Thank you Mr. Emory, for this time­ly and trag­ic reminder. I can’t help but think pow­er­ful forces want­ed the Tal­iban back in pow­er in Afghanistan for geopo­lit­i­cal pur­pos­es, and want­ed to avoid an even­tu­al West­ern deba­cle, so NATO forces were with­drawn. And nature took it’s course for the rest. I believe that these deci­sions will haunt these pow­er­ful forces in the years to come, unable to put the Genie back in the bot­tle. As I said, trag­ic.

As the US with­draw­al from Afghanistan in par­al­lel with the Tal­iban’s light­ning takeover of the coun­try con­tin­ues to painful­ly play, one of the grim­ly inter­est­ing ways to try to answer the ques­tion of ‘what went wrong (or did­n’t go wrong)?’ is to look at the report­ing and analy­sis on the sit­u­a­tion in Afghanistan in the days imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing the col­lapse of Kab­ul. What were experts say­ing right up until that moment? And that brings to a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view of Andrew Watkins, senior Afghan ana­lyst at the Inter­na­tion­al Cri­sis Group, pub­lished in Vox on August 11, days before the col­lapse of Kab­ul. It was already clear the sit­u­a­tion was dire by that point. The Afghan gov­ern­ment was already months into col­laps­ing around the coun­try. But as we’ll see, the immi­nent col­lapse of Afghan gov­ern­ment in Kab­ul still was­n’t obvi­ous. Not that Watkins had an opti­mistic view of things. Quite the oppo­site. The best-case sce­nario he was fore­see­ing was one where the Afghan gov­ern­ment holds togeth­er, fights the Tal­iban to a stale­mate, and even­tu­al­ly the two sides nego­ti­ate a peace and pow­er shar­ing agree­ment. An extend­ed fight that the Afghan gov­ern­ment does­n’t win but does­n’t entire­ly lose either. That was the best case sce­nario Watkins fore­saw. Which obvi­ous­ly did­n’t pan out. But that’s how this expert saw the sit­u­a­tion just days before the col­lapse.

The Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s agree­ment ham­mered out with the Tal­iban in ear­ly 2020 also played a role in the Tal­iban’s rapid advance due to the sig­nif­i­cant drop in US bomb­ing runs against the Tal­iban that hap­pened as a result of those talks.

Anoth­er fac­tor that led up to the cri­sis sit­u­a­tion is the fact that The US did not com­mence a lot of the plan­ning for what its post-with­draw­al sup­port and involve­ment in Afghanistan would look like until Pres­i­dent Biden made the final deci­sion to with­draw­al in mid-April. So the Trump admin­is­tra­tion set the US on a course of irre­versible with­draw­al in 2020, but the plan­ning for that was left to the new Biden admin­is­tra­tion. It echos the now infa­mous June ral­ly in Ohio where now-for­mer-pres­i­dent Trump took open joy in Biden’s inabil­i­ty to slow down or reverse the pull­out Trump ini­ti­at­ed.

At the same time, Watkins made clear that much of the blame falls of the Afghan cen­tral gov­ern­ment but effec­tive­ly being in denial that this day was actu­al­ly com­ing. In oth­er words, it’s not just that the US was­n’t ade­quate­ly pre­pared for this with­draw­al. The Afghan cen­tral gov­ern­ment itself was­n’t pre­pared because it was­n’t even psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly accept­ing that this was real­ly going to hap­pen. Steps weren’t tak­en to con­sol­i­date pow­er, includ­ing steps like aban­don­ing some areas to the Tal­iban in order to shore of a mil­i­tary stretched thin. When those steps were belat­ed tak­en, it only fueled fears the gov­ern­ment was in the process of col­laps­ing, cre­at­ing a self-ful­fill­ing cycle. The prospects for the sur­vival of the cen­tral gov­ern­ment had got­ten so bad that by the time Biden made his mid-April pull­out plan, there was the sug­ges­tion that this with­draw­al deci­sion was made based on how utter­ly hope­less the sit­u­a­tion seemed. And yet, again, despite all that under­stand­able doom and gloom, Watkins was­n’t expect­ing an immi­nent col­lapse of the Kab­ul gov­ern­ment. He thought the gov­ern­ment could last a while and maybe even fight for a stale­mate. And this inter­view was pub­lished four days before that gov­ern­ment col­lapsed overnight:

Vox

How are the Tal­iban gain­ing so fast in Afghanistan?

An expert on the Taliban’s sweep and what it means for Afghanistan.

By Jen Kir­by
Aug 11, 2021, 9:00am EDT

The Tal­iban are rapid­ly over­run­ning large parts of Afghanistan.

Over the past few days, Tal­iban fight­ers have report­ed­ly tak­en over nine provin­cial cap­i­tals. The siege comes after a relent­less, month­s­long offen­sive in the coun­try that has stretched Afghan gov­ern­ment forces. Since the US began with­draw­ing its troops from the coun­try at the start of May, the Tal­iban have swept through about half of Afghanistan’s 400 dis­tricts.

...

To under­stand the pace of the Taliban’s advance and what it means for Afghanistan’s future, I spoke to Andrew Watkins, the Inter­na­tion­al Cri­sis Group’s senior ana­lyst for Afghanistan. He explained how the Tal­iban took these provin­cial cap­i­tals, and what mis­steps by both the US and Afghan gov­ern­ments did — and didn’t — con­tribute to the Taliban’s advance.

A tran­script of our con­ver­sa­tion, edit­ed and con­densed for clar­i­ty, fol­lows.

Jen Kir­by

We’ve seen all these head­lines about the Tal­iban tak­ing provin­cial cap­i­tals. This may be a huge ques­tion, but can you give a sense of where things stand on the ground right now?

Andrew Watkins

It is a huge ques­tion, but it’s the right ques­tion to start with. Where are things right now? It would be a mis­take to get caught up in the col­lapse of provin­cial cap­i­tals because what has hap­pened this week is just the con­tin­u­a­tion of what we’ve seen over the last three months.

Start­ing about three months ago, in late May and then June, pick­ing up speed in July, the Tal­iban launched an offen­sive cam­paign that has swept across the coun­try in a way that has been unprece­dent­ed since the US inter­vened in late 2001.

I want to be care­ful about how I phrase it because every­one nit­picks — and they nit­pick cor­rect­ly — about var­i­ous mea­sures of which actor is in con­trol of which, or how much, ter­ri­to­ry. One imper­fect mea­sure is the Afghan government’s con­trol of dis­trict cen­ters. There are a lit­tle over 400 dis­tricts across Afghanistan; almost all of them have what’s called a dis­trict admin­is­tra­tive cen­ter. It’s one vil­lage cov­er­ing some­times crazy square mileage, rival­ing that of small­er US states like Rhode Island.

For the longest time, the Afghan gov­ern­ment has point­ed to this dis­trict cen­ter map as a means of demon­strat­ing their author­i­ty, when in real­i­ty, their only pres­ence or asser­tion of author­i­ty might be a dis­trict cen­ter where they have a cou­ple build­ings that are pro­tect­ed by a small mil­i­tary or police force, or some­times just a mili­tia that’s out­fit­ted and paid by the gov­ern­ment. And that’s it. That is the only gov­ern­ment that exists in that entire dis­trict, for miles around in any direc­tion.

