U.S., other aid cuts imperil Taliban control of Afghan government

 

It is still early days, and the picture of what is happening in Afghanistan now that the Taliban has regained control of the country continues to develop.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Central to affairs there is money. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half its population requiring humanitarian aid this year and about 90% of its people living below the poverty line of making $2 a day.

The country depends on foreign aid. Under the U.S.-supported Afghan government, the United States and other nations funded about 80% of Afghanistan’s budget. In 2020, foreign aid made up about 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP (the GDP, or gross domestic product, is the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in a country), down from 100% of it in 2009.

This is a huge problem for the Taliban, because their takeover of the country means that the money the country so desperately needs has dried up. The U.S. has frozen billions of dollars of Afghan government money held here in the U.S. The European Union and Germany have also suspended their financial support for the country, and today the International Monetary Fund blocked Afghanistan’s access to $460 million in currency reserves.

Adam M. Smith, who served on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, told Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that the financial squeeze is potentially “cataclysmic for Afghanistan.” It threatens to spark a humanitarian crisis that, in turn, will create a refugee crisis in central Asia. Already, the fighting in the last eight months has displaced more than half a million Afghans.

People fleeing from the Taliban threaten to destabilize the region more generally. While Russia was happy to support the Taliban in a war against the U.S., now that its fighters are in charge of the country, Russia needs to keep the Taliban’s extremism from spreading to other countries in the area. So it is tentatively saying supportive things about the Taliban, but it is also stepping up its protection of neighboring countries’ borders with Afghanistan. Other countries are also leery of refugees in the region: large numbers of refugees have, in the past, led countries to turn against immigrants, giving a leg up to right-wing governments.

Canada and Britain are each taking an additional 20,000 Afghan women leaders, reporters, LGBTQ people, and human rights workers on top of those they have already volunteered to take, but Turkey—which is governed by strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan—is building a wall to block refugees, and French President Emmanuel Macron asked officials in Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey to prevent migrants reaching their countries from traveling any further. The European Union has asked its member states to take more Afghan refugees.

In the U.S., the question of Afghan refugees is splitting the Republican Party, with about 30% of it following the hard anti-immigrant line of former president Donald Trump. Others, though, especially those whose districts include military installations, are saying they welcome our Afghan allies.

The people fleeing the country also present a problem for those now in control of Afghanistan. The idea that people are terrified of their rule is a foreign relations nightmare, at the same time that those leaving are the ones most likely to have the skills necessary to help govern the country. But leaders can’t really stop the outward flow—at least immediately—because they do not want to antagonize the international community so thoroughly that it continues to withhold the financial aid the country so badly needs. So, while on the streets, Taliban fighters are harassing Afghans who are trying to get away, Taliban leaders are saying they will permit people to evacuate, that they will offer blanket amnesty to those who opposed them, and also that they will defend some rights for women and girls.

The Biden administration is sending more personnel to help evacuate those who want to leave. The president has promised to evacuate all Americans in the country—as many as 15,000 people—but said only that we would evacuate as many of the estimated 65,000 Afghans who want to leave as possible. The Taliban has put up checkpoints on the roads to the airport and are not permitting everyone to pass. U.S. military leaders say they will be able to evacuate between 5000 and 9000 people a day.

Today, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley tried to explain the frantic rush to evacuate people from Afghanistan to reporters by saying: “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.” Maybe. But military analyst Jason Dempsey condemned the whole U.S. military project in Afghanistan when he told NPR's Don Gonyea that the collapse of the Afghan government showed that the U.S. had fundamentally misunderstood the people of Afghanistan and had tried to impose a military system that simply made no sense for a society based in patronage networks and family relationships.

ISIS-K fighters at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. Photo: Twitter

And yet, the media portrayal of our withdrawal as a catastrophe also seems to me surprising. To date, at least as far as I have seen, there have been no reports of such atrocities as the top American diplomat in Syria reported in the chaos when the U.S. pulled out of northern Syria in 2019. Violence against our Kurdish allies there was widely expected and it indeed occurred. In a memo made public in November of that year, Ambassador William V. Roebuck wrote that “Islamist groups” paid by Turkey were deliberately engaged in ethnic cleansing of Kurds, and were committing “widely publicized, fear-inducing atrocities” even while “our military forces and diplomats were on the ground.” The memo continued: “The Turkey operation damaged our regional and international credibility and has significantly destabilized northeastern Syria.”

