The Taliban shut in on Afghan cities, pushing the nation to the brink

Written by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Taimoor Shah
The Taliban have been encroaching on key cities round Afghanistan for months, threatening to drive the nation to its breaking level and push the Biden administration right into a no-win state of affairs simply because the United States’ longest battle is meant to be coming to an finish.
Around the northern metropolis of Kunduz, regardless of the winter’s fierce chilly, the Taliban have taken outposts and army bases, utilizing small armed drones to terrorize Afghan troops. In neighbouring Pul-i-Khumri, they’ve seized necessary highways in a stranglehold of the town, threatening fundamental lifelines to Kabul, the nation’s capital.

And right here within the metropolis of Kandahar, a bedrock of historic and political significance and an financial hub for the nation’s south, Taliban fighters have pummeled the encompassing districts, and moved nearer to taking the provincial capital than they’ve in additional than a decade.
The Taliban’s brazen offensive has put the Biden administration right into a harmful political bind. Under the deal struck by President Donald Trump with the Taliban final 12 months, all overseas troops — together with the remaining 2,500 U.S. service members who help Afghanistan’s beleaguered military and safety forces — are scheduled to withdraw by May 1, leaving the nation in an particularly precarious state.
The highway connecting Kandahar Airfield and Spin Boldak to Kandahar, Afghanistan, Feb. 1, 2021. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
If the Biden administration honors the withdrawal date, officers and analysts worry the Taliban might overwhelm what’s left of the Afghan safety forces and take management of main cities like Kandahar in a push for a whole army victory or a broad give up by the Afghan authorities within the ongoing peace negotiations.
But if the United States delays its withdrawal deadline, as a congressionally appointed panel advisable on Feb. 3, the Taliban would possible contemplate the 2020 take care of the United States void, possible resulting in renewed assaults on U.S. and NATO troops, and probably drawing the United States deeper into the battle to defend Afghan forces, whom the Taliban might nonetheless retaliate vigorously in opposition to.
Men sit throughout the road from a shrine being in-built Kandahar, Afghanistan for Gen. Abdul Raziq, the police chief who was killed by a Taliban infiltrator in 2018, Jan. 31, 2021. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
“The threat of Taliban military victories, especially in an area as symbolic and strategic as Kandahar, makes it difficult for the Biden administration to swallow the risks of finalizing a troop withdrawal,” mentioned Andrew Watkins, a senior analyst on Afghanistan for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based battle decision group. “Pulling out might be politically impossible if Kandahar was on the nightly news.”

In Panjwai, a district that neighbours Kandahar metropolis, the low thud of artillery punctuated a current heat winter afternoon, signalling the Taliban’s proximity to its populated middle.
At the sting of the district, a lone police outpost sandbagged into the rock ignored what was now Taliban territory. One officer’s head was bandaged from a roadside bomb blast, one other wore a gauze sling below his uniform, propping up a shoulder wounded from a sniper’s bullet.
“They are still working here; we can’t replace them, because we don’t have enough forces,” mentioned Safiullah Khan, the police officer in cost. “Our commanders steal from our fuel, food and our supply.”
A police and army put up in overlooking the Arghandab valley in Afghanistan, Jan. 31, 2021. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
During an offensive within the fall, the Taliban took swathes of territory after which largely held their floor regardless of makes an attempt by the Afghan safety forces and U.S. airstrikes to dislodge them.
Taliban commanders advised tribal officers within the district that the rebel group intentionally stopped wanting taking Panjwai, mentioned Haji Mahmood Noor, the district’s mayor, as a result of they had been advised to attend and see how the subsequent section of peace negotiations performed out.

“When the trees turn green the situation will get worse,” Noor mentioned, referring to the spring, when the Taliban can transfer extra relaxed below the duvet of blooming foliage.
Store home windows shattered by a Taliban mortar within the Arghandab District of Afghanistan, Jan. 31, 2021. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
Panjwai’s close to collapse and the rising menace to Kandahar metropolis are partially the consequence of the loss of life in 2018 of Gen. Abdul Raziq, who had been the province’s police chief since 2011. Known for settling disputes with threats and bloody retribution, and accused of many human-rights abuses, Raziq additionally used his shut relationship with the U.S. army, to maintain Kandahar province largely safe for years.