The Tal­iban has swept across the coun­try through these dis­tricts. But it’s not accu­rate to say the Tal­iban now con­trols all of the dis­tricts they’ve cap­tured, because in many places they haven’t set up a shad­ow gov­ern­ment. They haven’t left a gar­ri­son of their fight­ers to con­trol the area. In some places, they cause the Afghan troops or police to run away, to sur­ren­der, to retreat, to sim­ply go home.

In the end, what we can say is not how much the Tal­iban con­trols, but how much the Afghan gov­ern­ment has lost. Does that make sense?

Jen Kir­by

Yes.

Andrew Watkins

The map could be very mis­lead­ing if you say every time the gov­ern­ment leaves, the Tal­iban now con­trols all of that space. But we can mea­sure how much the gov­ern­ment has lost. The fact is, the gov­ern­ment has either been kicked out of or aban­doned more than 200 of the 400 dis­tricts in the coun­try. That’s hap­pened in just the last three months.

So when we ask, “How did we get here?” — where all of a sud­den in one week, nine out of 34 provin­cial cap­i­tals fall to the Tal­iban, or seem like they’re on the verge of falling — the answer is, well, half of the coun­try slipped out of the government’s con­trol in the last three months, and it no longer had a buffer pro­tect­ing those provin­cial cap­i­tals, which were these vil­lage out­posts and dis­trict cen­ters stand­ing in the way.

Jen Kir­by

So when we see the Afghanistan map with all the col­or-cod­ed ter­ri­to­ry, it’s not so much that the Tal­iban has full con­trol over those large swaths. It’s just that those lit­tle vil­lage out­posts have fall­en one by one, so there’s nobody around to stop the Tal­iban from clos­ing in on the cities.

Andrew Watkins

That’s exact­ly it. That’s not only what’s hap­pen­ing, but that’s also the sig­nif­i­cance of what’s hap­pen­ing. The few­er obsta­cles that stand in the Taliban’s way in the coun­try­side, the few­er speed bumps they have on their way to the doorsteps of the cities — which is where they are now — around most of the coun­try.

Afghanistan in the bal­ance.#AFP­Graph­ics : how the Afghan nation­al secu­ri­ty forces mea­sure up against the Tal­iban pic.twitter.com/r3MjRSq0gR— AFP News Agency (@AFP) August 9, 2021

The New York Times ran a piece and got some­one to go on the record with some­thing I’ve been told over the last cou­ple of weeks. One Afghan gov­ern­ment offi­cial told them some of these dis­tricts fell when 10 Tal­iban fight­ers showed up. A lot of this was just the col­lapse of gov­ern­ment author­i­ty, and if it could col­lapse in the face of 10 Tal­iban fight­ers, we have to be hon­est: It was bare­ly there to begin with.

Jen Kir­by

So when the Tal­iban is reach­ing these cities or provin­cial cap­i­tals, are they con­sol­i­dat­ing pow­er and tak­ing con­trol there?

Andrew Watkins

It’s still too flu­id to say they’re con­sol­i­dat­ing any­thing. What we can say is that they’re amass­ing huge num­bers of their fight­ers to try and encir­cle or sur­round some of these cities. They’re doing it in mul­ti­ple regions of the coun­try: in the north, in the south­west. In some places, the gov­ern­ment is push­ing them back more effec­tive­ly than oth­ers.

A lot of peo­ple seem to think that the Tal­iban advances mean they’re going to take over Kab­ul [Afghanistan’s cap­i­tal] immi­nent­ly, or that that’s going to hap­pen in a mat­ter of days or weeks. That isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly true. That might not even nec­es­sar­i­ly be the Tal­iban strat­e­gy.

What they seem to be doing seems to be some­thing they planned on for quite some time, which is to cut off the government’s abil­i­ty to resup­ply oth­er areas of the coun­try, to cut off the government’s abil­i­ty to move from point A to point B on the country’s roads, and to sur­round and choke off the country’s cities — not to fight their way through each and every city of the coun­try, but to pres­sure the gov­ern­ment to col­lapse.

Jen Kir­by

I want to talk about Kab­ul and the Taliban’s strat­e­gy, but I want to first step back and get a bet­ter sense of exact­ly why it has seemed so easy for the Tal­iban to move this swift­ly?

Andrew Watkins

Some peo­ple will say it’s because of the US with­draw­al. And if that is true, it’s based on the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact of that with­draw­al, not the mil­i­tary effect that it had. The US had sev­er­al thou­sand troops to help cov­er an area of the size of Texas. The US troops were not what was hold­ing the Tal­iban back in 200 dis­tricts around the coun­try. The US troops weren’t even out there at any of those vil­lages.

Now, since the US-Tal­iban agree­ment was signed ear­ly last year, the US real­ly scaled back its airstrikes against the Tal­iban, though they’ve picked them back up as the Tal­iban has gone on their offen­sive in the last three months. But for most of 2020, and the ear­ly months of this year, the US real­ly wasn’t bomb­ing the Tal­iban. That gave them a major reprieve from what had been a real­ly inten­sive bomb­ing cam­paign in 2018 and in 2019.

The US had almost built up an arti­fi­cial umbrel­la of secu­ri­ty with the num­ber of planes fly­ing and the num­ber of bombs drop­ping on the Tal­iban in the years before now, cre­at­ing a pro­tec­tive buffer so that Afghan secu­ri­ty forces didn’t real­ly need to fight. When­ev­er the Tal­iban would approach places, there was always US air­craft there to take them out.

There is an Afghan Air Force, but it’s minus­cule in com­par­i­son to what the US was fly­ing and the num­ber of muni­tions the US was drop­ping in the years before Feb­ru­ary 2020. The Afghan Air Force can’t close that gap. That means the Tal­iban had greater free­dom to move around the coun­try. They’ve been able to recu­per­ate and to plan and to get ready for this moment over much of the last year.

Jen Kir­by

And beyond the US with­draw­al?

Andrew Watkins

In addi­tion to the fac­tor of the US leav­ing, you also have a lot of reports that, in dis­tricts where maybe 10 or 20 Tal­iban fight­ers would show up, they would have already laid the ground­work with a dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign.

They’d tell local res­i­dents, “There are 2,000 more Tal­iban fight­ers, and they’re right behind us. They are on the way, and we’re going to burn down your vil­lage, we’re going to kill every­body; it’s hope­less, you’re sur­round­ed, so you may as well just run away.”

In some places, these remote vil­lages and out­posts that the Afghan gov­ern­ment had been try­ing to prop up had become sur­round­ed. The Afghan gov­ern­ment couldn’t get them ammu­ni­tion. It couldn’t get them food a lot of the time. A lot of the peo­ple at these out­posts, they weren’t get­ting reg­u­lar­ly paid. Their fam­i­lies weren’t get­ting their pay­checks con­sis­tent­ly from month to month. And so you’re talk­ing about a ter­ri­ble lev­el of morale among the Afghan government’s secu­ri­ty forces.

Final­ly, you have a lot of polit­i­cal divi­sion across Afghanistan among peo­ple who oppose the Tal­iban, but do not agree when it comes to the lev­el of sup­port for Pres­i­dent Ashraf Ghani’s gov­ern­ment. Espe­cial­ly since 2014, there’s been a his­to­ry of polit­i­cal strug­gles and infight­ing among peo­ple who are on the side of the Afghan gov­ern­ment, but can’t get along and coop­er­ate with one anoth­er.

...

