WASHINGTON: After a month of desultory attacks, the Taliban army collapsed in little more than 100 hours in the second week of November, successively evacuating Mazar-e-Sharif, Taloqan, Herat, Jalalabad and Kabul. Today, the remnants of the Taliban army are milling around Kandahar in the south or trapped in the northern enclave of Kunduz. If this is merely a ‘strategic withdrawal,’ as some maintain, it is not going well.
The Taliban and Al Qaeda units that began the campaign with 50,000 troops have been reduced by death and desertions to half that number. It is increasingly a foreign army - radical Chechens, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Sudanese and Saudis - fighting a losing battle.
What happened? Politically, it is crucial to understand the thinness of support for the Taliban. Hoisted into power by the Pakistani army and intelligence service in the 1990s, the Taliban are a minority movement among the Pakhtoon majority. Pakistan has always striven to keep a weak, pliable government in Kabul, one totally dependent on its support.
The Taliban, with their joyless bans on everything that make life bearable, were the perfect marionette. Although the Taliban controlled 90 per cent of Afghanistan until the recent Northern Alliance reconquest, they relied on Pakistani intelligence, logistics, armour, pilots, officers and special forces in their major operations.
This political weakness explains the military collapse. When confronted with overwhelming US firepower, the Talibs shattered and voted with their feet. The same thing happened in May 1919, when an Afghan army invaded the Pakhtoon tribal area of British India. Britain bombed Jalalabad and Kabul from the air and then strafed Afghan troop concentrations in the Khyber Pass. Confronted with modern war, the Afghans surrendered in just three weeks.
It took several weeks to begin deliveries of munitions, boots and uniforms to the Northern Alliance because of a US legal ban on military aid to nongovernmental forces. Once Pentagon lawyers circumvented the ban, the Northern Alliance pushed forward and, with them, US special forces, who selected targets that could then be precisely destroyed by satellite and laser-guided ordnance or imprecisely bludgeoned by 500-pound unguided bombs from the B-52s.
The combination of annihilating air attack and the push on the ground picked apart the Taliban army, which careened away in its Toyota pickups only to be rocketed and bombed from the air. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Hartford Courant.