Interviewing survivors in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar of an attack on Afghan civilians by U.S. soldier Robert Bales, convicted of killing 16 civilians
The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 was not caused by the withdrawal of a nominal 2,500 U.S. troops and 5,000 NATO troops.
It was the mass evacuation of every embassy in Kabul that caused a panic and hysteria that once ignited spread like wildfire in Kabul.
I am still at a loss to understand the why behind the mass evacuations. For TWO YEARS, Americans, at the highest level, sat at the negotiation table in Doha, Qatar with the same Taliban who took power in Kabul in August 2021.
The man former U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to as Abdul during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris is Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Baradar __ or Abdul as Trump who clearly was on a first name basis called him __ headed the Taliban side and signed the agreement that paved the way for the withdrawal, alongside then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Baradar is currently a deputy prime minister in the current Taliban de facto government in Kabul.
I am not being facetious because the disastrous withdrawal was just that, it was disastrous, for America, but more for Afghans and Afghanistan, and I recognize it was a new U.S. administration, but still that there was no one in the American administration or its intelligence who could reach out to Baradar or other senior Taliban to seek security guarantees seems incomprehensible.
That the U.S. and NATO countries chose not to reach out, that they preferred to run in a hysterical fashion, shuttering their embassies, airlifting their employees, demands an explanation. And before one scoffs at ‘security guarantees from the Taliban’ I would like to repeat the U.S. signed an agreement with the Taliban, the same ones currently in Kabul and the United Nations stayed behind and were unharmed. The U.S. Embassy has not been overrun since the Taliban takeover, nor has any other embassy.
I don’t say that as a nod to the Taliban, but as a fact that only adds to the mystery of why the U.S, and other embassies abandoned Afghanistan with such haste and hysteria that spread to the Afghan population.
Also it bears mentioning that the Taliban, while on the outskirts of Kabul, did NOT enter the capital until after U.S. ally Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who was also the beneficiary of tremendous U.S. largesse, fled with other high ranking Afghans.
The very day that Ghani fled, Afghanistan’s former president Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan peace council, were preparing to go to Doha with a proposal for a peaceful transition, Karzai would recall in an interview a few months after the Taliban takeover. https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-police-middle-east-taliban-ashraf-ghani-438230aa716f175cc35d3506d727f8b3#
In that interview Karzai was adamant that Ghani’s abrupt and secret flight scuttled a last-minute plan focused on the Taliban’s entry. He said that he and Abdullah had been working with the Taliban leadership in Doha on a negotiated agreement to allow the Taliban to enter the capital under controlled conditions.
When US. President Biden in April 2021 announced that troops would be withdrawing he said America was not abandoning Afghans and Afghanistan, yet that is what happened.
The Taliban were not an unknown. They had been in power before. They had sat across the table from high level Americans, from their fellow Afghans. In a number of provinces that fell to the Taliban, the Afghan National Army had simply walked away, some after receiving a stipend from the Taliban to go home. Many soldiers had not received their salaries from the U.S.-backed government for months and resupplies had been slow or non -existent.
The Afghan army’s collapse was as much a reflection of the U.S.-backed government’s weaknesses as the Taliban’s strength.
For many among Afghanistan’s young in the capital Kabul, they knew only stories of the Taliban’s previous rule, some apocryphal told by parents to frighten them into behaving and others true. As one young Afghan who was fleeing told me he knew Taliban from his village but he liked the freedoms he had and he didn’t want to lose them. He wasn’t afraid for his life, but for a life that would be dominated by restrictions, religious dogma and regressive rules, the one he knew the Taliban would bring and did bring.
The evacuation of over 140,000 Afghans stripped Afghanistan of some of its brightest and best educated. Afghanistan is worse for their departure. It is understandable they wanted a better life, some certainly feared retribution from the Taliban, particularly military people, but most were driven by a desire for a better life for themselves but mostly for their children. Still Afghanistan is worse for their departure.
Afghanistan is also worse for the hysterical departure of every embassy. Afghanistan is not only the 140,000 who were evacuated, it is a country of 40 million Afghans and a beautiful country. What of them?
The answer can’t be to evacuate everyone. It has to be to get back to Afghanistan to do as Biden actually promised back in April 2021 to not abandon them . It’s not enough to give humanitarian aid and shelter at embassies in Doha, talking to Afghans who can reach there or former U.S. backed Afghans, who bear heavy responsibility for the disastrous end to America’s longest war.
Isolating the Taliban isn’t hurting the Taliban, it is hurting Afghans.
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