The Taliban are on a roll. Earlier this week
their PR arm was claiming they hold 218 Afghan
districts out of 421 – capturing new ones every day.
Tens of districts are contested. Entire Afghan
provinces are basically lost to the government in
Kabul, which has been de facto reduced to administer
a few scattered cities under siege.
Already on July 1, the Taliban announced they
controlled 80% of Afghan territory. That’s close to
the situation 20 years ago, only a few weeks before
9/11, when
Commander Ahmad Shah Masoud told me in the Panjshir
valley , as he prepared a counter-offensive,
that the Taliban were 85% dominant.
Their new tactical approach works like a dream.
First, there’s a direct appeal to soldiers of the
Afghan National Army (ANA) to surrender.
Negotiations are smooth and deals fulfilled.
Soldiers in the low thousands have already joined
the Taliban without a single shot fired.
Mapmakers cannot upload updates fast enough. This
is fast becoming a textbook case of the collapse of
a 21st-century central government.
The Taliban are fast advancing in western Vardak,
easily capturing ANA bases. That is the prequel for
an assault on Maidan Shar, the provincial capital.
If they gain control of Vardak, then they will be
literally at the gates of Kabul.
After capturing Panjwaj district, the Taliban are
also a stone’s throw away from Kandahar, founded by
Alexander the Great in 330 BC and the city where a
certain mullah Omar – with a little help from his
Pakistani ISI friends – started the Taliban
adventure in 1994, leading to their Kabul power
takeover in 1996.
The overwhelming majority of Badakhshan province
– Tajik majority, not Pashtun – fell after only four
days of negotiations, with a few skirmishes thrown
in. The Taliban even captured a hilltop outpost very
close to Faizabad, Badakhshan’s capital.
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I tracked the Tajik-Afghan border in detail when
I traveled the Pamir highway in late 2019. The
Taliban, following mountain tracks on the Afghan
side, could soon reach the legendary, desolate
border with China’s Xinjiang in the Wakhan
corridor.
The Taliban are also about to make a move on
Hairaton, in Balkh province. Hairaton is at the
Afghan-Uzbek border, the site of the historically
important Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya,
through which the Red Army departed Afghanistan in
1989.
ANA commanders swear the city is now protected
from all sides by a five-kilometer security zone.
Hairaton has already attracted tens of thousands of
refugees. Tashkent does not want them to cross the
border.
And it’s not only Central Asia; the Taliban have
already advanced to the city limits of Islam Qilla,
which borders Iran, in Herat province, and is the
key checkpoint in the busy Mashhad to Herat
corridor.
The Tajik puzzle
The extremely porous, geologically stunning
Tajik-Afghan mountain borders remain the most
sensitive case. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon,
after a serious phone call with his Russian
counterpart Vladimir Putin, ordered the mobilization
of 20,000 reservists and sent them to the border.
Rahmon also promised humanitarian and financial
support to the Kabul government.
The Taliban, for their part, officially declared
that the border is safe and they have no intention
of invading Tajik territory. Earlier this week even
the Kremlin cryptically announced that Moscow does
not plan to send troops to Afghanistan.
A cliffhanger is set for the end of July, as the
Taliban announced they will submit a written peace
proposal to Kabul. A strong possibility is that it
may amount to an intimation for Kabul to surrender
and transfer full control of the country.
The Taliban seem to be riding an irresistible
momentum, especially when Afghans themselves were
stunned to see how the imperial “protector,” after
nearly two decades of de facto occupation, left
Bagram airbase
in the middle of the night.
Compare it to the evaluation of serious analysts
such as
Lester Grau, explaining the Soviet departure
over three decades ago:
When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989,
they did so in a coordinated, deliberate,
professional manner, leaving behind a
functioning government, an improved military and
an advisory and economic effort insuring the
continued viability of the government. The
withdrawal was based on a coordinated
diplomatic, economic and military plan
permitting Soviet forces to withdraw in good
order and the Afghan government to survive.
The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA)
managed to hold on despite the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991. Only then, with the loss
of Soviet support and the increased efforts by
the Mujahideen (holy warriors) and Pakistan, did
the DRA slide toward defeat in April 1992. The
Soviet effort to withdraw in good order was well
executed and can serve as a model for other
disengagements from similar nations.
When it comes to the American empire, Tacitus
once again applies: “They have plundered the world,
stripping naked the land in their hunger… They are
driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by
ambition, if poor…. They ravage, they slaughter,
they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they
hail as the construction of empire. And when in
their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call
that peace.”
In the wake of the hegemon, deserts called peace
include in varying degrees Iraq, Libya, Syria –
which happen to, geologically, harbor deserts – as
well as the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan.
It looks like Think Tank Row in DC, between
Dupont and Thomas circles alongside Massachusetts
Avenue, have not really done their homework on
Pashtunwali – the Pashtun honor code – or on the
ignominious
British empire retreat from Kabul.
That Afghan heroin rat line
Still, it’s too early to tell whether what is
being spun as the US “retreat” from Afghanistan
reflects the definitive unraveling of the
Empire of Chaos. That’s especially true because
this is not a “retreat” at all: it’s a repositioning
– with added elements of privatization.
At least 650 “US forces” will be protecting the
sprawling embassy in Kabul. Add to that possibly 500
Turkish troops – which means NATO – to protect the
airport, plus an undeclared number of “contractors,”
aka mercenaries, and an unspecified number of
special forces.
Pentagon head Lloyd Austin has
come up with the
new deal. The militarized embassy is referred to
as Forces Afghanistan-Forward. These forces will be
“supported” by a new, special Afghan office in
Qatar.
