General John Allen, USMC (ret), president of the Brookings Institution, lashed out at the New York Times for publishing an Op-Ed by Sirajuddin Haqqani. His article, Sirajuddin Haqqani, Terrorist, was an unfortunate response that reinforces a growing narrative regarding incompetence of the elite, ruling class.
The most glaring mistake in General Allen’s attack on the New York Times was repeating the thoroughly debunked “very fine people on both sides” hoax. The legacy media spread that hoax even though President Trump was talking about people protesting the removal of Confederate battle monuments. He specifically condemned the white supremacists if you listen to the whole quote. General Allen is the direct descendant of a Confederate Cavalry officer (I forget his name, but remember he fought at Culpepper), for which he is justifiably proud. I suspect he, too, was not happy about the removal of Confederate battle monuments. I know General Allen, my boss at the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course, and I admire him greatly, so it is disturbing to see him trafficking in hoaxes.
Worse was his endorsement of Forever War by implying we should renege on our Peace Agreement with the Taliban. This is his discussion of the Haqqani group:
This organization was and continues to be a central component of the Taliban, a major connecting file into al-Qaida, and a darling of Pakistan’s ISI. The Haqqanis, the Taliban, and al-Qaida endorse a radical interpretation of sharia that deprives women of any meaningful rights, to include the right to an education, and the freedom to pursue their own wants and interests, such as, for example, the legal profession. Countless lives were lost – and many, many more were wounded and otherwise terrorized – at the hands of this group and its peer terrorist entities, and had they not been formally designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, we would have had little means to diminish their influence and stop their violent activities. And at the very center of this violence was Sirajuddin Haqqani, operational commander of the Haqqani network as well as the #2 of the Taliban.
All of that is true and every bit of it irrelevant if we intend to sign a peace deal with the Taliban. It is none of our business if the Afghans decide to reconcile with Taliban leaders, including Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani is an evil man, and so is Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, who reconciled years ago and ran in the recent presidential election. The notorious warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who has been a member of the Kabul government when he wasn’t in exile dodging human rights tribunals, is an evil man. He was nominally on our side, so he’s a good, evil man, but to the Afghans, he’s little better than Haqqani.
What the Afghans do to reconcile the rift in their civil society is their business. If they want to reconcile with and guarantee the freedom of warlords like Haqqani, it is their right to do so. There are reasons to doubt the Taliban’s commitment to a more inclusive civil process, but it is no longer our concern.
Acknowledging the reality on the ground is essential. The Taliban cannot win militarily, and the same holds true for the central government. Given that context, it is time to let the Afghans work this out for themselves.
Sirajuddin Haqqani wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday where he explained the Taliban’s expectations and goals in signing a Peace Agreement with the United States. The piece was professionally written, and I do not believe Sirajudin can write so well in English, so I doubt he wrote it himself. Regardless, the Taliban statement stakes out the moral high ground with sentences like:
“I am confident that, liberated from foreign domination and interference, we together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity.”
Sirajudin Haqqani represents the Peshawar, not the Miranshah Shura, and the fact that he’s doing the writing indicates that the various factions in the Taliban are presenting a unified front. Haqqani is also directly responsible for scores of car bombings in Kabul and a laundry list of other attacks that targeted innocent Afghans. His statement has more than a bit of hypocrisy, but who cares? This communique was addressed to the Afghan people, and if they want to allow men like Haqqani to reconcile with the government, it is their business, not ours.
While the MSM component of the national media waited to see what President Trump would say so they could take the opposite position, the conservative press pounced on this sentence to dismiss the entire missive.
“We did not choose our war with the foreign coalition led by the United States. We were forced to defend ourselves.”
In the Washington Examiner, Becket Adams called the claim of self-defense “a damnable lie”. Mr. Adams went on to state that “The Taliban 100% chose this conflict with the U.S.” That was true in 2001, but that is not what Haqqani is talking about, and from the Taliban’s perspective, we did indeed force them to fight us.