Reports of that ethnic cleansing in the wake of our withdrawal seemed to get very little media attention in 2019, perhaps because the former president’s first impeachment inquiry took up all the oxygen. But it strikes me that the sensibility of Roebuck’s memo is now being read onto our withdrawal from Afghanistan although conditions there are not—yet—like that.

For now, it seems, the drive to keep the door open for foreign money is reining in Taliban extremism. That caution seems unlikely to last forever, but it might hold for long enough to complete an evacuation.

Much is still unclear and the situation is changing rapidly, but my guess is that keeping an eye on the money will be crucial for understanding how this plays out.

Meanwhile, the former president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, has surfaced in the United Arab Emirates. He denies early reports that he fled the country with suitcases full of cash.

The Taliban makes gains as the US prepares to leave Afghanistan

 

• Taliban militants have claimed 50 of Afghanistan’s 370 districts since May, as the insurgent group has begun pressing into territory they do not traditionally hold and the US and NATO troops prepare to leave after two decades. [CNN / Nic Robertson, Mohammed Tawfeeq, and Richard Roth]
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• As the Taliban gains ground across northern Afghanistan, anti-Taliban militias have sprung up in multiple provinces, triggering fears of a potential civil war and the kind of anarchy the country experienced in the 1990s. [Washington Post / Pamela Constable and Ezzatullah Mehrdad]
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• As in the '90s, after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the rise of mujahedeen militia infighting, various ethnic groups are arming themselves, creating the potential for Afghanistan to return to a coalition of fiefdoms and undermine the democratic government. [NYT / David Zucchino and Fatima Faizi]
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• With the impending withdrawal of the last US forces, many Afghan translators and contractors who have worked with American military officials for years say they fear for their lives due to the Taliban, and are waiting on a solution to a visa backlog that would help them escape to the US. [ABC News / Martha Raddatz, Cindy Smith, and Conor Finnegan]
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• The United Nations is desperately trying to ensure negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban occur diplomatically rather than on the battlefield, urging the Taliban to honor its agreement to renounce terrorism in exchange for American forces leaving the country. [AP / Edith M. Lederer]

The Russian President (NOT) Putin:Russian bounties, American lives, and White House inaction

Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images

On Friday last week, a New York Times scoop revealed that Russian military intelligence has been offering bounties to Taliban forces for the killing of American and British troops in Afghanistan. [NYT / Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Michael Schwirtz] Now, new reporting suggests that President Donald Trump knew as early as spring 2019 that Russia was placing those bounties. In addition to the President’s Daily Brief, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton briefed Trump directly on the assessment in March last year. [AP / James LaPorta] It’s unclear how many deaths can be directly tied to the bounties, but intelligence suggests that “several” US service members were killed as a result. In total, 16 Americans died from “hostile gunfire or improvised bombs” last year, as well as two so far in 2020. [Washington Post / Ellen Nakashima, Karen DeYoung, Missy Ryan, and John Hudson] On Tuesday, a subsequent New York Times report found that US intelligence intercepted financial transfer data showing GRU payments to a Taliban-linked account. The transfers are believed to be connected to the bounty program. [NYT / Charlie Savage, Mujib Mashal, Rukmini Callimachi, Eric Schmitt, and Adam Goldman] The intelligence was also considered credible enough that it prompted a National Security Council meeting to determine possible responses to the bounties, though White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted Monday that there is “no consensus” on its veracity. [CNN / Barbara Starr and Paul LeBlanc] As the Daily Beast reported Monday, the exact timeline for when the president might have been briefed, and on what, remains somewhat unclear, in part because Trump “has little patience for intelligence briefings, especially when the news isn’t good for him.” [The Daily Beast / Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng] On Sunday, Trump denied the story on Twitter, though multiple credible reports contrary to his tweet have since emerged. “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP,” he wrote, describing the story as a “fabricated Russia Hoax.” [Twitter / Donald Trump] In reality, it's vanishingly unlikely that Trump was never briefed. That leaves two options, as Vox's Zack Beauchamp explains: Either Trump was briefed and was so genuinely disinterested that it never registered, or he's deliberately lying to the American public. In any case, it's good news for Russia. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp] Congress has reacted to the story with alarm, with members of both parties calling for more information. A small group of House Republicans — no Democrats were included at the time — received a briefing Monday. [NPR / Philip Ewing] On Tuesday, select House Democrats were also briefed by the White House — but House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff told reporters that “the right people to give the briefing really were not in the room.” [Politico / Heather Caygle, Kyle Cheney, and Sarah Ferris]