The key provision is that the special privilege
to bomb Afghanistan whenever the US feels like it
remains intact. The difference is in the chain of
command. Instead of General Scott Miller, so far the
top US commander in Afghanistan, the bomber-in-chief
will be General Frank McKenzie, the head of CENTCOM.
So future bombing will come essentially from the
Persian Gulf – what the Pentagon lovingly describes
as “over the horizon capability.” Crucially,
Pakistan has officially refused to be part of it
although, in the case of drone attacks, they will
have to fly over Pakistani territory in Balochistan.
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan also refused to host
American bases.
The Taliban, for their part, are unfazed.
Spokesman Suhail Shaheen was adamant that any
foreign troops that are not out by the 9/11 deadline
will be regarded as – what else? – occupiers.
Whether the Taliban will be able to establish
dominance is not an issue; it’s just a matter of
when. And that leads us to the two really important
questions:
1. Will the CIA be able to maintain what
Seymour Hersh initially, and later myself,
described as the
Afghan heroin ratline that finances their
black ops?
2. And if the CIA cannot continue to
supervise opium poppy field production in
Afghanistan as well as coordinate the subsequent
stages of the heroin business, where will it
move to?
Every thinking mind across Central and South Asia
knows that the Empire of Chaos, for two long
decades, was never interested in defeating the
Taliban or fighting for “the freedom of the Afghan
people.”
The key motives were
to keep a crucial, strategic forward base in
the underbelly of “existential threats” China
and Russia as well as intractable Iran – all
part of the New Great Game;
to be conveniently positioned to later
exploit Afghanistan’s enormous mineral wealth;
and to process opium into heroin to fund CIA
ops. Opium was a major factor in the rise of the
British empire, and heroin remains one of the
world’s top dirty businesses funding shady intel
ops.
What China and SCO want
Now compare all of the above with the Chinese
approach.
Unlike Think Tank Row in DC, Chinese counterparts
seem to have done their homework. They understood
that the USSR did not invade Afghanistan in 1979 to
impose “popular democracy” – the jargon then – but
was in fact invited by the quite progressive
UN-recognized Kabul government at the time, which
essentially wanted roads, electricity, medical care,
telecommunications and education.
As these staples of modernity would not be
provided by Western institutions, the solution would
have to come from Soviet socialism. That would imply
a social revolution – a convoluted affair in a
deeply pious Islamic nation – and, crucially, the
end of feudalism.
“Grand Chessboard” Zbignew Brzezinski’s imperial
counterpunch worked because it manipulated Afghan
feudal lords and their regimentation capacity –
bolstered by immense funds (CIA, Saudis, Pakistani
intel) – to give the USSR its Vietnam.
None of these feudal lords were interested in the
abolition of poverty and economic development in
Afghanistan.
China is now picking up where the USSR left.
Beijing, in close contact with the Taliban since
early 2020, essentially wants to extend the $62
billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) –
one of the Belt and Road Initiative flagship
projects – to Afghanistan.
The first, crucial step will be the construction
of the Kabul-Peshawar motorway – through the Khyber
Pass and the current border at Torkham. That will
mean Afghanistan de facto becoming part of CPEC.
It’s all about regional integration at work.
Kabul-Peshawar will be one extra CPEC node that
already includes the construction of the
ultra-strategic
Tashkurgan airport on the Karakoram highway in
Xinjiang, only 50 kilometers away from the Pakistani
border and also close to Afghanistan, as well as to
Gwadar port in Balochistan.
In early June, a
trilateral China-Afghanistan-Pakistan meeting
led the Chinese Foreign Ministry to unmistakably bet
on the “peaceful recovery of Afghanistan,” with the
joint statement welcoming “the early return of the
Taliban to the political life of Afghanistan” and a
pledge to “expand economic and trade ties.”
So there’s no way a dominant Taliban will refuse
the Chinese drive to build infrastructure and energy
projects geared towards regional economic
integration – the mullahs’ side of the bargain being
to keep the country pacified and not subject to
jihadi turbulence of the ISIS-Khorasan
variety capable of spilling over to Xinjiang.
The Chinese gameplay is clear: the Americans
should not be able to exert influence over the new
Kabul arrangement. It’s all about the strategic
Afghan importance for Belt and Road – and that is
intertwined with discussions inside the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO), incidentally founded
20 years ago, and which for years has advocated for
an “Asian solution” for the Afghan drama.
The discussions inside the SCO regard the NATO
projection of the new Afghanistan as a jihadi
paradise controlled by Islamabad as not more than
wishful thinking nonsense.
It will be fascinating to watch how China,
Pakistan, Iran, Russia and even India will fill the
vacuum in the post-Forever Wars era in Afghanistan.
It’s very important to remember that all these
actors, plus the Central Asians, are full SCO
members (or observers, in the case of Iran).
Tehran plausibly might interfere with potential
imperial plans to bomb Afghanistan from the outside
– whatever the motive. On another front, it’s
unclear whether Islamabad or Moscow, for instance,
would help the Taliban to take Bagram. What’s
certain is that Russia will take the Taliban off its
list of terrorist outfits.
Considering that the empire and NATO – via Turkey
– will not be really leaving, a distinct future
possibility is an SCO push, allied with the Taliban
(Afghanistan is also a SCO observer), to secure the
nation on their terms and concentrate on CPEC
development projects. But the first step seems to be
the hardest: how to form a real, solid, national
coalition government in Kabul.
History may rule that Washington wanted
Afghanistan to be the USSR’s Vietnam; decades later,
it ended up getting its own second Vietnam, repeated
as – what else? – farce. A remixed Saigon moment is
fast approaching and yet another stage of the New
Great Game in Eurasia is at hand.
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