Scapegoating Pakistan for the Afghan debacle
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The US invaded Afghanistan in anger, outraged by Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, and it has withdrawn from there in utter confusion and disarray. The Taliban’s swift capture of Afghanistan, even before the US withdrawal was completed, precipitated the meltdown of the beleaguered Afghan state. The outcome is a debacle that no one wants to own but blame on others. For the US, Pakistan is the most convenient scapegoat.
However, this is not new. The US did the same in the late 1980’s following the defeat of Russia in Afghanistan. The US abandoned the region and sanctioned Pakistan for covertly pursuing a nuclear program. 30 years later, the same pattern is repeating itself and there is a sense of déjà vu in Islamabad.
Against this backdrop, it is essential to assess the underlying reasons for the Taliban’s rapid military victories in Afghanistan. Arguably, the Taliban gains are despite and not because of Pakistan’s alleged support. Even if the charge is taken at face value, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an insurgency to succeed.
Six elements are essential for an insurgency to triumph: i) external support/ sanctuaries, ii) mastery of guerrilla warfare, iii) funding to run the insurgency, iv) a weak and discredited government unable to govern, v) a public narrative that has mass appeal, and vi) some form of territorial control. If Pakistan was allegedly providing sanctuaries to the Taliban, what accounts for the remaining five factors.
Though the West singles out Pakistan for hosting the Taliban, the insurgent group diversified its diplomatic ties over the last five years with other regional states. The Taliban’s territorial advances in Afghanistan eliminated their dependence on Pakistan for sanctuaries and allowed them to become financially self-sufficient. The Taliban’s Qatar office enabled the group to forge ties with Russia, China, Iran, Central Asian States and others. For instance, the Taliban have an office in Iran known as the Mashhad Shoura in Khorasan-e Razavi province. Iran and Russia sought the Taliban’s assistance to counter the footprint of Daesh’s South Asia chapter and oust the US from Afghanistan. The Pentagon has acknowledged the Iranian and Russian weapons in the Taliban’s possession. However, singling out Pakistan suits the US to conceal its policy blunders in Afghanistan.
Arguably, the Taliban gains are despite and not because of Pakistan’s alleged support. Even if the charge is taken at face value, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an insurgency to succeed.
Abdul Basit Khan
Historically, the Afghans have never been kind to their invaders and the US was no exception. Throughout the last two decades, the US invasion of Afghanistan remained highly unpopular. Even the former Afghan President Hamid Karzai openly opposed and defied the US. Towards the twilight of his presidency, Karzai refused to sign the Bilateral Security Agreement with the US. Likewise, the incumbent President Ashraf Ghani openly criticized the US for bypassing his government in signing the Doha Agreement with the Taliban. On the contrary, the Taliban’s public narrative of fighting a foreign occupation widely resonated among the Afghan masses even if the latter opposed the group’s harsh theocratic practices. Pakistan has nothing to do with the disapproval of the US invasion of Afghanistan.
While the Ghani regime is corrupt and dysfunctional, corruption is particularly endemic in Afghanistan’s interior and defense ministries. The ammunition, food supplies, and other equipment are stolen from these two ministries before reaching the soldiers. Subsequently, the stolen defense items are sold in the black market, ending in the Taliban’s hands. The Afghan commanders claim salaries of “ghost soldiers” who do not exist. On the contrary, the soldiers are kept unpaid and not allowed to go on leaves and meet their families for months due to the fear of desertion. Afghan forces have a desertion rate of 5,000 per month as opposed to the re-recruitment rate of 300 to 500. This is one primary reason why the Afghan National Defense Security Force (ANDSF) personnel preferred surrendering to save their lives, instead of fighting against the Taliban.
The Taliban have become financially self-sufficient in large part due to their territorial gains in Afghanistan in recent years. For instance, the Taliban earned a staggering $1.6 billion in 2020 through the drug trade, illegal mining, timber trade and revenue collection in areas under their control. The control of the main highways in Afghanistan has allowed the Taliban to tax trade trucks and shipment containers, increasing their monthly income by millions. Furthermore, Afghanistan’s emergence in recent years as the global producer of methamphetamine or meth has been a revenue game-changer for the Taliban. According to reports, the group earns a whopping $4 million annually by taxing the producers and exporters of meth in one district alone. The donations that the Taliban allegedly collect from Pakistan pale into insignificance compared to these revenue sources.
For the Taliban, fighting is a way of life. They are children of conflict and byproducts of the last four decades of instability and chaos in Afghanistan. As a guerrilla group, they used the terrain and knowledge of topography as a force multiplier against a conventionally superior adversary, i.e., the US, through a protracted hit and run campaign forcing it to withdraw.
The US military presence and airpower, not the ANDSF, stood between the Afghan cities and the Taliban. The US withdrawal fueled the insurgent group’s territorial gains. Whatever was left of Pakistan’s limited influence on the Taliban to convince them for a political settlement vanished after the US announcement of the unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Pakistan was neither alone in providing some form of support to the Taliban, nor was this the decisive factor of the Taliban victory. Though the US can conveniently gloss over its policy failures in Afghanistan by blaming Pakistan, the jury is still out on what the goal of Washington’s war was: nation building or fighting terrorism. It was a war in search of a strategy whose goals were poorly defined. The outcomes was a forgone conclusion from the get go.
- The author is a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. Twitter: @basitresearcher
