by Zafar Iqbal Yousafzai 20 August 2021
The Taliban’s swift return to power shocked the world in addition to humiliation for Washington and Ghani administration that was not expecting what did happen in days. The question keeps coming to every mind why the Afghan forces collapsed so quickly and why Washington and Kabul could not do anything to handle the situation both on the ground and table. This article seeks to answer who is responsible for the fall of Kabul.
Any conflict at the end of the day ends with a resolution. And any resolution is not possible without any compromise. The same did happen in Afghanistan after a long period of two decades. During these two decades, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in addition to more than two trillion dollars by the US. As a solution was charted out in the shape Doha deal and the US agreed to be so lenient and accept many of the Taliban demands if Washington make it by the end of 2001 after toppling the Taliban and making the new setup, there would be no human or treasury losses and humiliation. Taliban after their fall were eager to join the new set up however, the US did not allow them.
It was the end of 2001; Hamid Karzai met a Taliban delegation in Shah Wali Kot district outside Kandahar. Taliban had agreed to surrender control of Kabul if general amnesty is given to the Taliban. Karzai laid the condition Mullah Umar will renounce terrorism which was accepted and an agreement was reached known as Shah Wali Kot agreement. As per the agreement, the Taliban will lay weapons and go home with dignity. However, the next day, the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld called Karzai to step back from the agreement and do not extend amnesty to the Taliban. This was the point that not only prolonged the US war in Afghanistan for twenty years but ended with humiliation as well.
Nevertheless, Obama administration in 2009 started the peace process with the Taliban to help settle the issue by negotiation to end the conflict. The complex peace process took eleven years to reach any settlement and the Doha agreement was signed in February 2020. However, two parties to the Afghan conflict doomed the peace process that compelled the Taliban to take over Kabul. First, the Afghan issue did not solve with the signing of the Doha agreement but another wave of controversy get started when the former president Ashraf Ghani on the next day of the agreement announced I will not release the Taliban prisoners despite it was agreed in the agreement—the Taliban prisoners and Afghan forces in Taliban prisons will be released before March 10 and intra-Afghan talks will be on the said date. However, due to Ashraf Ghani’s radical attitude and vested interests to prolong his own rule doomed the Afghan peace process.
When Washington was negotiating a deal with the Taliban, they had taken Ashraf Ghani on board and Khalilzad used to frequently visit Kabul. Only the Afghan government was not a part of the negotiations on the Taliban’s demand who were calling it a puppet government. The first round of the intra-Afghan talks held on September 12, 2020, which did not bear the desired results. Ghani and his aides were waiting for the US elections if Biden wins, he will get back from the Doha agreement like the one Donald Trump did in Iran’s nuclear deal case. However, that did not happen. Ghani was just passing his time in Arg while zero care for any sort of settlement in which his rule gets compromised.
The second major that doomed the peace process was the US ambivalent Afghan policy. First President Trump and then President Biden could not formulate a wise policy that could save Kabul from fall into the hands of the Taliban. President Trump though signed the deal with the Taliban but did not put enough pressure on Ashraf Ghani to show seriousness to the intra-Afghan talks which had led Afghanistan to a negotiated settlement. Trump had ten months to convince Ghani to reach a deal with the Taliban but he could not do so. Similarly, when Biden came to power, he took too much time to formulate such a strategy for Afghanistan that could end with a peaceful settlement on one hand and a venerable withdrawal of the US on the other. Biden too during his six, seven months did not compel Ghani to engage in a meaningful dialogue with the Taliban. The fall of Kabul by the Taliban if one hand humiliated the US at a global level, it also surfaced how hollow the US policies were for Afghanistan. Hence, the US ambivalent policy and the Ghani administration’s drive for its vested interests provided for the fall of Kabul.