Tag Archive for: Taliban

Afghan women’s football team a symbol of resistance against Taliban repression

This month marks two years since the US and allied retreat from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s resumption of power there. Amid all the depressing news about the brutal, misogynistic rule of the Taliban, in July there was a welcome moment in Australia’s display of support for Afghan women. Foreign Minister Penny Wong joined the Afghan women’s football team in a friendly kick of the ball in solidarity with them—an act that deserves commendation.

The Afghan football team, made up of young women from different segments of Afghanistan’s diverse population, has been in Australia under the country’s humanitarian program since they were evacuated in August 2021. The team now wishes to be recognised officially as Afghanistan’s national team without any identification with the Taliban’s de facto regime.

The women of Afghanistan are the most oppressed gender group in the world. The Taliban’s patriarchal gender-apartheid rule has deprived them of their basic human rights. They are banned from leading a normal life in every sense of the word. Even the right to education and work has been taken away from them, and movement outside is only allowed with a legal chaperone (husband, brother or father).

They have been forced to cover themselves from top to toe in the traditional burqa, and to remain mostly confined in their homes for the exclusive purpose of marrying, bearing children and performing domestic chores. Some girls as young as 12–13 years have been forcibly either married to or sexually abused by members of the Taliban. The psychological and physical effects of this have taken a heavy mental toll on them, and the rate of suicide among them is increasing.

This has come after Afghanistan experienced two decades of pro-liberalist changes during the US-led intervention in the country. Gone are the days when women were given opportunities to abandon some of the outdated cultural traditions and to participate actively in the reconstruction of their country.

In modern times, female emancipation began, though on a very modest scale, in the late 1950s in the traditionally conservative Muslim Afghanistan. It progressed intermittently under the conditions of warfare until it was shut down by the first round of the Taliban rule (1996–2001). However, during the two-decade-long US and allied involvement in Afghanistan, female education took off substantially, and many women participated in politics, administration, media and businesses. At one point, Afghanistan had more women in its pro-democratic cabinet and parliament than Australia, despite the conflict raging across the country. It is an enormous shock and tragedy that all that progress has now been reversed by the Taliban.

The Taliban have justified their barbaric actions against women and against any form of opposition in order to impose their totalitarian rule in the name of a version of Islam that is not practiced in any other Muslim majority country. There is absolutely nothing in Islam that endorses their ultra-extremist and ethno-tribal-centric interpretation and application of the religion. The group’s version of Islam is more focused on establishing tribal, political supremacy and changing Afghanistan into their image than serving the cause of Islam as a tolerant and humane faith.

The narrowly educated Taliban leaders, plus most of their illiterate commanders and fighters, have been trained in, and are backed by, neighbouring Pakistan in pursuit of a proxy domination of Afghanistan for its regional interests. The Taliban have repeatedly been told by most Muslim leaders and institutions, as well as the international community as a whole, that they are on the wrong side of Islam and history. But these remonstrations have had little effect.

The group’s actions have amounted to defaming Islam. They have defied the global demand for the formation of an inclusive government and respect for human rights, including those of women and girls, which are enshrined in Islam. They seem intent on using their hardline stance as a bargaining chip for gaining international recognition. This recognition must be denied, as their de facto regime has no domestic legitimacy.

Many brave women of Afghanistan have repeatedly dared to challenge the Taliban’s draconian impositions despite being subjected to the group’s repressive measures. Their protests are paralleled by the emergence of several armed resistance groups in the country. At the forefront is the National Resistance Front, led by Ahmad Massoud (son of the famed Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who resisted the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and subsequently the Taliban, but was assassinated by al-Qaeda agents two days before 11 September 2001).

Wong’s support of the Afghan football team and Afghan women in general deserves warm applause. It is also now time for Australia and the rest of the world to throw their weight behind the resistance to the Taliban rule. There is no other option than to forcefully prompt the group through coordinated pressure from inside and outside Afghanistan to change its ways. Otherwise, as the UN warned in a recent report, Afghanistan is in serious danger of giving rise to more regrettable terrorist actions under the Taliban.

Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the tragedy of Afghanistan

As the world marks the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks this weekend, two other events should be remembered. Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated on 9 September 2001 by al-Qaeda agents, two days before the attacks on New York and Washington. Massoud had fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the Taliban and al-Qaeda alliance in the following decade. The other event in this bleak trio is the Taliban’s reassumption of power in the wake of the US and allied retreat from Afghanistan a year ago. Together they explain the mess that is Afghanistan today.

Al-Qaeda’s attacks on the US were unprecedented. So too was America’s retaliative invasion of Afghanistan as the first salvo in a war on terrorism and as an attempt to democratise a highly traditional, socially divided, economically impoverished and conflict-ravaged country. Afghanistan had been mired in bloody warfare, fuelled by domestic fragility, internal power rivalries and outside interventions, from the time of the pro-Soviet coup in 1978.

Massoud, whose aim was an independent, sovereign and progressive Islamist Afghanistan, turned his stronghold of the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, into a fortress, first against the Soviets and their surrogate government in Kabul and then against the Pakistan-backed, al-Qaeda-allied Taliban who had established a medievalist theocratic reign of terror. For his brave, visionary and strategic leadership, he became known as the Lion of Panjshir or, what Sandy Gall calls him in his latest book, the ‘Afghan Napoleon’. Massoud had warned the West several months before 9/11 about the danger of terrorist attacks from Afghanistan. He became al-Qaeda’s number one target and was killed as part of the group’s preparations for its planned attacks on the US two days later.

But Massoud’s legacy didn’t die with him. His forces’ collaboration proved critical to the US military campaign that toppled the Taliban government and dispersed its leaders and operatives, and those of al-Qaeda, into Pakistan. The failure to defeat and decapitate them and to end their ties with Pakistan, however, allowed the terrorist forces to make a vengeful comeback two years later.

