(This diary is composed in part from comments I made in reply to diaries others have written about the situation in Afghanistan, as the US withdraws its military.)
Much of the media coverage and commentary about the rapid advance of the Taliban across Afghanistan, and the sudden dissolution of the Afghan government and military, which had been propped up by the US and NATO over the past two decades, has framed the conversation in terms of the wisdom, or lack thereof, of the US leaving.
Very little attention has been paid to the fact the supposedly democratic government and official military appears to have been little more than a charade:
An Afghan special forces officer stationed in Kandahar who had been assigned to protect a critical border crossing recalled being ordered by a commander to surrender. “We want to fight! If we surrender, the Taliban will kill us,” the special forces officer said.
“Don’t fire a single shot,” the unit’s commander told them as the Taliban swarmed the area, the officer later recounted. The border police surrendered immediately, leaving the special forces unit on its own. A second officer confirmed his colleague’s recollection of the events.
Unwilling to surrender or fight outmatched, the members of the unit put down their weapons, changed into civilian clothing and fled their post.
“I feel ashamed of what I’ve done,” said the first officer. But, he said, if he hadn’t fled, “I would have been sold to the Taliban by my own government.”
From what I’ve read and seen, no coverage has been devoted to the role of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in creating and sustaining the Taliban, with the sole purpose of creating a radical theocratic puppet state in Afghanistan.
The relationship between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban has been thoroughly and publicly documented since it first materialized more than two decades ago. It is not secret or mysterious:
Pakistan chose to employ the Taliban and other insurgent groups as proxies against Afghanistan as an “economy of force” effort. Without having to commit the bulk of its conventional force to dealing with Afghanistan, which would have left the Kashmiri and shared borders with India weakened, the Pakistanis instead “outsourced” the bulk of its efforts vis-à-vis Afghanistan to the Taliban. The Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Human Rights Watch reported in 2000:
“Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting [in Afghanistan], Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban's virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and ... directly providing combat support.”[8]...
Fearing that a unified and powerful Afghanistan would eventually seek resolution of the Pashtunistan “question” through force of arms, the ISI provided funding and training to create the first Taliban formations in late 1992 to serve as a proxy force for the destabilization and conquest of Afghanistan. Consistent with Phase 2 (Initial Contact) of the doctrinal UW model, the ISI approached Mullah Omar sometime in 1991 or early 1992 to offer its services for the achievement of the Taliban’s goals in Afghanistan. Making initial contact with the Taliban was easy for the CAD/ISI, since thousands of adherents remained in Pakistan around Quetta where they continued to receive radical Islamist instruction at the ISI-funded Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam madrassas. Mullah Omar maintained his rear headquarters in Quetta from which he regularly traveled back and forth to Kandahar and where he allegedly met with the ISI several times.[25] As the Taliban was essentially a CAD/ISI creation, it did not take long to coordinate agreements between the ISI and the Taliban to achieve the Pakistani objective of toppling the troublesome Afghan transitional government through a UW campaign using the Taliban as a proxy force. The ISI offered the Taliban the training and equipment it desperately needed to achieve its goal of establishing an Islamist Caliphate in Afghanistan, and all that the ISI asked in return were friendly relations and support of Pakistani regional objectives once the Taliban was in power.
Saudis Bankroll Taliban, Even as King Officially Supports Afghan Government
Dec. 6, 2016
Fifteen years, half a trillion dollars and 150,000 lives since going to war, the United States is trying to extricate itself from Afghanistan. Afghans are being left to fight their own fight. A surging Taliban insurgency, meanwhile, is flush with a new inflow of money.
With their nation’s future at stake, Afghan leaders have renewed a plea to one power that may hold the key to whether their country can cling to democracy or succumbs to the Taliban. But that power is not the United States.
It is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is critical because of its unique position in the Afghan conflict: It is on both sides.
A longtime ally of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has backed Islamabad’s promotion of the Taliban. Over the years, wealthy Saudi sheikhs and rich philanthropists have also stoked the war by privately financing the insurgents…
The contradictions are hardly accidental. Rather, they balance conflicting needs within the kingdom, pursued through both official policy and private initiative.
The dual tracks allow Saudi officials plausibly to deny official support for the Taliban, even as they have turned a blind eye to private funding of the Taliban and other hard-line Sunni groups.
Fighting proxy wars on behalf of benefactors takes money, money the Taliban does not have the capacity to generate on its own:
...the Taliban receives significant funds from Pakistan, Iran, and several Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
A UN Security Council report from May 2018 said the “Gulf region also remains important to the Taliban as a location where drug revenue can be laundered” through a “network of individuals, companies, mosques and madrasas, [and] various charitable foundations.”
Foreign funding provides a significant proportion of the Taliban's revenue and could be “as much as $500 million a year,” the BBC reported in 2018. It cited a 2008 “classified CIA report” as saying the Taliban received $106 million from foreign sources, “in particular from the Gulf States.”