OBAMA TRADES 5 GUANTANAMO TALIBAN PRISONERS FOR ONE AMERICAN POW

Jani and Bob Bergdahl (AP Photo/Times-News, Ashley Smith)

WASHINGTON POST, PAUL WALDMAN

Over the weekend the government announced that it had negotiated a deal for the release of Bowe Bergdahl, the sole American being held by the Taliban in Afghanistan. In exchange, five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo will be transferred to Qatar, where their movements will be restricted for a year.
Republicans will now attempt to turn this into a liability for President Obama. As Michael Tomasky put it,  this is “the right’s new Benghazi.



MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

So let’s imagine that on Saturday night, the news had emerged not that Bowe Bergdahl was being freed but that he’d been murdered by his Taliban captors. What do you suppose we’d be hearing from Republican legislators? You know exactly what: Barack Obama is the weakest president ever, this is unconscionable. Which, of course, is exactly what we’re hearing from them now that the U.S. Army sergeant, held by the Taliban since 2009, has been freed. And it’s going to get worse. I’m even tempted to say forget Benghazi—Bergdahl may well end up being the flimsy excuse for the impeachment hearings they’ve been dreaming of before all this is over.

The Republicans’ audacity here is a bit beyond the usual. Let’s face it: There is no question that if President George W. Bush or a President McCain or President Romney had secured Bergdahl’s release in exchange for five Taliban prisoners at Gitmo, Republicans would be defending the move all the way. That business about notifying Congress? They’d have a dozen excuses for it. We got our prisoner of war home, they’d all be saying. That’s what matters.
But Obama does it, and Bergdahl’s freedom isn’t what matters at all. It’s that we negotiated with terrorists. Well, yes. We’ve been negotiating with the Taliban for a long time now, trying to end the war. See, they’re the people leading the fighting on the other side. When you’re trying to end a war, that’s generally who you negotiate with.

Muhammad Naeem, a representative of the Taliban, speaks during a press conference at the official opening of their office in Doha, Qatar,

The five guys we returned to the Taliban are really bad guys, as Eli Lake and Josh Rogin wrote this weekend, and it’s fair to ask whether the price was too high. We can’t know the answer to that question today.

WASHINGTON POST, PAUL WALDMAN  (Cont'd)

But what exactly does it mean when we talk about these prisoners being “hard core” and posing a risk that is too great for us to take? Do they have some abilities no one else in the Taliban has? Are they particularly clever? Will they change the course of Afghanistan’s future? Do they have super-powers of some sort? From the way Republicans describe them, you’d think we were talking about Magneto and Lex Luthor. But we aren’t.
That isn’t to say the risk in releasing them is zero. The question is whether the risk is acceptably low. The five certainly might end up back in Afghanistan, and they certainly might want to fight the Americans still stationed there (though by the time they’re eligible to go, most of the American force will be gone). But so do thousands of other Afghans. The idea of them walking free might offend us on a moral level, but it’s difficult to argue that they pose a unique security threat to the United States that’s different from any other member of the Taliban.

Bowe Bergdahl prepares for graduation from basic training near Fort Benning in Georgia.

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST  (Cont'd)

But other criticisms are bogus. House intel chairman Mike Rogers said on TV Sunday that in cutting the deal, “you send a message to every al Qaeda group in the world that there is some value in a hostage that it didn’t have before.” That’s ridiculous. So al Qaeda groups didn’t know until this past weekend that taking an American hostage could give them leverage? Guerrilla forces have been taking people hostage since warfare began. We’ve even done lower-level prisoner trades in Afghanistan.