Washington’s hunt for 9/11 architect Osama bin Laden, its entanglement of Afghanistan’s invasion with the wider war on terrorism and its promotion of democracy placed Afghanistan on a very rocky course of change and development. These efforts prolonged and deepened the US and allied involvement in Afghanistan, and the war on terror led to the US invasion of Iraq that shifted American resources away from Afghanistan. Attempts at democratisation spawned incompetent and kleptocratic Afghan governments under presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.

Neither of these leaders, along with many other strongmen, managed to free themselves from self-interest and power struggles to generate national unity and broad prosperity. They not only failed the people of Afghanistan but also couldn’t provide the US and its allies with an effective and reliable partner on the ground. Meanwhile, despite its heavy investment in human and material resources, the US lacked a meaningful understanding of the complexities of Afghanistan and its neighbourhood, and thus couldn’t pursue an appropriate strategy. In a fashion typical of a big power losing a small war, it failed the people of Afghanistan. The Taliban and their supporters couldn’t have wished for anything better.

The US and its allies finally decided to extract their forces from an unwinnable war. It took a vocal US critic of the war, President Donald Trump, with the help of a misguided, neoconservative Republican devotee, the Afghan American Zalmay Khalilzad, to conclude the shameful 2020 Doha peace deal with the Taliban. This entailed the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan in return for nothing—not even a universal ceasefire, let alone a viable political settlement of the conflict. Afghanistan was offered on a platter to the Taliban and their outside backers. Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, simply, though poorly, completed the process, opening the gate for the Taliban to declare their theocratic order under the leadership of individuals, most of whom are still on the UN terrorist blacklist and some of whom are wanted by the FBI.

Despite Khalilzad and some other naive analysts believing that the Taliban had changed, it’s now evident that there’s no such a thing as a ‘new Taliban’. They have reinstated their reign of terror, targeting women and anyone else who opposes their theocratic, oppressive rule. The two decades of liberalist-inclined changes and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan that saw an educated and well-connected young Afghan generation emerge with hopes for a better future have all been reversed.

Afghanistan has been plunged into darkness economically, financially, socially and culturally. Half of its population is now facing starvation, and the country has become a pariah state. The Taliban’s politics of exclusivity, ethnic supremacy and out-of-date religiosity may appeal to Russia and China because of their anti-US stance, but the situation in Afghanistan has become frighteningly abhorrent and confronting.

The ideal of Massoud (on the back of whom, as the Wall Street Journal put it, the West won the Cold War) was about a free and progressive multiethnic and sectarian Islamist Afghanistan. This goal is now challenged, but it has by no means evaporated. It is taken up by his well-educated and strategically minded son, Ahmad Massoud, who now leads the National Resistance Front against the Taliban.

The NRF fighters, who include members of the previous government’s armed and security forces, have regrouped and operate in 12 northeastern and northern provinces. The NRF has become the repository of the wishes and aspirations of most Afghanistan people for freedom, for a publicly mandated inclusive government, and for the observation of human rights, specifically those of women and girls who have shown enormous bravery in the face of the Taliban’s inhuman and brutal restrictions and punishments. The NRF’s campaign is supplemented by growing resistance in some other parts of Afghanistan.

The Taliban don’t have the field to themselves. They are neither prone to change nor united among themselves to embrace an enlightened Islam. It is imperative that the West support the anti-Talban resistance until they can negotiate for a nationally and internationally legitimate and participatory system of governance and a sovereign united Afghanistan with respect for human rights and the rights of women. Whatever the circumstances, the struggle for the soul of Afghanistan is set to continue.

Did the Afghan failure lead to the Ukraine war?

Why did the West’s Afghanistan policy fail so spectacularly? Was it doomed from the very beginning, and have any lessons been learned? More to the point, did the end of one 20-year war pave the way for another?

One year after the fall of Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power, these and other questions are hanging in the air. They remain unanswered, partly because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and renewed Sino-American tensions have consumed much of the oxygen, but also because they are too painful to consider. It has been easier for the international community simply to forget about Afghanistan altogether.

Contrary to simplistic arguments one hears in the United States, the immediate reason for the Afghan regime’s collapse was not that Afghan soldiers didn’t want to fight for their country. In fact, tens of thousands had fought and died trying to stop the Taliban, only for the US suddenly to withdraw all political and material support for their fight. The regime collapsed because America had decided to get out, the consequences be damned.

As we have since learned (again) in Ukraine, an army’s ability to fight depends on the belief that victory is indeed possible, even if the odds are against it. Once the US had signalled its intention to withdraw completely from Afghanistan, it embarked on a rushed evacuation. In short order, the Afghan army lost access even to the repair and logistics personnel needed to maintain the complicated weapons systems that had been supplied to it. No wonder morale among Afghan troops collapsed. When the US cut and ran, Afghan soldiers took it as a signal to do the same.

The context for the US withdrawal had been shaped by the shameful deal that President Donald Trump struck with the Taliban in February 2020. With that, America indicated that it no longer cared whether there was a viable peace or political agreement in Afghanistan. It would leave no matter what, effectively abandoning the Afghan government.

When President Joe Biden took office, he decided to follow through on the Trump administration’s policy—against the advice of many. The US political system had become fed up with its own failures in Afghanistan. As the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted in a devastating report that year, there had never been a 20-year plan for the country; instead, there had been 20 one-year plans. With every passing year, the US would announce a troop surge or some other tactic that was supposed to represent a turning point. Only rarely did US policymakers acknowledge that nation-building and peacemaking depend more on an abundance of patience than on a predominance of firepower.

