Afghanistan not what we’d hoped
Ethnic discrimination, warlords, rising terrorism raise doubts about the mission
war.
It hasn’t helped that the U.S.-led NATO policy during the Obama years was to peg military and reconstruction aid on the Afghan government’s commitment to “reconciliation” with the most brutal enemies of the Afghan people, including the Taliban.
A shudder of fear swept through Afghanistan’s minorities last September when the terrorist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, after 15 years in hiding, was absolved of his war crimes from the 1990s and welcomed back to Kabul in a “peace talks” deal. The arrangement followed a suicide-bomb attack in Kabul that killed about 100 Hazaras at a peaceful protest against the Ghani government’s decision to reroute a transmission line away from the Hazara heartland.
Ever since, Afghanistan’s minorities have been turning to warlords from their own ethnic blocs for protection and leadership.
Afghanistan’s fracturing along ethnic lines, exacerbated by the “war weariness” of the NATO countries, has opened a political and military vacuum that Russia and Iran are happily filling, just as they did in Syria.
Two years ago, the Kremlin stopped co-operating with NATO in Afghanistan. At the time, Zamir Kabulov, Vladimir Putin’s special representative for Afghanistan, confirmed Moscow was sharing intelligence with the Taliban because “the Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours” against the Islamic State.
In recent weeks, Taliban commandershaveconfirmedthatTehran is boosting their supply of funding and weaponry, and that some of the arms shipments originate in Russia. Last October, Afghan security forces managedtorepulseamassiveTaliban assault in the province of Farah, on the Iranian border. Among the dead Talibs were four senior Iranian commandos, and several of the wounded Talibs were taken across the border into Iran.
It is not clear what role Turkey (still nominally a NATO member) is taking in Afghanistan’s ethnic troubles. In June, several of Afghanistan’s prominent Uzbek, Hazara and Tajik strongmen met in Turkey to announce a new anti-Ghani political coalition.
The coalition is led by the gruesome Uzbek warlord Abdurrashid Dostum, an old friend of Turkish President Recip Erdogan. Dostum is a vice-president of Afghanistan, but he lives in Turkey, allegedly for his health, although avoiding the sexual-assault charges he faces in Afghanistan might have something to do with it.
While Donald Trump’s White House convulses in imbecilities, it is difficult to determine what will become of Trump’s promised overhaul of the U.S. approach in Afghanistan, although he wants to wash his hands of the country.
The Americans ended their official combat role in Afghanistan three years ago. Roughly 8,400 U.S. soldiers remain as part of NATO’s trainingand-assistance effort involving about 13,000 soldiers from 39 countries. Canada’s contribution, after pulling the last of our soldiers in 2014, consists of an annual $150-million package of military and reconstruction aid until 2020.
The Trump administration is right about one thing: The good guys are not winning in Afghanistan