Ashraf Ghani
Ariana: Kabul residents on Monday voiced their anger at former president Ashraf Ghani, who slipped out of the country unnoticed on Sunday, and accused him of “national treason”. Many residents accused Ghani of deserting his people and of leaving them with a “vague destiny”. Ghani is believed to be in Oman, after flying out of Kabul soon after the Taliban reached the gates of the capital on Saturday night. Click here to read more (external link).
Ghani
Frud Bezhan
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
August 16, 2021
Thousands of Taliban militants encircled Kabul as fear and panic swept through the capital, its residents bracing for a bloody takeover of the city and a return to an oppressive life under the militant Islamist group.
Amid the chaos on the clogged streets and the teeming airport in Kabul, key government and political leaders were locked in tense negotiations with the Taliban over a peaceful transfer of power.
But President Ashraf Ghani was nowhere to be seen.
His ministers were frantically trying to contact him but could not reach his office. Hours earlier, the embattled Afghan leader had secretly slipped out of the sprawling presidential palace in central Kabul with a cohort of his closest aides and boarded a plane to an unknown country and away from the turmoil in his country.
Ghani, who had pledged just days earlier that he would not leave the country, had unceremoniously fled on August 15 during the country’s hour of need.
Yet he had not even informed key members of his cabinet, including acting Defense Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi.
“They tied our hands from behind and sold out the country,” Mohammadi wrote on Twitter as stunned officials found out their commander in chief had fled the country.
“Curse Ghani and his gang,” said Mohammadi, referring to the president’s two closest confidants — national-security adviser Hamdullah Mohib and Fazel Fazly, Ghani’s chief of staff — who had fled with him.
Abdullah Abdullah, a longtime rival and the second ranking official in the government, said “God should hold him accountable.”
Hours after his escape, Ghani wrote on Facebook that he left the country to prevent a “flood of bloodshed.” Some reports said he flew first to Tajikistan or Uzbekistan — though both countries denied it — before leaving for an unknown third country. His whereabouts are unknown as of late on August 16.
Ghani’s escape from Kabul, as the city came under Taliban rule without resistance, marked the end of his tumultuous, polarizing seven years in power.
Analysts say the 72-year-old’s abrasive and authoritarian leadership style, which alienated key power brokers, contributed to the rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s security forces and the unraveling of the government.
The Taliban had cascaded through the country since launching a blistering military offensive that coincided with the start of the final withdrawal of foreign troops on May 1. The militant group captured many of the country’s cities in just over a week, with government forces surrendering or retreating by the thousands.
“His divisive and unpopular leadership affected the management and planning of the war,” said Ali Adili, a researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent think tank in Kabul.
Ghani fired and replaced the country’s security leadership on several occasions. He had also sidelined crucial power brokers, including influential former warlords who held sway in the provinces, particularly in northern Afghanistan.
“The failure of resistance in the northern provinces against the Taliban in recent weeks was partly a result of Ghani alienating key figureheads and weakening local structures of power,” said Hameed Hakimi, a research associate at the London-based Chatham House think tank.
Rise And Fall From Power
Ghani, a former finance minister, rose to power in 2014 when he won a presidential election marred by widespread allegations of fraud and vote rigging.
Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun from the eastern province of Logar, has always had the qualifications for the highest political office in Afghanistan. He had worked for the World Bank and the United Nations, and even wrote a book on how to fix failed states.
But he lacked the grassroots support of many of his rivals and Ghani’s lengthy exile in the United States also earned him a reputation for being out of touch with ordinary Afghans.
He surrounded himself with a cohort of Western-educated aides and advisers and isolated himself from key domestic stakeholders.
Ghani was also accused of ethnic favoritism and of stoking tensions among the country’s many ethnic groups.
Hakimi described Ghani as a “classic Afghan populist” who appealed to what he believed his audience wanted to hear.
“His shallow populism was in part his hubris as someone who believed he had the academic and anthropological understanding of the society he wanted to rule,” he said.
“He was also an irascible president who was unable to control his temper or his tongue when given facts he disagreed with, or worse: when challenged,” Hakim added.
Torek Farhadi, a former government adviser who worked with Ghani, described the president as an “insecure” leader who was unwilling to compromise or cede power.
“His political moves were calculated to retain power,” said Farhadi. “In this process he alienated many stakeholders, be it traditional leaders or technocrats.”
