Resurrection of the Taliban all too predictable

Last time I was in Kunduz, there were three separate suicide attacks on Peace Avenue — on International Peace Day. That’s the Taliban for you. They don’t want peace. They want power.

For five years — 1996 to 2001— they wielded that power in Afghanistan, almost exclusively, all but for the Panjshir Valley where Ahmad Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance fighters repelled 10 separate onslaughts. Massoud was assassinated on the eve of 9/11 by Al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists — a quid pro quo between Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts.

Kunduz is also where the Taliban died.

In late 2001, the last of the Taliban fighting forces were besieged in the plateau northern capital by U.S.backed troops. A ceasefire was negotiated and thousands were taken captive, sent mostly to prisons run by the notorious Uzbek warlord, Gen. Rashid Dostum. Hundreds died of suffocation while being transported in sealed freight containers.

Many more, mainly non-Afghan Taliban — from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Chechnya — were incarcerated in a Dostum prison in Sheberghan, two provinces to the east. When they rose up against their guards, the U.S. launched an airstrike that killed at least 300, some dying with their hands still tied behind their backs. It was a singularly horrific event for the coalition campaign.

But there was little sympathy for the victims, even among the minority population of ethnic Pashtuns in Kunduz.

“They were murderers and they occupied us, just as the Soviets did before them,” a Tajik butcher told me afterwards. “Why should we pity them? They had no pity for us. Their ways were not our ways.”

It was in Kunduz where the Germans opened NATO’s first Provincial Reconstruction Team in 2004, as the World Health Organization and UNICEF and myriad non-governmental agencies poured in to provide services to the citizenry. An extensive vaccination program immediately slashed polio rates among children. The city, a farming and marketing hub populated primarily by Taliban-loathing Tajiks and Turkomans, quickly began to thrive.

But the medievalist Taliban, as we know, didn’t stay dead.

On Tuesday, Kunduz fell again to the Taliban, the first major Afghan city — sixth largest in the country — taken by the black-turbaned brigades since 2001.

The early-morning advance, according to witnesses, was so quick and thorough that Kunduz was in Taliban hands within a matter of hours. Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police abandoned their posts. They ran, chased away by an estimated 500 insurgents who’d allegedly infiltrated the city disguised as civilians — at least that’s the version of events put forward at a press conference by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani who, a year into his term, has yet to appoint a defence minister.

National security forces of 352,000, trained by the West, could not stand up to 500 Taliban invaders in Kunduz.

The Taliban offensive should not have come as such a surprise or overwhelming incursion. Kunduz had been under persistent insurgent assault for months; it was twice attacked over the summer.

U.S. strikes will doubtless force the Taliban to fall back, while relishing the propaganda coup. Until next time — because there will a next time, in Kunduz and elsewhere. “This incident will embolden the Taliban,” Sher Mohammad Azkundzada, a senator from Helmand, where the Taliban controls large swaths of territory, told the Washington Post. “We had warnings about the fall of Kunduz. No one listened.”

It’s not only Kabul, buffeted by international troops, which turned a deaf ear. So has Washington.

President Barack Obama is firmly committed to withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the next 16 months. This is a decision driven by domestic politics. It has nothing to do with the reality on the ground. In March, Obama agreed to halt the planned drawback target for 2015 — the goal had been to have that number down to 5,000 by December. But he’s sticking to 2016 and everybody out.

This is precisely what happened in Iraq: Publicly declaring a withdrawal timetable (Obama campaigned for the presidency in 2008 on a vow to bring all the troops home from Iraq) that provided a handy tactical itinerary for a resurgent Al Qaeda and the even more ruthless ISIS.

Fallujah is to American veterans of the Iraq War what Kandahar was to Canadians — sacrifices in a vacuum, gains reversed by political masters.

“The fall of Kunduz to the Taliban is not unlike the fall of Iraqi provinces to ISIL (ISIS),” Rep. Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement about Islamic State militant group. “It is a reaffirmation that precipitous withdrawal leaves key allies and territory vulnerable to the very terrorists we’ve fought so long to defeat.”

But the American public, like the Canadian public, has lost its stomach for combat in foreign lands. A 2014 Gallup poll found — for the first time since the 9/11 attacks — that roughly half those asked thought the U.S. should never have sent troops to Afghanistan.

And I suspect that 100 per cent of Afghans now believe what many originally feared: The West will abandon them again.