Joe Biden
Taliban suppress more dissent as economic challenges loom
The Taliban violently dispersed scattered protests for a second day Thursday amid warnings that Afghanistan’s already weakened economy could crumble further without the massive international aid that sustained the toppled Western-backed government.
The Taliban have sought to project moderation and say they want good relations with the international community, but they will face a difficult balancing act in making concessions to the West, satisfying their own hard-line followers and suppressing dissent.
A U.N. official warned of dire food shortages, and experts said the country was severely in need of cash, while noting that the Taliban are unlikely to enjoy the generous international aid that made up most of the ousted government’s budget.
The Taliban have pledged to forgive those who fought them and to restore security and normal life to the country after decades of war. But many Afghans fear a return to the Taliban’s harsh rule in the late 1990s, when the group largely confined women to their homes, banned television and music, chopped off the hands of suspected thieves and held public executions.
Read: US struggles to speed Kabul airlift despite Taliban, chaos
On Thursday, a procession of cars and people near Kabul’s airport carried long black, red and green banners in honor of the Afghan flag — a banner that is becoming a symbol of defiance. Video from another protest in Nangarhar province showed a bleeding demonstrator with a gunshot wound. Onlookers tried to carry him away.
In Khost province, Taliban authorities instituted a 24-hour curfew Thursday after violently breaking up another protest, according to information obtained by journalists monitoring from abroad. The authorities did not immediately acknowledge the demonstration or the curfew.
Protesters also took to the streets in Kunar province, according to witnesses and social media videos that lined up with reporting by The Associated Press.
The demonstrations — which came as people celebrated Afghan Independence Day and some commemorated the Shiite Ashoura festival — were a remarkable show of defiance after Taliban fighters violently dispersed a protest Wednesday. At least one person was killed at that rally, in the eastern city of Jalalabad, after demonstrators lowered the Taliban’s flag and replaced it with the tricolor.
Meanwhile, opposition figures gathering in the last area of the country not under Taliban rule talked of launching an armed resistance under the banner of the Northern Alliance, which joined with the U.S. during the 2001 invasion.
It was not clear how serious a threat they posed given that Taliban fighters overran nearly the entire country in a matter of days with little resistance from Afghan forces.
The Taliban so far have offered no specifics on how they will lead, other than to say they will be guided by Shariah, or Islamic, law. They are in talks with senior officials of previous Afghan governments. But they face an increasingly precarious situation.
“A humanitarian crisis of incredible proportions is unfolding before our eyes,” warned Mary Ellen McGroarty, the head of the U.N.’s World Food Program in Afghanistan.
Beyond the difficulties of bringing food into the landlocked nation dependent on imports, she said that over 40% of the country’s crop has been lost to drought. Many who fled the Taliban advance now live in parks and open spaces in Kabul.
“This is really Afghanistan’s hour of greatest need, and we urge the international community to stand by the Afghan people at this time,” she said.
Hafiz Ahmad, a shopkeeper in Kabul, said some food has flowed into the capital, but prices have gone up. He hesitated to pass those costs onto his customers but said he had to.
Read: Afghans protest Taliban in emerging challenge to their rule
“It is better to have it,” he said. “If there were nothing, then that would be even worse.”
Two of Afghanistan’s key border crossings with Pakistan are now open for trade. However, traders still fear insecurity on the roads and confusion over customs duties that could push them to price their goods higher.
Amid all the uncertainty and fears of Taliban rule, thousands of Afghans are fleeing the country.
At Kabul’s international airport, military evacuation flights continued, but access to the airport remained difficult. On Thursday, Taliban fighters fired into the air to try to control the crowds gathered at the airport’s blast walls.
After a chaotic start in which people rushed the runway and some clung to a plane taking off, the U.S. military is ramping up evacuations and now has enough aircraft to get 5,000 to 9,000 people out a day, Army Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor said Thursday.
President Joe Biden said he was committed to keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan until every American is evacuated, even if that means maintaining a military presence there beyond his Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawal.
In an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Biden said he thought the Taliban were going through an “existential crisis” about whether they wanted to be internationally recognized as a legitimate government. “I’m not sure they do,” he said.
The Taliban have urged people to return to work, but most government officials remain in hiding or are themselves attempting to flee. The U.S. has apparently frozen Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and shipments of dollars that help sustain the local currency, the afghani. The International Monetary Fund has cut off access to loans or other resources for now.
“The afghani has been defended by literally planeloads of U.S. dollars landing in Kabul on a very regular basis, sometimes weekly,” said Graeme Smith, a consultant researcher with the Overseas Development Institute. “If the Taliban don’t get cash infusions soon to defend the afghani, I think there’s a real risk of a currency devaluation that makes it hard to buy bread on the streets of Kabul for ordinary people.”
Smith, who has written a book on Afghanistan, said the Taliban are unlikely to ask for the same billions in international aid sought by the country’s fallen civilian government — large portions of which were siphoned off by corruption.
The Taliban have long profited off the drug trade in Afghanistan, which is the world’s top cultivator of the poppy from which opium and heroin are produced. The militants now have access to customs duties from the border crossings, which were the main source of domestic income for the previous government.
Read: Taliban militants violently disperse rare Afghan protest
But 75% of the previous government’s budget was covered by donor countries.
“It costs a lot less to run an insurgency than it does to run a government,” said Laurel Miller, director of the Asia program at the Crisis Group, an international think tank. “The opium trade and the border crossings (are) not enough money to run a government, at least as it has been run in recent years.”
The Taliban will struggle to make accommodations to the West while satisfying the ultraconservative Muslim fighters that brought them to power after a 20-year insurgency, with the latter likely being the priority, Miller said. Even a significant shift toward moderation might not be enough for Western countries to keep the aid flowing.
“How ready is Congress going to be to vote for development assistance for a Taliban government?” she said.
Defiant Biden is face of chaotic Afghan evacuation
Four presidents share responsibility for the missteps in Afghanistan that accumulated over two decades. But only President Joe Biden will be the face of the war’s chaotic, violent conclusion.
The president fought that reality Monday as he spread blame for the Taliban’s swift and complete recapture of Afghanistan. He pointed to a previous agreement brokered by then-President Donald Trump, expressed frustration with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and lamented the performance of Afghan national security forces. Republicans overwhelmingly criticized Biden and he found few vocal backers among fellow Democrats.
