Collusion between high-level Afghan officials and the Taliban (banned in Central Asia and considered terrorist) was a major factor behind the Taliban’s swift victory, Tajik political scientist Parviz Mullojanov believes. However, on the whole, the fall of the regime in Kabul was the result of the failure of the US and Afghan government policies that they had been pursuing for the past twenty years.
The rapid and successful rise to power of the Taliban (banned in Central Asian countries and recognized as terrorist) has caused serious concern in the international community at large, as well as among Afghanistan’s neighbors in the region. And perhaps the most frequently asked questions in this regard relate to those factors and reasons that led to such rapid military and political success of the Taliban. How is it that the Afghan army and police, who have spent tens of billions of dollars on equipment and training, ceded the country to the Taliban almost without resistance? Why did the population at large not stand up to the government, while most provinces and towns of the country meekly ceded control to the Taliban? Why could neither the government, nor the opposition and civil society in the country mobilize and organize even a semblance of defense against the Taliban’s path to power?
To answer these questions, let us take a closer look at what the mechanism for transferring power in the provinces and cities really looked like. We will also briefly review the key events and trends that have occurred in Afghanistan over the past twenty years-that is, during the period of NATO and U.S. presence in the country.
Mechanism of seizure of power
With each passing day there is an increasing flow of information from Afghanistan that shows a well prepared and planned scenario for the transfer of power to the Taliban. In other words, there is already good reason to believe that the Taliban gained control of the country through an arrangement between parts of the Afghan government and military commanders on the one hand and the Taliban on the other.
More broadly, it was a series of agreements between the U.S. and Pakistan that created an opportunity to legitimize the Taliban and their subsequent rise to power through the so-called “peace process. The deal provided for the formation of a coalition government, in which representatives of both the Afghan government and the Taliban were present on more or less equal terms. Thus, if successful, the U.S. would have an opportunity to create a picture of a successful settlement of the conflict and leave Afghanistan “without losing face,” and Pakistan had a real opportunity to bring to power the Taliban movement it backed.
In addition, the coalition government format would allow the U.S. to retain at least part of the pro-Western establishment in power and thus retain control of the political processes in Afghanistan. In order to start the process of negotiations, the U.S. made a number of serious concessions – released from prison five prominent Taliban leaders, led by one of the movement’s founders, Mullo Barodar, and agreed to direct negotiations with the Taliban, without the participation of representatives of the Afghan government.
The months-long talks in Doha, Qatar, ended on February 29, 2020, with the conclusion of a peace treaty between the United States and the Afghan Taliban. The treaty called for the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, a ban on al-Qaeda activities in Taliban-controlled areas, a cessation of hostilities and the beginning of negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
The agreement described in detail the mechanism and schedule for the withdrawal of American troops in several stages by September 11, 2021. At the same time, the U.S.-Taliban negotiations did not decide how a coalition government would be formed. It was decided to leave this range of issues to intra-Afghan negotiations which were supposed to start in March 2011. However, these talks never started; a government delegation flew to Doha several times, but the Taliban leadership delayed their start on various pretexts.
As a result, the peace deal was in fact unilaterally implemented only by the U.S., which withdrew its troops according to an agreed schedule. But since formal negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban practically broke down, the whole further process of transition of power was decided through behind-the-scenes agreements between part of the Afghan establishment and the Taliban leadership. It was these informal arrangements that appear to have predetermined the following mechanism for the Taliban to come to power:
First, at the highest political level, there was direct sabotage by the Afghan leadership of the entire system for managing and coordinating resistance to the Taliban formations. As it turns out today, key political and military officials of the Afghan government were involved to varying degrees in collusion with the Taliban. Most likely, the sabotage did not begin today or even yesterday. For example, parliamentarians in northern Badakhshan province have accused the Afghan government of preventing the destruction of Taliban bases in that province for years.
There is also evidence that during the last offensive there were direct instructions from Kabul to local officials and the military not to resist and surrender to the Taliban. For example, there is evidence of such orders to resistance leaders in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif from a number of senior Kabul officials. Also from Afghan sources we know that official Kabul sabotaged the supply of arms and ammunition to military garrisons, the payment of salaries to military personnel, and gave direct orders to surrender military facilities.
