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2021-08-17 Afghanistan
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Afghanistan's Military Collapse: Illicit Deals And Mass Desertions
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[Stars & Stripes] The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan's military that has allowed Taliban fighters to reach the gates of Kabul on Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government's lowest ranking officials.
The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and U.S. official.
Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with over a dozen Afghan officers, police, Special Operations troops and other soldiers.
During just the past week, more than a dozen provincial capitals have fallen to Taliban forces with little or no resistance. Early Sunday morning, the government-held city of Jalalabad surrendered to the militants without a shot fired, and security forces in the districts ringing Kabul simply melted away. Within hours, Taliban forces reached the Afghan capital's four main entrances unopposed.
The pace of the military collapse has stunned many American officials and other foreign observers, forcing the U.S. government to dramatically accelerate efforts to remove personnel from its Kabul embassy.
The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban's approaches.
"Some just wanted the money," an Afghan Special Forces officer said of those who first agreed to meet with the Taliban. But others saw the U.S. commitment to a full withdrawal as an "assurance" the militants would return to power in Afghanistan and wanted to secure their place on the winning side, he said. The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he, like others in this report, were not authorized to disclose information to the press.
The Doha agreement, designed to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, instead left many Afghan forces demoralized, bringing into stark relief the corrupt impulses of many Afghan officials and their tenuous loyalty to the country's central government. Some police officers complained that they had not been paid in six months or more.
"They saw that document as the end," the officer said referring to the majority of Afghans aligned with the government. "The day the deal was signed we saw the change. Everyone was just looking out for himself. It was like (the United States) left us to fail."
The negotiated surrenders to the Taliban slowly gained pace in the months following the Doha deal, according to a U.S. official and an Afghan officer. Then, after President Joe Biden announced in April that U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan this summer without conditions, the capitulations began to snowball. 
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Posted by Glolet Sholuse9176 2021-08-17 00:00||
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Posted by Dron66046 2021-08-17 00:41||
2021-08-17 00:41||
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Posted by Procopius2k 2021-08-17 07:09||
2021-08-17 07:09||
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Posted by Airandee 2021-08-17 09:26||
2021-08-17 09:26||
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Posted by Anomalous Sources 2021-08-17 21:25||
2021-08-17 21:25||
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