I admit I thoughtlessly said “well done” when Ole Joe pulled out from Afghanistan as if his dear life depended on it… and then I watched in disbelief the chaos that ensued.
Afghanistan will be minutely analyzed and re-analyzed for years to come just like Vietnam… and the verdict won’t be edifying.
The headlong US rush to disengage left a gaping strategic hole in one of the most critical and dangerous black holes in the world—and communicated a message of criminally amateur politico-strategic “exit planning” that made pulling out of Iraq look like a replay of D-Day, June 1944.
With the Taliban now firmly in power (and armed to the teeth with weapons and equipment abandoned by the retreating Americans) what follows is anybody’s guess. But the emergence of an Isis nucleus in the Khorasan district demonstrates that the wretched country won’t be “pacified” easily even if the Taliban presently have the upper hand. And a heating conflict between the Taliban and ISIS-K carries the potential of unforeseen complications that could and, most likely, would impinge on US strategic interests in that part of the world.
As the writer of the report below concludes: “….the United States fueled ISIS’s rise, then fought and defeated it, only to accidentally provide one of its affiliates with trained fighters. Whether it’s ISIS, or the Mujahedeen that splintered into a number of extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, or the Taliban itself, wherever the American military decides to intervene in the Middle East, terrorists who once received U.S. backed training or salaries seem to follow.”
Not a pretty sight. And perhaps another terrorist nightmare in the making.
Making Another ISIS in Afghanistan. ISIS-K in Khorasan Province
Where America goes in the Middle East, extremist groups tend to follow.
With the United States out of Afghanistan, former members of the Afghan Security Forces who were once trained by the United States are joining Islamic State-Khorasan Province, better known as ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s regional affiliate. The result is all too predictable given America’s track record of inadvertently aiding the creation of extremist groups in the Middle East.
As it stands now, the number of former members of the Afghan Security Forces joining up with ISIS-K remains small, but it is growing, according to both Taliban fighters and other former members of the Afghan Security Forces.
One former Afghan official told the Wall Street Journal that an officer who commanded the Afghan National Army’s weapons and ammunition depot in Gardez joined ISIS-K after the Afghan army became defunct, and was killed last month in a firefight with the Taliban. The official also said he knows several other members of the Afghan Security Forces who joined ISIS-K after the Taliban searched their homes and ordered them to present themselves to Taliban authorities once the Taliban took control of the country.
The Wall Street Journal also spoke to a resident of Qarabagh in the Ghazni province who said his cousin, previously a member of the Afghan army’s special forces, disappeared in September shortly after the U.S. withdrawal and has joined an ISIS-K cell. The Qarabagh man also said he knows four other former Afghan National Army soldiers who enlisted in ISIS-K in the past few weeks.
ISIS-K became known throughout the world when a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members and approximately 200 Afghans in an attack near the Kabul airport as the United States was completing its withdrawal in August.
Created in 2014 by former Taliban militants who were dissatisfied with potential peace talks and sought to take more drastic measures to fight the United States, ISIS-K has thus far played relatively a minor role in the network of extremist organizations operating in Afghanistan. Their relegation was a result of choosing both the Taliban and the United States as their enemies, as the nascent extremist outfit was ill-equipped to defend its territorial holdings in eastern Afghanistan, which the Taliban took from them in 2015.