An earlier blog post included some hints as to how the Taliban were able to sweep aside the forces of US client government in Afghanistan with relatively little bloodshed. In an interview by Laurie Taylor last week, Sarah Chayes, a former adviser to US and international forces in Afghanistan, with years of experience of the country and its people, emphasised the extent of the disenchantment of Afghans with what was presented to them as democracy.
For US National Public Radio, Chayes covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001 then stayed in Kandahar for most of the decade. Her books include The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban and On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake*. So far from being a surprise, the fall of the Ashraf Ghani regime was predicted by Chayes soon after it became established. She told Taylor:
"My only question was, would it just fritter away or would it be a sudden collapse. [...] it's stunning to me that westerners who had been engaged so intimately and so long didn't really understand how Afghans fight. This was not industrial warfare - that's not what they're used to - they don't, you know, fight to the death in mass atrocities. War is really more like theatre in Afghanistan; it's a way of trying to make a convincing demonstration of the likely outcome and then pressuring the enemy to join us. So, let's take a look at the hand that the Taliban were playing. You had a Doha Agreement whose terms effectively conferred sovereignty on the Taliban because it said 'don't deliver visas and passports to any international terrorists'. Well, only a government can deliver visas and passports. So effectively the Taliban had sovereignty. There was a date for the US withdrawal and there was an Afghan army that had been built in the mirror image of .our equipment-heavy technology-heavy army that would obviously not be able to do without that type of support. And then you had the Taliban who were happy to commit really gruesome atrocities designed for the maximum psychological effect.
"And then you had the corruption of the government of Afghanistan itself, and so the outcome wasn't just likely, it was certain."
Chayes detailed the daily humiliations which ordinary Afghans suffered at the hands of anybody employed by the government who wanted to extract bribe money. She confirmed that the Taliban had been nurtured in Pakistan under the aegis of the Pakistan intelligence services and introduced to Kandahar, not that the movement sprang up spontaneously in the villages surrounding the desert city.
On bringing democracy to Afghanistan:
"If you mean by democracy stolen elections, people treated the way you'd treat war booty to be humiliated and pillaged, public revenues that land in bigwigs' pockets and then they move it offshore as we're currently learning, decisions that are made on the basis of who's going to personally benefit from them, wouldn't you lose interest in democracy, if that's what it meant?
"On the contrary, the Afghans that I met had huge interest in what they thought democracy was, which is to say a voice in their collective destiny, equal justice and decisions that are made in the public interest and not for money.
"Does this sound at all familiar to you? As I was studying corruption in the United States, I mean, I've come to the conclusion that we really did make Afghanistan in our own image."
* featured in a 2020 edition of Thinking Allowed
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