Now, some peo­ple have asked, “Well, but wouldn’t they still want to keep the Tal­iban out?” And the fact is, they weren’t well-resourced, and they weren’t well pro­vid­ed for in many com­mu­ni­ties. All of that means they didn’t real­ly have what it would have tak­en to oppose the Tal­iban. So a lot of peo­ple backed off — not because the Tal­iban spread a mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign, not because the US had been pre­vi­ous­ly help­ing and all of a sud­den dis­ap­peared, but because of divi­sive polit­i­cal dynam­ics.

Jen Kir­by

So it’s not as black and white as “Afghan gov­ern­ment ver­sus the Tal­iban.” You’ve got a lot of decen­tral­iza­tion and shift­ing dynam­ics play­ing out across the coun­try.

Andrew Watkins

The only aster­isk is that the Afghan gov­ern­ment is incred­i­bly cen­tral­ized. The Afghan pres­i­den­tial sys­tem is one of the strongest pres­i­den­tial sys­tems in the world. It’s a win­ner-take-all sys­tem. There’s very lit­tle space for oppo­si­tion polit­i­cal par­ties, or for the run­ner-up in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Under Ghani, that process of cen­tral­iz­ing pow­er under­neath the pres­i­den­cy has only increased.

Much of Afghan soci­ety is still decen­tral­ized, and you’ve got a gov­ern­ment attempt­ing to cen­tral­ize, but in a way that iso­lates or alien­ates many local com­mu­ni­ties. The cost of cen­tral­iza­tion has been the government’s inabil­i­ty to actu­al­ly estab­lish buy-in and coop­er­a­tion and sup­port from whole regions of the coun­try.

Jen Kir­by

Based on these dynam­ics, it strikes me that some of this seems pret­ty pre­dictable, which makes me won­der whether the US real­ly did bun­gle this exit, by not prepar­ing for or try­ing to head off some of what we’re see­ing now?

Andrew Watkins

There were bun­gles on all sides. There were a series of mis­takes in the way that the Unit­ed States extract­ed itself in a mil­i­tary sense, but also polit­i­cal­ly. The US did not com­mence a lot of the plan­ning for what its post-with­draw­al sup­port and involve­ment in Afghanistan would look like until Pres­i­dent Biden made his deci­sion in mid-April.

By that point, we had already almost reached the May 1 dead­line for US troop with­draw­al that the peace deal between the US and the Tal­iban had man­dat­ed. There was a rush against the clock to start the with­draw­al in the hopes that the agree­ment might be pre­served with the Tal­iban.

But the US still hasn’t answered key ques­tions about how it will pro­vide remote sup­port to help main­tain the Afghan Air Force, what logis­tics and sup­ply lines will look like from abroad, whether it will con­tin­ue air sup­port after the August 31 with­draw­al date. Cur­rent­ly, the White House and the Pen­ta­gon say “no,” but it seems to be under debate right now in Wash­ing­ton. All of that has sent an alarm­ing mes­sage of uncer­tain­ty to the Afghans.

On the oth­er hand, the Unit­ed States began broad­cast­ing — rather seri­ous­ly — more than two years ago that it was look­ing to pull its mil­i­tary forces and grad­u­al­ly dis­en­gage from sup­port­ing the Afghan gov­ern­ment.

There are peo­ple in Afghanistan, includ­ing some of the senior­most advis­ers in the Afghan gov­ern­ment, who at least appear to have been in denial or to not have ful­ly accept­ed the Amer­i­cans were real­ly going to leave. This is some­thing oth­er Afghan com­men­ta­tors say.

And it cre­at­ed not just oper­a­tional depen­den­cies — like what I described about the umbrel­la of aer­i­al pro­tec­tion that Amer­i­can airstrikes were pro­vid­ing — but also a polit­i­cal atmos­phere of pro­tec­tion and of depen­den­cy that real­ly pre­clud­ed a lot of seri­ous plan­ning on the Afghan government’s side for the chal­lenges that would come the day the Unit­ed States with­drew.

For instance, some­thing that I’ve learned in my research, and it’s been con­firmed since in press reports, is that the senior mem­bers of the Afghan gov­ern­ment last year began telling Pres­i­dent Ghani and his top offi­cials that they need­ed to vol­un­tar­i­ly pull troops and gov­ern­ment pres­ence from at least 100 dis­tricts around the coun­try.

But Ghani and his offi­cials reject­ed the pro­pos­al out of hand; they said, “Absolute­ly not, that sends the wrong mes­sage, that’s weak­ness, we’re not going to give an inch of our coun­try.” And no one real­ly gave seri­ous thought to what was behind that pro­pos­al, which was, you know, a valid assess­ment that the Afghan gov­ern­ment was stretched too thin.

So there were absolute­ly mis­takes made — and are still being made — by the Unit­ed States in the way it didn’t nail down its plan­ning and its post-with­draw­al para­me­ters. But there has also been a state of either denial or neg­li­gence on the Afghan government’s part in not throw­ing itself into a com­pre­hen­sive plan to steel itself for what was com­ing.

Jen Kir­by

It sounds like there was an under­stand­ing that the Afghan gov­ern­ment was not capa­ble of con­trol­ling all its ter­ri­to­ry, no mat­ter what, and that it would need to let some of its ter­ri­to­ry fall to the Tal­iban for the sake of bet­ter pro­tect­ing cap­i­tals and oth­er crit­i­cal areas.

Andrew Watkins

That’s some­thing that the US and NATO have actu­al­ly been rec­om­mend­ing as ear­ly as 2016–2017, and that the Afghan gov­ern­ment has long resist­ed.

At some point in the last three months, the Afghan gov­ern­ment seemed to real­ize that was, in fact, what it need­ed to do. But it made that real­iza­tion far too late. If the deci­sion had been made ear­li­er, it could have been explained to the Afghan pub­lic in a way that might have mit­i­gat­ed the pan­ic that you see spread­ing across the coun­try now. It also could have pre­vent­ed a lot of oper­a­tional-lev­el loss­es. Untold amounts of ammu­ni­tion and mil­i­tary equip­ment have been left behind in these 200 dis­tricts where mil­i­tary forces have picked up and left.

So when the Afghan gov­ern­ment decid­ed or real­ized that it did need to draw down, it did so with­out want­i­ng to admit weak­ness in such a sen­si­tive moment. There­fore, it just looked like the gov­ern­ment was con­tin­u­ing to col­lapse, even if what it was doing was belat­ed­ly fol­low­ing that “cir­cle the wag­ons” strat­e­gy.

Jen Kir­by

Is it even pos­si­ble at this point for Afghan forces to stop or push back the Tal­iban, espe­cial­ly with­out US air sup­port?

Andrew Watkins

It is pos­si­ble. The Afghan mil­i­tary has the capa­bil­i­ty to do so. The ques­tion is what the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact of los­ing US air sup­port would be. The com­plete with­draw­al of US air sup­port would be a sig­nal to the Afghan gov­ern­ment that they are being left out to dry. That would both deflate morale on the Afghan government’s side and boost it among the Tal­iban. And it’s dif­fi­cult to pre­dict what the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact of that would be across the coun­try.

Mil­i­tar­i­ly, the Afghan gov­ern­ment has the advan­tage. It has an air force that is still func­tion­ing, for now. It has incred­i­bly capa­ble spe­cial forces, even though they’re stretched quite thin and are often the ones sent to do the fight­ing around the coun­try. In spite of all its chal­lenges, they do have the tech­ni­cal mil­i­tary capac­i­ty. The ques­tion is about polit­i­cal lead­er­ship and a sense of uni­ty — or not.

