Roving Periscope: All stakeholders, sans Afghans, love the ‘good’ Taliban!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Seeing Afghanistan collapsing, Donald Trump mocked his successor President Joe Biden—“are you missing me?”—who, in turn, blamed his Afghanistan counterpart Ashraf Ghani for the Taliban mess, who had fled ‘to avoid bloodshed’ but did not forget, allegedly, to carry with him some USD 50 million, and reportedly landed in Tajikistan.
Did he really flee to Tajikistan? Or was his real choice Turkey?
The Kabul International Airport has for long been protected by the armed-to-the-teeth US troops. No one—and Ashraf Ghani was still President when he fled!—could have escaped unnoticed from under Washington’s watchful eyes. For Ghani, and Biden, Ankara would, perhaps, be a better choice—after all, Turkey, the only Muslim member-nation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), had also sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001 for fighting the “War on Terror”.
In early August, the media reported that Turkey wanted to be in charge of securing the Kabul Airport. In other words, Ankara planned to be the predominantly Christian NATO’s only Muslim representative in Afghanistan. Apparently, Turkey was looking at the Kabul Airport and a refuge-seeking Ghani as bargaining chips to emerge as the main stakeholder in the geopolitical game unfolding in Central Asia.
The other purported choice, Tajikistan, already has Taliban-friendly Islamists raring to facilitate their entry into Xinjiang, the next Syria. Ghani might have, therefore, avoided Tajikistan, being unsafe heaven.
There was another reason why he would have avoided Tajikistan: Russia’s attempts since the last seven years to cozy up with the Taliban. Remember, the Islamist militia was founded in the 1980s primarily to sniff out the Soviet Union’s Red Army from Afghanistan.
But the ground rules have changed since. Every nation loves a ‘good’ Taliban because an even worse player has arrived: China!
Afghanistan’s two Central Asian neighbors—Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan — have held high-level talks with the Taliban and are likely to recognize Taliban rule, while the third, Tajikistan, has not engaged with this Afghan militia so as to discourage domestic Muslim radicals. All three Muslim republics were part of the defunct Soviet Union until 1991, just two years after the Red Army existed in Afghanistan in 1989.
Now a ‘pragmatic’ Russia, trying to plunge its fingers back in the Afghan pie, is staying put in Kabul. In a statement, its foreign ministry said on Monday that the situation in the Afghan capital is “stabilizing” and claimed that the Taliban had started “restoring public order”.
And Russian Ambassador to Kabul Dmitry Zhirnov said the Taliban was already guarding his embassy, which has nearly 100 staff and had given Moscow guarantees that the building would remain safe. “Not a single hair will fall from the heads” of the Russian diplomats, the Taliban promised.
If anything, the Kremlin has boosted the Taliban’s international credibility by hosting it several times for talks in Moscow, despite the radical Islamist movement still remaining a ‘banned terrorist organization’ in Russia.
Ambassador Zhirnov said Russia wanted Afghanistan to have peaceful relations with “all the countries in the world” and that “the Taliban had already promised us” this.
In fact, Moscow has courted the Taliban for seven years now. Only last month, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praised the terrorists as a “powerful force”, and blamed the Afghan government for faltering progress in talks.
Interestingly, even a defiant US President Joe Biden has also blamed the Ashraf Ghani-led Afghan government for surrendering so abjectly to the militants. Only recently, he had emphatically claimed that the Taliban, numbering some 75,000, had no chance of fighting against the Afghanistani troops, numbering about 300,000, armed with $84 billion worth of ammunition and supplies!
In less than a month, however, the Taliban overran Afghanistan.
The sudden meltdown indicated that either Biden was part of the unfolding game, or, worse, had no knowledge of the ground situation. In either case, his detractors are now demanding his ouster from the White House, making him, perhaps, the only President in US history to be subjected to this scrutiny barely seven months after he took an oath to protect the US Constitution and interests.
According to media reports, Zhirnov even praised the Taliban’s conduct. “The situation is peaceful and good and everything has calmed down in the city. The situation in Kabul now under the Taliban is better than it was under (President) Ashraf Ghani,” he told Moscow’s Ekho Moskvy radio station.
“Yesterday the regime fell like a house of cards. There was a feeling of disorder, a power vacuum, and looters came out on the streets,” Zhirnov said.
Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti reported, quoting its embassy’s claim made in Kabul, that Ghani had fled with four cars and a helicopter full of cash. “The collapse of the regime … is most eloquently characterized by how Ghani escaped from Afghanistan: four cars were filled with money, they tried to shove another part of the money into a helicopter, but not everything fit. And some of the money was left lying on the tarmac,” embassy spokesman Nikita Ishchenko was quoted as saying.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special representative on Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said on Monday Ghani’s flight from Kabul was “disgraceful,” and that the Afghan president “deserves to be brought to justice and held accountable by the Afghan people.”
He said the Taliban have already taken control of the security perimeter of the Russian embassy. He said he would hold detailed security talks with the Taliban on Tuesday.
The Taliban had promised, in line with earlier agreements, to protect Russian diplomats, he said. He claimed that schools in Kabul, including those for girls, had started functioning again.
