- The Taliban have taken over Afghanistan.
- On Sunday, the organization occupied Kabul, the country’s capital.
- This has plunged the country into chaos. Its President Ashraf Ghani has left the country and dozens of citizens want to leave Kabul.
The Taliban swept Afghanistan in just a few days and seized territories they did not control, sometimes even occupying major provincial capitals with little life.
Although there have been many reports of the military collapse of the Afghan army, interviews with Taliban leaders, Afghan politicians, diplomats and other observers indicate that the Islamic radical movement laid the foundation for its victory long before the events of the last week or so.
For months, the insurgents have stated that they have established relationships with low-level political and military officials and tribal elders to prepare for a more difficult struggle to regain control of the country they ruled from 1996 to 2001.
Timeline | Taliban occupy Kabul
In addition, about 20 years after the longest war in the United States began, foreign troops announced their withdrawal from Afghanistan in advance, shattering confidence in the Western-backed Kabul government and encouraging people to defect.
“The Taliban don’t want to fight,” said Asfandyar Mir, a South Asian security analyst affiliated with Stanford University. “They want to cause political collapse instead.”
The speed of the Taliban even surprised them. Last week, even in the northern part of the country, where the Taliban are traditionally weak, towns collapsed like dominoes, culminating in the capture of the capital Kabul on Sunday.
A Taliban commander in central Ghazni province said that once government forces see the United States finally leaving, resistance will collapse. In just one week, from Kunduz in the north to Kandahar in the south, all major cities in Afghanistan have fallen.
Read | Afghan central bank governor flees, currency plummets during Taliban takeover
“This does not mean that these Afghan leaders who surrendered to us have changed or become pious. This is because there are no more dollars,” he said, referring to the financial support the government and military have received from the West in the past two decades. .
“They surrendered like goats and sheep.”
The Western-backed President Ashraf Ghani fled abroad, and most other members of his government were in hiding and could not be contacted. Ghani’s own defense minister criticized his surrender.
A SIGAR report in July stated that in some areas, the Afghan army had resisted to a certain degree, while in other areas, they surrendered or fled disorderly.
Ashraf Ghani, President of Afghanistan.
When his fighters took over the presidential palace, Mullah Abdul Gani Baradhar, one of the main victors as the head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha, said it was an unparalleled victory, but unexpectedly swift.
He said: “We have reached an unexpected situation.”
condition
Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman for the Taliban based in Doha, said that although such contacts have a long tradition in Afghanistan, it is a common strategy to induce opponents to change positions in Afghanistan, but it still ensures the security of a large number of areas.
“(We) had direct talks with the security forces there, and through the mediation of tribal elders and religious scholars,” he said. “The whole of Afghanistan, not in a specific province or a specific geographic location.”
After being ousted in the 2001 campaign supported by the United States, the Taliban gradually rebuilt, funded by opium and illegal mining. As long as there is US air power to support the Afghan army, large-scale encounters are generally avoided.
Instead, they prefer to choose remote centers and isolated checkpoints, and spread fear in the city through suicide bombings.
At the same time, they controlled many provincial regions in the form of a shadow government with its own courts and taxation system.
In the traditionally weak northern and western regions of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban movement, it has acted to support local support and win over Tajiks, Uzbeks, and others among the intricate ethnic groups of Afghanistan, where residents and officials Say.
Senior Taliban Commander Vahidullah Hashimi said:
We have jihadists and fighters in every region. We have the Panjsiri Mujahide in Panjshir Province, the Barki Mujahide in Balkh Province, and the Kandahari Mujahide in Kandahar Province.
Throughout the process, Baradar managed to maintain a united front between the Taliban’s political leadership and combatants across the country, despite sometimes conflicts of interest on issues ranging from peace negotiations to sharing income from opium poppy cultivation. .
“Our security chief and the predecessors of other committees are all from ethnic minorities living there,” Shahin said. “That’s why they are able to negotiate and negotiate to obtain the regions of all these provinces.”
“This is different from the past.”
competition
Local events have shown that once US President Joe Biden confirmed the agreement reached by the previous government in Washington with the Taliban, the province’s long-term actions quickly paid off.
Although the peace agreement was signed before the U.S. withdrawal, the U.S. commander and the Defense Intelligence Agency pointed out that there are clear signs that the Taliban have stepped up their attacks on regional centers and want to cut off major highways as they prepare to attack provincial cities.
Quoting | World leaders react to Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
In addition, the Chief Inspector General of the State Council stated in a report in July that a series of targeted killings of key Afghan security personnel, including pilots, were carried out, “The purpose is to weaken… morale and undermine public trust in the government. “.
After occupying large areas of remote villages, the Taliban obtained border posts, cut off a major source of government revenue, and cut off the support of local tribes, which traditionally took a portion of customs taxes in exchange for their loyalty.
This strategy has fatally weakened the government led by Ghani. Ghani is a Western scholar supported by Washington, but he has almost no popular support outside of Kabul, and even has poor relations with some of his own commanders.
After escaping from the palace on Sunday, his defense minister, General Bismila Mohammedi, said on Twitter that he “tied our hands behind his back and sold our country. Cursed Gani and his gang .”
As a Pashtun distrusted by members of other ethnic groups, Ghani has always relied on the support of the unruly leaders of the former Northern Alliance, which the United States recruited in 2001 to defeat the Taliban. They include the former governor of Balkh Province Atta Mohammad Noor (Atta Mohammad Noor) and the Uzbek leader Rashid Dostum.
But the patient efforts of the Taliban undermined the sponsorship system that kept these leaders in place, and they fled on Saturday.
Atta Noor blamed his once unbreakable fortress in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif on “a huge, organized, and cowardly conspiracy.” He fell without fighting the day before the Taliban militants entered Kabul. .