Jen Kir­by

That brings us to Kab­ul, where the Afghan gov­ern­ment is locat­ed. What kind of threat is Kab­ul under right now?

Andrew Watkins

At this point, Kab­ul is not under direct mil­i­tary threat, not in the way that many cities around the coun­try are being sur­round­ed and harassed by the Tal­iban.

It’s not clear if the Tal­iban will, in the next weeks or months, start to move clos­er to Kab­ul and attempt to put pres­sure on the gov­ern­ment direct­ly by attack­ing Kab­ul, which would obvi­ous­ly result in a mass pan­ic, in civil­ian casu­al­ties, in turn­ing the pop­u­la­tion of Kab­ul against the Tal­iban — per­haps even more than the major­i­ty already are, accord­ing to pub­lic opin­ion polling.

It’s not clear if that will hap­pen, or if the Tal­iban will con­tin­ue to squeeze oth­er cities in the hopes of pres­sur­ing the gov­ern­ment in Kab­ul, demon­strat­ing the weak­ness of the Afghan gov­ern­ment and chal­leng­ing its sov­er­eign­ty around the coun­try.

Some­thing that’s impor­tant here — as impor­tant as the Tal­iban cap­tur­ing provin­cial cap­i­tals — is that the Tal­iban has begun to cap­ture large, com­mer­cial cross-bor­der cus­toms points, and they’ve done so for sev­er­al Cen­tral Asian coun­tries that bor­der Afghanistan, as well as at cross­ing points into Iran and Pak­istan.

This presents not only a domes­tic polit­i­cal chal­lenge to the Afghan government’s author­i­ty, but also a geopo­lit­i­cal chal­lenge because it forces neigh­bor­ing coun­tries to decide whether or not they want to de fac­to rec­og­nize and coop­er­ate with the Tal­iban on the oth­er side of the bor­der, instead of with the Afghan gov­ern­ment.

The Taliban’s approach has been to demon­strate Kabul’s weak­ness­es and to try to pres­sure it to col­lapse. The ques­tion is going to be whether or not they con­tin­ue to squeeze from the out­side in, or whether they move to squeeze Kab­ul direct­ly. It’s not obvi­ous yet which they’re going to opt for.

Jen Kir­by

Obvi­ous­ly, it’s impos­si­ble to make pre­dic­tions, but what is the pos­si­ble endgame if the Tal­iban con­tin­ues to squeeze the Afghan gov­ern­ment from the inside out?

Andrew Watkins

It’s too ear­ly to see the out­come. What is clear is that if the Afghan gov­ern­ment is able to mount a strong defense of cities, if it is able to take back some of these bor­der cross­ing points and maybe oth­er strate­gic stretch­es of the country’s major roads and high­ways, if the Afghan gov­ern­ment can put a stop to the Taliban’s advance and can stand firm — then it might be able to fight its way back to a stale­mate, a mil­i­tary sit­u­a­tion where there’s no clear win­ner, at least in the fore­see­able future.

If that hap­pens, you will very like­ly see both par­ties try­ing to claim con­trol over Afghanistan. The hope is that they would then poten­tial­ly move to peace talks if they don’t see a mil­i­tary solu­tion to the war. The con­cern is that if the Afghan gov­ern­ment can­not fight its way to a stale­mate, the momen­tum may grad­u­al­ly but con­sis­tent­ly slide in the Taliban’s favor.

Jen Kir­by

What I’m get­ting from this con­ver­sa­tion is that as bleak as it is, it is not yet a fore­gone con­clu­sion that the Tal­iban will “win.”

Andrew Watkins

That is absolute­ly true. I do not have any opti­mism for the sit­u­a­tion. But this is not a fore­gone con­clu­sion. It’s not inevitable.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Afghans, even in the best-case sce­nario for the Afghan gov­ern­ment, harsh gov­ern­ment coun­ter­at­tacks are just going to increase harm to civil­ians. The hard­er the gov­ern­ment is able to fight back, the more peo­ple will want to flee the fight­ing. So even in what many peo­ple would say would be the best-case sce­nario of the state sur­viv­ing and hold­ing the Tal­iban off, it’s an absolute human­i­tar­i­an cat­a­stro­phe.

I think that’s where, speak­ing as a polit­i­cal ana­lyst, I can say what is a fore­gone con­clu­sion is that more Afghans will suf­fer this year than they have even in past years. And this was already one of the worst con­flict zones on Earth.

Jen Kir­by

What’s the human­i­tar­i­an sit­u­a­tion right now as the Tal­iban advances?

Andrew Watkins

It’s absolute­ly atro­cious. Civil­ian deaths are on the rise quite steeply. The UN Assis­tance Mis­sion in Afghanistan tracks this com­pre­hen­sive­ly, and its num­bers are stag­ger­ing. Over 10,000 civil­ians have already been killed and injured in most of the last few years in Afghanistan. [Accord­ing to its lat­est report, civil­ian casu­al­ties are up near­ly 50 per­cent in the first six months of 2021, com­pared with the same peri­od in 2020.]

It’s going from the worst place on Earth for civil­ians stuck in con­flict to much worse. Dis­place­ment is large­ly inter­nal to date, but it’s hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple. It’s going to hit more than a mil­lion peo­ple dis­placed inter­nal­ly.

Jen Kir­by

One thing I’m strug­gling with is that all of this hor­ror is com­ing after the US spent 20 years in Afghanistan. This may be an impos­si­ble ques­tion, but I’m try­ing to under­stand whether the same dynam­ics would have played out if the US had left in, say, 2010, or at any oth­er time. In oth­er words, was it stay­ing there this long, was it the deci­sions of the past few years, that helped push Afghanistan to this place?

Andrew Watkins

A lot of peo­ple would like to put the blame on var­i­ous deci­sions made under the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, or the terms of the US-Tal­iban deal, or the mere fact that the US start­ed nego­ti­at­ing with the Tal­iban at all.

What every­one seems to leave out — which real­ly gives a pass to far too many peo­ple involved in pol­i­cy­mak­ing on Afghanistan for the last decade, maybe two decades — is that since the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, there was an acknowl­edg­ment among senior pol­i­cy­mak­ers that the war was already unwinnable.

That was why the ear­li­est attempts to try and probe the Tal­iban, to see what their appetite for peace talks was, start­ed as ear­ly as 2009. It’s very easy to for­get that. It took 10 hard years just to get to the point where they would actu­al­ly sit down and nego­ti­ate with US in any sub­stan­tive sense.

The real issues today come from the US and NATO part­ner deci­sion to draw down force lev­els but basi­cal­ly make up for it with airstrikes, rather than the Afghan gov­ern­ment being forced to grap­ple with its weak­ness­es and adapt to a land­scape where the US was no longer involved.

For instance, the first time the Afghan gov­ern­ment lost con­trol of a provin­cial cap­i­tal was in 2015. And then it hap­pened again in 2016, to the same provin­cial cap­i­tal. And then the gov­ern­ment almost lost anoth­er major cap­i­tal in 2018, etc., etc.

What we’ve seen in recent years was a sit­u­a­tion that was clear­ly slip­ping out of the Afghan government’s con­trol. And for much of that time, the US solu­tion was to ramp up airstrikes to help keep the scales lev­eled out. But with the US’s thumb on the scale, that meant the years went by and nobody real­ly want­ed to acknowl­edge how much they had tilt­ed out of the government’s favor.