‘Stole The Opportunity For Peace’
Ghani refused to stick to the terms of a power-sharing agreement he signed with his electoral rival, Abdullah, in 2014 that led to the creation of an unwieldly national unity government that was characterized by bitter divisions and bickering.
Ghani won the 2019 presidential election that was plagued by record-low turnout and allegations of fraud. Foreign powers and domestic power brokers had pleaded for him to postpone the vote in favor of peace talks with the Taliban. But he refused.
In 2018, the United States had opened direct negotiations with the Taliban in Qatar without the presence of the Afghan government. Eighteen months later, the sides signed a bilateral deal that paved the way for foreign troops to withdraw from Afghanistan.
The deal undermined Ghani’s government, which was not a party to the accord. It also committed his administration to free 5,000 Taliban fighters. Ghani initially balked at the mass release but grudgingly accepted it, staggering the freeing of the inmates in a way that delayed the peace talks by months.
Once intra-Afghan peace talks began in September 2020, Ghani was accused by critics of repeatedly stalling and undermining the peace process to retain power.
Almost one year later, Ghani did not oversee peace in Afghanistan but rather the end of 20 years of democratic rule as the Taliban seized power in Kabul.
“Ghani will be remembered as the president who stole the opportunity for peace from the people of Afghanistan,” said Farhadi.
Afghans poured onto the tarmac at Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul on August 16 in a desperate bid to flee the Taliban. Video posted on social media showed chaotic scenes of people clinging to a U.S. military jet as it took off to evacuate diplomatic staff.
Many Afghan journalists and activists have gone into “hiding” the day after Taliban fighters took control of the capital, Kabul. One RFE/RL Radio Azadi reporter, whose identity could not be revealed for security reasons, sees “a dark future” ahead. He said there were reports of Taliban militants going “house-to-house” and shooting people in the street.
Taliban going door to door looking for government employees, taking down names/addresses, disarming people, taking them away, beating musicians, destroying instruments, etc.
Taliban fighters beating musicians and destroying their instruments as they go door-to-door searching peoples’ homes in #Kabul, several residents told me.
History repeating itself.
Taliban banned music during its brutal former regime.
— Frud Bezhan فرود بيژن (@FrudBezhan) August 16, 2021
Taliban fighters going door-to-door in #Kabul, looking for government employees, soldiers and police, and Afghans who worked with foreign govts and NGOs, several residents tell me.
— Frud Bezhan فرود بيژن (@FrudBezhan) August 16, 2021
Some have been taken away, family members say. In other cases, houses have been searched and documents/weapons confiscated. Taliban also recording names/addresses.
— Frud Bezhan فرود بيژن (@FrudBezhan) August 16, 2021
By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
August 16, 2021
Seven people have been reported killed as thousands of Afghans flooded the runways and terminals of the Kabul airport amid chaos, attempting to leave after Taliban militants seized control of the country ahead of the withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces after a presence of nearly two decades.
The Pentagon said on August 16 that U.S. troops killed two people after they were seen “menacingly” brandishing weapons. Officials were not able to say how the five others died, but video from the airport showed hundreds of people trying to force their way onto a moving aircraft, some clinging to landing gear as it attempted to take off. U.S. officials said troops fired warning shots into the air to try and disperse the crowds around the flight, which was taking U.S. diplomats and embassy staff out of the country.
U.S. authorities said they were forced to close down the airport temporarily to restore order and clear the airfield of people so that flights could resume.
In sharp contrast to the situation at the airport, streets in the capital itself were mainly calm as Taliban soldiers patrolled the capital. The heavily fortified diplomatic Green Zone in Kabul appeared to be a ghost town, with countries rushing to evacuate their embassies.
Dozens of governments called for calm to allow for the departure of hundreds of foreign nationals and Afghans seeking to leave the country after the militants toppled the Western-backed government over the weekend.
“Afghanistan stands at a crossroad. Security and well-being of its citizens, as well as international security, are at play,” European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told journalists as he prepared to convene a meeting of EU foreign ministers for August 17.
EU officials are pleading with the bloc’s 27 capitals to give visas to Afghan workers at the bloc’s mission in Kabul and their families, estimated to number between 500 and 600, European diplomats said.
The government collapsed, with President Ashraf Ghani fleeing abroad on August 15 as the Taliban captured Kabul — the last major city in Afghanistan to hold out against an offensive that accelerated in the space of days as the militants rapidly gained control of territories across the country.
