Air of unreality grips Afghan capital
As president, aides become isolated, Taliban moving in
KABUL, Afghanistan — With his military crumbling, President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan fired a crucial part of his command structure and brought in a new one. He created a nebulous “supreme state council,” announced months ago, that has hardly met. And as districts fall to the Taliban across the country, he has installed a giant picture of himself outside the airport’s domestic terminal.
On Friday, U.S. officials announced the definitive closure of Bagram Airfield, the nerve center of 20 years of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, in the functional end of the U.S.’ war here. As the last troops and equipment trickle out of Afghanistan, an atmosphere of unreality has settled over the government and Kabul, the capital.
Americans have not been a visible presence in the city for years, so the U.S. departure has not affected surface normality: Markets bustle, and streets are jammed with homeward-bound civil servants by midafternoon. At night, the corner bakeries continue to be illuminated by a single bulb as vendors sell late into the evening.
But beneath the surface there is unease as the Taliban creep steadily toward Kabul.
“There’s no hope for the future,” said Zubair Ahmad, 23, who runs a grocery store on one of the Khair Khana neighborhood’s main boulevards. “Afghans are leaving the country. I don’t know whether I am going to be safe 10 minutes from now.”
The government passport office has been jam-packed in recent days, filled with a jostling mob, even though visa options for Afghans are severely limited. Some of the humanitarian organizations on which the beleaguered citizenry depend said they would begin limiting the number of expatriate employees kept in the country, anticipating a worsening of the security climate.
The security blanket that the United States provided for two decades haunts the Afghan government’s actions, inaction and policies, fostering an atrophying of any proactive planning, in the view of some analysts. If there is a plan to counter the Taliban advance, it is not evident as the government’s hold on the countryside shrinks.
Intelligence estimates for the government’s collapse and a Taliban takeover have ranged from six months to two years. Whenever it comes, the outlook is likely to be grim for Ghani and his circle, as recent Afghan history demonstrates. Several of his predecessors in the country’s top job have met violent ends.
“The environment is extremely tense,” said Omar Zakhilwal, a former finance minister, noting what he called an atmosphere of “semipanic” in the government.
“It’s beyond a crisis,” he said. “The mismanagement has led us to where we are today.”
In some places, government forces are surrendering without a fight, often because they have run out of ammunition and the government does not send more supplies or reinforcements.
The tactical mismanagement of the Afghan military and police forces is a rerun on a smaller scale of losing battles fought against insurgent groups for 40 years.
“You have a highly centralized military fighting a war against a highly decentralized insurgency, fighting an irregular war,” said Tamim Asey, a former deputy minister of defense who now leads a think tank in Kabul. “That is a recipe for disaster.”
Recent days have seen government forces regain control of key districts in the northern city of Kunduz. But since the new Cabinet appointments, more than a dozen additional districts have fallen.
Humvees, weapons and piles of ammunition have fallen into Taliban hands, much of it paraded triumphantly on videos released on social media by the group’s propagandists. The insurgents have even made easy inroads in northern provinces far from their homelands in southern Afghanistan, areas they struggled to capture in their mid-1990s takeover.
Accordingly, citizen militias are on the rise again in Afghanistan, with various ethnic and regional factions stirring up a volunteer effort to defend themselves against the Taliban’s advance.
On one level, the militia movement could inspire some hope that a large-scale collapse will not be immediate. But many fear it is a harbinger of greater chaos to come, with the war of insurgency fracturing into a multisided conflict with no central command against the Taliban.
Inside the presidential palace, Ghani has continued to isolate himself. Current and former aides say he rises at 5:30 a.m. to read a stream of reports, consulting with a handful of close aides and working until late into the evening. He has long had a problem with insomnia, they say, chopping up his days and nights into bursts of work interrupted by naps. But mostly, in a public sense, he has been absent except for the occasional pronouncement about the economy or corruption.
Several former aides criticized the president’s reliance on a tiny circle of Western-educated advisers. They noted that Cabinet members were afraid to contradict him because of his tendency to yell at them.
“He is the republic,” said Zakhilwal, the former finance minister. “The government is two, three, four faces.”
“A soldier sitting there, watching, asks, ‘Should I sacrifice my life?’ ” he added. “That’s why we are seeing soldiers surrendering across Afghanistan.”