Daniel Greenfield
September 05, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
On September 27, 1996, the State Department was very surprised when the Taliban took Kabul.
All
of the official reports stated that the Taliban were not likely to take
the capital. A lone memo, which never reached Bill Clinton's Secretary
of State, warned it could happen, but was mostly ignored until nine days
later when the Taliban “unexpectedly” marched into the city.
Biden
and his allies claimed that no one could have anticipated that the
Taliban would take Afghanistan in 11 days. As the Washington Post
recently noted, “On Sept. 27, 1996, Taliban forces captured Kabul
overnight, flooding in from all directions after a 15-day sweep of the
country. (In August 2021, it would take 10 days.)“ Were Biden and Milley
really that surprised by those extra 4 or 5 days (depending on how you
do the math) that they didn’t see it coming?
In 1996, the United
Nations, which was supposed to bring peace to Afghanistan, fled.
President Najibullah, who had lost the last of his Soviet support when
the USSR fell apart, stayed at the UN compound. He fought the Taliban
Jihadists who came for him before they hung and castrated him. The State
Department celebrated the Taliban win and began its outreach.
Glyn Davies, Obama's former Ambassador to Thailand, said back then
that he
hoped the "new authorities in Kabul will move quickly to restore order
and security and to form a representative interim government that can
begin the process of reconciliation nationwide."
Davies also claimed that he saw "nothing objectionable" about the Taliban imposing Islamic law.(Davies,
a Biden supporter and formerly an Elizabeth Warren supporter because
"Warren will rebuild American leadership by ending our endless wars",
works for former Secretary of State Madeline Albright's ASG consulting
group and has not offered any comments on Afghanistan.)
The
Clinton administration asked the Taliban to send an envoy to D.C. and
pleaded with the Jihadists to accept an American envoy. It was the
Taliban who turned Bill Clinton down.
In 2021, history repeated
itself again with an incompetent Democrat administration caught by
surprise at the speed of the Taliban’s victory before trying to come to
terms with the Jihadists.
Like Bill Clinton, Biden is learning the same old lesson the hard way without actually learning it.
The
State Department, which sent an emissary to urge the collapsing Afghan
government to come to terms with the Taliban and form an inclusive
government in the 90s, was playing the same dumb game now. A generation
later the State Department hadn’t learned a damn thing.
The
Taliban won in 2021 for the same reason that they had won in 1996. The
Afghan government had lost its main backer and was replaced by the
Pakistani-backed Taliban.
The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was set once Pakistan made them its final choice.
If the Taliban performed better in 2021 than in 1996, it’s because China is also backing them.
The American-Pakistani alliance of 1996 has been replaced by a Chinese-Pakistani alliance.
Afghanistan
is a tribal region of quarreling ethnic and religious groups, warlords,
druglords, elders, and gunmen. For the last two generations it’s been
ruled by whichever faction assembles enough backing from a foreign power
to maintain control over the country.
Temporarily.
Foreign
policy consists of the different sides jockeying for the support of the
United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and anyone interested
enough to provide money and guns.
The Taliban have not “taken”
Afghanistan. They’ve reached agreements with various factions, from the
druglords to tribal leaders and warlords, based on their foreign support
and momentum.
Those agreements will collapse when the Taliban start to
run into trouble.Their victories in 1996 and 2021 were partly achieved by foreign Jihadis fighting for them.
But
those Jihadis are a double-edged sword. The Taliban’s deal with Al
Qaeda helped it maintain power, but after September 11, led to their
overthrow by the United States.
The Taliban of 2021 will have to
decide whether they need the foreign fighters more than they fear the
United States. Considering Biden’s humiliating retreat, the Taliban are
unlikely to make a different choice than the one they made about Al
Qaeda during the Clinton administration.
The Afghan government that we backed was a phantom. So is the Taliban regime. Americans
think of government as an organized and pervasive force that extends
its dominion over all its territories. Afghan governments are more like
bandits, using fighters to intimidate the locals, and collect protection
money through their officials. An Afghan government is just a band of
fighters that have transitioned from roving bandits to stationary
bandits by seizing cities.
