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The Taliban have taken military control, but Afghanistan's future is cloudy. Assumption that the Taliban can, by itself, effectively govern a nation divided by conflicting tribal loyalties and a partially reconstituted population, with a sharply contrary mindset, needs more validation. Rather than facts, agendas have delegated responsibility for the debacle in Afghanistan. Analysis demonstrates that United States President Joe Biden is not responsible for the airport evacuation disaster or for the Taliban rapid advance to power and entrance into Kabul. Reports from Afghanistan continue to be guided by ideology and supposition and not by substantiated information.
Perspectives
One perspective from available information has the United States government not
having failed the Afghanistan government and its people; it has the Afghanistan
government having failed the U.S. government and its own people. The Taliban
did not take over the entire country; the Afghan government and its military
forces left a vacuum that the Taliban filled
Labeled as a government, the Afghan administration was a corrupt enterprise that existed from U.S. economic and muscle support. When support evaporated, the Afghan enterprise, realizing it could no longer continue to run the country for its own profit and that its personnel may have to work for a living, saw no reason to remain in place. Following a standard Afghanistan civil war policy, where one side capitulates to the other side with promises of safe passage (Click Here), national forces made arrangements and allowed the Taliban to take command. The military, which posed as an operational force, took the largesse from the U.S. government, lived freely, without working and without reporting for formal duty, agreed to give their armaments to the Taliban, and stayed home when their pockets became bare. .
The New York Times, December 2, 2010, related the corruption.
In one astonishing incident in October 2009 the then vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52 million in cash, according to one diplomatic report.
A cable, sent by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry detailed a colossal scale of capital flight from Afghanistan -- often with the cash simply carried out on flights from Kabul to the UAE. "Vast amounts of cash come and go from the country on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. Before the 20 August 2009 [presidential] election, $600 million in banking system withdrawals were reported; however in recent months some $200 million."
Couriers are said to usually carry the money on Pamir Airlines, which is jointly owned by Kabul Bank and influential Afghans such as Mahmood Karzai, one of the president's (at that time) brothers, and Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik warlord who was Hamid Karzai's vice-presidential running mate in the August 2009 election
Other high-profile Afghans involved in amassing extraordinary wealth in Dubai include Sher Khan Farnood, the chairman of Kabul Bank who was disgraced this summer after corrupt loans at the bank almost brought down Afghanistan's fragile financial system. The document notes that Farnood - an enthusiast for high-stakes international poker tournaments - was said to own 39 properties on the Palm Jumeirah, a luxury man-made peninsula in Dubai."
Germany's Spiegel Online, January 19, 2009 reports -- "Need a driver's license in Kabul? $180 will get you one within hours and $60,000 will get you out of jail."
From Spiegel International, September 1, 2010:
A UN study shows that bribery is equal to a quarter of the Afghan GDP. "59 percent of Afghanistan citizens point to corruption as the greatest problem facing the country -- that ranks the problem even higher than security (54 percent) and unemployment (chosen by 52 percent of those polled). The study, released on Tuesday, was put together by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and includes the responses of 7,600 people from 1,600 villages questioned between August and October of last year."
Jane Ferguson, Pulitzer Center grantee, in an article, The Many Lessons, Unheeded, Along the Way, substantiated the military ineffectiveness.
In the summer of 2004, traveling through Afghanistan, I had the unusual experience of mid-level U.S. soldiers and aid workers offering to speak on the record about the egregious gap between the rosy official pronouncements of progress and the realities, as they saw them. They showed me the empty, unused health clinics and schools we had built. They shared stories of the Afghan soldiers and police who were deserting almost as fast as we trained them.
How could a non-mechanized force of an estimated 60,000 core fighters (Click Here) spread throughout large-sized Afghanistan, lacking tank brigades, helicopters, an air force, artillery, and a strong central command, easily penetrate urban defenses of supposedly well equipped forces. The June 2014 events in Iraq, when a small force of ISIS comfortably overcame a supposedly well equipped and well trained Iraqi military and captured Mosul, answers the question; they could if the well-equipped urban forces were non-existent or had no reason to fight.
President Biden's August 31 commitment to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, followed an agreement made by his predecessor, Donald Trump, and allowed sufficient time to evacuate U.S. and other personnel from Kabul. From the time that President Trump signed the agreement to withdraw, all Americans had opportunities to leave Afghanistan and all Afghanis had opportunities to petition for assistance to leave Afghanistan. If administrations arbitrarily urged or forced people to leave, the actions would have indicated that the U.S. administration expected the Taliban to win, which would have demoralized the Afghan national army and created a panic and flood of people desiring to immediately leave. An emergency arose when the Afghan national forces suddenly collapsed and Afghanistan President, Ashraf Ghani, secretly left Kabul and signaled to all government employees that it was time to leave. "President Ghani promised via a television address to take responsibility for the security of the people of Kabul and meet anyone disturbing the law and order with full force. But late on Sunday, Afghan officials told news agencies that he fled the country for Tajikistan as the Taliban was on the verge of capturing power."
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