Read: Chaos as thousands flee Afghanistan after Taliban takeover
The collapse of the Afghan government is the biggest foreign policy crisis of Biden’s young presidency, recalling setbacks for past presidents such as the withdrawal from Vietnam and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. The reverberations of the Taliban’s success were startling, endangering Afghan women and girls, posing new security threats and threatening to undercut global views of America’s reliability.
In the face of such stark consequences, Biden admitted no fault for the chaotic drawdown and instead forcefully defended his move to leave a nation the U.S. has tried to safeguard since it toppled the Taliban regime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when smoke still rose from the rubble of the World Trade Center.
“Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not,” said Biden. “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war? I will not repeat the mistakes we made in the past.”
Read: Biden team surprised by rapid Taliban gains in Afghanistan
When Biden took responsibility, it was more for ending the war than for the manner in which it happened.
“I know my decision will be criticized. But I would rather take that criticism than pass this on to a fifth president,” said Biden. “I am the president of the United States, the buck stops with me.”
His firm tone differed little from just five weeks ago, when he bullishly predicted what would happen as his August 31 deadline for withdrawal neared. He declared there was going to be no repeat of the humiliating U.S. evacuation from Vietnam nearly a half century ago and “no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”
But Monday yielded devastating images from Kabul that rivaled anything witnessed in Saigon.
Thousands of Afghan citizens, many of whom worked as translators and other aides to American troops, thronged the Kabul airport, desperate to escape the Taliban. In heartbreaking footage, some tried to desperately board a U.S. military plane flying to safety, attempting to dash alongside as it raced down the runway.
A few managed to cling to the plane before it took off and video showed several falling through the air as the airplane rapidly gained altitude over the city.
The evacuation received condemnation at home and abroad, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling the latest developments “bitter, dramatic and awful.” And security officials warned that Afghanistan would soon provide safe harbor for terrorist groups again.
The Taliban seemed poised to have total of control of Afghanistan on Sept. 11, just as they did on the date two decades earlier when al-Qaida terror attacks plotted from its soil toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. The fallout from 2001 attacks reshaped America’s relationship with the Middle East, and more than 3,000 American and NATO forces died in the resulting combat in Afghanistan during the manhunt for Osama bin Laden and beyond.
Under the command of President George W. Bush, American forces stormed into Afghanistan soon after the terror attacks on a hunt for bin Laden while trying to disrupt al-Qaida’s ability to conduct further assaults on the West. There was immediate success: The Taliban were routed, the terror group disrupted.
But after that came the grinding second phase of the war and a surge of troops from President Barack Obama in 2009. Though Obama later moved to reduce the number of troops, the volume of insurgent attacks and civilian causalities prevented a full drawdown.
Trump mulled meeting the Taliban at Camp David on an earlier Sept. 11 anniversary, only to back away from the idea amid an uproar. But he announced that the U.S. would pull all its forces out by May 2021, an agreement Biden honored and delayed only slightly.
Efforts were made, at great expense, across all the administrations to train and arm the Afghan forces once the U.S. departed. But that investment of American blood, time and treasure proved useless as the Taliban conquered much of the nation without a fight and Afghanistan’s president fled the country as soon as the invading forces reached Kabul.
Read: Who are the Taliban?
In the upper ranks of Biden’s staff, the rapid collapse in Afghanistan only confirmed the decision to leave: If the meltdown of the Afghan forces would come so quickly after nearly two decades of American presence, another six months or a year or two or more would not have changed anything.
His move to withdraw troops this summer, though polarizing in the national security community, had been praised by some on both sides of the aisle as timely and appropriate. But on Monday, Republicans were eager to slam Biden’s decision and blame him for the chaos, though many of them had supported a withdrawal when it had been proposed by Trump a year ago.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, however, had consistently advocated keeping troops in Afghanistan, and he said the military briefings he attended suggested the Taliban would be able to quickly regain power.
“I think the president felt strongly about this, obviously,” McConnell said. “He overruled his own military leaders to do it and he owns it.”
Biden has argued for more than a decade that Afghanistan was a kind of purgatory for the United States. He found it to be corrupt, addicted to America’s largesse and an unreliable partner that should be made to fend for itself. His goal was to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, not building a country, and his aides have pointed to polling — taken before the chaos of the last week — that shows that a majority of Americans favor bringing troops home.
But that political gamble could prove risky as the scenes of fear and violence from Afghanistan are broadcast around the globe, especially if the chaos in Kabul makes “Saigon look like Disney World,” warned Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a veteran who served in Afghanistan.
“The bottom line is that there’s going to be a lot of people that are very let down by the United States of America,” Kinzinger said in an interview. “We will inevitably, inevitably be in conflict again somewhere. How are we going to convince those locals that we’re going to follow through when we’ve abandoned those in Afghanistan?”
Concerns over US terror threats rising as Taliban hold grow
America’s top general said the United States could now face a rise in terrorist threats from a Taliban-run Afghanistan. That warning comes as intelligence agencies charged with anticipating those threats face new questions after the U.S.-backed Afghan military collapsed with shocking speed.
Less than a week after a military assessment predicted Kabul could be surrounded by insurgents in 30 days, the world on Sunday watched stunning scenes of Taliban fighters standing in the Afghan president’s office and crowds of Afghans and foreigners frantically trying to board planes to escape the country.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators on a briefing call Sunday that U.S. officials are expected to alter their earlier assessments about the pace of terrorist groups reconstituting in Afghanistan, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.
Read: Biden team surprised by rapid Taliban gains in Afghanistan
In June, the Pentagon’s top leaders said an extremist group like al-Qaida may be able to regenerate in Afghanistan and pose a threat to the U.S. homeland within two years of the American military’s withdrawal from the country. Two decades after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban harbored al-Qaida leaders, experts say the Taliban and al-Qaida remain aligned, and other violent groups could also find safe haven under the new regime.
Based on the evolving situation, officials now believe terror groups like al-Qaida may be able to grow much faster than expected, according to the person, who had direct knowledge of the briefing but was not authorized to discuss the details of the call publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
The Biden administration officials on the call with senators – among them were Milley, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — said U.S. intelligence agencies are working on forming a new timeline based on the evolving threats, the person familiar with the matter said.
Current and former intelligence officials on Sunday pushed back against criticism of what was widely seen as a failure by the agencies to anticipate how fast Kabul could fall. One senior intelligence official said that “a rapid Taliban takeover was always a possibility,” adding: “As the Taliban advanced, they ultimately met with little resistance. We have always been clear-eyed that this was possible, and tactical conditions on the ground can often evolve quickly.” The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
But President Joe Biden didn’t suggest such an outcome at a July 8 news conference, when he said “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
The reduced U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan — down to 2,500 troops at the end of President Donald Trump’s term — may have hindered intelligence efforts in Afghanistan. Retired Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency until October, said having fewer Americans embedded with Afghan forces meant there was less insight into how those forces would perform.