Second, the Afghan leadership did everything possible to disrupt the mobilization and arming of the people’s militia (basij) in the provinces and cities of the country. The government dragged its feet on creating the militia to the last; only in late July and early August, when the situation on the fronts became catastrophic, did the Afghan government finally call on the population to enlist in the militia. Despite this, sabotage continued: for example, eyewitness accounts show that when the Shiberghan militia ran out of ammunition, the local garrison refused to help them, citing instructions from above. Also in a recent interview, Nur Muhammad Ato, former governor of Balkh and head of the Mazar-e-Sharif militia, said that in two months of heavy fighting his militia received only 300 old M-16 rifles from the military, and that without any ammunition – and this despite the fact that the local garrison depots were overflowing with weapons and ammunition. He also spoke of sabotage by local officials and the military, phone calls urging them to stop resisting from higher ranks, behind-the-scenes collusion between the Mazar-e-Sharif military garrison command and the Taliban, and so on. In Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, part of the collusion between local military and civilian authorities and the Taliban was the capture of resistance leaders. As a result, Ismail Khan, the leader of the militia in Herat, was arrested during a meeting with the governor and the military command; in Mazar-e-Sharif such a scenario was avoided by chance.
Third, in a significant number of cases, local Afghan authorities encouraged the surrender of settlements by mediating between Taliban and community elders. Thus, the vast majority of districts and towns came under Taliban control on the basis of agreements between local informal leaders (warlords, clergy, community leaders) and Taliban commanders. The surrender agreements were based on the formula “loyalty and submission in exchange for security guarantees and the inviolability of property. Similar agreements were concluded with commanders of military garrisons and heads of local administrations. In the Afghan press today there is also a lot of evidence and facts about the significant sums allegedly paid to heads of administrations and military officials for the surrender of military and civilian facilities. For example, such accusations were made against the governor of Paktia province, who was arrested immediately after the fall of the province and his flight to Kabul.
On the other hand, in most cases, the population and local communities exerted direct pressure on the security forces, forcing them to prevent military action and destruction in towns and villages. As a result of such pressure, the security forces and militias in Badakhshan, Paktiya, Tokhar, Uruzgan and so on, were forced to surrender to the enemy or leave the settlements without a fight.
It is still difficult to say to what extent corruption and big politics were involved in the organization of government sabotage. It is most likely that a number of factors played a role here: political considerations, conspiracy behind the scenes, direct corruption of officials, management crises, blackmail (there is evidence of threats to the families of Afghan pilots and officers), and so on.
And yet, the existence of a backroom collusion between the top Afghan government and the Taliban seems to be the main factor that accounted for the Taliban’s victory. Incidentally, one indirect evidence of this collusion is the fact that the main figures in Afghan politics today feel quite comfortable under the new government. There is no evidence of reprisals against top officials – in contrast to the increasing flow of facts about the persecution and extrajudicial executions of journalists and civil activists. On the contrary, former President Karzai and his family are readily accepted in Kabul, President Ashraf Ghani’s brother has openly joined the Taliban; Prime Minister Abdullo Abdullo has mediated with anti-Taliban resistance forces on behalf of the Taliban, persuading them to agree to a peace deal.
Causes and Factors
It should be stressed that a backroom deal by itself could not have led to such a rapid fall of the pro-American regime in Afghanistan. The agreements to surrender power are the result of a massive political crisis in the country, caused by a number of objective factors.
The main factor is the complete failure of the American strategy in Afghanistan on four key fronts: 1) nation-building 2) resolving the Afghan crisis); 3) implementing socio-economic and political transformation; and 4) ideology and propaganda. Let us examine each of these areas separately:
In the area of nation-building, the U.S. and NATO initially had an overly simplistic view of the situation in Afghanistan and, therefore, were simply not prepared for the need to untangle the complex knot of internal Afghan contradictions and problems. The fact is that the key dilemma of political discord in the country is the problem of power. The key question is what the future Afghanistan should be: a Pashtun nation-state, as it has been since its inception, or a federal entity where northern minorities have at least proportionate access to resources and power.
Since the Soviet intervention, the traditional, centuries-old political and ethnic balance in the country has been fundamentally disrupted- during the 1980s and 1990s, the northern minorities have gained military and economic resources and are no longer willing to tolerate the unequivocal political dominance of the Pashtun majority. In turn, the Pashtuns are just as adamant in not accepting the new reality and the military-political balance; it is for this reason that many Pashtun tribes have so far supported the Taliban, which they see as virtually the only force capable of putting the country back on track.
