“Surrender or die.” That’s the message sent to Afghan security outposts and rural leaders by the Taliban, and the effectiveness of that warning has begun to accelerate. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan has demoralized the national security forces that we set up to hold off a Taliban resurgence in the vacuum left by our departure, the New York Times reports this morning.
And each surrender adds to the momentum for the Taliban’s return to power:
Since May 1, at least 26 outposts and bases in just four provinces — Laghman, Baghlan, Wardak and Ghazni — have surrendered after such negotiations, according to village elders and government officials. With morale diving as American troops leave, and the Taliban seizing on each surrender as a propaganda victory, each collapse feeds the next in the Afghan countryside.
Among the negotiated surrenders were four district centers, which house local governors, police and intelligence chiefs — effectively handing the government facilities to Taliban control and scattering the officials there, at least temporarily.
The Taliban have negotiated Afghan troop surrenders in the past, but never at the scale and pace of the base collapses this month in the four provinces extending east, north and west of Kabul. The tactic has removed hundreds of government forces from the battlefield, secured strategic territory and reaped weapons, ammunition and vehicles for the Taliban — often without firing a shot.
The base collapses are one measure of the rapidly deteriorating government war effort as one outpost after another falls, sometimes after battles, but often after wholesale surrenders.
This demonstrates a couple of hard truths after twenty years of US war in Afghanistan. The first is that the Pashtuns, from which the Taliban largely originate, are too large a tribe to ever be sidelined or marginalized in Afghanistan. And the second truth is that twenty years hasn’t even put a dent in the first truth, much as a decade of Soviet occupation couldn’t do it either. The US could stay in Afghanistan for fifty years, or even a hundred years, and it would still be less a nation than a region of warring tribes vying for domination with no infrastructure or loyalties past that of clan and tribe.
This has been a civil war that stretches back centuries. America’s intervention didn’t change that; it only picked temporary winners. America’s withdrawal won’t change that, either.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations came to the same conclusion, although Joe Biden complained that Donald Trump’s withdrawal schedule was too abrupt. However, the NYT reported earlier this week that Biden’s now accelerating the withdrawal too, calling it “a race to the exits“:
United States troops and their NATO allies intend to be out of Afghanistan by early to mid-July, well ahead of President Biden’s Sept. 11 withdrawal deadline, military officials said, in what has turned into an accelerated ending to America’s longest war.
But the race to the exits, which has picked up steam as planeloads of equipment and troops are flown out of the country, leaves the United States grappling with huge unresolved issues that officials had thought they would have more time to figure out.
The Pentagon still has not determined how it will combat terrorist threats like Al Qaeda from afar after American troops leave. Nor have top Defense Department officials secured agreement from allies about repositioning American troops in other nearby countries. And administration officials are still grappling with the thorny question of whether American warplanes — most likely armed Reaper drones — will provide air support to Afghan forces to help prevent the country’s cities from falling to the Taliban. …
Kandahar Airfield, once one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan, was quietly shuttered this month along with several other smaller bases. And in the coming days U.S. fighter jets, lethal fixtures in the country since the start of the war, will begin departing from the sprawling Bagram Air Base for good, the officials added. Bagram, the largest U.S. base in the country, is the main hub for the withdrawal and will most likely be the last base the United States leaves behind.
As the withdrawal accelerates, it leaves key questions unanswered. Without any US forces in Kabul, how do the Afghanis keep the airport open? If that becomes contested, then diplomatic contacts will become next to impossible, at least with the current government. Even if the current government can hold Kabul and its environs, it might end up as more of a city-state than a national capital as the Pashtuns grab Kandahar and the rural areas, while the northern tribes consolidate in their own regions. Diplomacy may be all but moot in that situation.
And now that we’re pulling out, the NYT notes, we aren’t going to have many options for going back in — at least not quickly. Where would we stage the necessary troops? Not in Iran, obviously, and almost certainly not in Pakistan, where support for the Pashtuns/Taliban remains high. To the north, all of the bordering nations are former Soviet republics where Vladimir Putin’s lessons in Ukraine and Georgia would outweigh any desire to give the US military a bigger footprint. China wouldn’t necessarily be happy to see us set up shop in this region, either. The Xinjiang province where Beijing is committing genocide is in this same general neighborhood, don’t forget. The supply lines for a new invasion are longer and more treacherous than they were after 9/11.
The biggest question for us at the moment is protecting those who protected us:
The Pentagon is in the early stages of planning for the potential evacuation of thousands of Afghan nationals whose work for the US could make them Taliban targets when the American military withdraws from the country, according to four administration officials.
The officials emphasized that a formal request to develop a contingency plan has not been made by the White House but there is significant pressure on the administration from Capitol Hill and outside groups to safely remove the Afghans before US troops leave.
President Joe Biden’s April announcement that the US would withdraw troops by September 11 has created uncertainty for thousands of Afghans who risked their lives to help the US military working as translators and in other roles since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001.
Officials have privately said the troop withdrawal could be completed in July which increases the sense of urgency. There has also been an uptake in Taliban violence against Afghan security forces and civilians in recent weeks and Afghans who are waiting for visas to come to the US have been killed by the Taliban.
The White House had better accelerate that “formal request.” Time has run out on our allies, and one can imagine they’re studying this piece of history on YouTube intently these days.
