The return of the Taliban: a non-victory flavored with American defeat | The political marketing Washington used to smooth the flight from Afghanistan

When, a year ago, the United States Secretary of State –Mike Pompeo– met in Qatar with the historic Taliban Baradar Akhund, the world didn’t pay much attention to the episode which – we now know – was a singular “no win” pre-chord with a certain scent of defeat. NATO with Trump assumed their failure to eliminate the Taliban and negotiated an orderly exit. There appears to have been a secret deal that Islamic fundamentalists only partially honored: they advanced the humiliating lightning strike, certain that there would be no drones overhead. . They respected, on the contrary, the commitment of non-aggression towards the foreigner: the American troops live in Kabul with these bearded men in sandals which draw their eyes, without exchanging a shot. But this is not a void chess pact, but an inglorious withdrawal: there is a clear winner and who – logically – had been hidden.

Genghis khan

When Biden ratified the Trump deal, the debacle began. The Afghan army tripled the Taliban and outnumbered it, but they felt helpless. Faced with the first defeats, they lost their will: “if in the long run we’re going to lose, why fight? The rebels applied the strategy of Genghis Khan: light seat, persuasion and surrender in exchange for respect for life. As a result, hundreds of thousands of small arms, artillery vehicles, helicopters, planes, drones, night vision equipment were seized – all of them. Made in the USA– and the fighters change sides. The dominance of the freeways was the key to a war they won at 130 kilometers an hour in Japanese trucks. They took the borders and financed themselves with customs taxes, opium cultivation and heroin trafficking. They dominated the supply and reinforcement lines – theirs and others – isolating the towns until they surrendered. On August 3, 223 out of 400 neighborhoods were his. And twelve days later, the conquest of Kabul was almost a formality.

His seizure of power in 1996 was more contested, but no less surprising: Mulha Omar created the Taliban in 1994 and in two years conquered the whole country. Their predecessors – the Mujahedin – had defeated the Soviet empire in 1989 and now they have defeated North Americans with guerrilla techniques (the English were expelled in the 19th century). Afghanistan is a necropolis of empires.

The civilizing gaze

Journalist Jon Lee Anderson recalled in a magazine article The New Yorker What Colonel Stephen Lutsky He told her that he did not trust the local army: he suspected that many were Taliban spies. And he confessed that “the cultural complexity of the environment is so great that it’s hard to understand… For North Americans, things are black or white (good or bad boys). But not for the Afghans. There are good and bad Taliban, and some want to make deals with them. ”

It is believed that many Afghan servicemen have already signed their surrender pact months ago. It was implied that the Taliban would return to power: the question was when. According to Lee Anderson, a central mistake was to believe that military superiority is a guarantee of victory, without assessing an understanding and a cultural approach of the Other who would begin by learning their language (hardly anyone took the job). On the ground, the United States repeated their common ethnocentrism when they stepped out into the world: they replicated their culture by living in fortified bubbles in the middle of the desert. In one base, they even had a Burger King and outside the walls it was lived like in the Middle Ages. The Taliban were able to exploit this advantage against an adversary considered by many to be the new invader, penetrating into rural areas.

Self-criticism

The american president Joe biden He was sincere in the face of the greatest national disappointment since the trauma of Vietnam: “our mission in Afghanistan has never been to build a democracy, but to prevent terrorism in our country” (they went to eliminate Bin Laden and Mulha Omar : the first escaped on horseback through the mountains and the second on a motorcycle through the desert). In a New York Times article, the self-criticism of Michael mckinley deserves to be a former ambassador to Afghanistan: “We have succeeded in eliminating Al-Qaeda from the country by reducing the terrorist threat in the United States, but we have failed in the counterinsurgency strategy, in the Afghan policy and in the nation building… and we misunderstood the geopolitics of the Region. ”He speculated that delaying the game for two years would not have prevented the outcome: “We should have remained engaged with Afghanistan indefinitely at a cost of billions with little hope of building anything in a country of weak governance.”. McKinley regrets that he overestimated Afghan military capabilities and miscalculated in a March report: he warned that the Taliban could take power in two to three years (not weeks).

A 2019 report indicates that Among the 352,000 Afghan soldiers, tens of thousands were “ghost soldiers” unwilling to fight the 75,000 Taliban. Another problem was not being able to coordinate with Pakistan the destruction of the Taliban bases there, a rearguard where they recruited and assembled. In July 2021, Pakistan’s interior minister admitted that the family of thousands of Taliban lived in the suburbs of Islamabad (469 kilometers from Kabul). McKinley is not surprised at the failure to impose a Western model: less than two million voted in the 2019 election. And the United States has turned a blind eye to the corruption of the two civilian presidents. Foreign influence in the election of candidates and officials was so obvious that it undermined the credibility of the government.

What do we expect from the new generation of Taliban? His leadership has discovered diplomacy and a certain political correctness: he will have to trade with the world. But it would be naive to believe that these dogmatists whose Former health minister Mullah Balouch complained in 1997 that the Red Cross refused to send surgeons to amputate thieves’ hands and feet: he had to do the work himself. During those 20 years, they have maintained their criminal misogyny and homophobia, their xenophobia – they are predominantly Pashtun – and their absolutism against what is different. Until a few weeks ago, car bombs exploded and three female journalists were murdered in Jalalabad in March. The only pledge they signed with the United States was to get rid of Al Qaeda.

Victory, draw or defeat?

To win this war, NATO and Afghan troops had to make more use of their ground bases, fighting head-to-head in every city: inaccurate drones killing thousands of civilians only exacerbated nationalism . After the failures in Iraq, Libya and Syria in trying to mold the Muslim world in the image of the Western civilizing gaze, Afghanistan is joining. Moscow and Beijing may have smiled, but they are also worried about the rise of extremism: it is suffering in Chechnya and Xinjiang. America’s world leadership emerges from Afghanistan weakened. Their political machinery of cover-up worked well: the world did not foresee that what was negotiated in Qatar was almost a transfer of power (the Afghan government was excluded from the meeting and it was decided for them to release 5 000 Taliban). It was the chronicle of an announced death. The only thing not programmed was the speed of the result. The dead, perhaps, will come later.

A few days ago they asked the former general David Petrée if the United States had lost the war. The former commander in Afghanistan responded “I don’t think we lost: we are withdrawing; and there is a big difference there. ” In fact, it was a rare defeat (they sent others to fight who disappeared). Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States put it bluntly: “This was not a peace deal, it was a surrender.