“It’s very, very difficult to gauge the morale down at the unit level because you’re just not there anymore,” Ashley said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if Afghan leaders would tell us only what we want to hear anyway.”
Read:Taliban sweep into Afghan capital after government collapses
Monitoring terrorism threats in Afghanistan will be even more difficult with U.S. troops withdrawing and the Taliban in control. Intelligence agencies in Afghanistan work side by side with troops. Without the same military presence, spies are severely limited in what they can collect about the morale of Afghan troops or support for the Taliban.
“If they leave, which they did, that means we leave as well,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who held several roles related to Afghanistan during a 26-year career in the CIA. “And that certainly affects our intelligence gathering footprint.”
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that once evacuations are settled that “our focus is going to shift” toward intelligence and counterterrorism activities. The U.S. will have to ensure it has the ability to track whether Al Qaeda is reconstituting there, he said in an interview.
“The Taliban has lots of reasons to honor their agreement with the United States and keep al-Qaida at bay. And our mission now is to put ourselves in a position where we can monitor and verify that that commitment,” he said.
U.S. national security officials also briefed House members and tensions ran high. Republican leader Kevin McCarthy became furious after the administration officials would not confirm that President Ashraf Ghani had left the country, according to a person who participated in the meeting.
“Why are we doing this now?” McCarthy asked.
Ghani flew out of the country as the Taliban insurgents closed in on Sunday and posted on Facebook that he had chosen to leave the country to avert bloodshed in the capital. He did not say where he had gone.
Read:Who are the Taliban?
Rep. Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican and Green Beret who served in Afghanistan, sharply criticized the briefing as “a regurgitation of the president’s statement” from Saturday.
Waltz said Austin blamed the Afghan forces’ lack of will to fight, while Blinken cited the deadline set by former President Donald Trump’s administration for an American withdrawal.
“There was no discussion of a path forward except some vague reassurances that they’ll protect the homeland,” Waltz said.
Biden team surprised by rapid Taliban gains in Afghanistan
President Joe Biden and other top U.S. officials were stunned on Sunday by the pace of the Taliban’s nearly complete takeover of Afghanistan, as the planned withdrawal of American forces urgently became a mission to ensure a safe evacuation.
The speed of the Afghan government’s collapse and the ensuing chaos posed the most serious test of Biden as commander in chief, and he was the subject of withering criticism from Republicans who said that he had failed.
Read: Brac pulling foreign staff, inc. 12 Bangladeshis, out of Afghanistan
Biden campaigned as a seasoned expert in international relations and has spent months downplaying the prospect of an ascendant Taliban while arguing that Americans of all political persuasions have tired of a 20-year war, a conflict that demonstrated the limits of money and military might to force a Western-style democracy on a society not ready or willing to embrace it.
By Sunday, though, leading figures in the administration acknowledged they were caught off guard with the utter speed of the collapse of Afghan security forces. The challenge of that effort became clear after reports of sporadic gunfire at the Kabul airport prompted Americans to shelter as they awaited flights to safety after the U.S. Embassy was completely evacuated.
“We’ve seen that that force has been unable to defend the country, and that has happened more quickly than we anticipated,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN, referring to the Afghan military.
The turmoil in Afghanistan resets the focus in an unwelcome way for a president who has largely focused on a domestic agenda that includes emerging from the pandemic, winning congressional approval for trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending and protecting voting rights.
Biden remained at Camp David on Sunday, receiving regular briefings on Afghanistan and holding secure video conference calls with members of his national security team, according to senior White House officials. His administration released a single photo of the president alone in a conference room meeting virtually with military, diplomatic and intelligence experts. The next several days would be critical in determining whether the U.S. is able to regain some level of control over the situation.
Read: Taliban sweep into Afghan capital after government collapses
The Pentagon and State Department said in a joint statement Sunday that “we are completing a series of steps to secure the Hamid Karzai International Airport to enable the safe departure of U.S. and allied personnel from Afghanistan via civilian and military flights.” Biden ordered another 1,000 troops into Kabul to secure the evacuation.
Discussions were underway for Biden to speak publicly, according to two senior administration officials who requested anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Biden, who is scheduled to remain at the presidential retreat through Wednesday, is expected to return to the White House if he decides to deliver an address.
Biden is the fourth U.S. president to confront challenges in Afghanistan and has insisted he wouldn’t hand America’s longest war to his successor. But the president will likely have to explain how security in Afghanistan unraveled so quickly, especially since he and others in the administration have insisted it wouldn’t happen.
“The jury is still out, but the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden said on July 8.
As recently as last week, Biden publicly expressed hope that Afghan forces could develop the will to defend their country. But privately, administration officials warned that the military was crumbling, prompting Biden on Thursday to order thousands of American troops into the region to speed up evacuation plans.
One official said Biden was more sanguine on projections for the Afghan fighters to hold off the Taliban in part to prevent a further erosion in morale among their force. It was ultimately for naught.
Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump also yearned to leave Afghanistan, but ultimately stood down in the face of resistance from military leaders and other political concerns. Biden, on the other hand, has been steadfast in his refusal to change the Aug. 31 deadline, in part because of his belief that the American public is on his side.
A late July ABC News/Ipsos poll, for instance, showed 55% of Americans approving of Biden’s handling of the troop withdrawal.
Most Republicans have not pushed Biden to keep troops in Afghanistan over the long term and they also supported Trump’s own push to exit the country. Still, some in the GOP are stepping up their critique of Biden’s withdrawal strategy and said images from Sunday of American helicopters circling the U.S. Embassy in Kabul evoked the humiliating departure of U.S. personnel from Vietnam.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell deemed the scenes of withdrawal as “the embarrassment of a superpower laid low.”
Read: Kabul airport closed to commercial traffic
Meanwhile, U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about the potential for the rise in terrorist threats against the U.S. as the situation in Afghanistan devolves, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive security matter.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators on a briefing call Sunday that U.S. officials are expected to alter their earlier assessments about the pace of terrorist groups reconstituting in Afghanistan, the person said. Based on the evolving situation, officials believe terror groups like al-Qaida may be able to grow much faster than expected.
The officials on the call told senators that the U.S. intelligence community is currently working on forming a new timeline based on the evolving threats.
