Brian M Downing
Taliban forces are taking control of as much of Afghanistan as they wish. The United States is hoping its embassy is spared the humiliations of 1975 in Saigon and four years later in Tehran. It’s in the hands of the Taliban and its regional backers, Russia, Iran, China, and Pakistan. Staffers can only hope for the best and keep an eye on the helipads. That’s what twenty years has brought.
What accounts for the Taliban’s success, despite its unsophisticated logistics and vulnerability to airpower?
Ethnic homogeneity
The ANA, as noted in an earlier essay, comprises soldiers from several ethnic groups. They do not always have a common language, mistrust is ancient and irremediable, and cooperation is elusive. Even if a battalion is of one group, it will not trust an adjacent unit of another. An army divided against itself cannot fight.
The Taliban are almost all Pashtun. There are certainly rivalries within that sprawling system of confederations, tribes, and clans, but the Taliban formed combat units from cooperative and trusting tribes and are intimidating or defeating the others.
Many units are tribal levies organized by local chieftains and attached to Taliban networks. Fighters are drawn from the same villages and have known their unit leaders, offering a measure of trust for one another. Progress over the years has bestowed an aura of charismatic authority over every level of the command structure. As province after province falls, the aura must be impressive, almost preternatural.
Tactical skills and strategic plans
Taliban fighting units display considerable tenacity, understanding of the terrain, and knowledge of local clans. Mastery of small-unit tactics, however, is utterly lacking. Russian soldiers in the eighties, American trainers in the same period, and ISAF troops in the later war are in accord on this.
Mujahideen fighters ignored foreign advice and continued to use the same infiltration/exfiltration routes and broke off promising skirmishes early on. Taliban units continue the tradition. After all, it worked against the Soviet Union and the United States. Pashtun tribal lore wins out over Fort Benning doctrine.
Taliban strategy has been far more thoughtful. For over ten years they’ve avoided large campaigns like the 1968 Tet Offensive and concentrated on gradually expanding in rural districts and isolating major cities. Only part of the expansion came from military action. The rest, perhaps the majority of it, came from parleys with local chieftains. Grievances with government officials were discussed and became the basis of support.
Over the last few years Taliban negotiators have presented themselves as inevitable winners who will govern more justly than Kabul – hardly a high aim but a desirable one. This has been critical in their successes in the north where fellow Pashtun people are found only in Kunduz. As Bernard Fall noted long ago, a government losing an insurgency isn’t being outfought, it’s being outgoverned.
Airpower
The ongoing offensive has overstretched the ANA, especially its special forces, and exploited places where the forces break. The Taliban has adroitly done the same with US and Afghan air power. They have no air defenses. MANPADs have been detected only a handful of times and not at all in the ongoing drive. Comparisons to the ISIL war are helpful.
When US and coalition aircraft broke the ISIL attack on Kobane, and turned the tide in the war, they came from aircraft carriers and bases along the Gulf. Further, they were attacking a small number of targets around the beleaguered Kurdish town.
The Taliban attacked three major cities in the south, Ghazni in the center-east, Kunduz and several other cities in the north, and the approaches to Kabul in Wardak and Logar provinces – pretty much all across Afghanistan. There are far fewer American and Afghan aircraft available compared to the fight for Kobane and pilots are unable to devastate Taliban attackers as they did ISIL bands. Airpower was stretched thin and made far less formidable.
In the last few days the ANA has broken in the north, south, and center. Most ANA units will not be able to find their way to areas where Kabul still has some say. The war is over.
© 2021 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.