Jen Kir­by

And now we may be ful­ly tak­ing our thumb off the scale, no mat­ter the out­come.

Andrew Watkins

Even in Biden’s remarks in mid-April, there was the sug­ges­tion that this with­draw­al deci­sion was made based on how hope­less the sit­u­a­tion seemed. It was not the with­draw­al that cre­at­ed an unwinnable sit­u­a­tion. The with­draw­al deci­sion was made because in Biden’s assess­ment, the sit­u­a­tion already was unwinnable.

—————

“How are the Tal­iban gain­ing so fast in Afghanistan?” by Jen Kir­by; Vox; 08/11/2021

“For the longest time, the Afghan gov­ern­ment has point­ed to this dis­trict cen­ter map as a means of demon­strat­ing their author­i­ty, when in real­i­ty, their only pres­ence or asser­tion of author­i­ty might be a dis­trict cen­ter where they have a cou­ple build­ings that are pro­tect­ed by a small mil­i­tary or police force, or some­times just a mili­tia that’s out­fit­ted and paid by the gov­ern­ment. And that’s it. That is the only gov­ern­ment that exists in that entire dis­trict, for miles around in any direc­tion.”

The Afghan cen­tral gov­ern­men­t’s actu­al author­i­ty cov­ered a dis­trict cen­ter in Kab­ul. That’s it. Some build­ings. It’s an impor­tant fac­tor to keep in mind when try­ing to under­stand how the Tal­iban was able to cap­ture Kab­ul almost imme­di­ate­ly. As Watkins put it, it’s not about how much ter­ri­to­ry the Tal­iban was gain­ing but how much the Afghan gov­ern­ment was effec­tive­ly los­ing. And since most of the ‘hold’ on the ter­ri­to­ry was large­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal, the col­lapse of the Kab­ul gov­ern­ment could hap­pen almost imme­di­ate­ly. All that was required was the chang­ing of some minds (changed under the Tal­iban’s threats):

...
In the end, what we can say is not how much the Tal­iban con­trols, but how much the Afghan gov­ern­ment has lost. Does that make sense?

...

The map could be very mis­lead­ing if you say every time the gov­ern­ment leaves, the Tal­iban now con­trols all of that space. But we can mea­sure how much the gov­ern­ment has lost. The fact is, the gov­ern­ment has either been kicked out of or aban­doned more than 200 of the 400 dis­tricts in the coun­try. That’s hap­pened in just the last three months.

So when we ask, “How did we get here?” — where all of a sud­den in one week, nine out of 34 provin­cial cap­i­tals fall to the Tal­iban, or seem like they’re on the verge of falling — the answer is, well, half of the coun­try slipped out of the government’s con­trol in the last three months, and it no longer had a buffer pro­tect­ing those provin­cial cap­i­tals, which were these vil­lage out­posts and dis­trict cen­ters stand­ing in the way.
...

Also note how Watkins was acknowl­edg­ing that oth­ers were indeed pre­dict­ing exact­ly what hap­pened: that the Tal­iban would take con­trol of Kab­ul in a mat­ter of days or weeks. But Watkins point­ed towards a dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble Tal­iban strat­e­gy of basi­cal­ly sur­round­ing Kab­ul and wait­ing for the gov­ern­ment to col­lapse. Whether or not that was part of the orig­i­nal plan, it became moot after the gov­ern­ment more or less col­lapsed on its own:

...
A lot of peo­ple seem to think that the Tal­iban advances mean they’re going to take over Kab­ul [Afghanistan’s cap­i­tal] immi­nent­ly, or that that’s going to hap­pen in a mat­ter of days or weeks. That isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly true. That might not even nec­es­sar­i­ly be the Tal­iban strat­e­gy.

What they seem to be doing seems to be some­thing they planned on for quite some time, which is to cut off the government’s abil­i­ty to resup­ply oth­er areas of the coun­try, to cut off the government’s abil­i­ty to move from point A to point B on the country’s roads, and to sur­round and choke off the country’s cities — not to fight their way through each and every city of the coun­try, but to pres­sure the gov­ern­ment to col­lapse.
...

Also note the role the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s agree­ment with the Tal­iban signed in ear­ly 2020 played in all this: the sign­ing of that agree­ment came with the pull­back of an inten­sive US bomb­ing cam­paign that was real­ly the only thing hold­ing the Tal­iban back:

...
Some peo­ple will say it’s because of the US with­draw­al. And if that is true, it’s based on the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact of that with­draw­al, not the mil­i­tary effect that it had. The US had sev­er­al thou­sand troops to help cov­er an area of the size of Texas. The US troops were not what was hold­ing the Tal­iban back in 200 dis­tricts around the coun­try. The US troops weren’t even out there at any of those vil­lages.

Now, since the US-Tal­iban agree­ment was signed ear­ly last year, the US real­ly scaled back its airstrikes against the Tal­iban, though they’ve picked them back up as the Tal­iban has gone on their offen­sive in the last three months. But for most of 2020, and the ear­ly months of this year, the US real­ly wasn’t bomb­ing the Tal­iban. That gave them a major reprieve from what had been a real­ly inten­sive bomb­ing cam­paign in 2018 and in 2019.

The US had almost built up an arti­fi­cial umbrel­la of secu­ri­ty with the num­ber of planes fly­ing and the num­ber of bombs drop­ping on the Tal­iban in the years before now, cre­at­ing a pro­tec­tive buffer so that Afghan secu­ri­ty forces didn’t real­ly need to fight. When­ev­er the Tal­iban would approach places, there was always US air­craft there to take them out.

There is an Afghan Air Force, but it’s minus­cule in com­par­i­son to what the US was fly­ing and the num­ber of muni­tions the US was drop­ping in the years before Feb­ru­ary 2020. The Afghan Air Force can’t close that gap. That means the Tal­iban had greater free­dom to move around the coun­try. They’ve been able to recu­per­ate and to plan and to get ready for this moment over much of the last year.
...

And yet, despite the US sign­ing that agree­ment with the Tal­iban, it was­n’t until Biden came into office that the US actu­al­ly began plan­ning in earnest for the with­draw­al. That’s why there was no plan until Biden announced one in April. The August dead­line was already set thanks to Trump’s agree­ment with Tal­iban, as Trump bragged about at that June Ohio ral­ly. Trump tossed Biden the hot pota­to time bomb at the last moment:

...
There were bun­gles on all sides. There were a series of mis­takes in the way that the Unit­ed States extract­ed itself in a mil­i­tary sense, but also polit­i­cal­ly. The US did not com­mence a lot of the plan­ning for what its post-with­draw­al sup­port and involve­ment in Afghanistan would look like until Pres­i­dent Biden made his deci­sion in mid-April.

By that point, we had already almost reached the May 1 dead­line for US troop with­draw­al that the peace deal between the US and the Tal­iban had man­dat­ed. There was a rush against the clock to start the with­draw­al in the hopes that the agree­ment might be pre­served with the Tal­iban.

But the US still hasn’t answered key ques­tions about how it will pro­vide remote sup­port to help main­tain the Afghan Air Force, what logis­tics and sup­ply lines will look like from abroad, whether it will con­tin­ue air sup­port after the August 31 with­draw­al date. Cur­rent­ly, the White House and the Pen­ta­gon say “no,” but it seems to be under debate right now in Wash­ing­ton. All of that has sent an alarm­ing mes­sage of uncer­tain­ty to the Afghans.
...

