Who Are the Taliban?
bbc.com
bbc.com
That's like saying Peter Thiel founded Tesla. It's so obviously false that anyone pushing that narrative is presumptively dishonest.
> After the Soviet Union intervened and occupied Afghanistan in 1979, Islamic mujahideen fighters engaged in war with those Soviet forces.
> Pakistan's President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq feared that the Soviets were planning to also invade Balochistan, Pakistan, so he sent Akhtar Abdur Rahman to Saudi Arabia to garner support for the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation forces. A while later, the US CIA and Saudi Arabian General Intelligence Directorate (GID) funnelled funding and equipment through the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) to the Afghan mujahideen.[112]
> About 90,000 Afghans, including Mohammed Omar, were trained by Pakistan's ISI during the 1980s.[112] British professor Carole Hillenbrand concluded that the Taliban have arisen from those US-Saudi-Pakistan-supported mujahideen: "The West helped the Taliban to fight the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan".[113] Nearly all of the Taliban's original leadership previously fought in the Soviet-Afghan War for either the Hezb-i Islami Khalis or Harakat-i Inqilab-e Islami factions of the Mujahideen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/07/history-tr...
There's plenty of blame to go around, and no reason to be selective unless you have an agenda.
Pakistani ISI backed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the “Butcher of Kabul”, in an effort to help install a Pakistani friendly government in Afghanistan, but backed off after pressure from the US. The Taliban was then formed in southern Afghanistan by Mullah Mohammad Omar, also from former Soviet fighters, and quickly conquered significant territory from the other warring factions. The Pakistani ISI backed them, but covertly to avoid pushback from the US. The Haqqanis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar became allies, with the Taliban controlling the majority of Afghanistan, while Ahmad Shah Massoud and his “Northern Alliance” controlled the north.
The US under Clinton was pretty wishy washy about Afghanistan at that point, mostly just wanting the fighting to end. But they did work with Massoud and the Northern Alliance in order to attempt to target Osama Bin Laden after the 1998 embassy bombings. Under Bush, the CIA was in the process of beginning a covert operation to support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, but then Massoud was assassinated by the Taliban on September 9th, 2001, and two days later was 9/11.
But the ISI was not run by the CIA. Pakistan had, and still has, their own agenda and priorities that do not align with the US. So if you are implying that the ISI funding of the Taliban must have actually been the CIA, that is not supported by the evidence.
None of that is to say the CIA misadventures in Afghanistan before 9/11 were somehow harmless. They handed over briefcases of cash to Jalaluddin Haqqani, who became a key ally of the Taliban and the Haqqani Network he created ended up supplying explosives to the Taliban and lauching highly successful suicide attacks on US forces in Afghanistan.
I know people like simple narratives and having someone to blame, but the situation in Afghanistan over the past 40 years is not simple and is not because of the actions of just one country.
I never made such claims; starting on an ad hominem and ending on a strawman doesn’t really lend much credibility to what lies in between.
Descent into Chaos: The United States & the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan & Central Asia and In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan are also great reads about Afghanistan.
Not as on topic, but still good would include The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth about how the CIA shifted towards more targeting operations and the military shifted to more intelligence gathering and how that has blurred the lines between the two. And The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One about how insurgencies work, how local people are recruited and coopted by globally minded jihadists using local problems, and how a counter insurgency operation requires understanding and addressing local dynamics and issues, and breaking the connection between locally focused fighters and global jihadists.
Wasn't Omar part of the mujahideen?
Realise that 120 years later, the cycle never has ended.
The group is thought to now be stronger in numbers than at any point since they were ousted in 2001 - with up to 85,000 full time fighters, according to recent Nato estimates.
So less than half of the Afghan National Army's 180,000 troops:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_National_Army
There is a rule of thumb that attackers need to outnumber defenders 3 to 1 in order to win. But that assumes the defenders actually want to do their job.
"Soldiers in Ghurmach in the northern province of Faryab had spoken to a local media about the same topic just a month before, saying, "We haven't eaten for days. We only have four sacks of flour for 400 soldiers. No one cares about us. We can't fight the Taliban on only bread and water.""
It seems that endemic corruptions was one of the main reasons.
"[...] In May 2018, the police in Badghis province in the north-west of Afghanistan confirmed that a contractor that provided food to Afghan security forces was serving up dog meat. "
"[...] According to the same report, there are thousands of 'ghost soldiers' in the ranks of the Afghan army: soldiers who exist only on paper, allowing commanders to inflate their budgets and fill their pockets. An Afghan army soldier earns only 200 dollars a month. "
With all the money that was funneled from the coalition, this doesn't surprise me. In hindsight, I don't see how the Afghan government could have ever survived the Taliban without indefinite presence of the USA.
https://observers.france24.com/en/20200218-afghanistan-corru...
That is more of a rule for an individual battle. The Afghan army cannot mass all its troops for a battle. They have to attempt to hold large amounts of territory, spreading themselves thin. The Taliban can mass troops in specific areas, so it outnumbers the defenders, and then move on. It is not accurate or fair to portray the ANA as some sort of clearly superior force that just doesn’t feel like fighting.
At which point the army could not just move back in and retake the "lost" area because...?
Welcome to the last 20 years of counter insurgency in Afghanistan.
The Taliban did not roll through Afghanistan as a big wrecking ball. A moment of thought would tell you that this model does not match the growing area they controlled, nor the way it grew toward Kabul from all sides. Nor is it plausible that the army, with more than double the troops, better vehicles and air support would be unable to converge on your hypothetical wrecking ball.
The Taliban avoided big battles, because they always lost those. By all accounts, their final advance was so rapid only because they met virtually no resistance. When they reached Kabul, they initially stayed outside the city, until word got out that the military and police had abandoned their positions and looting was underway, at which point they announced that they were going in to restore order.
This stability gives a sizable level of local support. For many however it's literally a death sentence.
Taliban rule is incredibly oppressive though, almost cartoonishly so. I can't think of any contemporary regime more tyrannical and authoritarian. Their stated aim is to "recreate the time of the Prophet" 1400 years ago.
China isn't totalitarian but I believe the Taliban aims to be. I should look into this more.
Kim Dynasty, North Korea.
Support might be a strong word. More like acquiescence. The Taliban actively attempt to undermine and destroy security in areas it does not control. Most Afghans don’t like the Taliban but understand there isn’t really a viable alternative. It is either the chaos of no control, the Taliban randomly attacking people in places secured by the government, or the repressive security of the Taliban.