Afghanistan Thread

Since the peeps at the US Politics Thread is (at the moment) taking up some space in talking about the withdrawal of American-led NATO forces from Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken it as an easy step to engage the Afghan military, police, NDS and friendly militias.

The foreign embassies are closing up shop and airlifts are being arranged. China is one of those countries making the arrangements as of this post.

This thread is where we talk about the upsurge, any security issues being raised in the news and whether the Taliban and Kabul will ever, ever come to another round of talks that will end the fighting or turn this into NATO's Vietnam. Also this'll include any activities for anti-Taliban resistance.

As this is a contested issue, please keep cool heads or the mods will intervene. And let's have a healthy debate... (or not and I see an attempt to not derail the other threads get shot down).

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/afghan-pilots-assassinated-by-taliban-as-united-states-withdraws/articleshow/84266631.cms

Let's start with this.

Afghan Air Force pilots are being assassinated by the Taliban in order to weaken it.

Live Updates:

• Fourthspartan 56 has provided a Liveumap of Afghanistan. Props to him.

Twitter:

Anti-Taliban resistance:

• The NRF has an official Twitter account.

• The pro-Panjshir account posts updates on what's happening in Panjshir and the nearby provinces.

• This twitter account gives update on the map of Afghanistan being used as a reference point on any instances of battles.

• Ahmad Massoud has an official account related to stuff after the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

• Ali Maisam Nazary, a close confidant of Massoud Jr, also tweets on anything related to Panjshir.

• Fahim Dashty is the NRF rep from inside Panjshir. (Deceased on September 5, 2021, deleted. Keeping it here for posterity.)

• Sibghatullah Ahmadi is the new NRF rep.

• There's an Anonymous-linked account that also posts updates on other Panjshir-related videos/info that aren't covered in the news.

• The Andarab Resistance Front account covers pro-NRF operations that cover Andarab and the surrounding areas.

• The Afghanistan Freedom Front twitter account.

• The Afghanistan Liberation Movement twitter account.

• Nasser von Waziri twitter account as ALM rep.

Ex-military/NDS:

• Colonel Rahmani's an ex-Special Mission Wing pilot who's now living in the US. He talks about people (especially those from the police/NDS/military) still stuck there and is trying to get them out.

• Masoud Andarabi's an ex-DG of the NDS. He sometimes talks about the criticial issues that led to Kabul being captured. He's also getting critical of the Taliban's recent actions up north.

• Sarfaraz was said to be one of the few surviving Afghan commandos who helped Saleh in his trek to Panjshir when he got word that Kabul was going to be seized by the Taliban.

• Major Wazir Akbar Mohmand from the ANA Commando 215 Corps also shares details on what's happening after he made it to Panjshir. He too escaped when the Taliban took over. (Deceased on September 6, 2021) As of September 2021, the account is managed by his brother, Mirwais Mohmand, who served in the 215 Corps. (Account closed. Keeping it here for posterity.)

• This account's used by someone who's an ex-Afghan commando, but has survived the trek to Panjshir. He also gives updates on what's going on in the area from the ground.

• Hamid Saifi's leading most of the ex-Afghan troops alongside the Panjshir fighters.

• Sami Sadat's an officer of the Afghan Army's 205th Corp. He's one of the few officers who was able to head to Panjshir.

• Khalid Amiry's an ex-officer with the Kta Khas.

Civilians:

• Bilal Sarwary's a good source to look into about the daily life happening before and after the Taliban took over Kabul.

• Babak Taghvee does OSINT on a number of places. Lately it's Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and parts of the ME. Could include Pakistan.

• This twitter account collects all accounts related to what the Taliban's doing post-Ghani government.

Reddit:

• This reddit page talks about the ongoing fights in Panjshir and in the other provinces.

• This reddit page centers on NA activities.

Websites:

• The official NRF site

• A website raised for the Northern Alliance by Friends of the Northern Alliance.

• A website for Panjshir Observer, an Afghan-based, English website for things happening in Afghanistan, including Panjshir.

Information:

• Radio Free Europe has the current Taliban structure made available here.

• Radio Resistance twitter account dedicated to release anti-Taliban information on what's happening in Afghanistan.

• An ArcGIS StoryMap of current/past anti-Taliban operations.

Edited by Ominae on Dec 5th 2022 at 1:46:38 AM

Thats pretty nefarious...

I'm going to need to dive into the various dynamics at play to get an understanding, but I'm very curious how long the other powers in the area will keep Afghanistan at arms length as it falls to the Taliban.