Still, there were no additional steps planned beyond the troop deployment Biden ordered to assist in the evacuations. Senior administration officials believe the U.S. will be able to maintain security at the Kabul airport long enough to extricate Americans and their allies, but the fate of those unable to get to the airport was far from certain.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has backed the Biden administration’s strategy, said in an interview that “the speed is a surprise” but would not characterize the situation as an intelligence failure. He said it has long been known that Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban if the United States pulled out.
“Given how much we have invested in the Afghan army, it’s not ridiculous for analysts to believe that they’d be able to put up a fight for more than a few days,” Murphy said. “You want to believe that trillions of dollars and 20 years of investment adds up to something, even if it doesn’t add up for the ability to defend the country in the long run.”
In the upper ranks of Biden’s staff, the rapid collapse in Afghanistan only confirmed the decision to leave: If the meltdown of the Afghan forces would come so quickly after nearly two decades of American presence, another six months or a year or two or more would not have changed anything.
Read: Afghan president flees the country as Taliban move on Kabul
Biden has argued for more than a decade that Afghanistan was a kind of purgatory for the United States. He found it to be corrupt, addicted to America’s largesse and an unreliable partner that should be made to fend for itself. His goal was to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, not building a country.
As vice president, he argued privately against Obama’s surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in a bid to stabilize the country so that the United States and its allies could then pull back their forces.
As president, Biden said in July that he made the decision to withdraw with “clear eyes” after receiving daily battlefield updates. His judgment was that Afghanistan would be divided in a peace agreement with the Taliban, rather than falling all at once.
While Biden has prided himself on delivering plain truths to the American public, his bullish assessment of the situation just a month ago could come back to haunt him.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan,” he said in July. “The likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely.”
Biden orders 1,000 more troops to aid Afghanistan departure
President Joe Biden authorized on Saturday an additional 1,000 U.S. troops for deployment to Afghanistan, raising to roughly 5,000 the number of U.S. troops to ensure what Biden called an “orderly and safe drawdown” of American and allied personnel.
U.S. troops will also help in the evacuation of Afghans who worked with the military during the nearly two-decade war.
The last-minute decision to re-insert thousands of U.S. troops into Afghanistan reflected the dire state of security as the Taliban seized control of multiple Afghan cities in a few short days. The militant and fundamentalist movement gained control of key parts of the country it governed until being ousted by U.S. and coalition forces after the Sept. 11 attacks. Biden had set an Aug. 31 deadline for fully withdraw combat forces before the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
Read: US keeping distance as Afghan forces face Taliban rout
Biden attributed much of the chaos unfolding in Afghanistan to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war, which Biden said created a blueprint that put U.S. forces in a difficult spot with an emboldened Taliban challenging the Afghan government.
“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor — which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019 — that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001,” Biden said in a statement Saturday. “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”
In his statement Biden didn’t explain the breakdown of the 5,000 troops he said had been deployed. But a defense official said in a media statement that the president had approved Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s recommendation that the lead battalion of the 82nd Airborne Brigade Combat Team assist in the State Department’s drawdown.
Initially 1,000 troops were in place to aid with the withdrawal, and administration officials quickly judged that total to be insufficient. An additional contingent of Marines arrived in Kabul as part of a 3,000-troop force intended to secure an airlift of U.S. Embassy personnel and Afghan allies as Taliban insurgents approached the outskirts of the capital. The additional 1,000 troops approved Saturday appeared to bring the total to 5,000.
Officials have stressed that the newly arriving troops’ mission was limited to assisting the airlift of embassy personnel and Afghan allies, and they expected to complete it by month’s end. But they might have to stay longer if the embassy is threatened by a Taliban takeover of Kabul by then.
In a sign of fears that the Taliban could soon capture Kabul, U.S. Embassy personnel were urgently destroying sensitive documents, according to two U.S. military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation.
Read: Battle gains challenge US hopes of better-behaved Taliban
As the situation in Afghanistan rapidly worsened, Biden, who was spending the weekend at Camp David, and Vice President Kamala Harris held a secure video conference on Saturday morning with national security officials before Biden announced the additional troops.
On Saturday, the Taliban captured Mazar-e-Sharif, a large heavily defended city in northern Afghanistan, and closed in on Kabul by taking the Logar province just to the south. The Taliban have made major advances in recent days, including capturing Herat and Kandahar, the country’s second- and third-largest cities.
“Clearly from their actions, it appears as if they are trying to get Kabul isolated,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said, referring to the Taliban’s speedy and efficient takedown of major provincial capitals this past week.
Biden had given the Pentagon until Aug. 31 to complete the withdrawal of the 2,500 to 3,000 troops that were in Afghanistan when he announced in April that he would end U.S. involvement in the war. That number has dropped to just under 1,000, and all but about 650 were scheduled to be gone by the end of the month; the 650 were to remain to help protect the U.S. diplomatic presence, including with aircraft and defensive weapons at the Kabul airport.
But the decision in recent days to dispatch 4,000 fresh troops suggested that American forces and their allies were at risk. There was no discussion of rejoining the war, but the number of troops needed for security will depend on decisions about keeping the embassy open and the extent of a Taliban threat to the capital in coming days.
Having the Aug. 31 deadline pass with thousands of U.S. troops in the country could be problematic for Biden, who said he had no regrets about stopping the U.S. war by that date. Republicans criticized the withdrawal as a mistake and ill-planned, though there was little political appetite by either party to send fresh troops to fight the Taliban.
Read:US vows to isolate Taliban if they take power by force
The president said Saturday his administration had conveyed to Taliban representatives in Qatar that any actions in Afghanistan that harm U.S. personnel will be met by a “swift and strong” military response. Biden also directed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to support Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and engage with regional leaders in the pursuit of a political settlement with the Taliban.
Ghani delivered a televised speech Saturday, his first public appearance since the recent Taliban gains, and pledged not to give up the “achievements” of the 20 years since the U.S. toppled the Taliban.
Despite the Taliban’s gains, the Biden administration has said that Afghan security forces’ air force and superior numbers could give them an edge against the insurgents. The statement served to highlight the lack of morale by Afghan forces to fight in a situation where the Taliban seemed to be speeding forward.
The State Department said the embassy in Kabul would remain partially staffed and functioning, but Thursday’s decision to evacuate a significant number of staff suggested concerns about protecting American and Afghan lives as the Taliban progressed through the country. The Biden administration has not publicly ruled out a full embassy evacuation or possibly relocating embassy operations to the Kabul airport.