Of course, we will never know whether a more coherent approach to Afghanistan would have produced a better outcome. For years, the thought of holding talks with the Taliban was unthinkable. By the time that finally began to change, the US had lost its strategic patience and was willing to accede to the Taliban’s core demand—that Western forces withdraw from the country—regardless of whether a political agreement was in place.

The inglorious endgame was foreseeable. The Taliban are back in control of the country, and any hope that they would govern more pragmatically than in the past has been dashed. Though Taliban leaders promised a more moderate approach upon their return, it soon became clear that they didn’t mean it. Once again, Afghan girls are being denied education. The economy has collapsed, food insecurity is rising sharply and the country has overtaken Yemen as the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Worst of all, very few people outside the region seem to care.

But make no mistake, the fall of Kabul last year had repercussions that have yet to be fully appreciated. It demonstrated that the US might not have the staying power or the strategic patience that’s necessary to achieve a military victory or ensure a lasting peace in countries where it has intervened. It showed that any other relatively marginal country or region might also be abandoned in the interest of focusing US resources on China.

The Kremlin certainly took note. Shortly after the Taliban’s takeover, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s national security adviser noted publicly that the Ukrainians could not rely on the US to stick around for the long term. Within weeks of the fall of Kabul, Russian troop trains and tank transports had begun their massive move towards the Ukrainian border. As one war ended, another began.

Afghanistan’s abyss

In the year since the abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban by the US and its allies, the country has gone down precisely the path any logical observer would have predicted: a medieval, jihadist, terrorist-sheltering emirate has been established. The US will incur costs for betraying its Afghan allies for a long time to come. But nobody will pay a higher price than Afghans.

The geopolitical fallout of America’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan—after US President Joe Biden followed through on the withdrawal commitment of his predecessor, Donald Trump—is still growing. By exposing the US as a power in decline, the withdrawal gave a huge boost to militant Islamists everywhere, while emboldening Russia and China. It is no coincidence that, not long after the fall of Kabul, Russia began massing forces along Ukraine’s borders and China sent a record number of warplanes into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone.

But things are much worse in Afghanistan. Women and girls have lost their rights to employment and education, with many girls subjected to sexual slavery through forced marriages to Taliban fighters. Taliban death squads have been systematically identifying and murdering those who cooperated with US and allied forces. Torture and execution have become commonplace. Afghanistan’s Hindus and Sikhs—descendants of those who withstood the medieval-era conversions to Sunni Islam by the country’s Arab conquerors—have been fleeing to India to avoid slaughter.

The regime’s cabinet is a veritable who’s who of international terrorists and narcotics kingpins. Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is responsible for Afghanistan’s internal security and preventing the country from becoming a safe haven for international terrorists, is the leader of the ruthless Haqqani network. The US has designated him a ‘global terrorist’ and placed a US$10 million bounty on his head.

Not surprisingly, the Taliban continues to shelter known terrorists, as the recent Biden-ordered assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in central Kabul showed. While Biden was quick to take a victory lap after al-Zawahiri’s killing, the assassination hardly reflects well on him. A year ago, when ordering US troops to beat a hasty retreat, he claimed that the US no longer had any interest in Afghanistan, because al-Qaeda was already ‘gone’. (No matter that, just weeks earlier, a United Nations Security Council report had shown that al-Qaeda militants were fighting alongside their Taliban associates.)

Compounding the danger to Afghanistan and its neighbours, the US left behind US$7.1 billion worth of weapons in its chaotic withdrawal from the country. According to a recent Pentagon report, the US has no plans to retrieve or destroy the equipment, despite recognising that the Taliban has already ‘repaired some damaged Afghan Air Force aircraft and made incremental gains in its capability to employ these aircraft in operations’.

In short, Biden’s decision to overrule his generals and withdraw from Afghanistan—a month before his own target date of 11 September—has created a security and humanitarian nightmare. And Biden is nowhere near finished making foreign-policy blunders in Afghanistan.

After Kabul’s fall, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the US would judge its future engagement with the Taliban-led government based on ‘one simple proposition’: whether it helps the US advance its interests, including ‘seeing that women’s rights are upheld’, delivering humanitarian assistance and pursuing counterterrorism. But even though the Taliban has failed on all three counts, the Biden administration is gradually easing sanctions on the regime.

At the UN, the US spearheaded a resolution providing for a humanitarian exemption to the sanctions imposed on Afghanistan. The US Treasury Department’s General Licenses, aimed at facilitating the provision of humanitarian relief, now allow financial transactions involving the Taliban and the Haqqani network. And the US is negotiating with the Taliban over the release of US$3.5 billion of Afghan central-bank reserves.

Meanwhile, the US refuses to target Haqqani or other leading terrorists in Kabul. Yes, al-Zawahiri was assassinated, but, contrary to the Biden administration’s narrative, he was not all that influential. He was largely retired, living with members of his extended family in a Kabul house under Haqqani’s protection.

What’s next? Will the US now reward Pakistan—one of America’s 18 ‘major non-NATO allies’—for opening its airspace to the drone that killed al-Zawahiri? True, Pakistan reared the Taliban and engineered the US defeat in Afghanistan, but now it wants an early International Monetary Fund loan dispersal to help it avert a debt default.

Likewise, will the US now continue to pursue the release of Afghanistan’s central-bank reserves to the Taliban, despite its indisputable harbouring of terrorists and establishment of an oppressive and violent Islamic state? The Biden administration defends its engagement with the Taliban by speciously contending that the top terrorist threat in Afghanistan is the Islamic State–Khorasan. But IS-K has relatively few members, no state sponsor or Afghan allies and controls no territory.