U.S. troops were in control of Kabul’s international airport, where commercial flights were suspended on August 16, stranding many Afghans who sought to flee.
The Hamid Karzai Airport authority said it was forced to cancel all remaining commercial flights “to prevent looting and plundering.” The Afghanistan Civil Aviation Authority announced that Kabul airspace had been released to the military and that it advised transit aircraft to reroute.
A number of major airlines said they had stopped using Afghanistan airspace in response to the directive.
The White House said U.S. President Joe Biden was returning to Washington from the nearby Camp David presidential retreat to make a statement at 3:45 Washington time on the latest developments.
For months Biden had downplayed the prospect of the Taliban taking control following an announcement in April that the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops would be withdrawn by August 31. On August 14 he defended his decision, saying an “endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
He now faces rising criticism, especially from Republicans in Congress, after the insurgents’ rapid offensive captured most of Afghanistan’s major cities in less than a week.
“It is certainly the case that the speed with which cities fell was much greater than anyone anticipated,” national-security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an interview on NBC’s Today show on August 16.
“At the end of the day, despite the fact that we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to give the best equipment, the best training and the best capacity to the Afghan security forces, we could not give them the will and they ultimately decided that they would not fight for Kabul and they would not fight for the country,” he added.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the Taliban and all other parties to exercise “utmost restraint” in order to protect the lives of Afghans and ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Guterres said the rights of women and girls must be protected, in a reference to the Taliban, which imposed a strict interpretation of Sharia law during their 1996-2001 rule. The UN chief will address the body’s Security Council later on August 16 over the situation in Afghanistan.
“The world is following events in Afghanistan with a heavy heart and deep disquiet about what lies ahead,” Guterres said, noting that the Taliban had so far respected the safety of UN personnel in the country.
The UN humanitarian office said members of the humanitarian community remain committed to helping the millions of Afghans needing assistance and are staying in the country despite the “highly complex” security environment.
More than 18.4 million people were already in need of assistance before more than 550,000 were displaced by conflict this year, according to the office, known as OCHA.
Many fear reprisals from the Taliban for their cooperation with government authorities or for working with foreign governments during the two decades the international coalition was present in Afghanistan. Those fears sparked desperate scenes at the airport as they sought a way out of the country.
Ireland’s Ambassador to the UN chided the Security Council for failing to heed warnings over the situation in Afghanistan, saying “now we will have to address the consequences.”
A member of the Taliban administration told Reuters that the group had started collecting weapons from civilians because people no longer need them for personal protection, as the Taliban sought to reassure the international community that Afghans should not fear them.
In a message posted to social media, Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar called on the militants to remain disciplined, saying: “Now it’s time to test and prove, now we have to show that we can serve our nation and ensure security and comfort of life.”
Mohammad Naeem, a Taliban spokesman in Qatar, where the group has a political office, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi that the militants were discussing the future of Afghanistan with a number of Afghan politicians.
Deputy national-security adviser Jon Finer said in an interview on MSNBC that the United States remained engaged in diplomatic conversations with the Taliban in the Qatari capital, Doha.
This story includes reporting by Radio Azadi correspondents on the ground in Afghanistan. Their names are being withheld for their protection.
With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP
Baradar (center)
By Golnaz Esfandiari
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
August 16, 2021
Abdul Ghani Baradar, known as Mullah Baradar, is a co-founder of the Taliban and senior leader of the militant Islamist group who is expected to hold a top role in governing Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover of the country.
Baradar — the most public face of the Taliban — was also the insurgent group’s representative who signed the landmark February 2020 Doha agreement with the United States that aimed to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Born in 1968 in Uruzgan Province, Baradar is a Durrani Pashtun from the Popalzai tribe. He also served as the Taliban’s deputy defense minister.
Baradar fled to Pakistan after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States that led to the group’s ouster.
Baradar spent eight years in jail in Pakistan after being reportedly arrested in Karachi in 2010 in an operation by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agents. He was released following a request by U.S. envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad to play a role in the peace talks due to his authority and his reputation for being able to negotiate.
But while the 2020 deal with the United States ended America’s longest war, it also paved the way for the Taliban’s triumphant return to Kabul on August 15 after it seized much of the country within a week as Afghan forces melted away.
‘A Very Calm Person’
Baradar, who was reported to be on his way to Kabul on August 15 for the first time in nearly two decades, could play a senior role in Afghanistan’s future administration.
Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman and negotiator, told the Associated Press on August 16 that the militants would hold talks in the coming days aimed at forming an “open, inclusive Islamic government.”
Baradar, who serves as the head of the Taliban’s political bureau, is a powerful figure who is respected within the group for his military as well as negotiating skills.
In a brief video statement on August 15, Baradar said the group’s victory was unexpectedly swift, adding that the real test would begin now with serving the people and resolving their problems.
Journalist Sami Yousaifzai has covered the Taliban for many years and has met with Baradar.
“Baradar is a very calm person, I met him three or four times, he’s very diplomatic, he only speaks to the point. Even before his capture he was known as a figure silently doing a lot of thinking [for the Taliban]. He has a lot of respect within the Taliban,” Yousafzai told RFE/RL.
“I think he has ambitions to become leader and he’s the one who struck a deal with the Americans very successfully,” he added. “As much as I’ve heard from the Taliban, he also has a desire to be in a senior role in the future.”
Working In The Shadows
Baradar, who became second-in-command after the death of elusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar in 2013, had reportedly worked in the shadows for years, strategizing the bloody Taliban insurgency and appointing the group’s military commanders.
During his detention in Pakistan he was reported to have provided the United States with “useful” information about the inner workings of the militant group.
Baradar is from the same tribe as former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has stayed in Kabul and has said he is working “to solve the issue of Afghanistan with the Taliban leadership peacefully.”
Baradar, who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, held several posts under the brutal Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001 during which women were stripped of basic rights, including being banned from studying and working and having restricted access to medical care.
The group has in recent weeks attempted to project a more moderate image while many — including scores of Afghans fleeing their country and those who have lived in recent years in areas controlled by the Taliban — remain unconvinced.
In a 2009 interview with Newsweek, Baradar said the group was determined to fight until the expulsion of U.S. troops from the country.
“The history of Afghanistan shows that Afghans never get tired of struggling until they have freed their country. We shall continue our jihad till the expulsion of our enemy from our land,” he said.
In March 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump held a 35-minute phone conversation with the Taliban political leader that Trump described as “very good.”
In November, Baradar met with then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Doha.
He was also involved in recent days in failed talks with the administration of President Ashraf Ghani, who fled Afghanistan on August 15.
Taliban militants (file photo)
Jamie Dettmer
VOA News
August 16, 2021
The rapid Taliban offensive across Afghanistan that culminated Sunday with the flight of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was meticulously planned and executed with ruthless efficiency, say Western military experts.
And they note the Islamist militants appeared to have learned from their tactical mistake in the mid-1990s, when they overran Kabul before having secured the north of the country, allowing opponents to form a Northern Alliance opposition.
This time around, Taliban commanders have been much more methodical, building up momentum by securing outlying districts, securing the main border posts with neighboring Pakistan and Iran, then moving on to regional capitals, and leaving Kabul for last after seizing Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan’s fourth largest city and the onetime stronghold of the Northern Alliance.
The Northern Alliance helped U.S.-led forces topple the Taliban in 2001, after the September 11th terror attacks on the United States.
A pair of veteran warlords had pledged to assist the Afghan army in protecting Mazar-e-Sharif, but as with many other provincial capitals, a strong defense did not materialize.
Demoralized Afghan army forces shrank away or surrendered. The pro-government militias downed their weapons or switched sides after warlords Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ata Mohammad Noor fled abruptly, Abas Ebrahimzada, a local lawmaker, told the Associated Press.
“The Taliban’s success has not happened by chance,” said Tim Willasey-Wilsey, a former British diplomat and now a visiting professor at King’s College London. “It is clearly the fruit of preparation and planning. Above all, they have learnt from the experience of 1994 to 1996 when they eventually took Kabul but failed to capture the north,” he wrote in a commentary for the Cipher Brief, an online subscription-based conversation site connecting private and public sector security professionals.
Western diplomats say Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s political chief, and Mullah Yaqoob, son of the Taliban’s founder Mullah Omar, who leads the group’s military commission, were among the main strategic planners behind the offensive, likely plotted over years.
Baradar is a veteran leader and was largely brought up in Kandahar — the Taliban’s birthplace. His military experience goes back even before the formation of the Taliban — he fought against the Russians in the 1980s. After the Russians left, he partnered with Mullah Omar, his brother-in-law, to set up the Taliban movement of young “purist” Islamic scholars with the backing of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. With the same rapidity seen in recent weeks, the Taliban in 1996 seized power after capturing a series of provincial capitals.
