Taliban in Jalalabad, edge closer to Kabul
Afghan troops, allies turn over guns, gear
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban seized the city of Jalalabad early today, cutting off Afghanistan’s increasingly isolated capital Kabul to the east as the insurgents’ blitz across the country continued less than three weeks before the U.S. hopes to complete its troop withdrawal.
The militants posted photos online early today showing them in the governor’s office in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province.
Abrarullah Murad, a lawmaker from the province told The Associated Press that the insurgents seized Jalalabad after elders negotiated the fall of the government there.
The loss of Jalalabad comes on the heels of the Taliban’s capture of Mazar-e-Sharif on Saturday, the country’s fourth-largest city which Afghan forces and two powerful former warlords had pledged to defend.
Abas Ebrahimzada, a lawmaker from the Balkh province where the city is, said the Afghan army surrendered first, which prompted
pro-government militias and other forces to lose morale and give up in the face of a Taliban onslaught opened earlier Saturday.
Ebrahimzada said Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ata Mohammad Noor, former warlords who command thousands of fighters, had fled the province, and their whereabouts were unknown.
Noor said in a Facebook post that his defeat in Mazar-e-Sharif was orchestrated and blamed the government forces, saying they handed their weapons and equipment to the Taliban. He did not say who was behind the conspiracy, nor offer details, but said he and Dostum “are in a safe place now”
The Taliban have made major advances in recent days, including capturing Herat and Kandahar, the country’s secondand third-largest cities. They now control about 24 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, leaving the Western-backed government with a smattering of provinces in the center and east, as well as Kabul.
Saturday, the Taliban captured all of Logar province, just south of Kabul, and detained local officials, said Hoda Ahmadi, a lawmaker from the province. She said the Taliban have reached the Char Asyab district, just 7 miles south of the capital.
Later, the insurgents took over Mihterlam, the capital of Laghman province, northeast of Kabul, without a fight, according to Zefon Safi, a lawmaker from the province.
PEACE TALKS
Also Saturday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani delivered a televised speech, his first public appearance since the recent Taliban gains. He vowed not to give up the “achievements” of the 20 years since the U.S. toppled the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks.
“We have started consultations, inside the government with elders and political leaders, representatives of different levels of the community as well as our international allies,” Ghani said. “Soon the results will be shared with you,” he added, without elaborating further.
The U.S. continued holding peace talks between the government and the Taliban in Qatar last week, and the international community has warned that a Taliban government brought about by force would be shunned. But the insurgents appear to have little interest in making concessions as they rack up victories on the battlefield.
In Qatar’s capital, Doha, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad met with Taliban political leaders who demanded an end to intensifying U.S. airstrikes aimed at slowing the fast-moving push by Taliban forces to gain territory, occupy provincial capitals and hold key roadways.
In a statement taking stock of its battlefield victories, the Taliban on Saturday sought to project itself as Afghanistan’s rightful rulers, appealing for calm and claiming no harm would come to those who’ve aided the American-led military campaign or held jobs in the central government. Rather, those people would be granted “amnesty.”
“We assure all our neighbors that we will not create any problems for them,” the statement asserts. “We also assure all the diplomats, embassies, consulates, and charitable workers, whether they are international or national that not only no problems will be created for them … but security and a secure environment will be provided to them.”
Ghani has proposed waiting at least a week for a government delegation with a plan for a new power-sharing agreement to arrive in Doha. But that timetable was seen as unrealistic in the fast-shifting developments, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
President Joe Biden said he has asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken to support Ghani and other Afghan leaders “as they seek to prevent further bloodshed and pursue a political settlement.”
Any political settlement at this point is likely to be tantamount to full Taliban control, even if it includes elements of power-sharing with nonmilitant political figures and power brokers. The Taliban have been adamant that Ghani cannot remain in power.
Ghani also expressed concern about the thousands of displaced Afghans who have fled to the relative safety of Kabul in recent weeks, and who could fan a fresh wave of refugees moving into neighboring countries and beyond.
About 1,200 Afghans have been transported to the U.S. in recent days, and the Biden administration has committed to temporarily moving another 4,000 applicants and their families to other countries while their immigration paperwork is finalized.
Canadian officials on Friday committed to taking in 20,000 refugees, focusing on those most in danger, including women leaders, human-rights advocates, journalists, gay and transgender people, persecuted religious groups and families of interpreters already resettled in Canada. No timeline was given for the resettlements.
These official rescue efforts account for only a fraction of Afghans displaced by the conflict. A quarter-million people have fled their homes since the end of May, the United Nations refugee agency said. Of them, most — 80% — are women and children. Some 400,000 people have been displaced since the beginning of the year.
