By Scott Taylor
At the time of writing, Afghan government security forces had completely collapsed without a fight and Taliban forces in Afghanistan were in control of Kabul.
Amidst all the chaos it was announced that both the U.S. and U.K are redeploying thousands of combat troops into the Afghan capital.
These soldiers are not the vanguard of yet another NATO surge to attempt to re-install President Ashraf Ghani to power. On Sunday President Ghani realized the game was up and he fled to safety in Tajikistan
No, these British and American troops are being sent in to provide a secure corridor by which to extricate the remaining international diplomatic community.
The once nearly 400,000 strong Afghan National Security Forces have proven woefully incapable of holding back the Taliban fighters in the wake of the U.S. withdrawing the last of their major combat forces on July 2.
The U.S. was still providing air support, but such strikes were meaningless if the Afghan ground forces had no will to fight back against their fellow countrymen.
For keen eyed observers of the Afghanistan conflict one of the most surprising developments was the success which the Taliban have enjoyed in capturing towns in the north of the country.
The predominantly Pashtun Taliban have never fared well north of the Hindu Kush mountain range wherein the majority of the population are Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmen.
Abandoned without any serious resistance from the demoralized Afghan army, the Taliban have seized the cities of Sheberghan, Konduz and Mazar-i-Sharif.
In response to that dire situation, Thompson Reuters reported that prior to his defection, President Ghani had made a last ditch appeal to call on the support of “regional strongmen” to help repulse the Taliban advances. In particular Ghani was appealing to “regional strongman” Atta Muhammad Noor to help prevent the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Another “regional strongman” is Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum who has in recent days flown back into Afghanistan after receiving medical treatment in Turkey. It was hoped that with his presence on the ground, the infamous Dostum could still rally his Uzbek fighters to retake their former stronghold of Sheberghan.
The crazy part of Ghani’s plan was this belated attempt to rebrand Noor and Dostum with the new, kinder, gentler moniker of regional strongmen.
Since the Soviet invasion in 1979, Noor and Dostum have been called warlords. They fought against and for the Soviets respectively.
After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, Dostum had continued to prop up the communist regime of President Najibullah in Kabul. In 1992, Dostum did what he does best and changed his loyalty to the Mujahadeen. Najibullah was finished, but Dostum lived to fight another day.
The ongoing clashes between Dostum and his rivals such as Atta Noor, became known as the warlord era.
The perpetual violence and virtual anarchy of the warlord-era helped the Taliban movement to gain popularity with those Afghans who were prepared to sacrifice personal freedoms in exchange for the stability that the Taliban could provide them.
In 2001 Dostum and Noor both fought for the U.S. in what was dubbed the Northern Alliance, when they collectively collapsed the Taliban regime.
Hollywood aficionados will recall that Dostum’s fighters were lionized in the 2018 war movie ‘Twelve Strong’.
After garnering more than one million votes in the 2004 presidential election, Dostum held a variety of high level posts in the Afghan regime, including that of Vice President.
Atta Noor was named the governor of Mazar-i-Sharif until Ashraf Ghani fired him from that post in 2018 as a result of corruption allegations.
Throughout the entire two decades of U.S. led occupation, both Noor and Dostum maintained their own private militias. It is those forces which ex-President Ghani and his western backers had hoped would turn back the Taliban tide.
Calling them regional strongmen does not change the fact that these two Afghan warlords already have had their era. They were so violent and corrupt that Afghans turned to the Taliban.
For Ghani’s last roll of the dice to have stood any chance of success would have required the average Afghan forgetting about the bloody violence which the warlords had inflicted upon them. The surging success of the Taliban in recent days would appear to prove that Afghan memories are not that short.
