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Interview with Times Now

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September 15, 2021

[INTERVIEW] ‘Taliban’s return was imminent, but was India prepared?’ Rakesh Sood on the way forward

India Akrita Reyar | Chief Editor (Digital) Updated Sep 15, 2021 | 11:24 IST

India’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, Rakesh Sood, speaks about the current circumstances in Afghanistan and the road ahead for global players, including India.

Taliban's return was  imminent, but was India prepared - Interview Rakesh Sood India’s former ambassador to Afghanistan Rakesh Sood  |  Photo Credit: Twitter

Exactly two decades after 9/11, life came a full circle in Afghanistan as well. Its experiment with democracy crumbled as the Taliban got a virtual walkover after quickly overwhelming the country’s military and administrative structure. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that by January 2021, the Taliban was in its strongest military position and America had the smallest number of US forces in  20 years there. US President Biden, therefore, faced a choice between ending the war or escalating it, which would have required a substantial deployment of forces. 

Considering the dramatically changed dynamics in our neighbourhood, Akrita Reyar of Timesnownews.com spoke with India’s former ambassador to Afghanistan Rakesh Sood about the current circumstances and the road ahead. 

Akrita Reyar: The new Taliban government has been announced in Afghanistan. What are your first thoughts on looking at the mix?

Rakesh Sood: The new Taliban interim government reflects the internal differences between the Taliban’s different factions, which is why it took them quite some time to come out with the composition. 

Second, it was quite clear that getting over these differences needed the presence of the ISI and that is why the DG ISI was physically present in Kabul, meeting different Taliban factions, the leaders and the groups, to be able to work out a compromise. 

Taliban cabinet
Taliban Cabinet Ministers | Pic Credit: AP

Akrita Reyar: Taking forward the point of the Pakistan imprint on the new Taliban government, how much of a hand of Pakistan do you see in the entire strategy and execution of the Taliban operation to take over Afghanistan? Was this completely its brainchild?

Rakesh Sood: The Taliban followed a calibrated military strategy. They waited till they were absolutely certain that the US was sticking to a withdrawal deadline and it was an unconditional withdrawal. This was announced by President Joe Biden on the 14th of April. Thereafter, beginning in May, the Taliban executed an effective military strategy. I am sure they had good teachers who had learned the lessons of what had gone wrong in the past during the 1990s. Obviously, the good teachers I’m referring to are the ISI who were advising them. However, the Taliban, I think, were then able to execute this strategy reasonably efficiently. The strategy consisting of focusing on the more isolated military and police outposts, especially in the remote areas, which have a limited strength of maybe 10 to 15 people; it was easy to surround them with 40 to 50 Taliban fighters and since the US was in the process of withdrawal and air support was missing, the 10 to 15 people at these remote outposts ended up surrendering or capitulating because they were promised safe passage. This resulted in the fact that the Taliban were also able to acquire, without much fighting, additional military hardware from the stores at these places. 

Taliban soldiers stand guard over surrendered Afghan Militiamen in the Kapisa province
Taliban soldiers stand guard over surrendered Afghan Militiamen in the Kapisa province | Pic Credit: AP

The second strategy that the Taliban then followed was to move to the northern parts of Afghanistan and certain district headquarters as these were the expected areas of resistance. After they had taken these over, it enabled them to surround certain provincial capitals. They only started focusing on the provincial capitals in August. So through May, June and July, they essentially focused on remote areas, district headquarters, and revenue-generating border checkpoints. They knew that they would perhaps face resistance out of Panjshir valley, so they surrounded Panjshir Valley and cut it off from other districts at the Tajik border. Therefore Panjshir Valley lost its connectivity to Tajikistan, which is what it had retained during the 1990s when the Soviets could not occupy Panjshir Valley or when the Taliban during the 1990s could not occupy Panjshir Valley.

A Taliban soldier guards the Panjshir gate in Panjshir province northeastern of Afghanistan
A Taliban soldier guards the Panjshir gate in Panjshir province of Afghanistan | Pic Credit: AP

Akrita Reyar: How do you predict Western nations including the EU and the US to respond to the Taliban government in terms of giving it recognition and future dealings; after all, most are UN-designated terrorists and have bounties on their heads? 