I also wonder if Kabul can right itself and start fighting back. I mean yeah, this is looking a lot like 1992 right now, but one should consider the possibility of them (eventually) realizing that history is repeating itself and change course. There is some evidence that they are at least trying, on the militia level, to chase the Taliban out of some places. But they need to coordinate better, and not end up like the Mujahideen of yesteryear...

True.

The upsurge has ironically united all Afghans. Even the women and the children of NA veterans.

Sadly, the Afghan military needs to do their OPSEC better. Brings to mind the commandos who were killed without backup.

I found an interesting live map of Afghanistan that shows areas of Taliban control and lists recent events.

It's nice to see a visual representation of the complete failure of American nation-building. -_-

A lot depends on what Pakistan decides to do. If they decide to lend material support to the Taliban (they did in the past) then I think it will be very difficult for the Kabul Regime to continue in power.

We've also been covering this in the last few pages of the South Asia and Military thredes, btw.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistan-after-rooting-for-afghanistans-taliban-faces-a-blowback-11625822762

The Wall Street Journal suggests Pakistan is actually crapping bricks over this. One thing that a lot of people have been assuming is that the Taliban will wash over the country and it will return to Pre-War on Terror status. Except there's a very good argument that is not actually possible and there's not a single Taliban anymore but numerous hostile Taliban groups.

Its more likely that as soon as the Kabul government falls, Civil War will happen between the Taliban factions and the nation will balkanize. The Taliban also controls a bunch of territory but doesn't control it directly.

Given the Taliban is kidnapping and conscripting and indoctrinating people for a large portion of their soldiers as pointed out in the link I sent as well as holding families hostage, I think there's a lot of assumptions above. Radicalizing against the US has certainly happened in the War on Terror but the situation in Afghanistan is fundamentally very different from the rest of the world.

https://asiafoundation.org/where-we-work/afghanistan/survey/

Here's a survey that 88% of those surveyed said that women's rights needed to be protected.

Literally a major reason for the uprising against Assad was revelations about how America was TOO friendly with him and preferred him to an unstable democracy. America only turned against him after his mass atrocities and reluctantly.

Pretty sure the armed uprising was in response to Assad's over-reaction to the protests. In any case, Assad was never an ally of ours, he was always a Russian client.

Otherwise I'm in broad agreement with the rest of your points.

One associate of mine in the military points out the Taliban's lack of control over the country isn't even due to the American military but the fact that plenty of warlords, neutral or armed by the USA, have power independent of the government.

In addition to the fact there's like 40 Talibans controlled by different leaders, there's a lot of places where tribal leaders rule feudal style.

https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-warlords-resurgence-echoes-civil-war/31217648.html

In a very real way, it's almost certainly more likely Afghanistan will become a failed state versus a new dictatorship.

In some ways a worse outcome.

One way to see the Taliban "sparrow" (Named after the NPA's Sparrow units) tactics is already starting to work on Afghan Air Force personnel as most of them are feeling the paranoia that the military's OPSEC is failing to protect them. In that way, the AAF will be less effective in doing airstrike/humanatarian airlifts.

There's an AJ interview where an Afghan official involved in national security affairs going on the record saying that some districts that were easily captured by Taliban forces is because the AAF had limited time to do airlifts/commando insertions. So yeah, there's a reason for that...

India's diplomatic corp is starting to do the heavy lifting. There's word that they're talking to Pakistani/Russian diplomats, to the SCO and likely to the CSTO as they have a lot to lose if Afghanistan goes the way of a failed state again.

Not sure if they're still doing spec ops/intelligence cooperation with the Afghan military/NDS with the upsurge though.

Edited by Ominae on Jul 11th 2021 at 7:45:09 AM

A SAMPLE OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE:

"We hope for a real peace,” Khan says, calling on the Taliban to negotiate an end to the war. “But if there isn’t one, people shouldn’t worry. We will defend their honor and dignity. We won’t let anyone trample on them.” — Ismail Khan, a powerful former warlord.

Khan, an ethnic Tajik, claimed hundreds of “armed mujahedin” had been deployed in all districts of Herat Province, of which Herat city is the capital. The Taliban, a predominately Pashtun group, controls large swaths of the countryside around the city.

Many of the country’s former warlords, including Khan, are ex-commanders of the mujahedin, the Western-backed Islamist groups that fought the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later the Taliban.

Khan warned the government, which he described as “incompetent,” that there would be a “reaction” if it tried to disarm the “mujahedin,” employing a term loaded with symbolism by the role that such Islamic fighters' played in the Soviet-Afghan War especially.

Khan’s comments came just days after Zulfiqar Omid, a Hazara activist and politician, on April 13 announced the creation of a “resistance front” in the province of Daikundi, in central Afghanistan.

