The Fall of Afghanistan: Why the Afghan Government Could Not Stop the Taliban
During 2021, the last NATO troops are leaving Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires. The Taliban, radical Islamic militias that the US and her allies have fought against for the last 20 years, are once again asserting control on the country. Province after Province is falling back into the rule of the group, unmaking the efforts of the last 20 years. This begs the question how a militia of rugged and mostly ill-equipped militants is able to defeat the army of the Afghan government, that receives support and training from the West. In this video, we will discover the true reason of the Taliban’s success: It is neither their proficiency in warfare or bravery but their ability to run a – subjectively - more efficient and organized government then the official Afghan government in Kabul.
During the peak of NATO activity, the Taliban were mostly forced to hide in difficult to access strongholds in the mountains or use covert militants that facilitated terrorist attacks. Since they enjoyed at least some support in general population and from foreign donors, they were able hold out the Western attempts to pacify the area. They knew that the just have to keep up with some pressure, because the West will pull out at some point when the cost, paid in blood and money, becomes unbearable.
I. How the Taliban conquer a province
Now that this time has come, the Taliban are able to advance from their holdouts into the more fertile countryside and the cities. Let’s have a look at the typical advance into a province:
It’s important to know that the Taliban are not an unified body like a modern army of a nation state. They consist of loosely associated groups that – in theory – have to obey orders from members of the group that enjoy higher authority and are accepted as leaders by other members. Infighting between theses groups is common and leaders that are disobedient will be punished or even killed.
After the withdrawal, the local groups started to establish their control in the countryside, that is by occupying villages and transport links. They face little to no resistance by locals that either support them or cannot muster the strength to organize a meaningful response. Before the withdrawal, showing such a open presence would have drawn the attention of the Western force – making drone strikes easy.
Furthermore, the local groups receive reinforcements from other groups that already have secured their areas. These reinforcements accelerate the advance: Obviously, they bring in more manpower to overwhelm the few meaningful defenses. It is important to know that the local groups usually had some kind of truce with local government forces and civil agencies. On the one hand, this truce did not help with defeating the Taliban; on the other hand, the local Taliban did not advance further than the limits set by the truce, usually refraining from showing too much activity in cities or near the Afghan forces’ military facilities. As mentioned above, the incoming groups are under their own command, thus breaking the fragile peace and accelerating the fight for and the Taliban’s capture of the province. In many cases, the local Taliban even warn local officials and especially civil agencies to bail before an attack.
After taking control of the countryside, the Taliban start to siege military bases and cities. As any military strategist knows, breaking a siege usually requires outside help. The Afghan government usually fails to provide such, thus leaving the sieged soldiers on their own.
The Taliban have a habit of executing any government official or soldier or police officer they encounter. Knowing this, most of the security forces flee when a siege is imminent thus leaving cities with thousands of inhabitants with a few dozen brave souls that either fight till the end or go underground, hoping to build up a counter-resistance. As mentioned above, there are connections between local Taliban groups and the Afghan military. Thus, they sometimes offer the government groups their life and money to go home if they surrender. Given the choice between death or going home, most soldiers take the later, leaving their military equipment with the Taliban.
Therefore, not the Taliban’s military profess or bravery or even numbers allow them to capture their targets but the low morals of the defenders. The Taliban are able to capture cities with a few dozen fighters that would have had more police officers than that. A certain militant groups in Syria and Iraq employed the same strategy with battles like Mosul, an Iraq city with millions of inhabitants, that fell to a few thousand active fighters. Note, that taking such a city, defended by regular military would require hundreds of thousand of soldiers. Think of Stalingrad.
On the flipside, the West too had an easy game conquering Afghanistan. The real trouble starts when you have to build a government to stay in control.
II. Living under Taliban Rule
Once a territory is captured, the Taliban start to establish their government. This government is structured around a court that applies Islamic laws and is tasked with everything from criminal law to settling civil disputes. This court has an appointed judge and convenes once a week or so to hear cases and make decisions.
The Taliban fighters serve as a police force that is mandated with finding perpetrators and performing the judgment. Adultery gets you strokes with a cane or worse. Robbers will get their hand amputated. Government officials will be executed. This system is cruel and inhuman, but many locals like it, seeing it as an improvement to the lacking criminal justice system of the Afghan government that was not able to deal with robberies and other crimes, plunging the countryside in lawlessness.
Furthermore, the Taliban are raising a flat tax of 10% on income but the local fighters usually are forcing locals to pay higher taxes or gift them food or valuables, thus raising the effective tax rate.
It’s noteworthy that the Taliban mostly allow foreign NGOs to operate within their territory and keep the schools which the Afghan government pays for operating, even though women are excluded from higher levels of education.
This points to the reason of the Taliban’s success: They are able to offer better protection against crimes and better government services or at least the same services as the official government, plus the lack of terrorist attacks because the terrorists rule themselves. This makes it difficult for the Afghan government to rally its armed forced behind its flag and convince locals to resist Taliban incursion. To be fair, there are regions with strong local militias that are able to fend of the Taliban, even during their heyday before 2001 the Taliban never ruled the whole country. These militias are usually rooted in shared ethnicity or other unifying elements but non in the trust in the Afghan government.
All in all, the success of the Taliban can be attributed to their ability to gain legitimacy, that is recognition as government instead of being mere terrorists, by actually providing a somewhat better government. Mixing in the Islamic elements, that give them legitimacy on religious base, opens more solid ground to stand on than the western-backed Afghan government, that is corrupt at best, completely inept at worst.
III. Seeking International Legitimacy
Even though the Taliban have some domestic legitimacy, they have fallen short to gain international recognition as the official government. As long as the incumbent Afghan government exists, it will not be possible for the Taliban to gain the recognition they desire. However, the fall of Kabul is just a matter of time and the Taliban once again will rule over most parts of Afghanistan.
The Taliban want to be recognized because this offers them access to international institutions. They want, like every crooked government, development aid and access to international markets and banking. Afghanistan is a country rich of resources that could be exploited and sold.
Nowadays, the undisputed rule over an area alone is not enough to justify recognition as it was in the 19th century and before. Usually, some adherence to human rights is needed to be accepted onto the international stage, even though the bar is set really low, as North Korea and others show. The Taliban know this and thus try to polish their image a little bit by hiding their crimes. An article of The Guardian mentions attempts by local officials to carry out punishments like the caning of women behind closed doors where is nobody around to film their deeds.
IV. Conclusion
The Fall of Afghanistan shows that it is the lack of legitimacy that kills every government. The Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan, has seen many imposed governments come and go that all were not able to make enough of the population recognize them as the government, give them a cause that it is worth dying for. All the support the West can offer cannot solve this lack of legitimacy.
The same goes for other incumbent governments that succumbed to Revolution: The French King was toppled over the narrative of him being a greedy tyrant, the military not willing to follow his orders. The British were not able to keep the 13 colonies because not enough people were willing to fight and die for King George instead of freedom – Note that the areas of nowadays Canada were royalists and defended their King. The difference was legitimacy.
Thus, the first page in the militant’s playbook simple reads: You cannot win with money or soldiers or weapons but legitimacy.