Rakesh Sood: I am not in a position to predict how Western governments will respond to it. They will I’m sure take their decisions based on their interests. They obviously want to ensure that they’re able to get not just their citizens, but also the Afghans who have worked with them and they feel that they need to bring them out because they are in a position of vulnerability or danger. So that is one priority for the Western governments. Another priority for the Western governments is to ensure that there is no refugee influx into their countries. I don’t think they will bother too much if the Afghan refugees went to neighbouring countries like Pakistan or Iran, but certainly, they will not want refugees coming into Europe or into Canada or America. Third, I think they would also like, to the extent possible, to prevent any humanitarian crisis arising out of food shortages or medical shortages. 

Akrita Reyar: Do the developments have a sobering impact on India? Were we underprepared in the face of imminent US pullout? And what now from here…

Rakesh Sood: I do not know, but I think that any political observer would indicate that the process of legitimization of the Taliban was quite clear for at least a decade, if not earlier. In 2013, the Taliban opened an international office in Doha and they had a public presence. A number of countries were engaging with the Taliban directly, a number of European countries, plus China plus Russia plus Iran plus, of course, Pakistan and Central Asian countries. Taliban delegations were being received in many of these countries. I think it was therefore quite clear that the Taliban was emerging as a political actor. And that was in 2013, in 2018 the US began direct talks with the Taliban. So it should have been abundantly clear then; in 2020 an agreement was signed with the timeline for US withdrawal. It should again have been abundantly clear and as I said earlier, on 14th April, President Joe Biden also announced he would stick to the agreement except that he extended the withdrawal timeline from 30th of April to the 31st of August. So, in short, for nearly a decade, the writing has been on the wall that the Taliban were coming back, and the US was in the exit mode. 

LAST US TO LEAVE AFGHANISTAN
U.S. Army, Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, was the last U.S. soldier to board a C-17 cargo plane at Kabul airport | Pic Credit: AP

Therefore, anybody who says that we were surprised, I think has failed to see the writing on the wall. Yes, you could be surprised about the fact that the actual US withdrawal in the last two weeks was conducted somewhat poorly. It reflected a lack of proper planning or reflected a degree of incompetence, but that is only in the last two weeks with the fact that the US was leaving, and the Taliban were coming back is something that has been known for, as I said, nearly a decade. 

Akrita Reyar: We can’t get away from the question of China and Russia – what is it for them in this and how do you foresee them playing their cards? You have already mentioned they have been engaging with the Taliban for a while.

Rakesh Sood: I think both China and Russia, having got rid of the US presence in Afghanistan, will now focus on their interests in terms of the fact, whether the Taliban will keep to their understanding, which the Taliban have conveyed to China and to Russia, that they will address their security concerns and not allow any groups in Afghanistan to adversely target either Chinese territory or Russian territory, I’m sure the Chinese or Russians will see to if these commitments are being fully honoured or not and calibrate their relationship accordingly. 

How we got here? What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?

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Published on August 30, 2021

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How we got here? What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?

Rakesh Sood

As the United States races to meet the evacuation deadline of 31st August, it is clear that the images of the messy exit will stay etched in our collective conscious for a long time, just as the iconic image of US marines being evacuated from Saigon by a helicopter from a rooftop in April 1975 have never been forgotten. Already questions are being raised about the ‘sudden’ US decision, US credibility, and the collapse of the Afghan army.

A US decision to exit has been coming for a decade. In February 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated a fundamental shift in US policy when she recast the earlier precondition for talks with the Taliban – “insurgents to lay down arms and renounce violence, accept the framework of the Afghan constitution, and separate from Al Qaeda” – as outcomes. This was at the height of the ‘surge’ announced by President Barack Obama that was expected to change the military situation on the ground.

UK, Germany and Norway were among the NATO members who were actively pushing this US shift as a quid pro quo for contributing to the surge. In 2007, UK had done a side deal with the Taliban in Helmand where its soldiers were deployed – that Taliban would not plant IEDs on routes patrolled by the British and in turn, the British would overlook the opium production. Then-President Hamid Karzai was upset when he learnt of it, leading to the overnight expulsion of two diplomats in December 2007, Michael Semple working with the EU delegation and Mervyn Patterson, a UN official. There were unconfirmed reports that the CIA, unhappy with British moves, had leaked the information to Karzai’s office.