In a Facebook post, Omid said the militia had been formed to “fight against injustice and discrimination” and provide security in Daikundi, a relatively peaceful province that has been recently hit by militant attacks. The fighters are led by Mohammad Ali Sadaqat, a mujahedin-era commander.

Yeah, Ismail Khan was one of the OG mujahideen commanders back in the '80s — in fact, as a young army captain, he led the mutinying garrison in the 1979 Herat Uprising against the communist regime. Most of the Afghan "government" today honestly still functions like medieval fiefdoms, franchised out to the same warlords who made up the ruling regime in 1992 (and then turned on each other, paving the way for the Taliban's rise).

In that respect, the pro-government forces are at least as fragmented and dysfunctional as the Taliban are. The regular ANA isn't necessarily the best-armed or most effective fighting force in a given area. In the Taliban's traditional constituencies in the southern rural Pashtun belt, troops from the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara regions in the north often already presume that the locals are hostile and in bed with the Taliban, while locally-recruited troops are just as often thoroughly compromised by the Taliban.

Outside of regular government forces, the country is dotted by the fiefdoms of old mujahideen commanders. Ismail Khan's militia in Herat is part of the Jamiat-e Islami network from the '80s, an Afghan offshoot of a Pakistani Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that encompassed Ahmad Shah Massoud's Panjshir clique, as well as other allied leaders like Atta Muhammad Nur in Balkh. The latter was bitter rivals with Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, who led a pro-Soviet militia in the '80s before defecting to the mujahideen after their departure and was the CIA's main partner on the ground during the 2001 invasion. The Hazara minority in the central highlands were some of the Taliban's most bitter enemies during the civil war (mostly due to their Shi'a faith) and maintain numerous regional militias, having never really trusted Kabul to defend them properly.

These folks have three decades' worth of beef with the Taliban and massacred thousands of Taliban POWs between them during the civil war, so don't expect a quick or peaceful resolution to the conflict on their turfs. Some of the old mujahideen commanders, like Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, have rebranded themselves as "pro-reconciliation" politicians but keep a large armed following anyway because hey, why not?

So, you know how in Crusader Kings III, you need to pursue tech options that increase Control to get anything meaningful done? You know how it also invariably hecks off your vassals and causes them to rise up against you? That's the dilemma that Afghanistan has been facing throughout its entire modern history. Back in the '80s, the Soviets figured that they didn't have the capability to closely control the countryside outside of the major cities and ring road. So they decided to contract out that task to local warlords, who would fight each other the mujahideen on the communist regime's behalf. You want a Mercedes? Done. A gated compound in downtown Kabul? Sure, absolutely. What, your militia is still rolling around with old British rifles? Here, have some tanks and heavy artillery.

By the time of the Soviet withdrawal, the country was among the world's top five arms importers. Afghanistan might have some of the world's worst literacy and infant mortality rates, but let it never be known that the international community would ever leave it wanting for guns.

That predictably backfired after the Soviet withdrawal, when the Najibullah regime, now selling itself on Islam and Pashtun nationalism rather than communism, made a big political oopsie: forgetting that the pro-Soviet militias mainly came from the ethnic minorities in the north, he launched a series of Pashtun nationalist policies that drove Dostum and co. to the arms of the mujahideen before the ink on the paper was dry. Fast-forward a decade, and ISAF was facing the same dilemma in Afghanistan: where the roads end, the Taliban begin. No, seriously, that's what Bush said in a 2007 speech. So this time, would Kabul and ISAF do the warlord thing, or would they put warlordism under control and build inclusive institutions that serve all of the Afghan people? Trick question. In 20 years of war, Kabul and its Western backers never figured out a way to do the latter.

This was partly an inevitable result of the circumstances leading to the Taliban regime's downfall. You had all these Northern Alliance militias claiming credit for the victory, many of whom had been shooting at each other years before the Taliban even arrived on the scene. It was perhaps only natural that their leaders ended up nabbing important government posts in the aftermath, which many of them used to subvert Kabul in their own interests rather than the other way around. The Afghan army, today, has more generals than the US Army, most of whom use their status as "freedom fighters" from the '80s and '90s to let their uniformed goons run drugs and shake down motorists virtually unhindered. And while the Karzai government promised to rein in the warlords' rule way back in the early 2000s, it was never going to be a promise that he'd keep — because if you don't buddy up with the warlords, then well, how else are you going to make sure that their people vote the right way come the elections?