But it was­n’t just the US that did­n’t ade­quate plan. Senior mem­bers of the Afghan gov­ern­ment were appar­ent­ly in denial. And when they did final­ly make moves to con­sol­i­date the cen­tral gov­ern­ment into a small­er ter­ri­to­ry, it was too rushed, too late, and only has­tened the gov­ern­men­t’s col­lapse:

...
On the oth­er hand, the Unit­ed States began broad­cast­ing — rather seri­ous­ly — more than two years ago that it was look­ing to pull its mil­i­tary forces and grad­u­al­ly dis­en­gage from sup­port­ing the Afghan gov­ern­ment.

There are peo­ple in Afghanistan, includ­ing some of the senior­most advis­ers in the Afghan gov­ern­ment, who at least appear to have been in denial or to not have ful­ly accept­ed the Amer­i­cans were real­ly going to leave. This is some­thing oth­er Afghan com­men­ta­tors say.

And it cre­at­ed not just oper­a­tional depen­den­cies — like what I described about the umbrel­la of aer­i­al pro­tec­tion that Amer­i­can airstrikes were pro­vid­ing — but also a polit­i­cal atmos­phere of pro­tec­tion and of depen­den­cy that real­ly pre­clud­ed a lot of seri­ous plan­ning on the Afghan government’s side for the chal­lenges that would come the day the Unit­ed States with­drew.

For instance, some­thing that I’ve learned in my research, and it’s been con­firmed since in press reports, is that the senior mem­bers of the Afghan gov­ern­ment last year began telling Pres­i­dent Ghani and his top offi­cials that they need­ed to vol­un­tar­i­ly pull troops and gov­ern­ment pres­ence from at least 100 dis­tricts around the coun­try.

But Ghani and his offi­cials reject­ed the pro­pos­al out of hand; they said, “Absolute­ly not, that sends the wrong mes­sage, that’s weak­ness, we’re not going to give an inch of our coun­try.” And no one real­ly gave seri­ous thought to what was behind that pro­pos­al, which was, you know, a valid assess­ment that the Afghan gov­ern­ment was stretched too thin.

So there were absolute­ly mis­takes made — and are still being made — by the Unit­ed States in the way it didn’t nail down its plan­ning and its post-with­draw­al para­me­ters. But there has also been a state of either denial or neg­li­gence on the Afghan government’s part in not throw­ing itself into a com­pre­hen­sive plan to steel itself for what was com­ing.

...

At some point in the last three months, the Afghan gov­ern­ment seemed to real­ize that was, in fact, what it need­ed to do. But it made that real­iza­tion far too late. If the deci­sion had been made ear­li­er, it could have been explained to the Afghan pub­lic in a way that might have mit­i­gat­ed the pan­ic that you see spread­ing across the coun­try now. It also could have pre­vent­ed a lot of oper­a­tional-lev­el loss­es. Untold amounts of ammu­ni­tion and mil­i­tary equip­ment have been left behind in these 200 dis­tricts where mil­i­tary forces have picked up and left.

So when the Afghan gov­ern­ment decid­ed or real­ized that it did need to draw down, it did so with­out want­i­ng to admit weak­ness in such a sen­si­tive moment. There­fore, it just looked like the gov­ern­ment was con­tin­u­ing to col­lapse, even if what it was doing was belat­ed­ly fol­low­ing that “cir­cle the wag­ons” strat­e­gy.
...

Step­ping back, Watkins reminds us of one of the dark­est facts about this whole sit­u­a­tion: the US mil­i­tary deter­mined the Afghan was was unwinnable as ear­ly as 2009:

...
A lot of peo­ple would like to put the blame on var­i­ous deci­sions made under the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, or the terms of the US-Tal­iban deal, or the mere fact that the US start­ed nego­ti­at­ing with the Tal­iban at all.

What every­one seems to leave out — which real­ly gives a pass to far too many peo­ple involved in pol­i­cy­mak­ing on Afghanistan for the last decade, maybe two decades — is that since the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, there was an acknowl­edg­ment among senior pol­i­cy­mak­ers that the war was already unwinnable.

That was why the ear­li­est attempts to try and probe the Tal­iban, to see what their appetite for peace talks was, start­ed as ear­ly as 2009. It’s very easy to for­get that. It took 10 hard years just to get to the point where they would actu­al­ly sit down and nego­ti­ate with US in any sub­stan­tive sense.

The real issues today come from the US and NATO part­ner deci­sion to draw down force lev­els but basi­cal­ly make up for it with airstrikes, rather than the Afghan gov­ern­ment being forced to grap­ple with its weak­ness­es and adapt to a land­scape where the US was no longer involved.

...

Even in Biden’s remarks in mid-April, there was the sug­ges­tion that this with­draw­al deci­sion was made based on how hope­less the sit­u­a­tion seemed. It was not the with­draw­al that cre­at­ed an unwinnable sit­u­a­tion. The with­draw­al deci­sion was made because in Biden’s assess­ment, the sit­u­a­tion already was unwinnable.
...

Final­ly, despite all of that, Watkins was­n’t see­ing an immi­nent col­lapse. It had no opti­mism about the sit­u­a­tion but he was­n’t see­ing a total col­lapse as inevitable. Even so, the “best-case” sce­nario of the state sur­viv­ing and hold­ing the Tal­iban off is still an absolute human­i­tar­i­an cat­a­stro­phe. That’s how awful the sit­u­a­tion was already: the best-case sce­nario was still an absolute human­i­tar­i­an cat­a­stro­phe:

...
It’s too ear­ly to see the out­come. What is clear is that if the Afghan gov­ern­ment is able to mount a strong defense of cities, if it is able to take back some of these bor­der cross­ing points and maybe oth­er strate­gic stretch­es of the country’s major roads and high­ways, if the Afghan gov­ern­ment can put a stop to the Taliban’s advance and can stand firm — then it might be able to fight its way back to a stale­mate, a mil­i­tary sit­u­a­tion where there’s no clear win­ner, at least in the fore­see­able future.

If that hap­pens, you will very like­ly see both par­ties try­ing to claim con­trol over Afghanistan. The hope is that they would then poten­tial­ly move to peace talks if they don’t see a mil­i­tary solu­tion to the war. The con­cern is that if the Afghan gov­ern­ment can­not fight its way to a stale­mate, the momen­tum may grad­u­al­ly but con­sis­tent­ly slide in the Taliban’s favor.

Jen Kir­by

What I’m get­ting from this con­ver­sa­tion is that as bleak as it is, it is not yet a fore­gone con­clu­sion that the Tal­iban will “win.”

Andrew Watkins

That is absolute­ly true. I do not have any opti­mism for the sit­u­a­tion. But this is not a fore­gone con­clu­sion. It’s not inevitable.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Afghans, even in the best-case sce­nario for the Afghan gov­ern­ment, harsh gov­ern­ment coun­ter­at­tacks are just going to increase harm to civil­ians. The hard­er the gov­ern­ment is able to fight back, the more peo­ple will want to flee the fight­ing. So even in what many peo­ple would say would be the best-case sce­nario of the state sur­viv­ing and hold­ing the Tal­iban off, it’s an absolute human­i­tar­i­an cat­a­stro­phe.