There is one reason the Taliban exists:
View: Afghanistan is just a symptom. The real problem is Pakistan
Shreyas D. Deshmukh and Sanjay Pulipaka/ Economic Times
July 15, 2021
Pakistan’s political and military leadership vehemently denies supporting the Taliban. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the Taliban found refuge in Pakistan for over two decades. In fact, in 2016, Sartaj Aziz, then Prime Minister’s Adviser on Foreign Affairs, accepted that Pakistan hosted the Taliban leadership. If Pakistan could embrace the Taliban even in the presence of the western coalition forces, to assume that Pakistan will suddenly maintain distance from the Taliban after the US withdrawal…
Given the increased radicalisation in Pakistan society, the Taliban continues to get sympathy from large segments of Pakistani society. The Taliban has been asserting greater control on natural resources and is collecting taxes from traders in the border towns in the recent past. The Taliban also funds its operations through narcotics business. Despite massive counter-narcotic efforts by the US, costing almost $ 9 billion, opium production peaked at 6,300 tons in 2020.
Some Afghans Blame Neighboring Pakistan for Taliban Gains
As the Taliban swiftly capture territory in Afghanistan, many Afghans blame Pakistan for the insurgents’ success.
August 12, 2021
As the Taliban swiftly capture territory in Afghanistan, many Afghans blame Pakistan for the insurgents’ success, pointing to their use of Pakistani territory in multiple ways. Pressure is mounting on Islamabad, which initially brought the Taliban to the negotiating table, to get them to stop the onslaught and go back to talks.
While analysts say Pakistan’s leverage is often overstated, it does permit the Taliban leadership on its territory and its wounded warriors receive treatment in Pakistani hospitals. Their children are in school in Pakistan and some among them own property. Some among Pakistan’s politicians have rebranded the insurgents as “the new, civilized Taliban.”
Ismail Khan, a powerful U.S.-allied warlord, who is trying to defend his territory of Herat in western Afghanistan from a Taliban onslaught, told local media recently the war raging in his homeland was the fault of Pakistan.
“I can say openly to Afghans that this war, it isn’t between Taliban and the Afghan Government. It is Pakistan’s war against the Afghan nation,” he said. “The Taliban are their resource and are working as a servant.”
I am at a loss for the lack of coverage of these relationships between the Taliban and this network of states, but I am completely unable to fathom why anyone in the US or NATO would view either Pakistan Saudi Arabia as allies in the middle east, or partners in efforts to combat terrorism:
Yesterday, almost 21 years since the fall of the Taliban in September of 2001, the world watched in horror as the Taliban took the Presidential Palace in Kabul – the last symbol of control held by the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The news cycle has been filled with stories asking how and whether the Taliban has changed since 2001, how they have taken control so quickly, and what is next for Afghanistan and its people.
What the simplistic debate over the exit of the United States and international armed forces misses is just how cynical a picture these actions paint of global counterterrorism mechanisms and their commitments to human rights and rule of law when it matters most. Counterterrorism is meaningless when we abandon the Afghan people to their fate under the rule of a terrorist organization. As the Security Council hosts another emergency meeting this morning, world leaders should have no illusions about what the abandonment of the Afghan people involves: a terrorist organization is in the process of taking over a democratic state.
The Taliban is a United Nations designated terrorist group. In 1999, the Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, passed resolution 1267, designating the Taliban as a terrorist organization. This came largely because of its refusal to transfer Osama Bin Laden and his associates to the United States after they were indicted for the 1998 terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. That resolution, which was adopted unanimously, reiterated, in the most forceful of terms, the Security Council’s “deep concern over the continuing violations of international humanitarian law and of human rights, particularly discrimination against women and girls,” and strongly condemned “the continued use of Afghan Territory, especially areas controlled by the Taliban, for the sheltering and training of terrorists, and planning of terrorist acts.”
Dkos member Thutmose V wrote an excellent diary about the US involvement in Afghanistan, and posed an important question:
A question we have to answer is whether the United States should ever get involved in a regional conflict for humanitarian reasons.
This was my reply:
Framed this way, the answer is unequivocally yes.
That is, should we use military force to intervene in an ongoing genocide, for example. The question could be framed conversely- When is it morally acceptable to refrain from military intervention to prevent or cease genocide?
My sense of this is shaped by my identity as a Jew of Russian and Romanian descent. Which means, in part, that I am not a pacifist. There are groups and governments that use violence to promote various ends— political, economic, cultural (like so-called ethnic cleansing), and usually these are intertwined motives.
The groups and governments that use violence for these purposes are commonly not swayed by diplomacy and appeals to morality. There are times when they are only constrained by military force. Not simply the threat of force, but the use of force.
Now, the questions that follow from this are-
a) What humanitarian purposes justify the use of military force?
b) Who decides?
I don’t have clear answers to either question, and I suspect it is always a case by case decision, maybe that’s how it always should be.
A little additional disclosure and context for my views-
My son is serving in the Army, currently stationed in the Republic of Korea. He serves alongside NATO partners, and members of the ROK armed services. While many South Koreans express misgivings about the US military presence, many also voice gratitude, and see it as essential.
Imagine what would happen to the Republic of Korea, Japan and Taiwan if the US and NATO removed all military presence from East Asia. And we have had a massive military presence there for over seventy years.
Why would anyone think it would be possible to establish a stable, democratic government in Afghanistan that would withstand the efforts of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to install the Taliban in only twenty years? Or fifty?