The Biden administration seems committed to striking a kind of Faustian bargain with the Taliban. But to what end? The Taliban’s political power and Islamist ideology make it a critical link in the international jihadist movement. And its rule is threatening to turn Afghanistan into a breeding ground for international terrorism, narcotics trafficking and mass migration. There is no justification for engaging with it.

Through its precipitous and bungling withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration handed Islamists worldwide their greatest victory. But the war is hardly over. As the Taliban’s self-styled emir, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, recently declared, ‘This war never ends, and it will continue till judgment day’.

Afghanistan, a year after the Taliban takeover

Today is the anniversary of the takeover of Kabul, and control of Afghanistan, by Taliban forces. It’s been one year since the end of the 20-year war by UN-mandated US-led coalition forces to install and preserve rule by democratic processes, at a cost of more than US$2 trillion—and over 100,000 casualties, combatant and non-combatant. But what have the Taliban achieved during the past year, what of the future, and what are the policy implications for Australia?

Historians will come up with multiple political and military reasons why we lost. The reasons are complex; it’s Afghanistan, after all, a graveyard of empires. I’ll put forward one overarching reason: our failure yet again to recognise that ‘victory’ is political. It’s about winning hearts and minds. War is one means to this end, not the endgame.

That the Taliban now run the country, at both the national and provincial levels, is not in doubt. They are in control, and for an indefinite period. However, no country has yet officially recognised a Taliban ‘government’: UN references to ‘de facto authorities’, ‘de facto ministers’, and ‘caretaker cabinet’ are fitting, pending resolution. Ultimately, that resolution could depend on the Taliban creating an ‘inclusive’ political process or government of some sort, but under the current regime the sharing of power, if any, would be essentially symbolic.

Not unexpectedly, Taliban rule during the past year has been by intimidation and force. They are not widely popular, but neither were their predecessors. Survival has long been about playing by the rules, whoever is in power.

Open-source information suggests that the Taliban are ‘united’ under leaders who, with few exceptions, are Pashtun and Sunni. However, while longstanding tensions do exist between Pashtun tribes, and between the Pashtuns and other ethnic groups such as the Tajiks and Uzbeks , there’s no evidence of serious fractures, including among senior personalities, within the Taliban ‘coalition’. However, these differences are, and always have been, sources of potential volatility and vulnerability for the Taliban and previous governments.

Although the overall level of violence in Afghanistan has dropped significantly during the past year, some armed resistance does exist. This comes mostly from elements of Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K; the local IS affiliate) and the National Resistance Front (NRF; led by Ahmad Massoud, son of a legendary warlord and guerrilla leader assassinated by al-Qaeda in 2001).

IS-K is concentrated in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kuna. The NRF is mostly in the northeastern provinces of Panjshir and Baghlan. However, the numbers of both are reportedly small, and neither appears to have external support, at least at present, from neighbouring governments.

Both resistance forces are being actively targeted by the Taliban. Besides conventional combat operations, the Taliban’s tactics reportedly include the detention, torture and extra-judicial killing of the groups’ alleged supporters. Both forces are largely contained and don’t constitute any significant threat to the Taliban.

The quality of government over the past year under the Taliban has been poor, and the economy is in sharp decline. According to a recent UN report, Afghanistan since the takeover has witnessed an ‘unprecedented economic, financial, and humanitarian crisis’ that has left ‘[s]ome 24.4 million people, or 59% of the estimated population … in need of humanitarian assistance’. This includes food, shelter, medical treatment, water, sanitation and hygiene. Nearly 20 million Afghans are facing ‘acute hunger’ and more than six million face emergency levels of food insecurity.

There are several major causes for this. One is the serious decline in foreign donor funding to pay for imports of food, medicines and other necessities. Another is the serious decline in administrative competence across the civil service, due to the loss of many experienced officials who fled Afghanistan before or after the takeover and their deliberate replacement with inexperienced members of the Taliban. To help correct this, the UN and other agencies have sought increased humanitarian support, the unfreezing and repatriation of Afghanistan’s funds overseas, and the expansion of UN and other agencies’ in-country missions including, where possible, taking on expanded administrative and specialist roles.

Human rights have also taken a hard hit during the year. A UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan report on human rights released last month delivered a range of negative findings, including limitations on freedom of expression and assembly, restrictions on journalists, arbitrary detention, torture and extra-judicial killings.

One major concern was the Taliban’s imposition of new regulations on women and girls, including stricter dress codes, gender segregation, denial of access to secondary education, and restriction of employment almost exclusively to the education, health and humanitarian sectors. These changes have driven hundreds of thousands of women into unemployment. Their loss of income has further lowered their living standards. These changes are unpopular and not all Taliban leaders agree with them, but this interpretation of sharia law by key clerics prevails, for now.

Iran, the Central Asian republics, Russia, China, Pakistan and India—Afghanistan’s neighbours and near neighbours—all have direct interests in its stability. Economics is one strong reason. Afghanistan offers opportunities for increased trade, transit trade and potential exploitation of its vast mineral resources. Security is another, and especially whether the Taliban rulers are willing, or able, to prevent Afghanistan from again being a safe haven for jihadist groups from which they pursue cross-border agendas. These groups include al-Qaeda, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and others comprising Russian Chechyans, Uzbeks, Tajiks and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

Peace and stability across this war-ravaged state; implementation of an inclusive political process and ideally an inclusive government; management of the humanitarian crisis, especially in the areas of food security and health care; and restoration of basic human rights for women and children are all issues of high policy concern to Australia. Australia must continue to pursue its existing actions and initiate appropriate new steps to help find solutions to these challenges.

For the most part, this will necessitate working through the UN and other international organisations to maximise results. There is also the issue of immigration. The government must be seen to meet its moral obligations in this important humanitarian area.