By 2011, the US had begun to come around to the British viewpoint and this eventually led to the opening of the Taliban’s Doha office in 2013. Pakistan’s long game of providing sanctuary and safe havens for the Taliban was beginning to pay off. The Doha office was the first step towards gaining acceptance. During the 1990s, there were only three countries that had given recognition to the Taliban regime – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. This time, Pakistan wanted to ensure that the Taliban enjoyed greater acceptance before they reached Kabul.

Various dialogue processes took off. Pakistan initiated the Quadrilateral Coordination Council with the US, China, Afghanistan and Taliban. Istanbul became the venue for the Heart of Asia process. Russia entered the scene with the troika – the US and China, an extended troika, that added Pakistan and then the Moscow platform that included Afghanistan, the Taliban, and regional countries. The Taliban group in Doha was getting adept at handling media and conference diplomacy even as the US ended its combat operations by concluding Op Enduring Freedom on the 31st of December, 2014 and commenced Op Resolute Support, which restricted the US and ISAF role to ‘training, advising and assisting’ the Afghan forces as they began to take the lead in combat. This dropped the number of US troops down to 8500.

The next major breakthrough came in 2018, when the Trump administration announced the appointment of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as Special Envoy for Afghanistan Reconciliation and he began direct talks with the Taliban. It was a step forward in the legitimisation process. Khalilzad began by setting out four objectives – a ceasefire, cutting links with Al Qaeda, IS and other terrorist groups, intra-Afghan peace talks and withdrawal of foreign forces, underlining that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. Eventually, he dropped the conditionalities and acquiesced to the Taliban’s stand – a timebound unconditional US withdrawal in return for safe passage. The other three issues were relegated to the sidelines without any timeframes. The document bore a strange title: “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognised by the U.S. as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America”. This rather clunky phrase was repeated more than a dozen times in the text of the Agreement, a clear indication that the days of the Islamic Republic, established after the Taliban were ousted in 2001, were numbered.

The 2020 Doha Agreement was neither Afghan-led or owned but received unanimous endorsement of the UN Security Council. In a collective suspension of disbelief, the US withdrawal deal in return for safe passage was unanimously endorsed by the United Nations Security Council as a “peace deal”. Nobody questioned the rather strange agreement that was signed between two entities that didn’t recognise each other. Further, with US help, the Taliban also enhanced their legitimacy at the expense of Kabul’s government, which was pressured by the US into releasing some 5,000 Taliban insurgents in its custody.

Once President Joe Biden declared on 14th April that the US would exit before the 9/11 anniversary, the Taliban began with their military operations. An expiry date had been set. The evacuation involved 3000 US soldiers, 8000 NATO troops, and nearly 17000 private contractors. The Afghan army had been built on the US model, based on sophisticated reconnaissance units, real time intelligence using drone and aerial surveillance and monitoring, and air support. During the last six years when they had the lead in combat, they had lost over 50000 security forces compared to less than a hundred US and NATO troops killed in action, proving their fighting mettle. It is true that there was corruption and this impacted morale, but institution building takes time. However, with the withdrawal, all support systems disappeared. Ammunition replenishment to forward bases dried up as supply chains collapsed. Medical evacuation was no longer feasible. Aircraft, helicopters and drones were grounded. GPS tracking and targeting ended as proprietary software from weapon systems was removed. The soldiers had been trained to fight like an army, not as a guerrilla force, and now, they were crippled. Perhaps the most succinct explanation of the collapse was in the recent op-ed in the New York Times by a three star general of the Afghan army Samy Sabet, “We were betrayed by politics and presidents”.

What happens now in Afghanistan? The Taliban emerged as an Islamist Pashtun force in the 1990s and that remains its DNA. It has once again achieved power through military means and not through negotiations. Statements about creating an inclusive and representative government remain vague and ambiguous. To form an inclusive government requires developing Afghan nationalism over and above the Islamist Pashtunism. What does this do to its relationships with its principal benefactor, the ISI and other collaborators, the foreign militant groups like Al Qaeda, IS-K, IMU, ETIM, TTP, etc? All these remain open questions.

The US may have ended its ‘longest war’, but in Afghanistan new conflict lines are emerging. 

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Rakesh Sood Ambassador

The Return Of The Islamic Emirate

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Published in Hindustan Times on August 20, 2021

There is an old saying – Be careful what you wish for….China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan were the most vociferous in demanding the exit of the United States (US) from Afghanistan. Now that images of people hanging on to a C-17 Globemaster, as it taxis for take-off evoking parallels with the fall of Saigon in April 1975 have been seen with smug satisfaction in Islamabad, Tehran, Beijing and Moscow, a grim reality is seeping in. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has already expressed his unhappiness at US’ ‘hasty’ exit.

