply delay the inevitable.
They were never going to keep fighting and dying for an American installed corrupt puppet who fled into exile, to simply spare their former U.S. masters the embarrassment of being routed by the Taliban.
Ironically, the intact arsenal which the Taliban now find themselves in possession, is too enormous for them to absorb. There are news reports that much of the hardware the Taliban captured is being sold to Iran.
That has got to irk the brass hats at the Pentagon.
Anyone familiar with the history of Afghanistan would realize that once the last foreign soldiers has been driven from their soil, the various Afghan factions will resort to fighting each other.
This has already begun with the son of the revered former Tajik warlord Shah Massoud proclaiming to lead the anti-Taliban resistance from his stronghold in the Panjshir valley.
Bolstering Ahmad Massoud’s claim to legitimacy was the presence of Afghanistan’s self-proclaimed acting President, Amrullah Saleh. Following the last Presidential election Saleh was named Afghanistan’s first Vice-President. With Ghani in exile, Saleh professes that constitutionally that means the presidency is now in his hands.
Nevertheless, it might have been wiser for Saleh to resist the Taliban at the head of the former Afghan Army which still had the U.S. air force in support rather than organizing a handful of fighters in a remote valley.
Allying themselves with Massoud’s resistance movement are two former notorious warlords, Atta Noor and Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum.
Noor is an ethnic Tajik, while Dostum is an Uzbek. For decades they have ruled over Mazar-i-Sharif and Sheberghan respectively, first as warlords and then under the moniker of governor as part of the U.S. installed Kabul regime.
Neither Noor or Dostum’s private militia’s resisted the Taliban in support of Ghani’s government forces.
In typical Afghan fashion, they cut a deal not to interfere until after Ghani was removed. They are now hoping to use their military muscle to negotiate with the Taliban for a share in the spoils.
For those looking to understand just how the Canadian government could have been so wrong about our involvement in Afghanistan, we need to look at the self-delusion of the key players.
In 2007, I met with Canadian Ambassador Chris Alexander in Kabul. At that juncture he chastised me for having interviewed Dostum at his stronghold in Shebirghan.
According to Alexander, I was wrong to give Dostum any sort of publicity because he was a remnant of the old warlord regime – a thing of the past.
Dostum went on to serve as Vice President in the Ghani regime, and is now back on the board as a key player in this new Taliban era.
Alexander’s inaccurate view that Dostum was a remnant of Afghanistan’s past revealed just how little the youthful ambassador grasped the complexity of the Afghan political landscape. Alexander saw only what he wanted to see.
Unfortunately far too many Canadians put their faith in his flawed judgment. The writing was always on the wall but our senior leadership did not know how to read it.
