The fate of Afghanistan was sealed as soon as the US forces evacuated Bagram airbase in the dead of the night on July 1, six weeks before the inevitable fall of Kabul on August 15. Bagram was the nerve center from where all the operations across Afghanistan were directed, specifically the vital air support to the US-backed Afghan security forces without which they were simply irregular militias waiting to be devoured by the wolves.
Evacuating Bagram was the watershed moment when the skipper
switched the engines off and intimated sailors henceforth they’d have to use
oars to float the ship ashore. Unsurprisingly, the doomed ship sank to the
bottom of the ocean even before the crew could scramble over to the refuge of
the safety boats.
In southern Afghanistan, the traditional stronghold of the
Pashtun ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its support, the
Taliban military offensive was spearheaded by Mullah Yaqoob, the son of the
Taliban’s late founder Mullah Omar and the newly appointed defense minister of
the Taliban government, as district after district in southwest Afghanistan,
including the birthplace of the Taliban movement Kandahar and Helmand, fell in
quick succession.
What has stunned military strategists and longtime observers
of the Afghan war, though, was the Taliban’s northern blitz, occupying almost
the whole of northern Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as northern Afghanistan
was the bastion of the Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic
groups, which were known to have longstanding enmity with the Pashtun Taliban.
It’s an established fact that a grassroots insurgency
anywhere cannot be sustained for long unless it draws some level of popular
support from the local population. But if the leaders of the Northern Alliance
were allied with the US occupation forces and waging a fierce battle against
the Taliban, then which regional force instigated the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic
groups to rebel against their leadership and join ranks with the Taliban in its
holy war against the foreign occupation?
In an explosive investigative
report [1] last July, Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, a US
government-funded organization, revealed: “When the Taliban captured a
strategically important security checkpoint near Afghanistan's border with
Tajikistan last month, it assigned a Tajik militant to raise the Taliban flag
on the site.
“The militant goes by the alias Mahdi Arsalon and has a
group of fighters from Tajikistan under his command, an eyewitness to the
flag-raising and other sources told RFE-RL. The Taliban also put Arsalon and
his group in charge of security in five districts the Taliban seized near the
Tajik border in recent months.
“In Afghanistan, Arsalon and other Tajik militants are known
as the Tajik Taliban. But in reality they are members of Jamaat Ansarullah,
which is banned in Tajikistan as a terrorist group.
“Jamaat Ansarullah was founded by a rogue former Tajik
opposition commander a decade ago with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the
government in Dushanbe. Mahdi Arsalon’s real name is Muhammad Sharifov.
Sharifov, 25, was born in the village of Sherbegiyon in Tajikistan’s eastern
Rasht Valley.”
Although Tajikistan, led by President Emomali Rahmon, is the
only Central Asian State still hostile to the Taliban, despite the Kremlin’s
insistence it strike a more conciliatory tone with the new de facto power in
Afghanistan, what the RFE-RL report failed to disclose is the fact that behind
the back of the Emomali government, the Russian security agencies clandestinely
nurtured not only Jamaat Ansarullah, led by Tajik militant leader Mahdi
Arsalon, but also several other smaller groups and breakaway factions of Tajik
and Uzbek militants and persuaded them to join ranks with the Taliban in its
war against the US forces and the allied Northern Alliance collaborators in
Afghanistan.
While providing a few “unnecessary details” at the bottom of
the article, which the authors of the report were likely unaware of themselves,
the RFE-RL report spilled the secret: “According to sources in Tajikistan,
Sharifov aka Mahdi Arsalon joined Jamaat Ansarullah about seven years ago […] Sharifov
was accepted into the seventh grade because of his age even though he had not
ever attended state schools before.
“After graduating in 2015, he disappeared from the village
and no one in Nurobod ever saw him again. Sharifov’s mother, Zulqada Yunusova,
told RFE-RL that her son went to Russia as a migrant worker in 2015.
“RFE-RL also spoke with a former friend of Sharifov who
claims Sharifov tried to convince him to join the jihad in Afghanistan. The
Tajik man spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons. The man said he
first met Sharifov when they worked in Russia and they stayed in contact on
WhatsApp until about two months ago.”
Clearly, Sharifov and his band of militants were recruited
by security agencies while he was searching for some menial job in Russia.
Following the Ukraine crisis in 2014 and consequent souring of relations
between the Kremlin and the Western powers, Russia militarily intervened in
Syria in September 2015.
At the same time, Russian security agencies also began
providing funds and weapons to the Afghan militants battling the NATO forces.
Reportedly, Russia also offered
bounties [2] to the Taliban to hunt down American soldiers.
In an August
2017 report [3] for the New York Times, Carlotta Gall described the killing
of former Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a US drone strike in
Pakistan’s western Balochistan province in May 2016 while he was on his way
back from a secret meeting with Russian and Iranian officials in Iran.