The key question is if there really is a Taliban 2.0 or just a more media savvy repackaged Taliban 1.0 that will create more regional instability. But to unravel that, let us return to how Afghanistan got here.

A messy exit

The demise of the Islamic Republic and return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan became inevitable when in February last year, US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad signed an agreement with the Taliban Deputy Leader Mullah Barader in Doha, committing to US withdrawal. While Khalilzad delivered the agreement for the Trump administration, President Joe Biden’s announcement on April 14, 2021 that US would be out before the 9/11 anniversary reaffirmed the unconditional withdrawal.

The US was hoping for a ‘decent interval’ between its exit and the eventual collapse of the Kabul regime but once the Taliban sensed victory, they moved in with an ‘indecent haste’.  Despite a domestic backlash against the messy withdrawal, Biden has maintained that his decision was the right one.

The reality is that a cumulative set of mistakes that made US’ continued presence a lightning rod for the insurgency. In 2001, US went into Afghanistan on a counter-terrorism mission, deluded itself that the Taliban had been defeated when they had merely escaped across the border into Pakistan, got distracted with Iraq in 2003, and then got drawn into an increasingly vicious counter-insurgency mounted by the re-energised Taliban.

Meanwhile, the narrative about ‘forever wars’ gained traction. The reality is that as Gen Doug Lute said – the US did not fight a 20-year war; it fought a one-year war, 20 times over. In any case, US had ended its combat operations in 2014 replacing it with a limited ‘train, advise and assist’ mission. While 2352 US soldiers were killed between 2001 and 2014, the number of deaths in the following six years was 96. The annual expenditure with its reduced presence was about $45 billion, a small fraction of its $700 billion defence budget.

The real problem was that without removing the sanctuaries in Pakistan, US was caught in a stalemate that made its continued presence unpopular. Its association with a local government that lacked legitimacy and was seen as corrupt and incompetent by the people, added to it.

Pakistan’s strategy paid off when the Doha office opened in 2013, beginning the process of Taliban’s legitimisation, something it had lacked in the 1990s. Changing power equations made Russia and China more wary and critical about US presence in its backyard. Biden is right that delaying the departure would not have changed anything and no astrologer could have found a propitious moment.

India’s options

Like other countries, India too supported ‘an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned’ peace and reconciliation process. But while other countries did not let this prevent their contacts with the Taliban in Doha and elsewhere, India followed it in letter and spirit. Indian officials did participate in meetings where Taliban were present but refrained from exploring any direct engagement with the Taliban. With the US out and Ashraf Ghani gone, there was no option except to withdraw all diplomatic presence, closing the embassy for all practical purposes.

While no one knows if Taliban have changed, they will find that Afghanistan has changed in the last twenty years. It is a young nation with a median age of 18 and a half years. More than two-thirds of the population is below 30, and this cohort has grown up in a conservative but open society; 60 percent of the population enjoy internet access. They, along with women, minorities will resist a return to the Islamic Emirate of the 1990s.

Further, Taliban today is not a unified entity. Mullah Barader is a co-founder of the Taliban and Mullah Omar was his brother-in-law. He was taken into custody by the ISI in 2010 to punish him for being in direct contact with President Hamid Karzai. Eight years in ISI custody are unlikely to have left him with happy memories. The Doha negotiators constitute the public face but the fighting has been done by local commanders on the ground. Quetta shura is headed by a cleric Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada and two deputies, Mullah Yaqub, son of Mullah Omar who has been overseeing military operations in the south and Sirajuddin Haqqani who heads the Haqqani network, operating in the east. There are other groups too – Al Qaeda, IS -Khorasan, Uighurs (ETIM), Uzbeks (IMU), Tajiks (Khatiba Imam al Bukhari) and Pakistani groups like the TTP, LeT, JeM, Jamaat ul Ahraar, Lashkar-e-Islam and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. All of them have linkages with Taliban fighters on the ground but power sharing negotiations may end up pitching them on opposite sides.

Another chapter in Afghanistan’s political transition that began with the coup in 1973, has ended and at present, India has little choice except to wait and watch because unlike the West, we remain part of the region.

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