Taliban capture key northern city, approach Afghan capital
The Taliban on Saturday captured a large, heavily defended city in northern Afghanistan in a major setback for the government, and were approaching the capital of Kabul, less than three weeks before the U.S. hopes to complete its troop withdrawal.
The fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, the country’s fourth largest city, which Afghan forces and two powerful former warlords had pledged to defend, hands the insurgents control over all of northern Afghanistan, confining the Western-backed government to the center and east.
Abas Ebrahimzada, a lawmaker from the Balkh province where the city is located, said the national army surrendered first, which prompted pro-government militias and other forces to lose morale and give up in the face of a Taliban onslaught launched earlier Saturday.
Ebrahimzada said Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ata Mohammad Noor, former warlords who command thousands of fighters, had fled the province and their whereabouts were unknown.
Read: Taliban sweep across Afghanistan's south, take 4 more cities
Noor said in a Facebook post that his defeat in Mazar-e-Sharif was orchestrated and blamed the government forces, saying they handed their weapons and equipment to the Taliban. He did not say who was behind the conspiracy, nor offer details, but said he and Dostum “are in a safe place now”
The Taliban have made major advances in recent days, including capturing Herat and Kandahar, the country’s second- and third-largest cities. They now control about 24 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, leaving the Western-backed government with a smattering of provinces in the center and east, as well as the capital, Kabul.
On Saturday, the Taliban captured all of Logar province, just south of Kabul, and detained local officials, said Hoda Ahmadi, a lawmaker from the province. She said the Taliban have reached the Char Asyab district, just 11 kilometers (7 miles) south of the capital.
Later, the insurgents took over Mihterlam, the capital of Laghman province, northeast of Kabul, without a fight, according to Zefon Safi, a lawmaker from the province.
On Saturday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani delivered a televised speech, his first public appearance since the recent Taliban gains. He vowed not to give up the “achievements” of the 20 years since the U.S. toppled the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks.
The U.S. has continued holding peace talks between the government and the Taliban in Qatar this week, and the international community has warned that a Taliban government brought about by force would be shunned. But the insurgents appear to have little interest in making concessions as they rack up victories on the battlefield.
“We have started consultations, inside the government with elders and political leaders, representatives of different levels of the community as well as our international allies,” Ghani said. “Soon the results will be shared with you,” he added, without elaborating further.
Hours later, his forces suffered one of the biggest setbacks since the Taliban offensive began.
Mazar-e-Sharif, home to a famous blue-tiled Muslim shrine, was a stronghold of the Northern Alliance, ethnic militias who helped the U.S. topple the Taliban in 2001.
In 1997, as many as 2,000 Taliban fighters were captured and killed by forces loyal to Mohammed Mohaqiq, a Shiite Hazara leader, and his ethnic Uzbek allies. The following year, the Taliban returned and killed thousands of Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif in a revenge attack.
Several makeshift camps had sprung up around Mazar-e-Sharif where mostly ethnic Hazaras had taken shelter after fleeing their homes in outlying areas. They said the Taliban had detained relatives who sought to leave their districts and in some cases burned schools.
Read:Taliban press advance after capturing 2 major Afghan cities
Tens of thousands of Afghans have fled their homes, with many fearing a return to the Taliban’s oppressive rule. The group had previously governed Afghanistan under a harsh version of Islamic law in which women were forbidden to work or attend school, and could not leave their homes without a male relative accompanying them.
Salima Mazari, one of the few female district governors in the country, expressed fears about a Taliban takeover earlier Saturday in an interview from Mazar-e-Sharif, before it fell.
“There will be no place for women,” said Mazari, who governs a district of 36,000 people near the northern city. “In the provinces controlled by the Taliban, no women exist there anymore, not even in the cities. They are all imprisoned in their homes.”
The Taliban appointed hard-line cleric Mujeeb Rahman Ansari as women’s affairs minister in Herat, according to a prominent women’s activist from the city who did not want to be identified because she fears for her safety. She described Ansari as being “strongly against women’s rights.” He rose to prominence about 2015 and became infamous for dozens of billboards he installed in Herat that told women to wear Islamic hijab and demonized those who would promote women’s rights.
The Taliban also captured Paktika province and small Kunar province, both bordering Pakistan, as well as Faryab province in the north and the central province of Daykundi, lawmakers from those areas said Saturday.
Sayed Hussan Gerdezi, a lawmaker from Paktia province, said the Taliban seized most of its local capital, Gardez, but battles with government forces were still underway. The Taliban said they controlled the city.
The withdrawal of foreign troops and the swift collapse of Afghanistan’s own forces — despite hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. aid over the years — has raised fears the Taliban could return to power or that the country could be shattered by factional fighting, as it was after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. It’s also prompted many American and Afghan veterans of the conflict to question whether two decades of blood and treasure was worth it.
Afghans have been streaming into Kabul’s international airport in recent days, desperate to fly out, even as more American troops have arrived to help partially evacuate the U.S. Embassy.
U.S. President Joe Biden has authorized an additional 1,000 U.S. troops for deployment to Afghanistan, according to a statement from a defense official. That raises to roughly 5,000 the number of U.S. troops to ensure what Biden calls an “orderly and safe drawdown” of American and allied personnel. U.S. troops will also help in the evacuation of Afghans who worked with the military during the nearly two-decade war.
The first Marines arrived Friday. The rest are expected by Sunday, and their deployment has raised questions about whether the administration will meet its Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline.
The U.S. Air Force has carried out several airstrikes to aid its Afghan allies on the ground but they appear to have done little to stem the Taliban’s advance. A B-52 bomber and other warplanes traversed the country’s airspace Saturday, flight-tracking data showed.
Read:Taliban take 10th Afghan provincial capital in blitz
The U.S. invaded shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, which al-Qaida planned and carried out while being sheltered by Taliban. After rapidly ousting the Taliban, the U.S. shifted toward nation-building, hoping to create a modern Afghan state after decades of war and unrest.
Earlier this year, Biden announced a timeline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of August. His predecessor, President Donald Trump, had reached an agreement with the Taliban to pave the way for a U.S. pullout.
Biden’s announcement set the latest offensive in motion. The Taliban, who have long controlled large parts of the Afghan countryside, moved quickly to seize provincial capitals, border crossings and other key infrastructure.
“The security situation in the city is getting worse,” said Kawa Basharat, a resident in Mazar-e-Sharif, hours before the city fell. “I want peace and stability; the fighting should be stopped.”
Was America's 20-year war in Afghanistan worth it?
