Not learning from past mistakes, when it had to return to Afghanistan in 2001 to take on its own Frankenstein monster, the Taliban, the US has again signed a peace pact with it
Reporting from the Afghan frontlines, 22-year-old cavalry officer and war correspondent Winston Churchill had talked about the bravery of the Pathan warriors: “Their swordsmanship — neglecting guards — concerns itself only with cuts and careless of what injury they may receive, they devote themselves to the destruction of their opponents.” However, the warrior-scholar was far less charitable with the “mullah” among the Pathans: “Their holy men — the mullahs — prize as chief privilege, a sort of droit de seigneur (right of the lord). It is impossible to imagine a lower type of being or a more dreadful state of barbarism.”
The Afghan wastelands, which were immortalised for hosting the fictionalised “great game” by novelist Rudyard Kipling, actually live up to their literary billing. The barren swathes of the unforgiving heights of the Hindu Kush mountain ranges to the Wakhan panhandle have witnessed the unquenched ambitions of various empires — from the Persians to the Greeks, Mongol, Turkic, Mughals, Qajars, Tsarist, British to the erstwhile Soviets in the 1980s. The bloody graveyard of empires was exemplified by the retreating British forces from Kabul, when only one out of 18,500 soldiers made it out of the ferocious Afghan tribesmen, who slaughtered the contingent of the then most powerful military in the world.
Yet again, arguably the most powerful empire in the world today, the US, has succumbed to the irascible, uncontrollable and fierce warriors of the region, albeit under the cover of a pact, “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan.” After suffering over 2,400 American combat fatalities (additional 1,100 NATO soldiers) and with over 20,660 men injured, the longest war in the US’ modern history (over 18 years since 2001), and burning over a two trillion dollar in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, US President Donald Trump signed an ostensible “peace deal” with the Afghan Taliban.
The deal was inked from the Taliban side by its co-founder, Mullah Ghani Baradar, who is described as a typical “old-fashioned Pashtun tribal head.” The Taliban, which has been the principal terror organisation in Afghanistan, responsible for over 157,000 deaths (as per research from the Cost of War Project at Brown University), has incredulously been promised that it would work along with other members of the United Nations Security Council to “remove members of the Taliban from the sanctions list with the aim of achieving this objective by May 29, 2020.”
The weakly worded and vacuous Afghan “peace deal” that is inherently lop-sided in favour of the Talibanis — with measurable deliverables from the US and vague generalities in the form of Talibani deliverables — is telling in terms of who had the upper hand in the negotiations. The entire edifice of the so-called peace hope is predicated on the complete disownment and U-turn of Talibani behaviour, conduct and ideology — from their historically violent, sworn intransigence and without any hard commitment to reform itself.
The Ashraf Ghani Government in Kabul has been a mute, unengaged and sidelined spectator in the entire process and is hopelessly left to fend for itself as the American soldiers extricate themselves. This withdrawal from the conflict zone follows an unmistakable pattern with the US unilaterally bolting out from a precarious situation — it had done so earlier from this very region in the late 1980s; in Iraq after removing Saddam Hussein; in Libya after eliminating Muammar al-Gaddafi; in Lebanon after the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings; in Somalia and in Vietnam among others. It follows the usual pretence of leaving the situation to the locals to “handle their destiny.” Subsequent events have always been even more chaotic, filled with violence, bloodshed, capitulation and take-over by extremist forces.
In an eerily similar situation from the past history, when the US had tired from the unending and inconclusive fighting in Vietnam, it signed a “peace agreement” entailing a ceasefire, release of prisoners, talks between warring factions, withdrawal of its troops (exactly the same terms as in the latest Afghan peace treaty), effectively leaving the depleted US-supported faction to fend for survival. Expectedly and within a few months, the US-supported South Vietnamese forces were slaughtered.
While accepting the surrender, North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin rubbished the so-called “peace deal” provisions and asserted, “Between Vietnamese, there are no victors and no vanquished. Only the Americans have been beaten.” Today, Kabul stares at a similar deal with an irreconcilable terror organisation that is not even monolithic or unified in control and has a dubious track record of shifting loyalties among its warlords — the portents are ominous.
Almost immediately, the obviousness of the “face saving” instrument that afforded the Americans to cut-and-run is proving true. Within days of the so-called “peace deal”, brazen violations by the Taliban included a wave of ferocious attacks, forcing the US to make “defensive” air strikes against the Taliban in the Helmand province — hardly reassuring of the road ahead. While Trump spoke about his “good talks” with the Taliban leader Baradar, expected fissures erupted with the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani rejecting the demand to release Talibani prisoners.
Ghani’s comments that, “the Government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners” and further clarification that the US could not take unilateral decisions on its behalf by stating that, “it is not in the authority of the US to decide, it is only a facilitator”, augurs a bleak future.
In 1989, the US had stalled all overtures, invitations and concessions by the then Mohammad Najibullah regime and persisted with the jihadi mujahideen, the forbears of the present-day Taliban. Washington, DC, had wrongly punted on the Inter-Services Intelligence-supported extremist forces and paid a bloody price by supporting a puritanical ideology that would haunt it in the near future.
By 2001, the US had returned to Afghanistan to take on its own Frankenstein monster, now called the Taliban. The then President, George Bush, had famously said, “As a result of the US military, the Taliban is no longer in existence.” He was clearly wrong and the present President has again signed another deal with the historically untrustworthy Taliban. History is deemed to repeat itself.
(The writer, a military veteran, is a former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands)