The Taliban’s disastrous year-long rule in Afghanistan

One year on, the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan continues to be marked by extremist brutality in the name of Islam and defiance of the UN-led international demand for an inclusive government and respect for human rights. The group has not been accorded global recognition and the Afghan people are in the midst of the worst humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan’s modern history. The country’s future prospects have never been so bleak.

Afghanistan’s citizens and the world were repeatedly told by the US representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, who concluded the February 2020 deal with the Taliban to pull out all foreign troops from Afghanistan, that the Taliban have changed. He, along with a few observers, coined the term ‘new Taliban’ to define the group as more nuanced than they were during their previous draconian rule, before being toppled by the US invasion for harbouring al-Qaeda following its 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on America.

Yet, the Taliban, backed by Pakistan and courted by China and Russia as part of an anti-US stance, have shown no signs of change in their extremist theocratic beliefs and practices. They have taken Afghanistan back to a medievalist era, imposing severe political and social restrictions and brutally punishing those in opposition. Women and girls, not to mention the non-Pashtun minorities smaller than the Taliban’s own Pashtun cluster, have become the main target of the regime’s repression. Afghanistan’s economy, finances and development enterprises have collapsed, and more than half of the country’s estimated 40 million people are on the verge of starvation.

Meanwhile, US political and military leaders have been soul-searching to determine what precisely led to America’s and, for that matter, NATO’s and non-NATO allies’ strategic blunder and failure in Afghanistan. The latest figure to speak out publicly on the issue is the former commander of the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and director of the CIA, David Petraeus. In an article published this week in The Atlantic, he identifies the primary reasons for America’s failure in Afghanistan as the lack of US strategic patience and commitment, misallocation of resources, unwillingness to go after the Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, and a time-based rather than condition-induced withdrawal of forces, as well as the lack of suitable Afghan leaders.

In a perhaps partly self-incriminating way, Petraeus provides a compelling argument as to why the US Afghanistan campaign ended in a disaster and how it could have been better managed to prevent the return to power of the Taliban, along with their al-Qaeda allies. He intimates that in Afghanistan, the US could have achieved at least what it accomplished in Iraq, although arguably Iraq is still in the doldrums. However, he doesn’t address how a traditional and fragmented country like land-locked Afghanistan, in a zone of regional and global rivalries for contrasting interests, could have been transformed into a viable state within a period that an interventionist power could reasonably endure. He seems to overlook the factors that had historically impeded nation-building in Afghanistan and thwarted success on the part of interventionist major powers to mould the country according to their ideological and geopolitical objectives.

Whatever the reasons for America’s failure, it has left behind a country whose rule under the Taliban will now persist to haunt not only the Afghan people but also the West.

The best option now is to back the people of Afghanistan so they can regain their composure and strength to bring about change from within. Internal resistance to the Taliban and their Pakistani backers is growing. The National Resistance Front, led by Ahmad Massoud, son of the famed Ahmad Shah Massoud who fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and subsequent Taliban rule but was assassinated by al-Qaeda–Taliban agents two days before 9/11, has become very active in northern and northeastern Afghanistan. The NRF stems from the Panjshir province north of Kabul, but its fighters come from different ethnic backgrounds and include some of the elements of the former US-trained Afghan army and security forces. It stands for a free, independent, inclusive and politically, socially and religiously progressive Afghanistan.

Its activities are accompanied by uprisings in some other parts of the country, including the central provinces—the traditional habitat of the Hazaras, who, like their Panjshiri Tajik counterparts, have become the target of what has been reported as Taliban ethnic-cleansing operations. Meanwhile, the brave women of Afghanistan have not been totally silenced. They have persisted with their agitations.

So, not everything is lost. The struggle against the Taliban is going to be long and hard, given the quantity of modern weapons that they have inherited from the US forces. Yet, if the Taliban and their outside backers thought that the defeat of the US and its allies opened the way for their ethnic political supremacy and a stable Afghanistan, they are likely to find that their expectations will be confounded in the medium to long run.

Afghanistan’s opium problem requires a humanitarian solution

The Australian government recently donated $40 million to assist with alleviating the food security and economic crises unfolding in Afghanistan, while reiterating its condemnation of the Taliban’s repression and exclusion of women and girls from education and work. Many nations have withheld donations because of these violations of human rights—as well as the revenge executions and disappearances of ‘traitors’ who worked with US-led forces and the US-backed Afghan government or criticised Taliban policies—to avoid legitimising the Taliban’s rule.

The commitment to oppressing women is, however, evidently still more important to the Taliban leadership than basic food security, despite their having a front-row seat to watch the humanitarian crisis play out and affect all Afghan society, not just women.

Surely the international community knows this calculus by now. The most significant difference between the Taliban of the 2020s and 1990s seems to be that instead of banning the internet as part of their strategy to control the population, they are savvy about the potential for a curated social-media presence to affect international perceptions and promote disinformation domestically for political and security purposes.

Australia did the right thing in making its decision based on the immediate food security needs of Afghans. This is a hugely complex situation, and the Afghan people stand to suffer even more if the international community applies too much pressure on particular issues at particular times. Intersecting security issues also make it impossible for the international community to get it right—if that’s defined as finding an option that causes no harm.

The recent ban on opium cultivation in Afghanistan responds to one of the big demands of the international community since the Taliban retook the country last year: drug control. This issue is the perfect storm of intersecting internal problems and external demands.

The particular vulnerability of the Afghan people in the wake of the US and allied withdrawal means their net benefit must remain the guiding principle for the international community’s approach to drug control, even if that brings costs or challenges there or at another place in the global heroin supply chain.

Afghan opium supplies approximately 80% of all users globally.