As President Joe Biden ends the US combat role in Afghanistan this month, Americans and Afghans are questioning whether it was worth the time, cost and casualties.
More than 3,000 American and other NATO lives lost, tens of thousands of Afghans dead, trillions of dollars of US debt that generations of Americans will pay for, and an Afghanistan that in a stunning week of fighting appears at imminent threat of falling back under Taliban rule, just as Americans found it nearly 20 years ago.
For Biden and some of the American principals in the US and NATO war in Afghanistan, the answer to whether it was worth the cost often comes down to parsing.
Read: Biden orders 1,000 more troops to aid Afghanistan departure
There were the first years of the war when Americans broke up Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida in Afghanistan and routed the Taliban government that had hosted the terrorist network.
That succeeded.
The proof is clear, says Douglas Lute, White House czar for the war during the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and a retired lieutenant general: Al-Qaida has not been able to mount a major attack on the West since 2005.
"We have decimated al-Qaida in that region, in Afghanistan and Pakistan," Lute says.
But after that came the grinding second phase of the war. The US fears of a Taliban rebound whenever Americans eventually pulled out meant that service members kept getting sent back in, racking up more close calls, injuries and dead comrades.
Lute and some others argue that what the second half of the war bought was time – a grace period for Afghanistan's government, security forces and civil society to try to build enough strength to survive on their own.
Quality of life in some ways did improve, modernising under the Western occupation, even as the millions of dollars the US poured into Afghanistan fed corruption. Infant mortality rates fell by half. In 2005, fewer than one in four Afghans had access to electricity. By 2019, nearly all did.
The second half of the war allowed Afghan women, in particular, opportunities entirely denied them under the Taliban, so that more than one in three teenage girls – their whole lives spent under the protection of Western forces – today can read and write.
Read:Taliban sweep across Afghanistan's south, take 4 more cities
But it is that longest, second phase of the war that looks on the verge of complete failure now.
The US war left the Taliban undefeated and failed to secure a political settlement. Taliban forces this past week have swept across two-thirds of the country and captured provincial capitals, on the path of victory before US combat forces even complete their pullout. On many fronts, the Taliban are rolling over Afghan security forces that US and NATO forces spent two decades working to build.
This swift advance sets up a last stand in Kabul, where most Afghans live. It threatens to clamp the country under the Taliban's strict interpretation of religious law, erasing much of the gains.
Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for Central Asia during much of the war's first decade, says the criticism was largely not of the conflict itself but because it went on so long. "It was the expansion of war aims, to try to create a government that was capable of stopping any future attacks."
America expended the most lives and dollars on the most inconclusive years of the war.
The strain of fighting two post-9/11 wars at once with an all-volunteer military meant that more than half of the 2.8 million American servicemen and women who deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq served two or more times, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University.
The repeated deployments contributed to disability rates in those veterans that are more than double that of Vietnam veterans, says Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University.
Linda calculates the US will spend more than $2 trillion just caring for and supporting Afghanistan and Iraq veterans as they age, with costs peaking 30 years to 40 years from now.
Read: Taliban take much of provincial capital in south Afghanistan
That is on top of $1 trillion in Pentagon and State Department costs in Afghanistan since 2001. Because the US borrowed rather than raised taxes to pay for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, interest payments are estimated to cost succeeding generations of Americans trillions of dollars more still.
Annual combat deaths peaked around the time of the war's midpoint, as Obama tried a final surge of forces to defeat the Taliban. In all, 2,448 American troops, 1,144 service members from NATO and other allied countries, more than 47,000 Afghan civilians and at least 66,000 Afghan military and police died, according to the Pentagon and the Costs of War project.
All the while, a succession of US commanders tried new strategies, acronyms and slogans in fighting a Taliban insurgency.
Taliban press advance after capturing 2 major Afghan cities
Afghanistan’s rapidly-advancing Taliban insurgents entered a western provincial capital, an official said Friday, hours after they captured the country’s second and third largest cities in a lightning advance just weeks before America is set to end its longest war.
The seizure of Kandahar and Herat marks the biggest prizes yet for the Taliban, who have taken 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals as part of a weeklong blitz.
While the nation’s capital, Kabul, isn’t directly under threat yet, the losses and the battles elsewhere further tighten the grip of a resurgent Taliban, who are estimated to now hold over two-thirds of the country and continue to press their offensive.
With security rapidly deteriorating, the United States planned to send in 3,000 troops to help evacuate some personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Separately, Britain said about 600 troops would be deployed on a short-term basis to support British nationals leaving the country, and Canada is sending special forces to help evacuate its embassy.
Read: Taliban take 10th Afghan provincial capital in blitz
Thousands of Afghans have fled their homes amid fears the Taliban will again impose a brutal, repressive government, all but eliminating women’s rights and conducting public executions.
Peace talks in Qatar remain stalled, though diplomats are still meeting, as the U.S., European and Asian nations warned that any government established by force would be rejected.
“We demand an immediate end to attacks against cities, urge a political settlement, and warn that a government imposed by force will be a pariah state,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy to the talks.
Fazel Haq Ehsan, chief of the provincial council in the western Ghor province, said Friday that the Taliban had entered Feroz Koh, the provincial capital, and that there was fighting inside the city. The Taliban meanwhile claimed to have captured Qala-e Naw, capital of the western Badghis province. There was no official confirmation.
Mohammad Omer Sherzad, the provincial governor of southern Uruzgan province, said he had been approached by tribal elders seeking a negotiated pullout but that government forces are still battling the Taliban around the provincial capital of Tirin Kot.
The Taliban are also on the move in Logar province, just south of Kabul, where they claim to have seized the police headquarters in the provincial capital of Puli-e Alim as well as a nearby prison. The city is some 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Kabul.
The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment suggests Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months. The Afghan government may be forced to pull back to defend the capital and just a few other cities in the coming days if the Taliban maintain momentum.
The onslaught represents a stunning collapse of Afghan forces after the United States spent nearly two decades and $830 billion trying to establish a functioning state after toppling the Taliban in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The advancing Taliban ride on American-made Humvees and carry M-16s pilfered from Afghan forces.
Afghan security forces and the government have not responded to repeated questions from journalists, instead issuing video communiques that downplay the Taliban advance.
Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Afghan army has rotted from within due to corruption and mismanagement, leaving troops in the field poorly equipped and with little motivation to fight. The Taliban, meanwhile, have spent a decade taking control of large swaths of the countryside, positioning themselves to rapidly seize key infrastructure and urban areas once President Joe Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal.