Baradar was detained by Pakistani security forces in 2010 at the request of the Obama administration but freed three years ago, again at the request of the Trump administration, to lead the Taliban’s negotiation team in Qatar, where a partially secret deal was struck in February 2020 outlining the principle of a U.S. withdrawal.
Some critics of the Biden’s administration’s decision to withdraw argue that the negotiations in Qatar, which since became deadlocked when it came to peace talks between the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban, was just seen by the Islamist militants as a staging post to their sweeping into power. They noted the discrepancies between what the Taliban were saying in Doha, during ultimately fruitless exchanges, and what the group’s fighters were doing.
And it may have lulled Washington into believing that the Taliban were prepared to reach some political accommodations with their Afghan adversaries. Others see the talks as a contributing factor in the demoralization of the Afghan government and its 350,000-strong security forces, trained and equipped at huge cost by the U.S. and Western coalition allies.
“The Taliban’s advances can be attributed primarily to the erosion of morale and cohesion among the government’s security forces and political leadership,” according to Laurel Miller and Andrew Watkins of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research group.
In a commentary Saturday, they noted that since May, while talks in Doha were under way, the Taliban “drove security forces from more than 200 of the country’s roughly 400 districts, in many instances without much fighting.”
They added, “The first districts to fall were home to poorly resourced and surrounded small bands of government forces, and the Taliban reached out to many via local elders, persuading them to leave their posts without fighting. With each new advance, a sense of momentum grew among the insurgents’ own rank and file but also among local communities. Over recent months, the Taliban actively engaged local communities throughout the country with a mixture of disinformation, threats, targeted violence and promises of clemency, even in some cases for troops and civilian officials.”
Back in June, Andrew Wilder of the United States Institute of Peace, a Washington-based independent institute founded by the U.S. Congress, was warning the decision to withdraw U.S. forces “without a cease-fire or a framework for a political agreement between the Taliban and the government caught Afghans and regional countries by surprise,” adding the Taliban was “capitalizing on the moment to seize dozens of districts and project an air of confidence.”
As U.S. troops started the drawdown, psychological and military momentum shifted to the Taliban. After a trip to Kabul, he cautioned, “Afghan security forces suffer from low morale and frequent changes in leadership and supply shortages caused by poor planning and the withdrawal of international air support.”
Western military officials say the failure by the Ghani government to shape a strategic defense plan, give clear instructions to units, and even to supply with any consistency, further corroded the confidence of the Afghan military. And the speed of the Taliban offensive disoriented them as did suddenly being cut off from close U.S. air support, which a lot of their training focused on.
Analyst Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense-focused research group, told the BBC: “Soldiers are often sent to areas where they have no tribal or family connections. One reason why some may have been so quick to abandon their posts without putting up a fight.”
“I think the demoralization factor was predictable but not factored in enough by the decision-makers in Washington,” a senior British military official told VOA on the condition of anonymity.
“I am not surprised that much by the caving in of Afghan forces — with the notable exception of some special forces — or of local pro-government militias throwing in the towel or even swapping allegiances. If you look at what happened as Soviet forces started their withdrawal in the 1980s, something similar happened with militias and their leaders making their calculations and turning against the government as they sensed the central government was doomed,” he added.
Judging by Taliban actions the past few days, the group’s leaders may have factored into their end game calculations that tribal leaders and some veteran warlords would switch sides. And there are signs that the Taliban leadership has been holding secret talks with key local leaders for weeks to assure them that local political and administrative arrangements can continue as much as before as long as overall Taliban authority is accepted, say British officials.
In Herat, near the Iranian border, local leaders were quick to side last week with the Taliban, including Kamran Alizai, Herat’s provincial council chief, after little fighting, Local pro-government warlord Ismail Khan also quickly submitted and was dispatched by the Taliban to Kabul Friday as a go-between for talks with officials still loyal to the Ghani government, according to local reports.
Ghani
Reuters: Russia’s embassy in Kabul said on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in, the RIA news agency reported. Click here to read more (external link).
Taliban Militant Leadership
Ariana: In a bid to reassure the nation, the Taliban on Monday called on all government employees, including women, to return to work. The deputy head of the Taliban’s political office in Qatar Abdul Salam Hanafi stressed that diplomatic missions, and military and civilian government employees can work alongside the Taliban without any concerns and that no one’s rights will be violated. Click here to read more (external link).