The 2021 harvest in Afghanistan yielded enough opium to produce 320 tons of pure heroin. For context, if that amount were sold on the Australian market (at the standard price of $50 per 0.1 gram), it would be worth $145 billion, and that’s not including the huge increase in value that we know occurs as drugs travel internationally from the farmgate to the end user. It’s also 350 times the amount of heroin Australians are known to have consumed in 2021. The potential global health costs and criminal profit from the Afghan opium yield are huge.

But a law enforcement policy that takes away a major source of income must be accompanied by an aid and development strategy to replace that income with sustainable, viable options. Otherwise, the policy is unsustainable and vulnerable people will starve.

In Afghanistan, more than 70% of people live in rural areas and around 80% of livelihoods depend on agriculture. The severe drought that decimated crops and grain stores in 2021 shows no signs of abating.

A huge portion of these agriculture-dependent livelihoods are reliant on the opium economy. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime put the value of that economy (local consumption and exports) at 9% to 14% of GDP in 2021, compared with the estimate of 9% for officially recorded legal exports of goods and service in 2020. Opium alone brings at least as much money into Afghanistan as the entire licit export economy.

The country’s ongoing drought makes identifying alternatives even more challenging. Wheat and fresh produce, for example, provide much lower returns and have much higher water requirements than opium poppies.

What options will opium farmers have as food insecurity worsens and the images of people holding desperately onto the wheels of departing aeroplanes fade further from the memory of the international community?

Enforcing a ban like this in a large, infrastructure-sparse country would be challenging at the best of times from a purely logistical perspective. But how will it be enforceable in the context of a population 95% of whom already have insufficient food every single day?

This is in stark contrast to the success of Thailand’s opium crop-replacement program, which took a development instead of a law enforcement approach. Efforts focused on enhancing food security, providing alternative crops (such as coffee) and thereby sources of income, and increasing government services in remote and rural areas.

If the international community knows the Taliban won’t budge on their treatment of women and perceived traitors, then it can’t both withhold life-saving humanitarian aid on that basis and demand an end to the opium industry that puts food on the table in many of the country’s farming communities—especially not after another catastrophic, failed nation-building attempt by Western nations. Taking a stand for women’s rights means little if it requires condemning them to starvation.

Illicit drugs are never just a law enforcement issue. In Afghanistan’s case, there’s a large humanitarian component that must be addressed in an appropriately coordinated response if the opium ban is to have any chance of success.

Taliban opium ban could lead to increase in organised crime and terrorism

The Taliban’s recent ban on opium cultivation in Afghanistan, a repeat of previous attempts under Taliban rule up to 2001, shows how large-scale illicit drug economies are a fierce vector for organised crime and terrorism. The ban was announced last month in response to international demands for greater drug control in the country. It prohibits the buying, selling and use of a range of illicit drugs as well as alcohol.

In making the announcement, the Taliban leadership asked for the international community’s cooperation to help opium farmers find alternative businesses.

To be remotely effective or sustainable, the strategies the international community employs to reduce this huge economy must address it as a geostrategic security challenge for Afghanistan and the region. It’s not simply a law enforcement issue, however multilateral. Nor is it purely a humanitarian issue, though that’s a key and critically urgent element (and is the subject of a companion piece to be published on this forum).

The short-lived opium ban the Taliban implemented in 2000 was validated by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime after 10 months as ‘successful’ in stopping poppy cultivation in Taliban-controlled areas. The group rescinded the decree in September 2001, probably because of the political cost and economic pressure. This was just before the 9/11 attacks on the US and the military operations in Afghanistan that followed, so the sustainability of the ban was never proven. Cultivation has risen ever since. Earlier bans and reduction attempts in 1997 and 1999 were reportedly completely ineffective.

The Taliban and international community are well aware that the opium harvest provides major funding opportunities to non-state actors who seek to destabilise governments (just as the Taliban did themselves, and never to greater profit than during the US occupation that ended last year). Illicit drugs in general are known to fund organised crime and terrorism. Illicit drug production and trafficking have long been hallmarks of insecure states and conflict zones—examples include Myanmar under the current military junta, Colombia and Afghanistan since the 1980s.

Instability and low levels of governance provide opportunities for organised crime to operate unencumbered by law enforcement, and corrupt regimes and non-state actors can take a fat cut of criminal profits by allowing business to proceed. Afghan opium exports have been at historic highs for five consecutive years, at more than 6,000 tons worth US$1.8–2.7 billion annually. That’s a lot of funding potential for crime and terrorism in the region, for which the US’s 2001 military operation intended to remove the enabling conditions.

The UNODC warns that ‘shrinking the licit economy can make drug markets a larger share of the national economy’ and, without alternative avenues for income generation, stimulate more illegal activities. The withholding of international aid after the Taliban returned to power in 2021 has significantly reduced Afghanistan’s legitimate economy and is projected to shrink the country’s GDP by 20% within the year (perhaps the greatest indictment of the US-led nation-building agenda). From 6–11% of GDP in November 2021, the opium economy rose to 7.5–14% of GDP in 2022.

With the collapse of government and health services in the absence of aid funding, a lot of people are left without jobs or basic services and vulnerable to whatever options remain. The UNODC warns that options abound in the illicit drug economy, particularly in the production of synthetic opioids and methamphetamine. Global and regional demand are high and growing, and significantly higher seizures since 2018 in Afghanistan suggest production is also on the rise (182 kilograms of methamphetamine were seized in 2018 compared with more than 1,200 kilograms in 2019 and 2020).

During the short ban of 2000, the Taliban may have temporarily stemmed the flow of Afghan opium out to the world, but they kept profiting from international markets because the restricted supply caused the farmgate price to soar to 21 times the pre-ban value. Meanwhile, unverified rumours suggested that the group stockpiled large quantities of opium to ensure continuity in funding.