The difficulty of moving troops out to the provinces means the government is likely to focus all its efforts on defending the capital.
Read:US keeping distance as Afghan forces face Taliban rout
“Whatever forces are left or remaining that are in the Kabul area and the provinces around them, they’re going to be used for the defense of Kabul,” Roggio said. “Unless something dramatically changes, and I don’t see how that’s possible, these provinces will remain under Taliban control.”
In Herat, Taliban fighters rushed past the Great Mosque in the historic city — a structure that dates to 500 BC and was once a spoil of Alexander the Great — and seized government buildings. Witnesses described hearing sporadic gunfire at one government building while the rest of the city fell silent under the insurgents’ control.
Herat had been under militant attack for two weeks, with one wave blunted by the arrival of warlord Ismail Khan and his forces. But on Thursday afternoon, Taliban fighters broke through the city’s defensive lines and later said they were in control.
Afghan lawmaker Semin Barekzai also acknowledged the city’s fall, saying that some officials there had escaped. It wasn’t immediately clear what happened to Khan, who earlier had been described as under attack with his forces at a government building.
In Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, insurgents seized the governor’s office and other buildings, witnesses said. The governor and other officials fled the onslaught, catching a flight to Kabul, the witnesses added. They declined to be named publicly as the defeat has yet to be acknowledged by the government.
The Taliban had earlier attacked a prison in Kandahar and freed inmates inside, officials said.
Earlier Thursday, the militants raised their white flags imprinted with an Islamic proclamation of faith over the city of Ghazni, which sits on a crucial north-south highway just 130 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of Kabul.
In southern Afghanistan, the Taliban’s heartland, heavy fighting continued in Lashkar Gah, where surrounded government forces hoped to hold onto the capital of Helmand province.
Nasima Niazi, a lawmaker from Helmand, criticized ongoing airstrikes targeting the area, saying civilians likely had been wounded and killed.
“The Taliban used civilian houses to protect themselves, and the government, without paying any attention to civilians, carried out airstrikes,” she said.
With the Afghan air power limited and in disarray, aviation tracking data suggested U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers, F-15 fighter jets, drones and other aircraft were involved in the fighting across the country, according to Australia-based security firm The Cavell Group.
U.S. Central Command has acknowledged carrying out several airstrikes in recent days, without providing details or commenting on the concerns over civilian casualties.
Read: Battle gains challenge US hopes of better-behaved Taliban
A United Nations agency warned that civilians in southern Afghanistan faced cut-off highways and mobile phone outages. It described aid groups as being unable to determine how many people had fled as intense fighting and airstrikes continued there.
In Kabul and surrounding central provinces that remain under government control, the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said “the security situation remained unstable and unpredictable with elevated conflict and violence.”
Pakistan meanwhile opened its Chaman border crossing for people who had been stranded in recent weeks. Juma Khan, the Pakistan border town’s deputy commissioner, said the crossing was reopened following talks with the Taliban.
Even as diplomats met in Doha, Qatar on Thursday, the success of the Taliban offensive called into question whether they would ever rejoin long-stalled peace talks with the government in Kabul. Instead, the group could come to power by force — or the country could splinter into factional fighting like it did after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
US keeping distance as Afghan forces face Taliban rout
Afghan government forces are collapsing even faster than U.S. military leaders thought possible just a few months ago when President Joe Biden ordered a full withdrawal. But there’s little appetite at the White House, the Pentagon or among the American public for trying to stop the rout and it probably is too late to do so.
Biden has made clear he has no intention of reversing the decision he made last spring, even as the outcome seems to point toward a Taliban takeover. With most U.S. troops now gone and the Taliban accelerating their battlefield gains, American military leaders are not pressing him to change his mind. They know that the only significant option would be for the president to restart the war he already decided to end.
The Taliban, who ruled the country from 1996 until U.S. forces invaded after the 9/11 attacks, captured three more provincial capitals Wednesday, giving them effective control of about two-thirds of the country. The insurgents have no air force and are outnumbered by U.S.-trained Afghan defense forces, but they have captured territory with stunning speed.
John Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said the Afghans still have time to save themselves from final defeat.
Read:India begins evacuating its nationals from Afghanistan
“No potential outcome has to be inevitable, including the fall of Kabul,” Kirby told reporters. “It doesn’t have to be that way. It really depends on what kind of political and military leadership the Afghans can muster to turn this around.”
Biden made a similar point a day earlier, telling reporters that U.S. troops had done all they could over the past 20 years to assist the Afghans.
“They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” he said.
The United States continues to support the Afghan military with limited airstrikes, but those have not made a strategic difference thus far and are scheduled to end when the U.S. formally ends its role in the war on Aug. 31. Biden could continue airstrikes beyond that date, but given his firm stance on ending the war, that seems unlikely.
“My suspicion, my strong suspicion, is that the 31st of August timeline’s going to hold,” said Carter Malkasian, who advised U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan and Washington.
Senior U.S. military officials had cautioned Biden that a full U.S. withdrawal could lead to a Taliban takeover, but the president decided in April that continuing the war was a waste. He said Tuesday that his decision holds, even amid talk that the Taliban could soon be within reach of Kabul, threatening the security of U.S. and other foreign diplomats.
Read:2 more Afghan provincial capitals fall to Taliban on Monday
The most recent American military assessment, taking into account the Taliban’s latest gains, says Kabul could be under insurgent pressure by September and that the country could fall entirely to Taliban control within a couple of months, according to a defense official who discussed the internal analysis Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
Officials said that there has been no decision or order for an evacuation of American diplomatic personnel from Afghanistan. But one official said it is now time for serious conversations about whether the U.S. military should begin to move assets into the region to be ready in case the State Department calls for a sudden evacuation.
Kirby declined to discuss any evacuation planning, but one congressional official said a recent National Security Council meeting had discussed preliminary planning for a potential evacuation of the U.S. Embassy but came to no conclusions.
Any such plan would involve identifying U.S. troops, aircraft and other assets that may have to operate from within Afghanistan or nearby areas. The U.S. already has warships in the region, including the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and the USS Iwo Jima amphibious ready group with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard.
Military officials watching the deteriorating situation said that so far the Taliban hasn’t taken steps to threaten Kabul. But it isn’t clear if the Taliban will wait until it has gained control of the bulk of the country before attempting to seize the capital.