After Raziq’s loss of life by the hands of a Taliban infiltrator, his brother, Gen. Tadeen Khan, was made a basic in a single day and took over as police chief, however his lack of army expertise meant he was largely disconnected and absent from his duties. As his officers taxed and abused their residents with little oversight, the Taliban solid alliances with native tribal management and paid low-level law enforcement officials to desert their posts earlier than their fall offensive, native and provincial officers mentioned.
Haji Mahmood Noor, the district mayor for Panjwai on the district governors workplace in Panjwai, Afghanistan, Jan. 30, 2021. (Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
When the Taliban pushed into the districts round Kandahar, the police put up little or no battle. Many outposts had been already barely staffed, Noor and different native officers mentioned. Some Afghan authorities officers disputed that accusation, saying they retreated in worry. Others mentioned they didn’t know why they retreated in any respect.
Tadeen rejected any accusations of corruption and abuse and denied that his police forces had been withering round Kandahar.
“The Taliban do not have more power,” he mentioned, from his well-guarded compound in Kandahar metropolis. “The Afghan forces can defend themselves.”
The deteriorating state of affairs in Kandahar is a broader reflection of safety across the nation. The Taliban have spent the previous months capturing army bases and police outposts and putting in freeway checkpoints close to capital cities in provinces comparable to Helmand and Uruzgan within the south, and Kunduz and Baghlan within the north.
Though Taliban techniques differ from area to area, the outcomes are often the identical: elevated taxation on highways, plummeting morale among the many Afghan safety forces with dwindling U.S. help and rising worry amongst these dwelling in once-secure areas.
The Taliban’s goal is to drive the Afghan authorities into complying with their phrases of peace. In Qatar, Taliban leaders have demanded the discharge of round 7,000 extra prisoners and the institution of an interim authorities, two requests that Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s president, has to this point refused.
“The Taliban seem to believe that applying this pressure, staging their fighters to potentially strike Kandahar and other urban centers, will pressure the U.S. to withdraw, or else,” Watkins mentioned. “The strategic logic might have the opposite effect.”
To put together for a potential multipronged assault ought to the United States keep past the May 1 deadline, the Pentagon has requested extra army choices — together with a rise of U.S. troops or a dedication of extra air help from U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations within the Middle East and Afghanistan, in accordance with two U.S. officers. Whether these requests will likely be granted relies on the Biden administration’s subsequent transfer, which it’s anticipated to be introduced in coming weeks upon finishing a evaluation of the present settlement in place with the Taliban.
The unrest has already delayed the handover of Kandahar Airfield, a sprawling U.S. base east of the capital, to Afghan forces in current months. For now, a small detachment of U.S. and NATO troops stay to help the struggling Afghan forces, in accordance with a U.S. army official.
With the police drive largely in smash, the Afghan military and commandos have moved into Kandahar, starting operations in November to retake territory that was then retaken by the Taliban. Commando officers mentioned their forces had been exhausted by frequent orders to fill in for his or her police counterparts.
In close by Arghandab District, the positioning of the Taliban’s northern offensive on Kandahar metropolis, military leaders and law enforcement officials say they’re severely understaffed and their pleas for help have gone unheeded by officers in Kabul.
One outpost was utilizing two armored automobiles possible left over from the Eighties Soviet invasion to defend in opposition to Taliban positions on the river banks beneath.
In December, practically 200 checkpoints in Kandahar had been deserted by the Afghan military, in accordance with a U.S. authorities watchdog report launched Feb. 1. The collapse of some army bases within the fall afforded the Taliban troves of army tools and ammunition, together with a number of items of heavy artillery.
Afghan safety forces are additionally contending with parts of a populace which have extra religion within the Taliban than within the authorities. In capturing new territory, the Taliban put in their very own administrative companies, defined Lal Mohammad, 23, a wheat and grape farmer who now lives behind the Taliban’s entrance line in Panjwai.
Insurgent fighters have smashed smartphones and banned music, imposed a curfew, dug defensive tunnels between individuals’s houses and used empty rooms in them as preventing positions. Roadside bombs are in every single place, he mentioned. But land disputes and petty crime are properly managed, in comparison with the Afghan authorities’s corrupt paperwork, mentioned Mohammad mentioned.
“People like it,” Mohammad mentioned, including that he simply desires somebody to take over Kandahar so individuals can get again to their lives.
These sentiments are frequent in additional rural areas of Afghanistan. But the Afghan authorities’s incompetence and widespread corruption have introduced that perspective to the doorstep of one of many nation’s most populated cities.
“The government,” Mohammad mentioned, “has failed.”