When the Taliban entered Kunduz, the first provincial capital they had taken in 14 years of war, Ershad Alijani had to lie low. He had to hide. This in addition to reporting to us on what was happening there.
Word is they’re looking for anyone belonging to the police or the army, or working with international organizations. These people are trying to hide. The Taliban don’t seem to be targeting anyone else; it seems they’re trying to behave well with ordinary citizens.
Inside Kunduz: 'The Taliban have taken my city', Ershad Alijani and Gaelle Faure, France24
Word was, the Taliban were looking for anyone belonging to the security forces, and for anyone working with international organizations. And Alijani, an Iranian journalist working for French news organizations, might be considered the second.
The Taliban had been trying to take Kunduz since spring. The districts surrounding the city have seen widespread fighting all year. Still, the Taliban success in taking the city is surprising.
Still, nobody seems to have expected this!
Why Kunduz?
Why had the Taliban not first taken Kandahar their birthplace? Why not Jalalabad first, or Gardez?
Why not Tarinkot? Matiullah Khan had been assassinated in March. His replacement was assassinated shortly after. Tarinkot is remote and hard to defend. Much of the population there would be hardly unsympathetic to Taliban views of justice. Matiullah Khan would be a symbol of why.
He became a classic symbol of the American-backed strongman turned government official, a hallmark of the long war in Afghanistan. Like his counterpart in Kandahar Province, Lt. Gen. Abdul Raziq, who is widely accused of human rights abuses and running illicit businesses, Mr. Khan enjoyed the support of coalition military officials, who found him an indispensable ally in their fight against the Taliban.
“He was representative of a new breed of warlords,” said Anand Gopal, the author of the book “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.” “These are people entirely created by the international presence.”
Powerful Afghan Police Chief Killed in Kabul, Azam Ahmed, New York Times
Kunduz has a long history of complex factional fighting in the civil war. Of cycles of atrocity and counter-atrocity between many groups. Atrocity by and atrocity against Taliban, Jamiat, Hezb-i Islami, Jombesh, Ittihad, and Wahdat, to name some of the major ones.
Reporting in recent years describes Kunduz province as a place controlled by a bewildering array of armed gangs. Accounts of the abusiveness of the gangs accumulate year after year. The powerful commanders of these gangs, government authorities have feared to touch.
As a result, over the past year, the Taliban have managed to put some of their imams in Kunduz’s mosques, as well as appoint judges that were able to solve some long-festering cases against powerful locals that the authorities had previously feared to touch. This gained them a fair amount of popularity among the local population. Still, nobody seems to have expected this!
Inside Kunduz: 'The Taliban have taken my city', Ershad Alijani and Gaelle Faure, France24
Many of these commanders have a history of abuse and atrocity in the war, going back long before the United States arrived.
But the United States has managed to bring back to power and make very wealthy in Afghanistan, many of the most hated and most criminal men in the country.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan has a post, following the recent New York Times story that United States troops have been instructed to ignore the rape of Afghan children and other crime by our warlord allies. They point to what they had written, very early in the war.
After the Taliban fled Kabul and U.S.-backed warlords called the Northern Alliance (NA) entered the capital, RAWA wrote, “The retreat of the terrorist Taliban from Kabul is a positive development, but entering of the rapist and looter NA in the city is nothing but a [sic] dreadful and shocking news for about 2 million residents of Kabul.”
Murder, Mayhem and Rape in Afghanistan: Made in the U.S.A., Sonali Kolhatkar, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan
RAWA and many other groups and individuals have long been warning about this. But the warnings have largely been ignored.
But RAWA’s warnings fell on deaf ears, because defeating the Taliban outweighed the brutality of our warlord allies. Over the years, RAWA and many other groups and individuals have warned against allying with the criminal warlords, but the U.S. has ignored them.
The child rape story should not surprise us.
Washington Post highlights the history of atrocity and abuse in the long civil war in Kunduz, and the factional fighting.
As noted in this history by the Afghan Analysts Network, Kunduz city and the surrounding province by the same name was the frequent site of atrocities, looting and betrayal between 1992 and 2001, as the Taliban seized control of much of Afghanistan. Kunduz was encircled by warring factions five times in that period, changing hands five times, according to the analyst network. The province became a major stronghold of the Taliban and a training site for some elements of al-Qaeda.