I think that’s where, speak­ing as a polit­i­cal ana­lyst, I can say what is a fore­gone con­clu­sion is that more Afghans will suf­fer this year than they have even in past years. And this was already one of the worst con­flict zones on Earth.
...

Again, this inter­view was pub­lished less than two weeks ago, and just four days before the fall of Kab­ul. It was clear by then the sit­u­a­tion was absolute­ly dire and there was basi­cal­ly no real pos­si­bil­i­ty of the Tal­iban not gain­ing pow­er. It was just a mat­ter of when and how many more peo­ple would die between now and then. So the way things played out was more or less how experts pre­dict­ed they were going to play out in the end. We just hit that end a lot soon­er than the experts expect­ed.

A dozen US sol­diers and dozens of civil­ians were killed in a pair of bomb­ings out­side the Kab­ul air­port today in what appears to be an attack by ISIS in Kho­rasan (ISIS‑K). The attack fol­lows days of warn­ings by US intel­li­gence of an immi­nent attack on crowds out­side the air­port. But beyond hav­ing a feel of inevitabil­i­ty giv­en the chaot­ic nature of a mil­i­tary with­draw­al, the attack also has the feel of being the open­ing round in an Islamist pow­er-strug­gle that’s only going to grow after the US com­pletes the with­draw­al. A pow­er strug­gle that poten­tial­ly dou­bles as a dance. Will ISIS‑K and the Tal­iban remain foes? Might we see some sort of ‘good cop’/‘bad cop’ dynam­ic emerge, where ISIS takes the lead in ter­ror­iz­ing civil­ians while the Tal­iban plays the role of the ‘mod­er­ate’ Islamist pro­tec­tor?

And what about all the ques­tions around the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ISIS carv­ing out a new foothold? Let’s not for­get Afghanistan bor­ders Iran, Chi­na, and Rus­sia. It’s hard to imag­ine West­ern intel­li­gence ser­vices aren’t sali­vat­ing over the prospect of ISIS wag­ing some sort of cross-bor­der ter­ror cam­paigns in those coun­tries. These are the kinds of dark ques­tions we’re going to be get­ting answers to in com­ing weeks and months. Answers that will come in the form of the world wit­ness­ing what kind of ter­ror the peo­ple of Afghanistan are sub­ject­ed to going for­ward: Will it be the ter­ror of the Tal­iban’s bru­tal rule or the ter­ror of ISIS’s even more bru­tal slaugh­ter? Or both? Prob­a­bly both:

USA TODAY

What is ISIS‑K? Islam­ic State ter­ror group believed to have car­ried out Kab­ul attacks that killed 12 U.S. troops

Tom Van­den Brook, Josh Mey­er, Rebec­ca Morin
Pub­lished 12:10 pm ET Aug. 26, 2021 | Updat­ed 4:06 pm ET Aug. 26, 2021

WASHINGTON – Days before the attacks at the Kab­ul air­port in Afghanistan that killed a dozen U.S. troops, Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials had warned of threats posed by ISIS‑K, a ter­ror­ist group that is a sworn ene­my of the Tal­iban.

On Thurs­day, U.S. offi­cials said they believe ISIS‑K car­ried out the bomb­ing and gun attacks at the cap­i­tal’s Hamid Karzai Inter­na­tion­al Air­port and they view the group as a con­tin­u­ing threat.

...

ISIS‑K is an off­shoot of the Islam­ic State ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion that estab­lished a sprawl­ing caliphate in Iraq and Syr­ia. The group was all but destroyed by a U.S.-led cam­paign but affil­i­ates have since emerged and drawn recruits from oth­er local and region­al mil­i­tant groups.

ISIS‑K con­sid­ers the Tal­iban, not­ed for its bru­tal­i­ty, to be insuf­fi­cient­ly devout in its adher­ence to Islam. The two mil­i­tant groups have engaged in attacks on each oth­er.

Pen­ta­gon press sec­re­tary John Kir­by tweet­ed that there was an explo­sion at Abbey Gate, as well as one at or near the Baron Hotel, which is a short dis­tance from Abbey Gate. He not­ed the explo­sion at the gate “result­ed in a num­ber of US & civil­ian casu­al­ties.”

The Tal­iban, which took con­trol of Afghanistan ear­li­er this month, has been guard­ing the perime­ter of the Kab­ul air­port, where evac­u­a­tions of Amer­i­cans and Afghan allies were tak­ing place.

Dou­glas Lon­don, the CIA’s for­mer top coun­tert­er­ror­ism chief for the region, includ­ing Afghanistan, said the threat posed by ISIS‑K is now high­er because of the vac­u­um cre­at­ed after the Tal­iban top­pled the Afghan gov­ern­ment with­in a mat­ter of days.

The Pen­ta­gon inspec­tor gen­er­al, in a report released last week, not­ed ISIS‑K had lashed out in the last months of the Afghan gov­ern­ment, seiz­ing on its weak­ness.

“ISIS-Kho­rasan exploit­ed the polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty and rise in vio­lence dur­ing the quar­ter by attack­ing minor­i­ty sec­tar­i­an tar­gets and infra­struc­ture to spread fear and high­light the Afghan government’s inabil­i­ty to pro­vide ade­quate secu­ri­ty,” the report said.

What is ISIS‑K?

The “K” in ISIS‑K stands for Kho­rasan, the Islam­ic State in Iraq and Syr­i­a’s affil­i­ate in Pak­istan and Afghanistan, where U.S.-led forces have fought Tal­iban and al-Qai­da mil­i­tants since 2001. U.S. offi­cials have grown alarmed in recent years about the group’s grow­ing strength, sav­agery and intent on attack­ing West­ern tar­gets.

Of par­tic­u­lar con­cern for mil­i­tary plan­ners is ISIS-K’s focus on launch­ing attacks in Kab­ul. It mount­ed six major attacks in the Afghan cap­i­tal in 2016, 18 attacks in 2017 and 24 in 2018, the offi­cial said. Its attacks have con­tin­ued to inten­si­fy.

“They’ve been a per­sis­tent and vex­ing prob­lem because, despite all the pres­sure that we and then the Tal­iban have placed on them, they’ve man­aged to main­tain oper­a­tional cells that have been effec­tive as we’ve seen over the past few years in Kab­ul,” Lon­don said. “Most of the attacks that were the most heart­less ones, like against hos­pi­tals and the mater­ni­ty ward, were all ISIS‑K.”

That capa­bil­i­ty to launch dead­ly attacks is also the rea­son ISIS‑K pos­es such a threat to the Tal­iban and the affil­i­at­ed Haqqani Net­work, Lon­don said. “They main­tain these capa­bil­i­ties, and those are the rea­sons they and the Tal­iban are mor­tal ene­mies – because ISIS‑K rep­re­sents a com­peti­tor. They rep­re­sent a com­peti­tor for resources, mate­ri­als and pow­er, even though they’re rel­a­tive­ly small.”

ISIS‑K school attack

On May 8, ISIS‑K attacked a school for girls in Kab­ul and killed at least 68 peo­ple, wound­ing more than than 165, most of them girls, accord­ing to a Defense Intel­li­gence Agency assess­ment cit­ed by the inspec­tor gen­er­al. A sui­cide bomber drove a car laden with explo­sives into the school’s gate, and, as the chil­dren fled, addi­tion­al bombs explod­ed.

