MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Reality check on Afghanistan III

Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan has praised the conduct of the Taliban in the days since its takeover, saying there was no alternative to the hardline group and resistance to it would fail.

The comments by Ambassador Dmitry Zhirnov reflect efforts by Russia to deepen already well-established ties with the Taliban while stopping short, for now, of recognising them as the legitimate rulers of a country Moscow tried and failed to control before the Soviet Union withdrew its last forces in 1989.

Russia wants to ensure that the instability in Afghanistan does not spill over into Central Asia, part of the former Soviet Union it regards as its own back yard, and that the region does not become a launchpad for other armed groups.

Kabul has been largely calm, except in and around the airport where 12 people have been killed since Sunday, NATO and Taliban officials said.

Zhirnov’s comments contrast sharply with those of some Western politicians and rights activists who are deeply sceptical that the Taliban has moderated its violence towards those they see as incompatible with their nascent emirate governed by strict Islamic law.

Zhirnov said the facts on the ground had changed and the Taliban had made a set of encouraging pledges.

“We can’t wave reality aside. They [the Taliban] are the de facto authorities. There is no alternative to the Taliban in Afghanistan,” said Zhirnov.

The son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, one of the main leaders of Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet resistance in the 1980s, has pledged to hold out against the Taliban from his stronghold in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul.

Afghan First Vice President Amrullah Saleh has also said he is in Afghanistan and the “legitimate caretaker president” after President Ashraf Ghani fled.

Zhirnov said Saleh’s declaration violated the constitution and that Panjshir-based attempts to resist the Taliban were doomed. “They have no military prospects. There are not many people there. As far as we know they have 7,000 armed people. And they already have problems with fuel. They tried to fly a helicopter but they have no petrol and no supplies.” Zhirnov also questioned the idea that all of the Afghans trying to flee the country were doing so because of the Taliban.“Many people now see this situation … as a possible ticket to a new life [in the West] and this may not be related to the Taliban,” he said of the chaotic exodus.

While Russia has to deal with the mess the USA created and left behind.

American pundits, politicians and Pentagon apologists are all casting about trying to find the reason why the Afghanistan military, supposedly 300,000 trained people in uniform and supplied with over $83 billion in US weaponry including ground attack planes and helicopters, folded like an old deck of used cards in two weeks’ time confronted by an untrained Taliban a quarter that size armed with assault rifles and RPGs.

It’s been almost laughable watching the scramble in the US for an explanation. Gen. David Petraeus, who largely had the job of creating that military during his time heading up the Afghanistan War in the Obama administration, in an NPR interview, blamed President Biden for not sending in troops to defend against the Taliban drive, claiming that a (puppet) army will always fold if it doesn’t have backup. Probably true, but what was the alternative — another 20 years of US military “backup”? And shouldn’t Petraeus at least have taken a few minutes away from cavorting with his admiring female biographer Paula Broadwell to have warned Obama that an Afghan army wouldn’t fight in the clutch? Nixon after all tried the same thing — “Vietnamization” of the Vietnam War — and got the same result more than four decades ago when the so-called Army of the Republic of South Vietnam crumbled.

Other armchair warriors claim, as if sagely, that it was a “failure of leadership” in Afghanistan, as though more motivated Afghani generals and senior officers would have given the Afghan troops “a reason to stay and fight.”

Not mentioned by any of these “analysts,” is that the soldiers in the Afghanistan military didn’t have anything to fight for because they all knew that as awful as the prospect of a Taliban return to government power might be (and for many of these footsoldiers, it may well not have seemed so terrible, as long as they weren’t retaliated against for having been in the US backed and funded military), the government they got under US occupation was a swamp of truly epic corruption.

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani is reported to have fled the country in secret in a plane loaded with money and that a group of ground vehicles also followed with him out of the country to Uzbekistan similarly packed with bundles of cash.

He was surely not alone

Ghani’s sudden departure from Kabul led Taliban forces, who at the time had been waiting patiently outside the gates of Kabul for a surrender of the government, moved into the city of five million quickly when chaos broke out on news of his departure. They immediately took over control of Kabul from local military and police forces without a shot being fired.

But corruption was not just a problem among US puppet government leaders. It was endemic in the society and in the military, with US military whistleblowers reporting that it went “right down to the patrol level” of the Afghan Army.

People mostly joined the Afghan military because in a country where the average annual income is $500 it was a good job, especially if it didn’t do much fighting and if there were ways to make money on the side too.

As for a “will to fight” — given such corruption, what was there really to fight for? Certainly not the Afghan nation, as Afghanistan is actually a hodgepodge of different ethnic and linguistic groups that have been feuding and fighting amongst themselves for centuries. If there was any national consciousness at all, it would have been a simmering resentment at the occupation by US forces who in large part looked down on Afghans and themselves didn’t really want to be there.

Many experts on Afghanistan and on counter-insurgeny, both inside and outside the military, warned from the outset in 2001 that while the US surely could have gone in and ‘”taken out” Al Qaeda and its leader Bin Laden had they wanted to, but that the decision by the Bush/Cheney administration to turn that invasion into a longer term project ousting the Taliban and building a democratic country was a fool’s errand.

Now, by refusing to go back and look at that first fatal error and the imperial hubris that underlay and still underlies it, the stage is being set for the next big US intervention disaster.

The lesson of Vietnam was never learned, and if it was learned or referred to for even a short time, President George Bush declared it dead and buried after his trumped-up Gulf War “victory” over Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 1991. Now we have the lesson of Afghanistan, but the way things are going, we probably won’t learn that one either.

So the question is, where will the USA’s next lesson be: taught? Likely candidates appear to be Cuba, Venezuela and/or Iran.

PALESTINA