Afghanistan being abandoned to the militants
After a blundered private unveiling of Canada’s memorial to soldiers fallen in Afghanistan, the dead and their families got the ceremony they are owed.
Last weekend, the cenotaph — housed in Ottawa’s Afghanistan Memorial Hall — was rededicated, this time with families invited and an overflow crowd present.
Thus endeth the Canadian military expedition to a benighted country that is in poorer security shape than when NATO troops ended operations in December 2014.
And it will doubtless get worse when the Taliban sign a so-called peace deal with the U.S. — any day now — that should more accurately be termed a troop withdrawal. The agreement will allow President Donald Trump to pull America’s remaining 14,000 troops from Afghanistan, essentially in exchange for a Taliban pledge not to provide safe haven to terrorist groups, as it did for Al Qaeda in the ’90s, whence it plotted 9/11.
But Al Qaeda is already wellentrenched, again, in the ungovernable and violence-drenched nation. In 2015, a year after Canadians bugged out of Kandahar Province — their remit under the International Security Assistance Force — an expansive Al Qaeda training camp was discovered in the province’s Shorabak District and destroyed by airstrikes. They keep sprouting, however, because Al Qaeda, however diminished, won’t go away.
Where Al Qaeda doesn’t retain a foothold, Daesh has rushed in.
They’re all at knives — and RPGs and suicide vests — drawn with each other for the spoils of poor, pitiful Afghanistan, although only the Taliban doesn’t have designs on exporting terrorism, if they’re to be believed. Washington is keen to believe. As if recent history can be ignored and America can transform the Taliban into a political entity in a power-sharing arrangement with Kabul. With the Afghan government not party to the peace deal negotiations — which was a key Taliban insistence. Just as their other dealbreaker condition was, is, the complete withdrawal of foreign troops.
In that respect, the Taliban position dovetails with Trump’s vow to extricate the U.S. from Afghanistan militarily — a vow during the last election campaign that he can take to the next election campaign as a promise kept, bringing a conclusion to a campaign now in its 18th year. Nobody seems to much care about older promises — that Afghanistan would never be abandoned again by the West — and the millions of Afghans who will be left in the lurch when the long-game Taliban re-establishes its harsh suzerainty: women, ethnic and religious minorities, democratically engaged politicians, judges, teachers, students, kite-flyers.
Everything and everyone that was given space to breathe in a nation-building effort that cost more than 32,000 civilian war-related deaths in the past decade, the United Nations says — almost 4,000 in 2018 alone, including 927 children, highest civilian death tally since the UN began documenting statistics 10 years ago.
The international community is not to be trusted, as Afghans have learned, to their misery. Afghan society will be returned to the pitiless ministrations of the Taliban and the West will hardly look back — until the next atrocity that lands at its feet. As Kandahar — where almost 160 Canadian lives were sacrificed — has been wrested back by the Taliban. As Helmand Province — where 450 U.K. troops died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom — has been wrested back by the Taliban.
Because wild, chaotic, turbulent Afghanistan is a magnet for militants. Even bombarded by bunker-busters, they scramble back, carve out new lairs and redoubts, snap the frail filaments of the central government. Certainly the country’s security forces — built up and trained by the West — have not shown any capability of resisting renegade militias, whether under the command of war lords or professing fealty to a terrorist organization such as Daesh.
Daesh lost its caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria, the proto-state crushed by a U.S.backed coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurds and Armenians and Arabs.
But Daesh is far from vanquished, as military commanders have been warning. The transglobal network, with a war chest of $400 million (U.S.), has reconstituted on the lam — 139 attacks sprung in five Syrian provinces in the first six months of 2019, thousands of fighters scattered across Syria and Iraq, consolidating strength and territory, operational in 18 countries, according to military and humanitarian organizations, from Libya to Somalia to Chechnya to Yemen to Indonesia and the Philippines. If not Daesh explicitly, then affiliates that have pledged their allegiance to the group.
In Afghanistan, that’s Daesh in Khorasan — a medieval region encompassing parts of Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia — that began operations in 2015, founded by a small band of mostly Pakistani militants. Because Pakistan — in particular its intelligence branch — is always a malicious and meddlesome player.
Talibans displeased with the Taliban for entering into “peace” negotiations have peeled off to join Daesh offshoots in Afghanistan. Estimated at between 2,500 and 4,000, the Afghanistan offshoot’s modus operandi — based on Taliban tactics — is to carry out brutal attacks against civilians, including women and children, and soft targets: mosques, schools, weddings. It draws relevance from mass carnage, to the extent that it has been condemned by the Taliban and Al Qaeda for deliberately massacring civilians.
It was Daesh that claimed credit for last weekend’s suicide attack that killed 63 celebrants and injured 182 at a Kabul wedding, among the most devastating attacks in Afghanistan in the five years since Daesh established a beachhead in the eastern part of the country — active or present in nearly two dozen districts along the border with Pakistan.
“Force multipliers,” an asymmetric suicidal attack — one killer, scores killed.
Both the Taliban and Al Qaeda actually decried the attack, hastily removing themselves from culpability.
As if their terrorist resumes aren’t replete with similar monstrosities.
Which, in a grotesque alignment of interests, has put the Taliban and Al Qaeda, despite their internecine battles and bloody strategies, in an antiDaesh block with the U.S.
It is to weep, these shifting realpolitik conjunctions. Remember, there was no Daesh until the U.S. withdrew from Iraq.
But it’s Afghanistan in the Daesh’s crosshairs now. Always and forever, poor, pitiful Afghanistan.
It will doubtless get worse when the Taliban sign a so-called peace deal with the U.S.