If one was to believe the US UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s latest statement on the war in Afghanistan, it is going well for the US-backed government and the Taliban is moving towards peace. The reality is somewhat different.
The weekend’s bomb blast in Kabul which killed more than 100 people and injured well over 200 came after an attack against the Save the Children’s office in Kabul, and last week’s suicide attack against the city’s main five-star hotel. These are not the signs of a war going well or of an enemy ready to concede.
These attacks represent the first wave of the Taliban’s coming Spring offensive. They may also include elements of attacks by Islamic State in Afghanistan but, while the two organisations are not linked, they are both fighting to end the reign of the “democratically elected” Afghan Prime Minister Ashraf Ghani (Afghanistan’s electoral system is notoriously corrupt so notions of “democracy” there are generally seen as moot).
The end game of the opposition Taliban strategy is to install a leadership reflecting an austere and singular Islamist vision for the deeply fragmented state. The wider opposition is not tightly united.
Afghanistan has long been known for its tribal warlords and, while many of them are not enthusiastic about the Kabul government, they are similarly ambiguous about the Taliban as the alternative. Most tribal leaders just want to be able to continue with their age-old despotic traditions without external interference.
As a result, tribal leaders switch back and forth between aligning with the Taliban and with the Kabul government. This is largely dependent on whether the Kabul government includes them in the division of spoils from the elite’s corruption.
[Happy warmonger Trump joins the circle of a perpetual war]
At one level, corruption is all but completely out of control in Kabul; at another it is just a variation on traditional methods of retaining loyalties and doing business. In the Taliban’s favor is that, as a religious organisation, it has a strict policy against corruption and does provide a harsh consistency of its own judicial outcomes. Indeed, predatory crime and corruption by the government continue to drive many into the Taliban’s arms, ensuring it has a steady flow of recruits.
This has meant that while in 2015 the Afghanistan government controlled 72% of the country, a year later that had fallen to a little under 60%. By the end of 2017, 54% of Afghanistan had a permanent Taliban presence, with another 38% having a substantial Taliban presence. In short, the Kabul government is now losing the war.
2018 is expected to mark whether the Kabul government can succeed or not. Even with 4,000 extra US troops and 3,000 NATO troops with extended rules of engagement, the outcome is looking uncertain.
The Taliban is now engaged with the government in internationally brokered “peace talks”. However, the outcome to those talks will likely mean, either through a negotiated outcome or outright victory, there will be regime change in Kabul. The main question now seems to be how long the Kabul government can hold on and how much the US is prepared to continue to tip in, 16 years after it first began, to what now looks like a lost cause.
Damien Kingsbury is Deakin University’s Professor of International Politics.
One needs to remember the original ostensible reason for the invasion of Afghanistan. The official version was that the then Taliban government refused to hand over bin Laden whom the Americans said organised the events of 9/11 from his cave in Afghanistan. Even if that were true (and it was not) then how does one justify still being in Afghanistan more than 16 years later and bin Laden long dead (on either version)?
The truth is much closer to the geopolitical reality of (a) Afghanistan’s location viz a viz China and the “stans” plus Russia; its huge mineral wealth, especially so-called rare earths; and being the source of 95% of the world’s heroin.
Australia, which had no business invading in the first place, is still there, and the excuses, “training (sic) the Afghans” are less plausible by the day. Just what exactly does the Australian government hope to achieve in 2018 that it was unable to achieve in the past 16 years? One waits in vain for an even remotely plausible argument.
I remember a young Afghan friend whose father had died in the fighting during the Soviet occupation saying that he did not know whether or not his father was really a “martyr.” He was relieved when the Taliban won control of most of the country, set up a relatively incorrupt government and reduced sharply the growing of opium poppies. The latter action is probably what doomed them. 9/11, allegedly committed by Saudis, provided the pretext for invasion of faraway Afghanistan and the rest is ongoing history. The drug market must be fed so the production cannot be shut down.
Incorrupt bulldust. Just differently corrupt. This is the group that killed people for listening to music and bashed them for flying kites.
A congressional report estimates the war in Iraq & Afghanistan has cost about $2.4 trillion since 2007. One can only imagine how different the landscape would be if the money had been spent on waging peace not war, or if they had done & spent nothing at all. Instead as usual they have acted like a bull in a china shop in a war they’re never going to win (they can barely even articulate what they’re fighting for) and they’re well on the way to sending themselves broke over it.
There is little doubt that bin Laden organised 9/11, just not from a cave. He was running a camp. You have forgotten or did not know where bin Laden came from. However, I think if you look at oil, you will find that Hamad Karzai, the Yanks’ tame president was an oil pipeline negotiator pre 9/11. I have never been in any doubt that the Taliban was a creature of Pakistan’s ISI agency and paid for by Saudi businessmen, or government officials. Also remember that bin Laden was one of the Mujahedin funded by the US in the 80s.
On the contrary, there is every doubt that OBL was responsible. I have certainly not forgotten his origins nor his role in Operation Cyclone, and have published several articles on precisely that issue.
One of the great problems with addressing our role in the illegal Afghan war is the mental block people have over the real responsibility for 9/11.
As David Griffin among a number of excellent authors has pointed out, the official 9/11 story requires a great deal more than Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief.
For more than a century Western powers have failed militarily in Afghanistan. Even the Americans read some history, so there must be a reason. If it was just minerals then there many easier places to get them.
The Great Game goes on, for the same reasons which have been clear since Alexander sauntered by and left hellenic genes throughout Nuristan & Chitral.
The players have changed but the tune remains.
Is there anyone outside the Drumpf administration who actually believes anything that comes out of Nikki Haley’s mouth. She has even less credibility than his lickspittle of a press secretary.