In 2006, Dostum tortured and raped his own second-in-command, a sitting MP in the Wolesi Jirga, for daring to vote against his orders. He got away scot-free. It barely made the news outside the country, but the people of Afghanistan saw for themselves exactly what kind of governance they could expect from Kabul and the ISAF. In 2016, he did it again, this time while serving as a VP for Ashraf Ghani's government. In the same year, the government welcomed back the exiled Gulbuddin Hekmatyar without so much as a token acknowledgment of his long list of human rights abuses, which if you're an Afghan woman was as good a sign as any to bail. And in 2019, Massoud clique old guard Abdullah Abdullah outright threatened secession and civil war after losing to Ghani in an (admittedly really shady) presidential election. Honestly, in some ways, the warlords are at least as dangerous to the Afghan state as the Taliban are.

And that's just the fragmentation on the "government" side. Between them and the Taliban, you have an assortment of transnational militant Islamist groups like IS, TTP and IMU; drug cartels; armed human trafficking rings; and a million and one tribal/regional militias looking at which way the wind is blowing.

The balance of power may shift. But unless Kabul conjures up a miracle real quick and get all the rival factions backing it up to work together — and the US failed to do it for twenty years, so why would they succeed now? — things will remain fundamentally the same. Guns and militant nutjobs will continue to pour in. Refugees, drugs and crime will continue to flow out. The war wins. Everyone loses.

https://www.khaama.com/turkmenistan-deploying-troops-heavy-weapon-on-border-with-afghanistan-678567/

Turkmen troops are being mobilized to the the Afghan-Turkmen land border.

Y'know, it's funny how much of the war was dependent on Soviet infrastructure. The Bagram Air Base near Kabul, the main US base of operations in the country, was built by the Soviets in the '50s. The national ring road connecting the major cities was built in the same period, half by the US and the other half by the Soviets. The main US logistical staging ground on the eve of the invasion was the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in Uzbekistan, also built by the Soviets; when the US fell out with the Karimov regime following the Andijon massacre in 2005, the locus shifted to the Manas International Airport in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, which was, you guessed it, built by the Soviets. Up until 2014, the year that the US ceased large-scale combat operations in Afghanistan, much of the (non-weapon) supplies coming into the country came overland by rail through Russia; three guesses on how well that would work now. It took lots of deals with lots of devils to get the required war materiel into Afghanistan.

Anyway, just to give an idea of the sheer warping effect that war can have on the civilian economy: Afghans sift through US military junkyard for scraps to sell.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jul 12th 2021 at 6:15:50 AM

I've heard reports that after the troops "secretly" left Bagram, civlians went inside to take things that aren't hammered down and it took Afghan troops a while to reinforce the place.

Meanwhile, the Taliban have arrived at the gates of Kandahar.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/13/an-australian-soldiers-heroics-under-fire-to-save-an-afghan-interpreter-put-our-ministers-to-shame

An article where Australian vets are doing what they can to help Afghan locals who worked with them to get out.

Same thing with Canada.

Yeah, because our current PM is well-known for his compassion towards Afghan refugees.

Anyway: PBS NewsHour interviewed three American vets who served during the Obama-era surge on their experience and opinion of the way the war was conducted:

I don't exactly have a very high opinion of Dostum for the slew of above reasons, but in case you're wondering how the action looks like from the warlord forces' perspective, here's some recent footage of his son Yar Mohammad Dostum leading the Shebergan garrison in combat operations (although his appointment to the post might have, ahem, sidestepped the formal channels):

And speaking of warlord dynasties: PBS interviewed Ahmad Shah Massoud's son Ahmad Massoud on his leadership of the Panjshir militia, as well as some figures from the central government voicing concerns on the inherent hazards of franchising out the war to local militias.

I remember seeing Ahmad Massoud being interviewed in CBS a few weeks ago. His English was good.

His father spoke French, and Massoud Jr. was British-educated.

Oh yeah. Massoud Sr. IIRC studied at the local lycee when he was growing up.

Reuters had this news vid on Afghan special forces (not the Afghan Commando Unit itself, I'm assuming) searching and securing Kandahar at night.

Here lies irony, shrouded under a "Mission Accomplished" banner. The Guardian: George W Bush fears for women as he criticises Afghanistan pullout.

I mean, he's not wrong.

He just is responsible for not having any success in Afghanistan. Imagine if the military presence hadn't been divided into Iraq.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/06/03/afghan-pilot-once-denied-refuge-arrives-america-after-months-hiding.html

Naihim Asadi was allowed to permanently settle in the US with his family. However, it's a double-edged sword since it'll inspire other pilots/personnel who are paranoid about being shot by Taliban fighters in the open to escape to a friendly country.

Afghan military OPSEC's a b*tch.