Taliban

Saturday

John Jenkins

Don’t be fooled: the Taliban hasn’t changed its spots

Has the Taliban really changed its spots? Those who advocate talking to the Taliban make the case that they have. The organisation, they say, has recognised the mistakes it made in the years culminating in 9/11. Others claim that the organisation is now committed to local and national aims, not international terrorism, and that the Taliban have – or can be moderated – via the tool of engagement. All of these approaches seem to share the view there is a disconnect between the west’s reaction to events in Afghanistan, and the reality. But is this really the case?  Pakistan's national security adviser, Dr Moeed W Yusuf, has suggested the time has come to face facts: we need to accept the Taliban has won, negotiate with them and treat them as partners.

Philip Patrick

Why is Toyota so popular with the Taliban?

While Taliban posing with newly acquired US military hardware has been a searing humiliation for America in recent days, here in Japan the debacle in Afghanistan has led to a different source of embarrassment. A recurring image of coverage from Kabul is of Toyota pick-up trucks ferrying gun-toting fighters around the city. It has given the iconic company’s management a serious PR problem, and not for the first time. The Taliban have been favouring the sturdy and reliable Japanese ‘Land Cruisers’ since the 1990s, but it is also the vehicle of choice for Al Qaeda and Isis. The appeal seems to be the suitability for rough terrain and the ease with which the trucks can be retrofitted with gun placements, or in other ways customised for combat or intimidation.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

America, the Taliban and a farewell to arms

It was quite the handover at Kabul airport this week. The last American troops to exit Afghanistan reportedly left facing an ‘elite unit’ of the Taliban. In a season finale that the most dystopian screenwriter would have struggled to invent, the elite Taliban unit was itself bedecked in US military kit. That is, they were not only wearing uniforms and protective kit provided by the fleeing US army, but were parading the airport with US-provided guns in US-provided vehicles. This was the culmination of a fortnight that the White House is still trying to present as a success. One of the biggest airlifts in history, they insist. In reality the Biden administration has pulled off a feat few of us thought possible.

Sunday

David Loyn

How the Taliban will govern Afghanistan

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan for five years in the late 1990s, the key power lay in a modest room in a house in Kandahar. There was just a simple iron bedstead and a box as furniture, and no door but a curtain separating it from the rest of the house. Sitting on rugs on the floor the Taliban founder Mullah Omar issued orders, made appointments and took money from the box. The ministries in Kabul operated on fiats issued from this room. His successor as Emir, Haibatullah Akhunzada, does not enjoy the same unquestioning authority. He was known as a scholar and ideologue not a fighter, and emerged as a compromise leader in 2017 after Omar’s successor Mullah Mansour was killed by an American drone strike. Akhunzada has since promoted extreme violence.

Friday

Gabriel Gavin

How will Europe respond to a wave of Afghan refugees?

On Tuesday, Franek Sterczewski made a break for the border. Wearing a long trench coat and carrying a blue plastic bag, he managed to outrun one armed soldier before being stopped by a line of officers. Sterczewski, however, wasn't fleeing his native Poland — he was trying to help those who desperately want to get in. https://twitter.com/jakwojtanowski/status/1430213700464545792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw August 24, 2021 Brussels has accused the Belarusian government of actively shipping in would-be refugees The rebellious 33-year old MP had planned to hand out medicine and water to the line of asylum seekers camped out on the eastern frontier with Belarus.

Mary Dejevsky

The descent of Afghanistan

The bomb attacks at Kabul airport were what US and allied commanders overseeing the mass evacuation had most feared. In so far as they could be, they were prepared. They had, it appears, received very specific intelligence — perhaps based on a trial run by the bombers — that such attacks were in the offing. They warned people to stay away from the airport. Guards were doubtless on extra-high alert. And yet the perpetrators got through. More than 60 civilians were killed along with 13 US marines. Dozens more were injured and taken to already overburdened hospitals in Kabul. The carnage of 26 August was the costliest day in the last stages of the West’s Afghan war.

