(by Andrea Pinto) The complete conquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban was "sudden" and "unexpected" only for those who, in recent months, have not paid attention to the slow and progressive implosion of the country. It all started last October when the president of the United States Donald Trump announced that American troops would leave the country. Since that announcement, all analysts and international observers have predicted what happened today, the control of the country by the Taliban.
In fact, the exodus of Afghan families has been going on for months and the recent shocking images of men clinging to American transport planes are just the tail of a desperate escape from the country. The reality of the imminent Taliban takeover has been widely read by women residing in large urban centers who have been preparing for change for months by burning their Western clothes and throwing away cosmetics..
Meanwhile, countries like the Russia and UK they actively prepared to deal with the Taliban as the new rulers of Afghanistan. Almost five weeks ago, Ben Wallace, British Defense Minister announced that London was ready to "work with the Taliban, should they come to power". Soon after, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the Taliban "new rational actors" and warned the Afghan government that it risked losing control of the country by not seeking a negotiated deal with Taliban militants.
For months now, all major Asian newspapers have been conducting analyzes of what the region would look like after the Taliban's return to power. In fact, India has for some time been preparing to become "a state on the front line against the terrorism of the Taliban 2.0" in power. 2.0 because everyone can see the substantial evolution of the group both at a tactical and strategic level with the wise use of communication in the field ofwarfare information.
Each country in the immediate vicinity of Afghanistan reinforced troops in anticipation of the fall of Kabul and other major urban centers across Afghanistan. Even the United Nations had already warned on 22 July that the Taliban were rapidly gaining ground throughout Afghanistan. On July 23, the director of the CIA - Central Intelligence Agency - William Burns, according to various reports by his analysts, he said that the Taliban were "militarily stronger than 2001", acknowledging the possibility that "the Afghan government could have fallen with the advance of the Taliban, following the deployment of US troops". On July 22, the general Mark milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned US policy of the possibility of a complete takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. Even the former general David Petraeus he warned that without the presence of American troops, the Afghan armed forces would abandon their posts, flee the Taliban, surrender without firing a shot.
So why has the current US political leadership not heeded the warnings from the top of its military and intelligence services?
It is not the first time, it has already happened when George Bush Jr. he was determined to "export democracy" to Iraq in 2003, despite being informed by intelligence that such a move would spark a civil war between the country's Sunnis and Shiites.
When Barack Obama decided to declare the "end of the war" in Iraq in 2013, despite the concrete concerns of intelligence experts that such a move would help the Sunni insurgency and allow it to metastasize into the Islamic State.
Even when Donald Trump he decided to "bring the troops home" from Afghanistan in 2020, despite being told in no uncertain terms that by doing so he would return the country to the Taliban. So The Donald sent his head of the State Department, Mike Pompeo to negotiate the Doha agreements directly with the Taliban. Biden said today that the Afghans (the army ed.) Have not been able to defend their country from the advance of the Taliban. But how? Did they have to fight against the Taliban, against those who had an agreement with the Americans? A unique and misleading contradiction, a way to blame a failure on a people, the Afghan people, who found themselves in the midst of two hegemonies, in different ways, equally ruthless and unscrupulous, the Western and the Taliban.
The various US administrations that have followed, in a bipartisan manner, when they have had to decide on national and international security issues have always shown a clear refusal to accept the suggestions of their intelligence officers, this, only and only for mere calculations of political consensus without ever evaluating the repercussions on geopolitics even if there were blatant violations of human rights at stake.