By Ramadan Abdel Kader
The chaotic scenes of Afghans, jostling on the runway of the Kabul airport desperate to get out of the country, underscored deepening fears over the Taliban’s return to power amid a perceived hasty withdrawal of US troops from the country.
Several Western nations have pledged not to abandon the Afghans who have collaborated with the NATO troops and international organisations in Afghanistan for the past 20 years that followed the US-led invasion of the country and the Taliban’s ouster.
It remains to be seen how the mass evacuations will be carried out as the Taliban is keeping the world on tenterhooks about its way of governance and whether its new reign will depart from its draconic rule in the pre-invasion years.
The movement, which governed Afghanistan from 1969 till 2001, last week sought to reassure a jittery world, promising to respect human rights, particularly those of women, and to prevent Afghanistan from being used again as a launch pad for attacks against other countries. When in power in the 1990s, Taliban harboured Al Qaeda and other terror groups. Now, the movement has to prove it has really changed.
US President Joe Biden’s decision to pull out American forces from Afghanistan has triggered controversy especially after pandemonium in Kabul. But Biden stands by his decision. “We should be focusing on where the threat is the greatest,” Biden said, citing threats from Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and East Africa.
He also faulted the deposed Afghan government for the chaos that unfolded after the Taliban takeover. “When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, get in a plane and taking off and going to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off — that was, you know, I’m not, that’s what happened,” Biden said in an interview with ABC News last week.
“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he said earlier in the week.
The rationale, however, calls into question the billions of dollars pumped into Afghanistan over the past two decades to build up well-functioning security forces as well as the humanitarian cost there.
Over 100,000 Afghan civilians are estimated to have been killed, along with 45,000 members of the Afghan security forces, and at least 3,500 members of the US and coalition troops in the past two decades.
On invading Afghanistan in October 2001, the US declared that its objectives were to dismantle Al Qaeda and ensure that the country will no longer be used as a springboard for terrorist attacks. Turmoil in Afghanistan including deadly Taliban attacks on foreign soldiers was overshadowed by another equally prolonged US war in Iraq.
In May 2011, Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed in a US special raid in Pakistan. The US insists the mission has been accomplished and Al Qaeda routed.
In February 2020, the US and Taliban signed a historic deal, setting a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and committing the militant group to halt attacks on Americans and start peace talks with the Afghan government.
But as things are now standing, the Afghan scene can be summed up in one word: uncertainty.
When the US-led coalition troops kicked off pullout from Afghanistan last May, Taliban insurgents swept across the country, making territorial gains — sometimes without fighting.
Worries mount that Afghanistan is sliding into anarchy as the coalition forces are pulling out and a Daesh affiliate is establishing a foothold there. There are fears that radical groups will reconstitute themselves, being inspired by Taliban’s resurgence. Such fears echo in the Arab region, which has borne the brunt of Daesh terrorists and the hardline jihadists, dubbed the “Arab Afghans”.
Several Arab countries experienced attacks mounted by those terrorists. The other day, Hay’at Tahrir Al Sham (Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant), an Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, hailed Taliban’s sweep to power and hoped that rebels in the war-devastated country will learn a lesson from the Afghan movement’s “victorious” experience.
This may explain why the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan has riveted Arab attention too.
While facing the toughest test yet in his seven-month-old presidency, Biden’s decision on withdrawal from Afghanistan revives president Barack Obama’s 2011 decision to pull American troops from Iraq. A few years later, Daesh overran large parts of Iraq and unleashed a spate of brutal attacks in the Arab region and far beyond.
The contested withdrawal from Afghanistan is seen as part of a US strategy to end involvement in long-running wars that have exacted a high human and financial price. Biden said last month that the US would terminate by the end of this year its combat mission in Iraq.
In March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein and to eliminate alleged weapons of mass destruction that never existed. Bush the Jr also promised a “free and peaceful Iraq”. Ironically, the Arab country has since suffered from vicious violence and sectarian strife.
Discontent soon grew among the Iraqis as the scale of havoc wrought by the invaders and their missteps, including a decision to disband the Iraqi army, emerged.
Iraqis’ disaffection deepened as evidence surfaced of abuses committed by US military personnel against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
In the post-incursion years, US troops were the target of a wave of attacks.
In 2011, US combat troops pulled out of Iraq, only to return three years later after Daesh extremists grabbed large swathes of the country in a blitz amid a collapse of security forces.
In December 2017, the Iraqi government declared it scored victory over Daesh and regained all the territory the organisation had earlier captured. In September 2020, the then US president Donald Trump decided to reduce the number of US troops in Iraq from 5,200 to 2,000.
Trump, however, stoked anti-US sentiment among Iran-aligned Iraqi politicians and militias after top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani and an allied Iraq militia chief were killed in a US airstrike in Baghdad. In the aftermath, the Iraqi parliament voted for the departure of foreign troops from the country. Iraqi military bases housing US-led coalition forces have since come under dozens of attacks that Washington has blamed on Iran-allied militias.
With this in mind, the US has sought to redefine its military presence in Iraq. There are currently around 2,500 American military personnel in Iraq, many of them are expected to remain there to train and advise local forces in handling Daesh. In recent months, remaining Daesh pockets have unleashed a series of attacks in Iraq, fueling fears of the terror group’s revival.
Keeping the American military in Iraq would also help Washington to counter-balance Iran’s influence there.
This arrangement seems aimed to ease home pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhemi while keeping the American forces in Iraq under the new label of military trainers. The re-labelling does not come to the liking of Iran’s proxies, however.
Heartened by the messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Iran-backed militias are most likely to press for an outright end to the American presence in Iraq.
Increasingly distracted by the home issues and wearied by long presence in Iraq and concomitant risks, the US may eventually opt to quit once and for all.
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