The Taliban’s banning of the crop in response to international demands will have the greatest effect on rural communities, rendering them destitute and inexorably indebted (to opium traders). There is no empirical evidence to suggest that it will reliably or significantly reduce the global heroin supply or curtail the Taliban’s profits from it.

The Taliban calculus on the drug trade has now clearly shifted. In 1996, within two years of its formation, the group was taxing opium farmers and traders for significant profits instead of earnestly enforcing bans. In the more than 20 years since, the Taliban profited from the trade in the fashion typical of non-state groups seeking to destabilise a government—that is, both financially by enabling and taxing activities in areas they controlled and socially by extracting allegiance from the rural communities for whom the government-mandated bans, without alternative income sources, meant abject poverty.

Today, the Taliban are faced with consolidating power as the government of a profoundly failed and increasingly forgotten state. Afghanistan is haemorrhaging the international aid money that provides basic services to its people, who are already experiencing acute food insecurity and a wholesale humanitarian crisis. The Islamic State Khorasan terror group is stepping into the role of the primary non-state actor threatening security and stability in Afghanistan and the near region—a role only recently vacated by the Taliban themselves.

The new ban will likely turn rural communities suffering from income loss away from the source of this pain (the government) and toward its challengers, like IS-K. That’s even more likely given the high volume of indiscriminate violence the Taliban are levying, so far unsuccessfully, to weed out IS-K.

These intersecting threats rhyme with those of the 1990s. It can’t be long before our waning attention to the accelerating humanitarian crisis in Taliban Afghanistan is pulled acutely back to the region by another, consequent security crisis.

As long as Afghanistan is left a failed state, the illicit drug trade will boom, and with it organised crime and terrorist activity.

The narco-terrorist Taliban

The strategic folly of US President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan policy has been laid bare in recent weeks. First, the country came back under the control of the Pakistan-reared Taliban. The announcement of the interim government’s composition then dashed any remaining (naive) hope that this Taliban regime would be different from the one the United States and its allies ousted in 2001. Beyond the cabinet including a who’s who of international terrorism, narcotics kingpins occupy senior positions.

Afghanistan accounts for 85% of the global acreage under opium cultivation, making the Taliban the world’s largest drug cartel. It controls and taxes opioid production, oversees exports, and shields smuggling networks. This is essential to its survival. According to a recent report by the United Nations Security Council monitoring team, the production and trafficking of poppy-based and synthetic drugs remain ‘the Taliban’s largest single source of income’. So reliant is the Taliban on narcotics trafficking that its leaders have at times fought among themselves over revenue-sharing.

The Taliban is hoping to expand its drug income as much as possible. Since its takeover, prices of opium in Afghanistan have more than tripled. In India—which is situated between the world’s two main opium-producing centres, the Pakistan–Afghanistan–Iran ‘golden crescent’ and the Myanmar–Thailand–Laos ‘golden triangle’—seizures of Afghan-origin heroin have increased. As the UN Office on Drugs and Crime warns, the economic crisis Afghanistan currently faces will only increase the appeal of illicit crop cultivation for local farmers.

The problem extends beyond opioids. In recent years, Afghanistan has drastically expanded its production of methamphetamine. The appeal lies in the fact that meth offers producers a higher profit margin than heroin, owing to lower overhead costs and inexpensive ingredients, especially now that its chemical precursor, pseudoephedrine—a common ingredient in cold medications—is being produced locally.

Last year, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction warned that Afghanistan’s meth industry could soon be as large as its heroin industry. While the Taliban was not yet in control of Kabul at the time, it controlled the majority of Afghanistan’s small, clandestine meth labs.

The Taliban uses several smuggling routes to move opiates. It moves output to Western Europe via the Caucasus and the Balkans, and from there all the way to North America. With the help of the Tajikistan-based terrorist group Jamaat Ansarullah, it also uses a northern route to Russia. The southeastern route, which snakes through Pakistan, is enabled by Pakistani security officials, who cooperate with the Taliban and smuggling syndicates, known locally as ‘tanzeems’, in exchange for bribes.

In 2008, a Taliban drug trafficker was recorded boasting that most of his product ended up abroad. ‘Good’, he gloated. ‘May God turn all the infidels into dead corpses. Whether it is by opium or by shooting, this is our common goal.’ With the Taliban channelling profits from drug sales directly into its terror machine, the connection between Islamist violence and drug trafficking could not be starker.

This is not exclusive to the Taliban; Islamist groups like Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda are also linked to drug trafficking. But not all terrorist groups are on board with this approach. As a 2020 UN Security Council report points out, the Islamic State–Khorasan—IS’s Afghan arm—opposes the drug trade.

This is one reason why the outfit is an enemy of the Taliban, despite the two groups’ longstanding personal relationships, common history of struggle and shared belief in violent Islamism. In fact, when IS-K had control of the Afghan border province of Nangarhar, it blocked the Taliban’s trafficking routes into Pakistan. The link was restored only when the US and Afghan government forces smashed the IS-K stronghold there.

This highlights the failure of the US—and the West more broadly—to recognise the complex but clear links between drug trafficking and Islamist terrorism. Had the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan been followed by a US campaign to arrest and prosecute Taliban leaders for their narcotics-trafficking activities in American courts, the group’s appeal among fundamentalist Muslims might have been severely diminished.

Such a plan was proposed in 2012. In a 240-page memo, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and several Justice Department officials recommended prosecuting 26 senior Taliban leaders and allied drug lords for criminal conspiracy. A similar approach worked in Colombia, and helped to force the narcotics-funded Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to make peace with the Colombian government in 2016, after 52 years of guerrilla war.

But successive US presidents refused to use this strategy against the Taliban, which was a strategic mistake with costs that are only beginning to be revealed. By allowing the Taliban to enrich and sustain itself with drug profits during the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the US contributed to its own humiliating defeat at the hands of a narco-terrorist organisation.

