Give Sarah the Last Word - the Taliban Takeover Was an Inside Job


Former journalist/Afghan activist/military advisor Sarah Chayes has, for the past 20 years, lived and breathed Afghanistan. Now she reflects on how the Taliban returned to seize control seemingly overnight.

No hubris here. It took me months, and my own mistakes, to realize just how much corruption would affect the ultimate success of US efforts. But I did realize it. The proposition, after all, was fairly simple: Why would Afghans risk their lives to defend a government that was just as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were?

US decision makers across four administrations simply refused to contemplate that question. In 2011, when I was special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I participated in a Cabinet-level interagency policymaking process run by the national security staff that arrived at the explicit determination that we would not address the problem. We would not even take obvious steps to cease exacerbating it. “You must want the corruption here,” my friends in Kandahar were saying.

Just what democracy and rule of law did the United States and its allies bring to Afghanistan? Systematized corruption and blatant self-dealing? A Ponzi scheme in the guise of a banking system, while our own banking system was incubating the crash of 2008? A government where billionaires benefitting from monopoly procurement contracts get to write the rules?

False Flags

Pakistan. The Taliban — so the dominant narrative goes — arose in the early 1990s in Kandahar. That is incorrect. They were birthed across the border in Quetta, Pakistan. I have had countless conversations, with actors in the drama as well as ordinary people who had watched events unfurl in Kandahar, and in Quetta. Their accounts were detailed and unanimous: The Taliban were a project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. ISI operatives even conducted market research, testing the name “Taliban,” and the spin that these humble religious apprentices had no interest in government, they just wanted to curb the chaos infesting the city in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal.

The label and the message took. But they were lies.

And who negotiated the Taliban’s entry into Kandahar back then? Who peddled those lies to get battle-scarred Mujahideen commanders to step aside? None other than Hamid Karzai. His own father broke with him over his decision to further the ISI project, I was told by members of his household.

...after the Taliban’s 1990s triumph, Osama bin Laden took up residence in their de facto capital, barely a hundred miles from Quetta. Later, with US forces closing in on him, he escaped to Pakistan and sheltered in the army’s garrison city of Abbottabad.

By 2003, the Pakistani ISI was back at it: reconstituting, training, and equipping the Taliban again, rescuing targets American personnel had identified. That’s why Islamabad was not warned of the Bin Laden raid ahead of time — for fear he would be warned.

And now this.

How do we suppose a ragtag militia lurking in the hills — as we’ve so often heard the Taliban described — managed to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international support? Where did the men and materiel come from, the endless flow of cash to buy off local soldiers and police?

How many times have you heard US officials vaunt the progress being made in Afghanistan? How often did they insist that spectacular urban explosions were signs of the Taliban’s “desperation,” and their “inability to hold territory?” When did the US State Department spokesman tell reporters that the United States was not abandoning Afghanistan, merely “reducing its civilian footprint?”

Who did we think we were deluding?

On last weekend's Fareed Zakaria GPS, the host asked former Joint Chiefs Chairman, admiral Mike Mullen whether Pakistan made the Afghan war unwinnable.  Admiral Mullen makes the same allegation that Chayes referenced, Pakistan undermined the West by sheltering, training and equipping Taliban fighters.

Mullen added it's time for America to let Pakistan go. Let the Chinese have them.

UPDATE:

I had a chance to discuss Chaye's op-ed with a Pakistan-born doctor now living in B.C. He agreed with her take on the role of Pakistan's ISI in creating the Taliban.

This fellow told me of an experience when he was interning in a large hospital in Peshawar. He was told to go to a wing where he encountered some 200 Taliban needing medical aid from fighting in Afghanistan. Few spoke Pashto, the language of the Pashtun tribe. Most spoke Urdu, the language of Pakistan. A few spoke Punjabi. This was the supposedly Afghani Taliban - hardly.

As Ms. Chayes claims, he said it was common knowledge that the Taliban were the handiwork of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. The doctor added it was thought that about 35,000 Pakistan army soldiers were seconded to the Taliban to help it become the central government of Afghanistan.


Comments

  1. the salamanderAugust 19, 2021 at 6:38 AM

    .. that's a great post, thanks !

    .. The Holy Grail of true journalism is to go full Pulitzer Prize
    On site, in situ, embedded, culture integrated observations
    ie what it's actually like at street level
    Like - 'What's Really Going On Here'

    This is a lot more convoluted than I envisioned ..

    PS.. is she on camera docu / live journalist ..?
    Other Main Media whined about her hijab
    (or whatever it is..)
    In context to lack of context criticism
    versus her virtuous self on the street

    That's gossip and nitpicking shallow crap

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibAugust 19, 2021 at 7:47 AM

      Until recently she was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I'm not sure what she's up to now. Yes, she wore traditional Afghan dress. She really didn't have much choice when she spent the first decade after the Taliban ouster establishing two start ups to employ Afghanis, but especially women. Both companies operated in the Talibs' home base of Kandahar and, no, she wasn't protected by bodyguards.

      The Great Game, it's always wheels spinning within wheels. Rarely is anything as it seems. Rarer still that what we've been fed by our leaders and their generals turns out to be honest and accurate.

      As I mentioned in my previous post, when Chayes came to my attention I checked her out with an old Afghan hand from the Soviet days, Jonathan Landy of Knight Ridder news service. He had spent a couple of years running the hills with the Mujahedeen and he unreservedly vouched for her. That was good enough for me.

      Delete

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