Taliban advances test Afghan forces’ morale as the US leaves
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6 min read . Updated: 21 Jun 2021, 10:20 PM IST - Districts fall, often without a fight, as insurgents negotiate surrender deals
Every few hours this weekend, the Taliban released videos of triumphant insurgents inspecting yet another Afghan district headquarters that had been lost in battle by government forces or surrendered without a fight.
Some of these districts, a unit equivalent to American counties, are too remote or sparsely populated to warrant defending as the overstretched Afghan military, shorn of vital U.S. air support, refocuses on protecting the country’s major population centers.
Trained and equipped by the U.S. and Western allies for nearly two decades, the Afghan security forces, numbering roughly 260,000 men, should be strong enough to prevent the Taliban from seizing power in the immediate aftermath of the American military withdrawal that is nearing completion.
Yet, the seemingly never-ending succession of battlefield setbacks that suddenly accelerated this weekend is beginning to create a perception of inevitability about a Taliban takeover. It is a perception that, unless quickly reversed, risks snowballing into a self-fulfilling prophecy, Afghan officials warn.
Nearly two dozen of Afghanistan’s 387 districts were taken over by the Taliban, mostly in northern Afghanistan, on Saturday and Sunday, adding to some 30 others seized by the insurgents across the country since early May, according to local reports. The Taliban have also reached the outskirts of several provincial capitals.
Many of these districts have surrendered to the Taliban as a result of negotiations that involved local power-brokers and military commanders who figured they would get a better deal if they moved early. On some occasions, the Taliban even gave Afghan soldiers and policemen, many of whom have been unpaid for months, pocket money for a safe journey home.
This sense of crumbling morale has been compounded by the lack of clear military strategy in Kabul. It was only this Saturday that President Ashraf Ghani appointed a new defense minister, veteran commander Gen. Bismillah Khan, to replace a predecessor who had been convalescing in Abu Dhabi for several months. Mr. Ghani also named a new army chief of staff, Gen. Wali Ahmadzai, and a new interior minister, Gen. Abdul Sattar Mirzakwal, to oversee the police forces.
“We will not surrender to terrorists. We will not surrender to ominous plans," Mr. Ghani, who is scheduled to meet President Biden at the White House on Friday, said at a Saturday ceremony introducing the new ministers.
Fears of such a surrender to the Taliban dominated last week’s meeting between young Afghan activists and the country’s chief peace negotiator, Abdullah Abdullah, who is also traveling to Washington to meet Mr. Biden.
One woman from the eastern Ghazni province recounted how she recently traveled to her home district, passing government checkpoints, just to find abandoned outposts and Taliban patrols on the way back. Dr. Abdullah, whose alliance accounts for half the Afghan government under a power-sharing deal with Mr. Ghani, was peppered with questions about whether some secret agreement exists to hand over district after district to the Taliban.
“I told categorically, with 1,000% assurance, no, that is not the plan, but the fact that people are thinking this way, this in itself gives you the picture," Dr. Abdullah said in an interview after the meeting. “Perhaps the same thing goes in the mind of those soldiers who are defending the country. That in itself has consequences."
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Fazel Fazly, the director-general of Mr. Ghani’s presidential administration, said that he expected the Taliban offensive to intensify in coming weeks even as the insurgents and the government pursue U.S.-sponsored peace talks in Doha, Qatar. With Pakistani madrassas about to go on holiday, sending a wave of fresh recruits to the Taliban, July to September are likely to be the deadliest months, he said.
“We don’t expect any substantive talks in Doha or anywhere else vis-à-vis peace negotiations in the next five to six months. Both Pakistan and the Taliban want to test the [Afghan security forces] first and to hold some ground—more populated areas plus provincial capitals," Mr. Fazly said. “We have to defend ourselves, we may lose some ground in certain areas, but that is now fully managed by the Afghan government."
The government said last week that it will arrest local elders and politicians who attempt to mediate surrender deals between the Taliban and security forces. Yet, such warnings seem to have little effect on the ground. In the northern province of Takhar, where seven of 16 districts fell to the Taliban in recent days, local elders mediated the surrender of the Baharak district on Friday.
While the Taliban executed the district head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate for Security, they allowed 78 soldiers to leave as long as they abandoned their weapons, said Salahuddin Borhani, a member of the Takhar provincial council. A video released by the Taliban showed several American-supplied Humvees, dozens of assault rifles and three heavy machine guns left behind. In other Afghan districts captured in recent days, abandoned weapons included mortars and at least one howitzer artillery piece.
“How can a government that is unable to support its own soldiers and lets a district fall under Taliban control going to arrest the elders who live there?" Mr. Borhani said. The soldiers at Baharak fought for three days and surrendered only after they began to run out of ammunition and realized no help was forthcoming, he added. “If the government cannot support their forces through air or ground, the rest of soldiers see this, and it breaks their morale: they understand that if they have no backup, the result of their fighting will be death."
In the northern province of Faryab, some 24 members of Afghanistan’s highly trained commando forces were killed in a Taliban ambush last week, sending shock waves through the country. As of Sunday night, the Taliban were on the verge of entering the provincial capital, Maimana. “The situation is dire," said Rahmatullah Turkestani, who heads an association of political activists in Maimana. “It is obvious that the government is unable to fight without American and NATO support."
To be sure, the Afghan government has recaptured some of the lost districts. And, at this stage of the war, the Taliban don’t often attempt to hold these bases for long. “The Taliban are overrunning the districts, blowing up the buildings, and capturing prisoners, but they are not there to deliver governance. For them it is almost more of a PR exercise than holding the geography," said Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense minister who heads the Institute of War and Peace Studies in Kabul.
As far as the Afghan government is concerned, success by the end of the fighting season would be to prevent the Taliban from holding any of the nation’s 33 provincial capitals, Mr. Fazly said. A turning point, he added, would be a so-called “Jalalabad moment," a reference to the 1989 mujahedeen assault on the eastern Afghan city that ended up in a major rout for the insurgents and proved that Afghan government troops could remain viable even after the Soviet withdrawal.
When the government of Soviet-installed President Mohammed Najibullah, whose portraits are ubiquitous on Kabul billboards and car hoods these days, fell three years later, it wasn’t because it was defeated militarily but because it fractured from within, pointed out Rahmatullah Nabil, who headed the NDS spy agency until 2015. The current Afghan government faces a similar problem, he warned.
“Right now, the politicians are divided. And because of that, we are losing momentum on the military plane," Mr. Nabil said. “The Taliban will not push directly to take over. First, they will work to have a collapse from inside, and they have already made some friends among our politicians. They are approaching almost everyone."
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text
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