According to the Times report, “Iran facilitated a meeting
between Mullah Akhtar Mansour and Russian officials, Afghan officials said, securing
funds and weapons from Moscow for the insurgents.”
It’s worth noting, however, that it wasn’t just Russia that
was in bed with the Taliban. The allegations by regional power-brokers that
Washington, too, had provided material support to splinter groups of the Afghan
Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) as a tit-for-tat response to Pakistan’s
security agencies’ double game of nurturing the Afghan Taliban are not entirely
unfounded.
A news report
leaked [4] in March 2018, during the trial of the widow of Orlando
nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, an ethnic Afghan residing in the US who had
killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a mass shooting at the Pulse
Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, that his father, Seddique
Mateen, was an FBI informant for eleven years.
In an email, the prosecution revealed to the defense attorney
of Noor Salman, the widow of Omar Mateen, that Seddique Mateen was an FBI
informant from January 2005 to June 2016 and had been sending money to
Afghanistan and Turkey, likely to fund violent insurrection against the
government of Pakistan.
Similarly, in November 2018, infighting between the main
faction of the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada and a
breakaway faction led by Mullah Mohammad Rasul left scores of fighters dead in
Afghanistan’s western Herat province.
Mullah Rasul was close to Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad
Omar, and served as the governor of southwestern Nimroz province during the
Taliban's rule in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. After the news of the death of
Mullah Omar was made public by the Afghan intelligence in 2015, Mullah Rasul
broke ranks with the Taliban and formed his own faction.
Mullah Rasul's group was active in the provinces of Herat, Farah,
Nimroz and Helmand, and was known to have received arms and support from the
Afghan intelligence, as he had expressed willingness to recognize the
Washington-backed Kabul government.
Regarding Washington’s motives for providing covert support
to breakaway factions of the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani militants, the US
invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror
attack, and toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the Northern Alliance
comprising ethnic Tajik and Uzbek warlords.
Since the beginning, however, Afghanistan was an area of
lesser priority for the Bush administration. The number of US troops deployed
in Afghanistan did not exceed beyond 30,000 during George Bush’s tenure as
president, and soon after occupying Afghanistan, Washington invaded Iraq in
March 2003 and American resources and focus shifted to Iraq.
It was the Obama administration that made the Afghanistan
conflict the bedrock of its foreign policy in 2009 along with fulfilling
then-President Obama’s electoral pledge of withdrawing American forces from
Iraq in December 2011.
At the height of the surge of the US troops in Afghanistan
in 2010, the American troops numbered around 100,000, with an additional 40,000
troops from the rest of the international coalition, but they still could not
manage to have a lasting effect on the relentless Taliban insurgency.
The leadership and fighters of the Taliban found sanctuary
in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and mounted an
insurgency against the Washington-backed Kabul government. Throughout the
occupation years, Washington kept pressuring Islamabad to mount military
operations in the lawless tribal areas in order to deny safe havens to the
Taliban.
However, Islamabad was reluctant to conduct military
operations, which is a euphemism for all-out war, for the fear of alienating
the Pashtun population of the tribal areas. After Pakistan’s security forces’
raid in July 2007 on a mosque (Lal Masjid) in the center of Islamabad, which
also contained a religious seminary, scores of civilians, including students of
the seminary, died.
The Pakistani Taliban made the incident a rallying call for
waging a jihad against Pakistan’s military. Thereafter, terror attacks and
suicide bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus peaked following the July
2007 Lal Masjid incident. Eventually, under pressure from then-Obama administration,
Pakistan’s military decided in 2009 to conduct military operations against
militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The first military operation was mounted in the Swat valley
in April 2009, the second in South Waziristan tribal agency in October the same
year, and the third military operation was launched in North Waziristan and
Khyber tribal agencies in June 2014. In the ensuing violence, tens of thousands
of civilians, security personnel and militants lost their lives.
Although Pakistani political commentators often point
fingers at the Washington-backed Kabul government in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s
arch-foe India for providing money and arms to the Pakistani militants for
waging a guerrilla war against Pakistan’s state apparatus, reportedly
Washington, too, had provided covert support to the Pakistani Taliban in order
to force Pakistan’s military to conduct military operations against militants
based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Citations:
[1] Taliban Puts Tajik Militants Partially In Charge Of
Afghanistan's Northern Border:
https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/taliban-tajik-militants-border/31380098.html
[2] Eric Schmitt: Russia offered bounties to Taliban for
killing Americans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/us/politics/russian-bounties-warnings-trump.html
[3] Carlotta Gall: In Afghanistan, U.S. Exits, and Iran
Comes In:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/world/asia/iran-afghanistan-taliban.html
[4] Pulse Nightclub Gunman's Father Was an FBI Informant:
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