Charles Lipson

The terrible cost of the tragedy at Kabul airport

America’s frantic, confused exit from Afghanistan was a humiliating shambles even before Thursday's terrorist attack. Now, it is something much worse. It is a deadly tragedy, leaving victims dead and injured and trapping thousands of Americans and friendly Afghans in a lethal environment, where terrorists roam free. There will be a huge political price to pay for this disaster, and President Biden will pay it. This deadly fiasco didn’t just happen on his watch. It happened because of his decisions, a series of fundamentally bad ones, taken by the President himself.

Thursday

Duncan Gardham

Will the Taliban’s victory lead to attacks on British soil?

The security services in Britain have been concerned about the rise of the Taliban for many months. In government briefings they have been telling ministers that it was almost inevitable the Taliban would gain some role in the government of Afghanistan once Western forces withdrew – it was just a question of how much. It is easy to ignore, after the sudden collapse of Afghan forces, the fact that the national army had been losing ground to the Taliban over several years and bloody attacks have remained a constant in the centre of major cities in the country. The Taliban killed 16 people and injured 119 in a suicide bomb attack on a residential compound in the capital just days before the leadership was due to meet President Trump at Camp David in September 2019.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

What will happen to those left in Kabul?

The Afghan evacuation is feared to be entering its final hours, and with it a new desperation is building among people trying to get out of the country and those helping them. On the ground, troops are warning that Kabul airport could be overrun by people who are ineligible to leave but desperate to do so nonetheless. Embassy workers are trying to process visas, ministers are being bombarded with requests to look at cases where vulnerable Afghans have been overlooked or cannot make it to the airport safely.

Charles Moore

The failed assumption of Biden’s withdrawal

This week, the media pressure was on the British government to extend the deadline for the evacuations from Kabul airport. The government had no power to do this unilaterally: it duly asked the United States, and was duly turned down. The issue was almost beside the point. It is doubtful, given the burning desire of so many to leave the country, whether a few more days of rescue flights would have done much to shorten the suffering queue of hopefuls.  Each day is dangerous, so more days are more dangerous. Preoccupation with extension deflected attention from the key point, which is that all evacuation planning assumed that Kabul and its airport would be controlled by the (now former) Afghan government, thereby ensuring an orderly exit.

Tuesday

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Pakistan’s masochistic support for the Taliban

Taliban flags are already flying in Islamabad. Among those hoisting the white flag of the group is the women’s madrassa Jamia Hafsa, affiliated with the adjoining Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), which has also released a song celebrating the Taliban as ‘the symbol of Islam’. Lal Masjid, a few miles from Pakistan’s military headquarters and parliament, has been an emblem of terror and factory of jihad in Pakistan since its formation in the 1960s. The Lal Masjid cleric Abdul Aziz has in the past pledged allegiance to Isis and appeared to defend the 2014 Peshawar school attack which killed 141, mostly schoolchildren. When the army moved against Lal Masjid in 2007 it led to a nationwide explosion of terror attacks.

Sunday

Dominic Green

The buck stops with Biden

Joe Biden is unfit to be President of the United States. It was obvious when he was running for office that he lacks the physical stamina and mental acuity for the job. It has become increasingly obvious since January that the part-time President has either hidden from the media or stumbled through the kind of scripted press conferences that Americans rightly used to deride as the hallmark of banana republics. The handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan has exposed Biden's incapacity. The painful truth is now undeniable. He must go — even if that means Kamala Harris, who has been similarly wrong about Afghanistan and much else besides, taking over. They say success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. This failure is a two-parent family.

Ian Williams

China’s Great Game in Afghanistan

China greeted America’s chaotic retreat from Afghanistan and the Taliban seizure of power with a mixture of glee and trepidation. Its well-oiled propaganda machine has revelled in the fall of Kabul, but Beijing is fretting over the threat of instability on its doorstep – and there is a very real possibility that China will become next power sucked into the ‘graveyard of empires’. The humbling of the United States in Afghanistan fits nicely into the Chinese narrative of American decline, but Beijing has also used the withdrawal to pile pressure on Taiwan, warning the self-governing democratic island that Washington is an unreliable ally. ‘Afghanistan today, Taiwan tomorrow,’ ran a headline in the Global Times, a communist party tabloid.