“The situation has all the hallmarks of a humanitarian catastrophe,” Tomson Phiri, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program, said in a statement, noting that the conflict “has accelerated much faster than we all anticipated.”
‘NO PLACE FOR WOMEN’
Tens of thousands of Afghans have fled their homes, with many fearing a return to the Taliban’s oppressive rule. The group had previously governed Afghanistan under a harsh version of Islamic law in which women were forbidden to work or attend school, and could not leave their homes without a male relative accompanying them.
Civilians already are reporting the shuttering of girls schools and that poor families are being forced to cook for the fighters. They say young men are pressured to join the ranks of the militants.
Salima Mazari, one of the few female district governors in the country, expressed fears about a Taliban takeover earlier Saturday in an interview from Mazar-e-Sharif, before it fell.
“There will be no place for women,” said Mazari, who governs a district of 36,000 people near the northern city. “In the provinces controlled by the Taliban, no women exist there anymore, not even in the cities. They are all imprisoned in their homes.”
The Taliban appointed hardline cleric Mujeeb Rahman Ansari as women’s affairs minister in Herat, according to a prominent women’s activist from the city who did not want to be identified because she fears for her safety. She described Ansari as being “strongly against women’s rights.” He rose to prominence about 2015 and became infamous for dozens of billboards he installed in Herat that told women to wear Islamic hijabs and demonized those who would promote women’s rights.
The Taliban also captured Paktika province and small Kunar province, both bordering Pakistan, as well as Faryab province in the north and the central province of Daykundi, lawmakers from those areas said Saturday.
Sayed Hussan Gerdezi, a lawmaker from Paktika province, said the Taliban seized most of its capital, Gardez, but battles with government forces were still underway. The Taliban said they controlled the city.
The swift collapse of Afghanistan’s own forces — despite hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. aid over the years — has raised fears the Taliban could return to power or that the country could be shattered by factional fighting, as it was after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. It’s also prompted many American and Afghan veterans of the conflict to question whether two decades of blood and treasure was worth it.
Inside Kabul, scenes were reminiscent of the Taliban’s rise in the mid-1990s — with families selling everything and doing whatever they could to flee the country.
Afghans have been streaming into Kabul’s international airport in recent days, desperate to fly out, even as more American troops have arrived to help partially evacuate the U.S. Embassy.
5,000 U.S. TROOPS
In a statement Saturday, Biden said that some 5,000 U.S. troops will be deployed to oversee the evacuation of U.S. diplomats, Afghans who have worked with coalition forces throughout the war and others at “special risk from the Taliban advance.”
In his statement, Biden didn’t explain the breakdown of the 5,000 troops he said had been deployed. But a defense official said in a media statement that the president had approved Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s recommendation that abut 1,000 soldiers from the lead battalion of the 82nd Airborne Brigade Combat Team would join a force of about 4,000 soldiers and Marines either already on the ground or arriving soon.
The first Marines arrived Friday. The rest are expected today, and their deployment has raised questions about whether the administration will meet its Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline.
Officials have stressed that the newly arriving troops’ mission was limited to assisting the airlift of embassy personnel and Afghan allies, and they expected to complete it by month’s end. But they might have to stay longer if the embassy is threatened by a Taliban takeover of Kabul by then.
Taliban representatives have been warned that any actions putting U.S. personnel at risk “will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response,” Biden said.
The goal is “to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of U.S. personnel and other allied personnel and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance,” Biden said.
The U.S. Air Force has carried out several airstrikes to aid its Afghan allies on the ground, but they appear to have done little to stem the Taliban’s advance.
Biden attributed much of the chaos unfolding in Afghanistan to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war, which Biden said created a blueprint that put U.S. forces in a difficult spot with an emboldened Taliban challenging the Afghan government.
“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor — which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019 — that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001,” Biden said Saturday. “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”
Biden had set an Aug. 31 deadline for fully withdraw combat forces before the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
Biden’s announcement set the latest Taliban offensive in motion.
Having the deadline pass with thousands of U.S. troops in the country could be problematic for Biden. Republicans criticized the withdrawal as a mistake and ill-planned, though there was little political appetite by either party to send fresh troops to fight the Taliban.
Biden, who is spending the weekend at Camp David, again defended his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after 20 years.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” he said. “And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
Information for this article was contributed by Ahmad Seir, Tameem Akhgar, Rahim Faiez, Joseph Krauss, Jon Gambrell, Kathy Gannon, Robert Burns and Josh Boak of The Associated Press; by Rachel Pannett, Susannah George, Sammy Westfall, Karen DeYoung and Ezzatullah Mehrdad of The Washington Post and by Justin Sink of Bloomberg News (TNS).