The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, as well as the recent recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal that we simply continue to “muddle along” in Afghanistan, brought to light again what a pointless and tragic muddle the whole exercise has been. The longest war in which American troops have fought is that in Afghanistan, which is now 17 years old. Nearly one trillion dollars have been spent by the American government on this effort, with no end in sight. There were once 100,000 American soldiers in the country; that number is now about 14,000. That’s progress, but no one in authority in Washington seems to want to leave Afghanistan entirely, allowing it to fight its own battles. The Taliban are back; the central government controls only 54 percent of the districts, and the rest — nearly half the country — is either under Taliban control, or is territory contested between the Taliban and government forces.
On August 11, there was a devastating attack by the Taliban on an Afghan commando base in the district of Ajristan, 90 miles west of Ghazni city. Afghan officials and soldiers fled; as many as 100 commandos and police officers were killed, according to a senior Afghan official. The Taliban control the battlefield: it is they who decide when and where to attack, and then to either fade away, or to stand and fight. In Ghazni, it seems they decided to attempt to conquer this strategically-placed city of 270,000. First, they managed to take all but two of the 18 rural districts surrounding the city. Then they lay siege, for five days, to the city, finally taking control of it, but then were dislodged by a combination of American bombings and Afghan troops on the ground. Aside from the one hundred Afghan soldiers and police killed in the initial attack on August 11, several hundred more Afghan soldiers were killed during the siege and takeover of Ghazni.
Furthermore, elsewhere in Afghanistan, simultaneously with the Ghazni attack, the Taliban managed to kill more than 100 other Afghan soldiers in two separate attacks. According to American officials, these three attacks have together been a “catastrophe.”
As the New York Times reported:
The Ghazni assault has demonstrated a stunning display of Taliban tenacity that belies the official Afghan and American narrative of progress in the war and the possibility for peace talks. It also has revealed remarkable bumbling by the Afghan military, including the wrong kind of ammunition sent to besieged police officers. Moreover, the siege has raised basic questions about what conditions the Taliban might accept for peace talks.
The Taliban’s forces in Afghanistan are constantly replenished by volunteers who are eager to fight both the Afghan army, allied as it is to the infidel Americans and other NATO forces, and those Infidels themselves. The Afghan soldiers, even with American training and weaponry, have not performed as well as those of the Taliban. That’s not surprising. For the Taliban are fueled by religious fervor; the Afghan soldiers defending territory from being taken by the Taliban are merely doing their jobs. This makes a difference.
What can the Americans do? They can finally recognize the futility of their remaining on the ground in Afghanistan, and pull out their last remaining troops, some 14,000 of them. They can still supply the Afghan army with weapons, but the Afghans have to understand that it is their country, and it is they who will have to fight for it. There is a limit to what we should be expected to do. It’s been 17 years. We have been there long enough. It’s long past time for the Afghan army to pull up its socks.
Could the Taliban take over the entire country? It’s one thing to keep waging guerrilla warfare, where the time and place is of your choosing, inflicting high casualties on the enemy, before making your escape. It is quite another to take, and hold, and above all to effectively administer, a large city. When the Taliban have taken cities in the past, the results have been disastrous for them. They have highly effective soldiers, but not administrators to take care of the local hospitals, schools, police and firemen, water and food and energy supplies. Those tasks require different skills. When the Taliban controlled Kabul from September 1996 to 2001, their administration of what they called the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” was a study in chaos. And there is another problem. The Taliban are almost entirely Pashtun, a tribe that constitutes 60% of the Afghan population. At the high-water mark of Taliban control of the country, in 2000, when 90% of the country’s territory was controlled by them, the Taliban were governing many people whose languages, including Dari, they did not speak, and who mistrusted them on ethnic grounds. The Taliban also gave their own Pashtuns all the important administrative jobs in the cities they ran, ignoring the desire of the locals. Those Pashtuns were chosen even if they had no relevant experience, over non-Pashtuns with a great deal of such experience. There is no reason to think that, should they take over a half-dozen major Afghan cities, that they would behave any differently today.
How did the Taliban rule in Kabul, and Herat, and other cities where they took over the local administration? Women were forced to wear the burqa at all times in public, because, according to one Taliban spokesman, “the face of a woman is a source of corruption” for men not related to them. One Taliban commander forbade women even from walking outside near his office, lest they “distract” him. In a systematic segregation sometimes referred to as gender apartheid, in this Islamic Emirate women were not allowed to work, they were not allowed to be educated after the age of eight, and until the age of eight they were permitted to study only the Qur’an. Since almost all the teachers in elementary schools were women, the ban on women working led to the closing of all the elementary schools. Punishments of criminals were Shari’a-compliant and therefore barbaric — lots of amputations and executions. This only increased hatred of the Taliban among local populations.
The Taliban will continue to fight, keeping Afghan soldiers constantly off-guard, but despite its attempt to hold Ghazni, it may discover that taking and holding cities can become massive administrative headaches. Right now 54 percent of Afghanistan’s 400 districts are held by the government, 14 percent by the Taliban, and the rest is considered contested territory. If the Americans on the ground pull out, let’s assume that all the contested territory falls to the Taliban. That still leaves more than half the territory, almost all of it a wide swathe in the center of the country, under government control.