When the West came to Afghanistan, it decided to bet on returning the country to the format of a national Afghan (Pashtun) state, partly because of Pakistan’s position and partly out of the conviction that national minorities are unable to ensure control over the entire country. Therefore, the initial U.S. strategy was in fact to support the process of “re-Pashtunization” of power and security structures. Already in the mid-2000s the Americans began to realize the plan to neutralize the Northern Alliance and the gradual purge of its representatives in the Afghan government, army and security forces. In the Western press and academic publications there were numerous publications about the dominance of Tajiks and other minorities in the army and police – supposedly unfair to Pashtuns and contributing to the popularity of the Taliban among disgruntled Pashtuns.
The government of Karzai, and then Ghani, with the full support of the Americans, made every effort to split the Northern Alliance, to bribe and neutralize its leaders, and to radically reduce its political potential. Both presidents have consistently pursued a policy of Pashtunization of the administrative apparatus and security forces in the northern provinces; by 2015, most of the governors and commanders in the regions were already appointed from the center. The authorities were also quite successful in undermining the combat effectiveness of the former Northern Alliance structures, which they saw as the main threat to the country’s stability.
The problem was that the only natural ally of the NATO at the local level was the Northern Alliance, which represented minority interests, while the Taliban, which opposed the Western coalition, was traditionally based on the Pashtun majority. As a result, the Northern Alliance is now destroyed, but the Pashtun majority still prefers to support the Taliban. Thus, the process of re-Pashtunization, quite naturally, ended with the Taliban coming to power.
Later, under Barack Obama’s administration, Americans came to the conclusion that President Karzai, who belongs to the Pashtun-Durrani tribal group, discriminated against the Pashtun-Gilzai, who, allegedly for this reason, supported the Taliban en masse. In order to correct this “injustice”, they brought to power a new president – Gulzai in the person of Ashraf Ghani, who began a new staff cleansing, appointing to key positions his tribesmen and relatives. As a result of this policy, the Americans turned some of the Durrani against themselves and failed to pacify the Guilzai. A large proportion of the Guilzai who came to power maintained close relations with their relatives across the front lines, which further affected the army and government’s readiness to resist the Taliban.
As a result, it also turned out to be a failure of personnel policy. Appointments to key positions in the police and army were thus not based on merit but on criteria of national, clan and family affiliation as well as loyalty to the president. This personnel policy has had a significant negative impact on government effectiveness and the effectiveness of the police and the military.
In addition, none of the four U.S. administrations has succeeded in reducing corruption in Afghanistan. On the contrary, by 2021, corruption was almost catastrophic, permeating everything from civilian institutions to the police. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the army and police have developed a practice of so-called “dead souls,” whereby a large number of soldiers exist only on paper, even though significant funds are allocated to maintain them. According to various data, the number of dead souls in the aria ranged from 20-40%. The same practice of embezzlement and large-scale theft also characterized the administrative structures. All this caused deep resentment and discontent among the population and dramatically reduced the popularity of the government in the country.
- The national settlement process that the U.S. was trying to promote also failed. At first they did not want to talk to the Taliban at all; later, after the Obama administration came to power, the Americans adopted a new plan for solving the Afghan crisis, which implied the beginning of the negotiation process with the Taliban and the establishment of a coalition government with the participation of “moderate” Taliban representatives. Hoping to convince Pakistan to give up its support for the Taliban, the Americans allocated huge sums of money as financial support to this country and accepted all the conditions of the Pakistani leadership regarding the future structure of Afghanistan. Thus, the peace plan reflected, above all, the position and interests of Pakistan, which from the very beginning insisted on the Taliban’s return to power.
- The U.S. security and military-building strategy failed in the same way. For some reason, from the very beginning the U.S. built the Afghan army as a police force, that is, as a force for maintaining order, rather than a modern army capable of conducting large-scale military operations on its own. This concerned primarily the armament – the Afghan army received almost no heavy equipment (medium tanks and a sufficient number of heavy artillery pieces) from their American partners; the Afghan Air Force received only a small number (20-25) of Brazilian-made Tucano attack planes and several dozen helicopters. Despite numerous appeals from Afghanistan, the army has not received funds even to upgrade its remaining Soviet-era fleet of aircraft and heavy equipment. As a result, the Afghan army today is actually unable to conduct combat operations without massive air support.
