By Scott Taylor
The deadly terrorist attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul last Thursday was yet another serious blow to American martial pride as they struggle desperately to extricate themselves from a disastrous 20-year long occupation of Afghanistan.
A combination of suicide bombers and pre-placed gunmen with automatic weapons delivered an extremely lethal blow. A total of 13 U.S. servicemembers were killed and a further 15 were wounded, marking one of the highest single day casualty tallies during the entire conflict.
For the would-be Afghan asylum seekers crowded against the airport perimeter awaiting a possible flight to safety, the toll was even higher. Some estimates put the number of dead civilians as high as 90 with another 150 suffering injuries.
As devastating as this was to the increasingly frantic U.S. airlift effort, the attack was also a blow to the fledgling Taliban regime.
Within hours of the terror attack, DAESH-K was claiming responsibility for the killing spree.
For those who are perhaps not completely familiar with all the insurgent groups in Afghanistan, DAESH-K is also known as ISIS-K and ISKP. These evil doers are an off-shoot of the DAESH aka ISIS that we first encountered in Syria and Iraq. The letter “K” stands for Khorasan Province, which actually constitutes vast swaths of Central Asia, wherein they intend to establish an Islamic caliphate.
They first appeared on the scene in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces in 2014-15 and their initial recruits were from Pakistan-based Taliban who did not think the original Taliban were extreme enough.
Their attack on the Kabul airport not only sorely undermines the Taliban’s claim to be able to control the country, it also served as a reminder that as bad as they are, there are even worse elements to deal with in Afghanistan besides the Taliban.
Ironically the U.S. intelligence community now finds itself engaging in limited cooperation with the Taliban to not only prevent further DAESH-K attacks against their withdrawal efforts, but also to facilitate any hope of enforcing punishment upon the perpetrators of last Thursday’s attack.
In the immediate aftermath of the terror strike, a visibly enraged President Joe Biden vowed to the American people that justice would be served. “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this. We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay. I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command,” stated Biden in a public address.
Those are tough words, but as the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan now consists of nothing more than a desperate rear-guard securing the soon to be renamed Hamid Karzai International Airport, Biden’s only hope of punishing the culprits will require the Taliban’s cooperation.
Most western analysts disbelieve the claims by the Taliban leadership that this new and improved regime will be a kinder and gentler version of its former self.
Many fear that despite promises of amnesty the Taliban will soon resort to revenge killings of those who had facilitated the foreign occupation.
This eventually may in fact play out in the days to come, but it is somewhat ripe for the U.S. State Department to be preaching against revenge killings.
In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan with a small number of special forces troops and heavy air support allied with anti-Taliban Warlords. The most notorious of these was Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum.
Hollywood glorified Dostum and his American advisors in the 2018 film 12 Strong. What that movie did not reveal was that after his victory, Dostum executed approximately 2,000 of his Taliban prisoners. While that is horrific in itself, it was the fact that he killed them by simply locking them into crowded sea containers. They literally died through suffocation or starvation.
This was not an immediate death for the Taliban fighters, and the atrocity was well known among the rules-based international-order abiding U.S. military command.
Dostum was never charged with war crimes, and went on to serve pre-eminently within the Hamid Karzai regime. From September 2014 – February 2020, he was Afghanistan’s Vice President.
So yes, there are worse entities in Afghanistan than the Taliban and for the past twenty-years we helped keep them in power there.