Military commanders have long warned that it would be a significant challenge for the Afghan military to hold off the Taliban through the end of the year. In early May, shortly after Biden announced his withdrawal decision, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he foresaw “some really dramatic, bad possible outcomes” in a worst-case scenario. He held out hope that the government would unify and hold off the Taliban, and said the outcome could clarify by the end of the summer.
Read: Battle gains challenge US hopes of better-behaved Taliban
The security of the U.S. diplomatic corps has been talked about for months, even before the Taliban’s battlefield blitz. The military has long had various planning options for evacuating personnel from Afghanistan. Those options would largely be determined by the White House and the State Department.
A key component of the options would be whether the U.S. military would have unfettered access to the Kabul international airport, allowing personnel to be flown systematically out of the capital. In a grimmer environment, American forces might have to fight their way in and out if the Taliban have infiltrated the city.
The U.S. also would have to determine who would be evacuated: just American embassy personnel and the U.S. military, or also other embassies, American citizens, and Afghans who worked with the U.S. In that last category are former interpreters and those who face retaliation from the Taliban. The U.S. has already started pulling out hundreds of those Afghans who assisted troops during the war.
Senior defense leaders have been talking and meeting daily, laying out their grim assessments of the security situation in Afghanistan. Officials pointed to the fall of Baghlan Province as a worrisome bellwether, because it provides the Taliban with a base and route to Kabul from the north.
Battle gains challenge US hopes of better-behaved Taliban
Taliban conquests in Afghanistan are challenging the Biden administration’s hopes that a desire for international respect — and for international aid and cash — may moderate the fundamentalist militia’s worst behaviors when the U.S. ends its war there.
Showing little interest in a diplomatic settlement, Taliban commanders have sped up their battlefield advances ahead of the U.S. military’s withdrawal at the end of this month. They’ve seized six provincial capitals in the past week.
And while some Taliban commanders have behaved with restraint in newly captured territory, rights groups say others have acted much like the brutal Taliban the U.S. overthrew in 2001. That includes allegedly killing detainees en masse and demanding, in an allegation denied by a Taliban spokesman, that communities provide them with females above age 15 to marry.
Still, Biden administration officials have kept up the hopeful claim that a desire for international approval might influence Taliban actions. They reject criticism by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who opposes the withdrawal and dismisses what he calls “diplomatic carrots.″
Read:India begins evacuating its nationals from Afghanistan
“If the Taliban claim to want international legitimacy these actions are not going to get them the legitimacy they seek,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, in one of many such administration warnings.
U.S. envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad traveled to Qatar on Tuesday to make that point to Taliban officials directly, telling Voice of America that if the Taliban took over Afghanistan by force “they will become a pariah state.”
Regardless of whether the Taliban heeds that warning, President Joe Biden is showing no sign of slowing or reversing a decision to withdraw from the war.
The United States is ending its nearly 20-year combat mission in Afghanistan on Aug. 31 under a deal that President Donald Trump signed with the Taliban in 2020. The U.S. invasion beginning in October 2001 broke up the Afghanistan-based al-Qaida that had plotted the Sept. 11 attacks. It overthrew, with Afghan allies, the Taliban government that had refused to surrender Osama bin Laden.
Only three countries — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — recognized the old Taliban government. The inward-looking regime enforced the strictest interpretation of Islamic law. It banned singing, kite-flying and watching TV, and staged public hangings at Kabul’s main sports stadium.
Then-Taliban ruler Mullah Mohammed Omar made a gesture to the international community before 9/11 by ending cultivation of heroin poppies, something U.N. officials verified. But Omar told his ruling council he thought there was nothing his government could to do end international condemnation.
Omar’s Taliban council members at the time acknowledged the financial pain sanctions were causing.
For today’s Taliban, U.S. talk of things like international inclusion, aid and reconstruction money might have mattered more had it come even a few years ago, said Andrew Watkins, senior Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group.
A stronger Taliban today has been emboldened by the U.S. withdrawal. Hopes of grabbing all or much of Afghanistan, with all the border import fees and other revenues a country offers, make international support less essential.
In talks in Qatar, “Taliban political representatives did express genuine interest in international legitimacy and all the benefits that come with it,” Watkins said. But “what the Taliban never did was indicate a willingness to compromise” their behavior enough to lock down any such global recognition or financial support, he said.
Trump and Biden officials have hoped the prospect of ending its old outcast status would moderate the ethnic Pashtun fundamentalist group’s behavior in a range of ways: negotiating its place in Afghanistan’s power structure rather than grabbing it, treating Afghanistan’s minority groups humanely and barring Islamic extremist groups from using the country as a base to attack regionally or globally.
Read: 2 more Afghan provincial capitals fall to Taliban on Monday
Yet the Taliban’s political and military wings often seem at odds with the Taliban representatives in Qatar, who negotiate while the Taliban field commanders roll over territory at home.
As the political leaders talk compromise and power-sharing, Pakistani officials who are familiar with private discussions with the insurgent movement say they want complete power.
They also envision a strict religious government, accepting girls going to school and women working, but only within their Islamic injunctions. The Pakistani officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Some European diplomats are more skeptical than Americans that international opinion can sway the Taliban. So is Afghanistan’s president.
“Yes, they have changed, but negatively,” Ashraf Ghani, himself widely blamed for not doing more to strengthen his government and its defenders vs. the Taliban, told his Cabinet this month.
The Taliban have become “more cruel, more oppressive,” and would only share power if forced to on the battlefield, Ghani said.
Scenes of black-turbaned Taliban officials signing the U.S. withdrawal deal with Trump officials itself granted the Taliban new legitimacy. So did Trump’s praise of America’s Taliban battlefield enemies as “very tough, very smart.”
Eager to maintain trade and economic ties regionally if not globally, Taliban officials have been calling on Central Asian governments and diplomats in Russia and China, assuring the Taliban would be good neighbors.
The Taliban largely have honored at least one part of their deal with Trump, holding off from attacks on withdrawing U.S. forces.
Read: Taliban press on, take another Afghan provincial capital
The deal’s core requirement for Americans says the Taliban can’t again allow al-Qaida or anyone else to use Afghanistan to threaten the United States or its allies.
But an April Pentagon report said the Taliban maintained “mutually beneficial” relations with al-Qaida-related groups, and called it unlikely the militia would take substantive action against them.
Overall, “I don’t think the U.S. is going to get what it hoped for,” said Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Afghanistan researcher and former U.S. development official in Central Asia.
The Taliban ”don’t really have an incentive,″ unless their plans for any governing have changed, and it’s not clear that they have, she said. “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking that the Taliban had changed, you know, in the fundamental sense.”