Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

Iraq war and the Taliban’s return

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Iraq war and the  Taliban’s return

The inter-government conflict over the future of Taliban reached the apex in 2010 when President Karzai called the traditional Peace Jirga to advise him on the process. Taliban attacked the Jirga with no human casualties, but Afghanistan's security officials came under hostile criticism. After the Jirga was over, the President summoned Interior Minister, Hanif Atmar, and intelligence Chief, Amrullah Saleh to brief him on security flaws and mishandling.

After some tough briefings, the two officials failed to convince the President and were implicitly asked to step down. Atmar and Saleh were highly respected by international community and Afghans and their resignation was hardly justified or related with what happened on the first day of the Jirga.

Later on, when Saleh joined the opposition, he shed more lights on differences between his agency and elements in the Office of President. The core differences resided in the peace talk process, inclusion of the Taliban in the government and the fate of their prisoners.

NDS under Saleh was not happy with calling the Taliban brothers and their swift transformation to a political force. The agency was strongly urging that the Taliban were still enemies fighting the government, they should only benefit from the peace offer if they renounce violence and respect Afghanistan's democratic achievements and, above all, the current constitution.

This view was interpreted as an undisputed animosity towards the Taliban and the intelligence gathered by NDS was not taken seriously. Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan was not only accommodated by inter-government conflict, but also with external factors, particularly the war in Iraq that diverted huge political and financial resources from Afghanistan.

Since the 2001 war, American intelligence agencies had reported that the Taliban were so decimated that they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports. The American sense of victory had been so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call "the good war" off course. Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered.

Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan. They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care, education and the economy, as well as the quality of life in the cities.

President Bush's critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America's effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.

Statements from the White House, including from the president, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan's myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But in a move that foreshadowed America's trouble in Iraq, he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state. As the situation deteriorated, Mr. Rumsfeld and other administration officials reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops.

When it came to reconstruction, big goals were announced, big projects identified. Yet in the year Mr. Bush promised a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than did post-conflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor Haiti, according to a RAND Corporation study. Washington has spent an average of $3.4 billion a year reconstructing Afghanistan, less than half of what it has spent in Iraq, according to the Congressional Research Service. The White House contends that the troop level in Afghanistan was increased when needed.

Underlying many of the decisions, officials say, was a misapprehension about what Americans would find on the ground in Afghanistan. "The perception was that Afghans hated foreigners and that the Iraqis would welcome us," said James Dobbins, the administration's former special envoy for Afghanistan. "The reverse turned out to be the case."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration's policy, saying, "I don't buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources." Yet she said: "I don't think the U.S. government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq."

In interviews, three former American ambassadors to Afghanistan were more critical of Washington's record. "I said from the get-go that we didn't have enough money and we didn't have enough soldiers," said Robert P. Finn, who was the ambassador in 2002 and 2003. "I'm saying the same thing six years later."

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the next ambassador, said, "I do think that state-building and nation-building, we came to that reluctantly," adding that "I think more could have been done earlier on these issues." And Ronald E. Neumann, who replaced Mr. Khalilzad in Kabul, said, "The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn't have to do nation-building, and we could just leave it alone, that was a large mistake."

In all these periods that the US government was busy with Iraq war, Taliban was able to maintain their sanctuaries outside Afghanistan and invite their members for a new war that could bring them to power. Afghanistan made crucial but uncoordinated efforts to invite a more urgent attention to its cause, but the combination of aid-dependency and inter-government conflicts provided a greater chance for the Taliban to reappear and threaten the country's current and future achievements.

Ali RazaHussaini is the permanent writer of the Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at arhussaini@gmail.com

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