In 2002, the majority of the Taliban had surrendered and returned to their villages. There was one group of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters holed up in the mountains of Shah-i Kot, which we attacked, willy-nilly, with no intelligence or fire support preparation of the battlefield, and no idea how many adversaries we faced. The remainders were turning in their weapons and going home, which is precisely what Karzai, when he accepted the surrender of the Taliban government, asked them to do.
What do you do when part of a Special Operations Task Force with no enemies to identify or target? What we did was target the enemies of the warlords who cooperated with us and in the south of the country the Warlords we supported would be Karzai and his bitter rival Haji Gul Agha Sherzad. The village of Khas Uruzgan provides a perfect example of how we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by relying on those two men.
When the Taliban were routed in an epic battle pitting a Special Forces A-team headed up by Maj. Jason Amerine and dozens fast movers (jets) vs. a couple thousand Taliban just outside the provincial capitol of Tirin Kot the local Afghans held jirga’s and agreed to candidates for the positions of district mayor, district chief of police, etc… Unfortunately, the acting president (Karzai) sent one of his friends named Jan Muhammad, to be the provincial governor. Jan Mohammad intended to put his fellow tribesmen (Popalzai) into every paying billet in his province.
In towns like Khas Uruzgan, the men selected by the people to govern them moved into the district center and started accepting weapons from surrendering Taliban. Jan Mohammad, who had just been released from the Taliban prison by Karzai himself, moved into the provincial governor’s compound and promptly appointed his tribesmen to every district governor and police chief billet in the province.
In Khas Uruzgan, the man elected by the jirga occupied the district governor’s compound. Next door was a schoolhouse where Jan Mohammad’s men were busy disarming the Taliban, and there were tons of weapons in both buildings.
In late 2002, the U.S. Army conducted a raid on both buildings (which they thought held Taliban), killing several men in the process and yoking up several more for interrogations at the Bagram airbase. Anand Gopal, in his excellent book No Good Men Among the Living describes the results of this raid:
Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies. People in Khas Uruzgan felt what Americans might if, in a single night, masked gunmen had wiped out the entire city council, mayor’s office, and police department of a small suburban town: shock, grief, and rage.
It would be years before the United States admitted they had raided the wrong place. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (the current senior Taliban negotiator) had gone to ground near Khas Uruzgan, and our Special Forces decimated not one, but two wedding parties (with AC-130 gunships) in an attempt to catch him. Dozens of children and women were killed in these raids. It is essential to acknowledge that to the Afghan people, there were two wars, one that drove the Taliban from power quickly, and a second one that started when we stayed on in the country to “capture senior Taliban and al-Qaida”. The responsibility of this second war rests solely on the National Command Authority of the United States, which failed to define Phase four (what happens when we win).
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, second from left, with members of a Taliban delegation in Russia in 2019.Credit…Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
If you want to read an infuriating account of our incompetence making us enemies among people who wanted to be allies during that second round of war, read Chapter 5 of No Good Men Among the Living. It is a detailed description of how we were tricked into detaining and/or killing the entire anti-Taliban leadership of Band-i-Timor in the Maiwand district of Kandahar. You cannot make some of this stuff up.
The opinion piece by Sirajudin Haqqani was a masterstroke of information warfare and will be hard for the United States to refute. The Taliban leadership, unlike the American leadership, has skin in the game. There is no reason to doubt their commitment to participate in establishing an Afghanistan free of foreign troops and moving towards a consensus on who is governing what. It is now time for the United States to move out of the way and allow the Afghans to determine what their country will become.
In 2002, the Taliban were defeated, and al-Qaida had already gone to Pakistan. All the fighting since then has not changed a thing on the ground. It is time to pull out, reduce funding to Afghanistan, and let them sort out the situation among themselves.
Last week, news broke of a possible peace deal in Afghanistan, leading to a firestorm of speculation in the media about what’s going on. The reporting was not consistent, but the consensus is that the peace deal would call for negotiations between Afghans on both sides of the conflict to start next month, an eventual countrywide cease-fire, and a commitment from the Taliban not to harbor terrorist groups like al Qaida, while setting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
A famous quote incorrectly attributed to Winston Churchill, “Jaw Jaw is better than War War” (actually, he said, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war,” which makes more sense) reinforces that this is (potentially) good news. The devil is in the details, and we do not know what “reduction of violence” means to the United States or “withdrawal of U.S. troops” means to the Taliban.