It’s not too late for the US to start targeting the Taliban as a drug cartel through its federal courts. After all, Afghan-origin opioids have resulted in high rates of drug addiction and deaths around the world, from the US and Europe to Africa and Asia. And, given Afghanistan’s economic woes, the Taliban has a strong incentive to ramp up production and trafficking.

By highlighting the nexus between Islamist terrorism and the global narcotics trade, US indictments of the Taliban’s drug kingpins would help to build multilateral cooperation to crush the group’s primary source of income, such as by blocking shipments and seizing illicit profits, often parked in banks and real-estate investments abroad.

If the US does not lead an international effort to tackle Afghanistan’s opioid and meth production, the Taliban’s power—and ability to commit atrocities—will only grow and its narco-state will serve as a haven for al-Qaeda and other violent jihadist groups. As matters stand, the world can expect a major surge in international terrorism and drug overdoses in the months and years ahead.

Forgetting the lessons of 9/11 led to US defeat in Afghanistan

The American-led global war on terror, launched 20 years ago after the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States, was already faltering before President Joe Biden took office. Now it may not recover from the blow delivered by Biden’s historic blunder in facilitating the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan. The flag of the world’s deadliest terrorists—responsible for killing more than 2,000 US soldiers since 2001—will fly above Kabul on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

By empowering the Taliban, Biden has empowered all violent Islamist groups, thus making the rebirth of global terror highly likely. And by betraying one ally—the Afghan government—he has made other American allies feel that the US could abandon them, too, when the chips are down.

The greatest jihadist victory in modern times will soon give rise to a terrorist super-state—a haven for transnational fanatics and a magnet for violent Islamists from around the world seeking training to carry out attacks back home. The Taliban’s ‘Islamic emirate’ will lay the foundation for an international caliphate of the type sought by the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Whereas the short-lived ‘caliphate’ of the Islamic State filled a political vacuum in northern Syria before expanding into Iraq, the Taliban’s emirate has resulted from the defeat of the world’s mightiest power. The Taliban’s triumph will thus give the international jihadist movement an unprecedented boost, including for enlisting new recruits, with consequences that will play out for many years. The war on terror, which extends from the Middle East and southern Europe to Africa and Asia, will become increasingly difficult as its fronts multiply.

This comes at a time when America’s accelerating imperial decline is already weakening its capacity to impose its will on other countries, thereby encouraging China’s global expansion. Biden, continuing his predecessor Donald Trump’s policy of military retrenchment, recently committed to ending the US combat mission in Iraq this year.

The US has expended huge resources in its war on terror, waging counterterrorism operations in scores of countries. According to a recent report from Brown University’s Costs of War project, America’s post-9/11 wars, including efforts to secure its homeland, have cost about US$8 trillion and caused an estimated 900,000 deaths, including of civilians and humanitarian aid workers. But they have yielded no enduring results.

The main reason is that America has long forgotten the lessons of 9/11, including the need to shun the path of expediency. As a result, the politicisation of the war on terror has prevented a concerted ideological onslaught on violent jihadism.

Biden, for his part, is drawing specious distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ terrorists, in a bid to obscure both the significance of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and his administration’s outreach to it. For example, he claims that IS-Khorasan terrorists are ‘sworn enemies of the Taliban’ without acknowledging that the Taliban—like al-Qaeda and IS-K—are sworn enemies of the free world. Likewise, Biden was quick to absolve the Taliban of responsibility for the recent terrorist bombing at Kabul airport by pinning the blame on IS-K, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US is ready to work on ‘counterterrorism’ with the new regime in Kabul.

But the Taliban, al-Qaeda and IS-K share a common ideology and commitment to violent jihad, with their members commingling and even moving from one group to another. As the Pentagon has acknowledged, the victorious Taliban have released thousands of IS-K prisoners. And according to a recent United Nations Security Council report, ‘the Taliban and Al-Qaida remain closely aligned’.

Meanwhile, the State Department has sought to spin a myth by claiming that the Taliban and their special forces, the Haqqani Network, ‘are separate entities’. In fact, the Taliban and the Haqqani Network are a wing of Pakistan’s ‘deep state’. The network’s chief, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is a deputy leader of the Taliban. And the arrival in Kabul of the head of Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency even before the Taliban formed their government highlighted that the real victor in Afghanistan is Pakistan, which has virtually gained proxy control of its neighbour.

Yet, underscoring the geopolitics behind the war on terror, the Biden administration is unlikely to punish Pakistan, a ‘major non-NATO ally’, for engineering America’s humiliating rout in Afghanistan. Instead, it is relying on Pakistan and another long-time sponsor of jihadists, Qatar, to establish a relationship with the theocratic dictatorship in Kabul.

The US has come full circle by ceding control of Afghanistan to the same organisation that gave bin Laden the base from which to plot the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks resulted from America’s troubling ties with Islamist groups since the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan used Islam as an ideological tool to encourage armed resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, including the Haqqani Network’s founder, cut their teeth in that CIA-run covert war. Another veteran of that war now heads the Taliban regime—Mohammad Hassan Akhund, a UN-listed terrorist and architect of the 2001 demolition of the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan.

But within a decade of 9/11, the US returned to training jihadists and funnelling lethal arms to them in regime-change wars, such as in Syria and Libya, with the CIA’s US$1 billion secret war to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad resulting in the rise of IS. And it bankrolled Pakistan as it sheltered the Taliban’s command-and-control network.

Forgetting the lessons of 9/11 has effectively derailed the global war on terror. Putting it back on track, though a daunting challenge, is essential if the scourge of violent jihadism is not to become the defining crisis of this century.