Serious miscalculations were also made during the creation of the police force. They were based on the de facto model of the Iraqi police; accordingly, they were created by the same group of specialists and military experts that had worked in Iraq – and, unfortunately, with the same set of mistakes and shortcomings. The ALP (Afghan Local Police) was created by legalizing units of local field commanders, who received funds to mobilize and maintain up to 300 policemen. The ALP was supposed to effectively counter Taliban infiltration at the community and district levels. However, it soon became clear that most of the ALP units were divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, and engaged more in illegal trade than in fighting the Taliban. In many parts of the country, ALP units clashed regularly, destabilizing the local situation and irritating local communities. On the contrary, some units of the ALP maintained secret contacts with the Taliban, and even provided them with direct military and organizational support. All of these shortcomings became apparent immediately after the U.S. withdrawal; the Afghan security forces were totally helpless against the Taliban, and the entire security system, which the Americans had built over so many years and had cost them so much money and effort, collapsed almost immediately.
- The Afghan government has failed to provide society with a national idea that could unite the entire population of the country. In turn, the Taliban leadership in recent years has been able to form an extremely effective propaganda system, borrowing much of the methodology and approaches of ISIS.
In general, the new Taliban propaganda is based on several postulates and slogans: “the Taliban came to power to end the war and corruption”; “the Taliban today are not what they were before”; “the new society will be organized as a single community (umma), without singling out any class or part of it.
Against the background of widespread corruption and ineffective government, Taliban slogans began to look more attractive to many citizens, especially in the southern, Pashtun provinces of the country. In the north, there was a sharp decline in the popularity not only of the government but also of the former leaders of the Northern Alliance, who were accused of corruption and conformism as well as of betraying the interests of their communities.
This undermined the willingness of the population in the northern provinces to oppose the Taliban; although the population was not particularly sympathetic to the Taliban, it was not willing to take up arms to save the unpopular and corrupt government. On the other hand, even under President Karzai, soldiers and officers of the Afghan Army (ANA) were increasingly disoriented by statements from their president, who either called them to fight the Taliban implacably or called the Taliban leader “his dear brother. In this situation, ideological confusion and turmoil was already evident within the ruling regime by 2015, intensifying with each passing year as peace talks with the opposition progressed.
Ideological confusion also played a negative role in organizing the anti-Taliban resistance. Under the influence of state propaganda, Afghan society had set itself up for a gradual peace process that would end with an agreement with the Taliban and the establishment of a coalition government. As a result, society was totally unprepared for the new reality – the collapse of the peace process and the coming to power of the Taliban. Accordingly, the former Northern Alliance structures, as well as their potential allies, were also taken by surprise and therefore simply did not have time to organize themselves.
All of these factors ultimately created favorable conditions for such a quick and relatively bloodless takeover by the Taliban soon after the US troop withdrawal began.
Conclusion
Thus, the fall of the current regime in Afghanistan is the result of a major crisis in the country due to the failure of policies pursued by the U.S. government and local Afghan rulers for the last twenty years. The U.S. strategy from the beginning was based on the wrong assumptions- instead of providing equal access to administrative and economic resources to all the peoples of the country, it was focused on providing and protecting only one group. Also, the U.S. relied on the interests of Pakistan, which received $23 billion from the U.S. under tacit agreements – however, not only did not stop, but increased support for the Taliban.
An important role was also played by the internal split and disintegration of the Northern Alliance after the death of its leaders, Ahmad Shah Massoud and Barkhannudin Rabbani. A large part of the remaining leaders of the Northern Alliance compromised themselves in the eyes of their supporters and the population at large because of their conformism and involvement in a number of corruption scandals.
As a result, in recent years, there has been a “crisis of public trust” towards the government and prominent politicians. It is not that, as some observers write, “the Taliban have become more popular with the people. The point is that the government has become even less popular than the Taliban. It was this crisis of trust that allowed the Taliban to make such significant military gains in such a short time and ensure their de facto coming to power in Afghanistan.
What will the new power look like? Most likely, the Taliban will follow the model of neighboring Iran – the head of state will be a council composed entirely of the leaders of the movement. The Council will oversee the government, which will include representatives of various ethnic groups and parties loyal to the new government. Of course, there can be no real representation – these people will represent only themselves, or at best, their clans and nomenklatura groups. However, such an approach will allow the Taliban to improve its image abroad and present itself as a new type of government, which has the support of the entire population. At the same time, it is unlikely that the Taliban will create a parliament – so most likely the state model will be something in between the Iranian model and the ISIS structure.
The problem is that such a rapid rise to power was in many ways unexpected for the Taliban themselves, who do not look at all ready for the new responsibility. Therefore, the biggest question in this regard is to what extent the new government will be able to solve the problems facing the country and pull the state out of crisis.