The Taliban are not a monolithic organization but several competing factions. We have been dealing with the Quetta Shura, which represents, but cannot speak for, the other players like the Miranshah Shura (primarily the Haqqani Network) or the Peshawar Shura. That being said, the Taliban did deliver on an Eid ceasefire agreement last year, and that ceasefire held.
Taliban fighters taking selfies with Afghan army troops during Eid ceasefire last year.
We can get a reliable read on what the Taliban considers a reduction of violence in this detailed report from the always reliable Afghan Analysts Network. From the linked report:
Another Pakistani newspaper, quoting an un-named Taleban official, reported that the movement had agreed not to carry out attacks in major cities including Kabul and would not use car bombs and that the Taleban had also offered not to attack US bases and US soldiers, and that they wanted the US to cease air strikes in return. The newspaper said it had learnt “that Khalilzad had urged” the Taleban to agree to more measures, including a halt to IED attacks, but that they did not agree “as they have planted IEDs in many areas and it is difficult for them to remove all [of them].” Furthermore, the paper reported, the US also wanted a pause in Taleban attacks on Afghan government forces’ check posts, “which was also a concern of the Afghan government.”
Senior U.S. military officials (speaking off the record) in Afghanistan stressed that U.S. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan against the Islamic State group and al-Qaida will continue, separate from the truce agreement. This is problematic for several reasons, not the least of which is that ISIS-K in Nangarhar Province has been defeated.
Their fighters have mostly surrendered to the government or gone to ground. There are ISIS-K cells in the north of the country, but they are not large or powerful and are in the sights of the same fighters who rid Nangarhar Province of ISIS, and those fighters are Taliban.
The counterterrorism mission in the eastern part of Afghanistan has been focused on ISIS-K (Daesh to the locals) for years. Now that ISIS-K is gone, the Special Forces teams are flying around the province conducting ‘Key Leadership Engagements’ like the one I wrote about last week. That occurred in the Sherzad district, which is very close to Jalalabad and full of former HiG fighters who have cooperated with the Taliban on and off over the years. They cooperate mainly because Taliban shadow courts settle land disputes quickly and, they feel, reasonably.
The land deed office for Nangarhar Province – some of these documents are hundreds of years old
The time for our SF troops and the Afghan varsity Commandos to be running around district centers meeting with key elders seems long past. The local elders know all about the dysfunctional government in Kabul and will not be convinced it has their interests at heart until the government demonstrates it.
With ISIS-K on the ropes, trying to separate Taliban connected fighters from al Qaida will be problematic. The remaining senior al-Qaeda leaders have successfully gone to ground inside the tribal areas of Pakistan and do not need to move anywhere. Al Qaida has a presence at Taliban training camps and may even run a few, but I have no doubt the Taliban understand the consequences of allowing them to use their territory for international Jihad.
If there are no independent al-Qaida formations, then if you go after them, you are still going after the Taliban.
The incident rate in Afghanistan has plummeted this year. Some of this is due to the pounding the Taliban have taken from American air attacks, which increased dramatically in 2019. Some of this can also be attributed to the Taliban winding down operations as the peace talks continued. The stats below come from The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
Time will tell, but it seems that the end to American involvement in Afghanistan is near. But if you pull all the training support missions out and leave a Special Forces task force to continue hunting “al-Qaida and ISIS,” it will test, if not break, the fragile peace. We need to pull everyone out and let the Afghans settle things themselves. Continuing night raids and killing bad guys in Afghanistan does not reduce any threats to our homeland. It’s time to admit that and act accordingly.