Both the Northern Alliance and the Taliban behaved brutally as the alliance wrested control away in November 2001.
The bloody history of Kunduz, from Afghanistan’s ‘Convoy of Death’ to now, Dan Lamothe, Washington Post
They bring up the Dasht-i-Leili massacre of Taliban, by Junbish-i Milli forces under General Dostum, who was working in close cooperation with United States Special Forces, in late 2001.
And that’s to say nothing of the “Convoy of Death,” in which hundreds of Taliban fighters were allegedly killed after being captured in the 2002 [2001] rout in Kunduz. The U.S. group Physicians for Human Rights reported that it found about 3,000 Taliban fighters in the nearby Sheberghan prison, designed to hold about 800. Human rights workers were told repeatedly that some prisoners suffocated on the way there after being stuffed into sealed cargo containers. The practice was eventually detailed in a documentary.
General Dostum is the current First Vice President of Afghanistan. Empowering the warlords means up to that level. A previous First Vice President had been Mohammed Fahim.
Civilian casualties in the war have been steadily rising.
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are at a high, a United Nations report says, in a grim reminder that fighting in the country is as intense as it has ever been since the U.S.-led invasion of 2001.
Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan Reach Record High, Margherita Stancati, Wall Street Journal
Casualty rates in the government security forces are unsustainable, especially in the exposed and lightly armed police.
And after a casualty rate last year that the previous American commander called unsustainable, the numbers this year are even worse: up more than 50 percent compared with the first six months of 2014. About 4,100 Afghan soldiers and police officers have been killed and about 7,800 wounded, according to statistics provided by an official with the American-led coalition here.
Afghan Security Forces Struggle Just to Maintain Stalemate, Joseph Goldstein, New York Times
The United States has spent some trillion dollars in Afghanistan. The United Nations recently reported on the number of Afghans at or near starvation, and of the millions resorting to such things as begging to be able to eat.
According to a report released Friday by the U.N. and its partner agencies, 5.9 percent of Afghanistan's population -- 1.57 million people -- is now facing severe food insecurity, marking an increase of over 317,000 people over the past year. According to the U.N., food insecurity is defined as the lack of “physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”
By this definition, an additional 7.3 million people -- about one in four Afghans -- are facing moderate food insecurity.
Afghanistan: UN Records Rise In Severe Food Insecurity, Calls For Emergency Livelihood Support, Avaneesh Pandey, International Business Times
Newspapers have been reporting on
the lines, of thousands, outside the Kabul passport office every day, and that enough passports for those otherwise able to flee the country
cannot be printed.
Reading the news about Afghanistan can get pretty grim.
Newspapers will express an impatience in retaking Kunduz. Absurdly-set standards will then be said to have failed.
A day after Afghan government forces ceded control of the Kunduz provincial capital to the Taliban within a few hours, the promised counterattack also appeared to be falling apart
Afghan Crisis Grows as Push to Retake Kunduz Falters, Mujib Mashal, New York Times
The counteroffensive, however, did not appear to be going as well as hoped.
U.S. military launches airstrike on Kunduz after Taliban assault on the key city, Tim Craig and Brian Murphy, Washington Post
Ashraf Ghani has been given a divided and ineffective form and structure of government, by the United States. His setbacks and failures will then be pointed out here.
Kunduz’s fall is a major setback to Ghani’s attempt to bring order to Afghanistan, which has been wracked by decades of conflict. Violence has steadily increased since the departure of U.S. and NATO troops last year, and Afghan security forces have been unable to fill the gap.
The Battle for Kunduz, Krishnadev Calamur, Atlantic
The failures should not really be surprising. The dilemma has been present ever since the ineffective form of government was imposed. It was one strong addition to an already intractable set of problems, or an additional hurdle to jump in solving them.
I do not know why Kunduz.
Why Kunduz, a place of a wild array of abusive armed groups, some more and some less criminal, some more and some less legal, some pro government, some against, and some hard to clearly say, has been the first provincial capital to fall to anti-government forces. Why the general area of the Dasht-i-Leili massacre of Taliban, by the current First Vice President of Afghanistan, should be the first to fall to Taliban forces. Why Kunduz, long beset by factional war, should have factional forces now proving ineffective in keeping or regaining the city.
But this has all certainly been a long time coming.