Under Biden, the Taliban controlled
the rural areas, while the Afghan government held the cities. As the
withdrawal was announced, the Taliban formed alliances, swept across
provinces, and claimed the cities not, mostly by firepower, but by
cutting deals with key Afghan leaders.
The Taliban’s various
allies, from the Pakistanis, Qataris, the Iranians, and the Chinese, to
Al Qaeda and the druglords, got what they wanted by forcing the United
States out of Afghanistan.
But what they’re going to want now
are incompatible things. China and Pakistan want stability and the
opportunity to exploit Afghanistan’s mineral riches and geographic
location for trade. Al Qaeda and various foreign Jihadis want to set up
terrorist training camps and fight infidels. Some of them are likely to
target China as Jihadis operating in Pakistan have already done.
The
Taliban’s state sponsors want to reduce the flow of drugs, but opium is
the only functional part of Afghanistan’s economy: especially now that
the United States and its allies are gone. The Taliban formerly opposed
opium, but if they do it again, they’ll fund their own opposition. If
they try to restrain the foreign Jihadis who helped them take
Afghanistan, they’ll face a civil war.
Even if Biden refrains
from backing the opposition to the Taliban, India isn’t likely to be as
forgiving. Other countries and international players will find their own
reasons to do the same.
Biden’s State Department will be forced
to acknowledge, even faster than Clinton’s diplomats, that any promises
that the Taliban make are worthless. Taliban spokesmen have learned to
tell liberals what they want to hear, but don’t actually speak for the
leadership. Nor do they speak for the various factions who actually make
up the Taliban power on the ground. Or their backers.
Stability is not in Afghanistan’s future. The
Taliban, like most Jihadis, are players in someone else’s chess game.
Islamic terrorist groups, like their Marxist counterparts, have state
backers and wealthy funders behind them.
What looks like a stunning victory is more often the result of backroom deals.
Muslim
Jihadis claim a fearsome reputation, but routinely bow out of fights
when the odds aren’t on their side, when they aren’t feeling motivated,
or are paid off. They prefer to win battles by treachery and subterfuge
as they have done for over a thousand years since Mohammed.Americans
are used to the idea of standing, fighting, and dying for their
country. But fighters in tribal cultures are more nomadic. They don’t
stand and fight, they appear and disappear, as we saw in Afghanistan and
Iraq. They strike when they sense weakness and flee when they feel
strength. Biden showed weakness, so did the Afghan government, and the
rest is history.
The Taliban will impose unfiltered Islamic law,
but whether girls are allowed to go to school and women are permitted to
leave the house matters very little to the power players. Those
important enough will be able to do what the elites of Muslim countries
always do, send their sons and daughters to cavort in Beverly Hills and
the French Riviera, while poorer girls are beaten, enslaved, and
executed for minor offenses like meeting the eye of a strange man.
There
will be burkas for millions of Afghan women, but the daughters of key
leaders who cut deals with the Taliban will wear bikinis on the beaches
of the Atlantic and the Pacific.
The Biden administration cares
as much about the rights of women as the Clinton administration which
was willing to embrace the Taliban and endorse their oppressive Islamic
law. It was only when the Taliban turned down the Clintons that they
rediscovered an interest in feminism.
Count on the Biden administration and Democrats to follow the same corrupt road out of Kabul.
Afghanistan
will go on being what it was all along, a tribal wasteland run by
bandits, all of whom swear by Allah, but only some of whom kill women
for not wearing burkas, who get their money and guns from various
foreign interests and serve them until they inevitably betray them.
The
Taliban didn’t win a great victory. They assembled a house of cards
coalition just as they did before. That house of cards will begin
collapsing because Afghanistan is not a country and it cannot be ruled
by any government, only corrupted, robbed, and terrorized in Allah’s
name.
Tags:
Afghanistan,
recent,
War on Terror
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