First, it appears the dead and wounded (including the Afghan SF troops with the Americans) were at the hands of Afghan National Army soldiers. From the article linked above:
Additionally, at least six more American troops were also wounded. The high number of casualties (17 as of this reporting) is attributed to the ODA/Afghan combined force coming under fire from a DShK, a Russian designed heavy machine gun which fires a 12.7mm bullet. The wounded have been evacuated to the appropriate field hospitals.
The source explained to Connecting Vets that it is suspected that the Afghan National Army (ANA) was behind the attack, although details are still developing.
From what I can determine, they were attacked by a lone gunman with a heavy machine gun. It is safe to assume (if this proves true) that the lone gunman was a Taliban. They got an assassin into the governor of Kandahar’s security force, who was able to gun down the irreplaceable Gen Raziq. As I wrote, the time and will continue to write, this will happen again. It is obvious that the screening methods in use are not working, and, given my experiences in Afghanistan, I suspect they will never work.
Second, one is forced to ask why we are still conducting KLEs in the badlands at this late stage in the game. What did the SF guys believe would be accomplished? I can’t imagine a good answer to that question, and I have over eight years of experience conducting KLEs in Afghanistan, many of them right there in Sherzad district.
It isn’t easy to understand what is happening in Afghanistan. Nangarhar Province has gone from one of the safer provinces in the country to the deadliest one for American forces. The army had been losing soldiers over the past four-plus years in Nangarhar Province, fighting an outbreak of ISIS along the border with Pakistan.
The Taliban got sick and tired of ISIS deprivations before and rolled into Nangarhar and kicked their asses hard in 2015. Last fall, the multiple Taliban units returned to Nangarhar (probably from Loya Paktia via the parrot’s beak, which is that finger of Pakistan land jutting into Afghanistan at the bottom of the district map below) and beat ISIS like a drum. ISIS was surrendering to the Afghan government last time I checked, and is no longer a threat.
This is the Nangahar province of Afghanistan. Sherzad district is in the east of the Province, and the ISIS threat was centered in Achin district, well to the west. Back in the day, Sherzad was HIG land (not Taliban), but Heckmyter Chu-Hoi’d to the government side a few years back, and it is now a Taliban stronghold.
Despite ISIS being routed (reported here in the Military Times three months ago), ISIS-K is still being used to justify our continued involvement in Afghanistan. That is ridiculous – ISIS-K was a collection of Pakistani Taliban who were trying to carve out their own little Jihadi paradise in an area that contains the largest talc powder deposit in the world. Threat to the US Homeland? Hardly. Al Qaeda is the same – they have gone to ground and remain unmolested in Pakistan for 18 years now, and do not need to use Afghan soil for anything. The airport in Peshawar is 10 times better than Kabul International so why would any decent Jihadi move from his decades long home in Pakistan?
ISIS-K has been eliminated, and the Taliban now control most of the countryside in Nangarhar Province. Our troops are stationed at the Jalalabad airfield, primarily consisting of aviation and aviation support personnel. There are also two different Special Forces compounds there, which still house one or more Army Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) teams. I understand the necessity of conducting operations outside the wire of a secure base like Jalalabad to keep the threats at a distance. However, I am unsure about the potential benefits of engaging in key leader engagements at this point in time.
This is precisely the kind of senseless loss that is driving President Trump to wind down our involvement in Afghanistan. How do you justify losing 8 Americans and an unknown number of Afghan Commandos on a chin-wagging mission with a bunch of local elders?
As an aside, the only mainstream outlet to write about this is Fox, and their take is focused on the perfidy of Green on Blue attacks. They have (as usual) completely missed the obvious, and the comments section is so clueless it’s depressing. The other outlets are (I suspect) waiting to see what President Trump will say so they can say the exact opposite. Watch and see.
Maybe there are excellent reasons for the mission to Sherzad that we will never know, but I do know there are better ways to conduct KLEs. It is always better to risk one contractor than it is to risk a dozen highly trained special operators. The counterintuitive thing about that is that an experienced contractor traveling alone into the Sherzad district, wearing local clothes, and in a local vehicle is much safer than 20 soldiers rolling around in four MRAPs. That is a lesson we refuse to learn, and I think the President, for one, is getting tired of it.