Looking forward, and looking more broadly at this situation, all the ingredients are here for a classic GOP Obama-conspiracy-mongering soap opera that can be dragged out until January 2017. The late combat journalist Mike Hastings wrote a long profile of Bergdahl in Rolling Stone in 2012, and it gets right to the heart of what may be the coming GOP case against him.
First of all, Bergdahl wasn’t any Republican’s idea of a patriot. Yes, he volunteered to join the Army, but only after he’d been turned down by the French Foreign Legion. Once on the ground in Afghanistan, he was a deeply disillusioned soldier. Shortly after his battalion took its first casualty, he emailed his parents a scathing indictment of the military and everything he saw around him.
----
He wandered away from his unit. A Fox News commentator called him a “deserter.” He is officially in good standing in the Army and has even received the promotions due him during his time in captivity, but some consider him a deserter and traitor.

The argument will be made that he wasn’t worth saving, especially given what we had to give up. Hastings cites “White House sources” as telling him that Marc Grossman, Richard Holbrooke’s successor as AfPak coordinator, “was given a direct warning by the president’s opponents in Congress about trading Bowe for five Taliban prisoners during an election year. ‘They keep telling me it’s going to be Obama’s Willie Horton moment,’ Grossman warned the White House.”

Can Republicans make this resonate outside their base? Hard to say. I think to most Americans, this is a feel-good story. We value a life, one American life. Bibi Netanyahu traded one captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, not for five Palestinian prisoners. He traded Shalit for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. And there was broad agreement across the spectrum of Israeli politics that bringing Shalit to safety, even at that price, was the right thing to do.
But of course, that doesn’t matter to the right. No one outside their base cares much about Benghazi, but that hasn’t stopped them. They’ll keep pursuing Benghazi mostly to see if they can pin anything on Hillary, but when it comes to wet impeachment dreams, Benghazi may have just been pushed to the back seat. The crazy never stops.

Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said that there was a larger matter at play: The American military does not leave soldiers behind. “When you’re in the Navy, and you go overboard, it doesn’t matter if you were pushed, fell or jumped,” he said. “We’re going to turn the ship around and pick you up.”

A LONG WINDING JOURNEY BEGINS. PEACE TALKS WITH THE TALIBAN AS U.S. HANDS OVER MILITARY SECURITY TO AFGHANS

Taliban officials cut the ribbon at the official opening ceremony of a political office in Doha, Qatar on Tuesday.


The United States and Afghanistan will begin peace talks with the Taliban at an office in Qatar as early as next week. This new plan was announced as President Hamid Karzai and his country's forces assumed full responsibility for Afghan security Tuesday. "Our country is in the process of a historic event, and from now on, always, all the security responsibility will be conducted and performed by our forces and will be led by our own forces," Karzai declared to military leaders and diplomats at the handoff outside Kabul.

Earlier the Taliban, in a statement announcing their plans for peace talks and an office in Qatar, said they would not allow anyone to threaten or harm other countries from Afghan soil – a move senior US administration officials described as an important first step to the Taliban severing ties with al-Qaida.
The US has agreed that a formal rejection of al-Qaida by the Taliban leadership would now be a "negotiating aim" rather than a precondition for talks. It will also seek a commitment from the Taliban to end its insurgency in Afghanistan and recognise women's rights in the country.

"This is an important first step but it will be a long road," said one senior US official. "We have long said this conflict won't be won on the battlefield, which is why we support the opening of this [Doha] office."

If the talks begin, they will be a significant step in peace efforts that have been locked in an impasse for nearly 18 months, after the Taliban walked out and accused the United States of negotiating in bad faith.

But the Taliban may have other goals in moving ahead. Their language made clear that they sought to be dealt with as a legitimate political force with a long-term role to play beyond the insurgency. In that sense, in addition to aiding in talks, the actual opening of their office in Qatar — nearly a year and a half after initial plans to open it were announced and then soon after suspended — could be seen as a signal that the Taliban’s ultimate aim is recognition as an alternative to the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

By agreeing to negotiations, the Taliban can “come out in the open, engage the rest of the region as legitimate actors, and it will be very difficult to prevent that when we recognize the office and are talking to the office,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department official who is the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

 

 The United States, already heading toward its military exit, has little to offer beyond prisoner exchanges, and the Taliban are “not trying to help our strategy,” Mr. Nasr warned. “They’re basically trying to put in place their own strategy.”

The Taliban overture coincided with an important symbolic moment in the American withdrawal: the formal announcement on Tuesday of a complete security handover from American troops to Afghan forces across the country. That shift had already become obvious in recent months as the Afghan forces had tangibly taken the lead — and as the Taliban had responded by increasing the tempo of attacks against them.