Karan Thapar

My love for old Kabul

They say the city you most fondly remember is the one you grew up in. In my case that’s Kabul. I spent my formative years in the Afghan capital in the mid-1960s. It was a very different time and Afghanistan a very different country. But the Kabul that’s imprinted on my mind belongs to that decade. It was a happy city. No other description does it justice. Of course, it was poor, conservative and hierarchical but people were always smiling. They were warm, welcoming, courteous and generous. This was most obvious in their attitude to children. Everyone called me ‘bacho’. When Mummy took me out, shopkeepers would slip Hershey’s chocolates or spearmint gum into my hands and then seal my lips with their fingers.

David Loyn

Panjshir valley and the last resistance to the Taliban

The Panjshir valley, about three hours’ drive north of Kabul, has a mythical hold on the Afghan imagination. It is a natural fortress, a long lemon-shaped valley surrounded on three sides by 13,000-foot-high mountain ridges, with the only entrance a narrow road in a deep winding gorge to the south, cut by the Panjshir river. It is a place of stunning beauty, with green fields either side of the river laden with apple blossom in the spring, irrigated by ingenious canals. The walls between the fields, and sometimes the houses themselves, are buttressed with rusting metal war remains – the wheels of a tracked vehicle, armour plating, bridges formed of shell cases.

Saturday

Saqib Qureshi

Defence contractors were the real winners in Afghanistan

The fall of Kabul, like the fall of Saigon, will be taught in classrooms for decades to come. But the dramatic images coming out of Afghanistan don’t necessarily hail the beginning of a post-American world. If America learns the right lessons, it has the chance to pursue a more sustainable foreign policy. One lesson it could learn is to stop outsourcing its war-making and foreign policy to overpaid private firms. In a less politically correct era, these groups would be called what they really are: mercenaries. The corruption and graft expended on contracts of dubious value is legendary. In one episode, some £20 million was spent on forest camouflage for the now-collapsed Afghan National Army.

Rodric Braithwaite

Afghanistan and the end of the American hegemony

We used to sneer at the way the Russians were chased out of Afghanistan by a ragtag of mujaheddin armed only with Kalashnikovs and American Stinger rockets. No longer.  The last superpower to be defeated in Afghanistan withdrew in good order, having negotiated the arrangements with Kabul and the mujaheddin. They left behind a competent government, and an Afghan army capable of fighting the mujaheddin to a standstill. That government survived as long as the Russians went on supplying food and ammunition. Then the Russian government, close to meltdown, stopped deliveries. The mujaheddin swept to victory and fell straight into a bloody civil war. Many Afghans were relieved when the Taliban restored order.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

France is nervous about welcoming a wave of Afghan refugees

Emmanuel Macron has once more infuriated many in France, but this time it has nothing to do with Covid passports or mandatory vaccination. In an address to the nation this week, the president discussed the disturbing scenes from Kabul as the Taliban invaded the capital of Afghanistan. France, he said, would be a haven for those Afghans 'who share our values' but nevertheless the country must 'anticipate and protect ourselves against significant irregular migratory flows that would endanger the migrants and risk encouraging trafficking of all kinds.' His rhetoric went down badly with much of the French left.

Katherine Bayford

How America failed to learn its lessons from Vietnam

The hasty withdrawal from Kabul has inevitably been compared to the Fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. Pictures of a Chinook flying over the US embassy in the Afghan capital to pluck staff to safety did bear something of a resemblance to the airlift of 1975. But is the comparison fair? Joe Biden, at least, has been keen – for understandable reasons – to deny that Afghanistan is anything like Vietnam. A month ago, Biden told a reporter he saw ‘zero’ parallel between the Vietnamese and Afghan withdrawals: ‘The Taliban is not the same as the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capabilities.

Thursday

Antonio Giustozzi

The Afghan state was dying before the Taliban took over

To understand how Afghanistan is going to change in the future, you have to first understand what the ‘Islamic Republic’ established by the United States was like. Even before the Taliban took over, Afghanistan’s democracy had been deteriorating for some time, with three presidential elections in a row ending in bitter controversies over vote rigging, manipulation and fraud on a massive scale. The parliamentary elections attracted less attention but were no less controversial. Voter participation had declined constantly and in 2019, when the latest elections were held, turnout probably did not exceed 10 per cent, although it is hard to know the exact figure. Persistent insecurity and high levels of corruption weakened the legitimacy of the Republic.