The school was for the Haz­ara, a Shi­ite Mus­lim eth­nic minor­i­ty tar­get­ed by the Sun­ni ISIS‑K. In May 2020, ISIS‑K attacked a Haz­ara mater­ni­ty clin­ic, killing 24 moth­ers, new­borns and a health care provider.

Before the with­draw­al of U.S. troops, nego­ti­at­ed by for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and accel­er­at­ed by Biden, U.S. mil­i­tary com­man­ders sought to anni­hi­late ISIS‑K. Army Gen. Joseph Votel, for­mer head of U.S. Cen­tral Com­mand, declared that ISIS‑K ter­ror­ists were “not rec­on­cil­able.” In 2017, the Pen­ta­gon unleashed the largest con­ven­tion­al bomb in the U.S. arse­nal, the Mas­sive Ord­nance Air Blast, also known as the Moth­er of All Bombs, on an ISIS‑K strong­hold. The explo­sion killed an esti­mat­ed 96 fight­ers.

Evi­dence of the group’s fanati­cism, accord­ing to intel­li­gence gath­ered two years ago, showed that ISIS‑K fight­ers strand­ed in moun­tain pass­es sur­vived on a small sup­ply of pine nuts, the intel­li­gence offi­cial said. They pre­ferred starv­ing to prof­it­ing from the lucra­tive trade in opi­um, he said.

Lon­don said ISIS‑K devel­oped in Afghanistan and parts of Pak­istan. Its mem­bers are a cross sec­tion of tribes includ­ing Mehsud­is, Waziris and Pash­tuns from the cross-bor­der area in the north­east quad­rant.

“That’s where the heart of it is been. Those folks, real­ly they don’t real­ly see them­selves as Afghans, nor do they real­ly see them­selves as Pak­ista­nis,” Lon­don said.

A lot of ISIS‑K mem­bers came up through the ranks of Pak­istani extrem­ist groups like Tehrik‑E Tal­iban (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ), which was involved in the 2002 kid­nap­ping and mur­der of Wall Street Jour­nal reporter Daniel Pearl, accord­ing to Lon­don. But he said oth­ers defect­ed from the Tal­iban because they favored its more extreme and mil­i­tant ide­ol­o­gy.

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“What is ISIS‑K? Islam­ic State ter­ror group believed to have car­ried out Kab­ul attacks that killed 12 U.S. troops” by Tom Van­den Brook, Josh Mey­er, Rebec­ca Morin; USA TODAY; 08/26/2021

“Of par­tic­u­lar con­cern for mil­i­tary plan­ners is ISIS-K’s focus on launch­ing attacks in Kab­ul. It mount­ed six major attacks in the Afghan cap­i­tal in 2016, 18 attacks in 2017 and 24 in 2018, the offi­cial said. Its attacks have con­tin­ued to inten­si­fy.”

How many more attacks will ISIS‑K car­ry out in Kab­ul between now and the US’s final with­draw­al? That’s the imme­di­ate omi­nous ques­tion fac­ing the US and its allies in Kab­ul but based on ISIS-K’s his­to­ry, the group clear­ly has the capac­i­ty, launch­ing 24 attacks in Kab­ul in 2018, fol­low­ing the 2017 use of the MOAB (‘Moth­er of all bombs’) against the group’s strong­hold in 2017:

...
That capa­bil­i­ty to launch dead­ly attacks is also the rea­son ISIS‑K pos­es such a threat to the Tal­iban and the affil­i­at­ed Haqqani Net­work, Lon­don said. “They main­tain these capa­bil­i­ties, and those are the rea­sons they and the Tal­iban are mor­tal ene­mies – because ISIS‑K rep­re­sents a com­peti­tor. They rep­re­sent a com­peti­tor for resources, mate­ri­als and pow­er, even though they’re rel­a­tive­ly small.”

...

Before the with­draw­al of U.S. troops, nego­ti­at­ed by for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and accel­er­at­ed by Biden, U.S. mil­i­tary com­man­ders sought to anni­hi­late ISIS‑K. Army Gen. Joseph Votel, for­mer head of U.S. Cen­tral Com­mand, declared that ISIS‑K ter­ror­ists were “not rec­on­cil­able.” In 2017, the Pen­ta­gon unleashed the largest con­ven­tion­al bomb in the U.S. arse­nal, the Mas­sive Ord­nance Air Blast, also known as the Moth­er of All Bombs, on an ISIS‑K strong­hold. The explo­sion killed an esti­mat­ed 96 fight­ers.
...

And then there’s the giant pair of ques­tions: is ISIS‑K going to be allowed to carve out a new Islam­ic State in Afghanistan and will it use that ter­ri­to­ry to launch cross-bor­der attacks against Afghanistan’s neigh­bors. As the arti­cle notes, the actu­al mem­ber­ship of ISIS‑K pre­dom­i­nant­ly comes from cross sec­tion of tribes includ­ing Mehsud­is, Waziris and Pash­tuns from the cross-bor­der area in the north­east quad­rant along the bor­der with Pak­istan:

...
Lon­don said ISIS‑K devel­oped in Afghanistan and parts of Pak­istan. Its mem­bers are a cross sec­tion of tribes includ­ing Mehsud­is, Waziris and Pash­tuns from the cross-bor­der area in the north­east quad­rant.

“That’s where the heart of it is been. Those folks, real­ly they don’t real­ly see them­selves as Afghans, nor do they real­ly see them­selves as Pak­ista­nis,” Lon­don said.

A lot of ISIS‑K mem­bers came up through the ranks of Pak­istani extrem­ist groups like Tehrik‑E Tal­iban (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ), which was involved in the 2002 kid­nap­ping and mur­der of Wall Street Jour­nal reporter Daniel Pearl, accord­ing to Lon­don. But he said oth­ers defect­ed from the Tal­iban because they favored its more extreme and mil­i­tant ide­ol­o­gy.
...

Giv­en the over­lap between this area and trib­al areas that make up the bulk of the Tal­iban’s mem­ber­ship, it’ll be inter­est­ing to see see if ISIS‑K tries to carve out a caliphate in this region. And if that does hap­pen, what will Pak­istan’s response be?

Also keep in mind that if the Tal­iban real­ly does attempt to put in place poli­cies that fol­low the ‘kinder, gen­tler Tal­iban’ image the group has been pro­ject­ing, there’s a very real pos­si­bil­i­ty of the more Tal­iban mem­bers flock­ing to ISIS‑K in response since it sounds like that’s the dynam­ic that’s been fuel­ing the growth of ISIS‑K in the first place. That’s the dynam­ic that we could eas­i­ly see erupt here. At the same time, keep­ing ISIS‑K around as a ‘worse than us’ boogey­man might not be a bad pub­lic rela­tions move by the Tal­iban try­ing to calm a pop­u­lace with deep fears of the group. Then again, oblit­er­at­ing the group might also be a way for the Tal­iban to gain inter­na­tion­al recog­ni­tion, but that like­ly means more bomb­ings in Afghan cities as that war plays out. And that’s all why it’s very hard to imag­ine ISIS‑K isn’t going to become a grow­ing ter­ror­ist night­mare. Now, whether or not it becomes the kind of night­mare that tar­gets US and West with direct ter­ror attacks remains to be seen. That’s an open ques­tion. But if you’re in Afghanistan, or a coun­try bor­der­ing Afghanistan, the open ques­tion is more a ques­tion of where and when the next mass casu­al­ty ISIS ter­ror attack takes place.