In the past several weeks, Afghanistan has been on fire. Civilians have been falling off planes as they desperately tried to escape the newfound Taliban’s grip on the government of Afghanistan. US troops have been frantically trying to escape doom and the country that they once came to help and protect. Worst of all, Afghanistan is now being run by the same terrorist organization that was behind the worst attack in US history which- ironically- happened exactly 20 years ago.
DC Insider spoke with David Des Roches, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Gulf International Forum, to understand what the aftermath of all the chaos in the country has meant to the Afghan casualties, for the Afghan civilians, and Afghanistan- as a whole.
DC Insider: ISIS-K claims full responsibility for several dead and many injured during the Jalabad blasts only days ago. Is ISIS-K the new Taliban? Taste of their own medicine?
Des Roches: “The Taliban is definitely getting a taste of their own medicine; there's no doubt about. The Taliban is trying to position themselves as the government of Afghanistan and ISIS-K is is a group that's more fundamentalist than the Taliban so they say that the Taliban are apostates and that they are not following the path of this ___ which is precisely what the Taliban used to say about the Afghan government. however ISIS-K seems to be somewhat limited in its progress so they’ve never really been successful at recruiting outside of the eastern provinces.. although they do have the ability to reach other places. But it is telling, the Taliban recognizes them as a threat when they took over the prison in Kabul, the only guy that they admitted to killing was the leader of ISIS-K so I think that the Taliban uses them as rivals, if not a threat.”
DC Insider: What happens to Biden?
Des Roches: “It took an immediate toll on him his approval record went went underwater for a while so there were more people that disapproved of him than have approved of him. But there's been a lot of other stories popping up since then… Biden is just barely in positive polling territory now which shows that he took a big hit and he wants to simply move on.”
DC Insider: None of the mainstream media seems to be covering the Americans that were left in Afghanistan, as much as they wanted and tried to escape. What happened to the many that were left behind- basically, for dead- in Afghanistan in the midst of one of the sloppiest evacuations?
Des Roches: “Folks in Afghanistan are hearing stories of people being hunted down, others having to move from house to house… We know that the Taliban have executed some people that they’ve caught who have previously worked in positions of authority in the former regime or who they accuse of working with the Americans. I think that life is going to be very difficult for these folks and if they worked in security services in the former regime or if they are a woman who has the audacity to insist on learning, they’re going to find that their lives are in peril… I don't think it's going to be a good thing at all.”
DC Insider: A couple weeks ago, the Taliban stated that the “war was over.” Biden followed suit and stated that the US “had ended 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan.” Is there any truth to any of this or is it simply bad theatrics and misleading rhetoric?
Des Roches: “Well there are there are soldiers in Syria right now who are [still] getting paid combat pay, meaning that they are [still] legally classified as being in combat. we still have a substantial number of forces that are drawing combat pay in the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Djibouti, and many more.. If you're in the combat zone, you get paid an additional tax-free allowance which basically recognizes that you're there and is designed to compensate you for that.”
DC Insider: During the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. headquarters in New York on Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021, would you say that President Biden defended the conclusion of the Afghan war?
Des Roches: “there's no doubt… He has ended the American involvement in Afghanistan, at least for now and there's no doubt about that. All along, him and his backers have portrayed this as decisiveness or as picking the harder politically inexpedient right choice over the politically easier, yet more popular, wrong choice. He will continue to do that, I believe.”
DC Insider: Is Taliban a possible threat to the US?
Des Roches: “Not so much the Taliban, but the Taliban’s allies in Al-Qaeda. So far, there really hasn't been a whole lot of disengagement between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. [The truth is that] in some areas, they are complicit with Al-Qaeda… In other areas, they probably don’t have enough control to prevent Al-Qaeda from re-establishing itself. The Taliban running Afghanistan is something that all of the regional powers and all of the Western powers are greatly concerned about and I think that they have the right to be concerned about it.”
DC Insider: Was it a last resort to put the power in the hands of the Taliban?
Des Roches: “The US didn’t think it was putting power in the hands of the Taliban… We thought we were putting power in the hands of the Afghan government. I was just shocked at how vast and how quickly they folded and how they did it without a fight and in a lot of areas.”
DC Insider: What's next for Afghanistan?
Des Roches: “Honestly, I don't think it's a good thing… I think what's going to happen is poverty, famine, international isolation and then I think we’ll be at a place in which the Taliban will do what they've always done… they’ll continue to be regressive and repressive, they will crack down on the rights of women and religious minorities and then they'll say, “oh, world community, you have to feed our people” and I think that there will be a lot of grief over that and I think that the people who always lose the most when you have all of this sort of stuff going on are going to be the poor and disenfranchised.
DC Insider: How will Biden’s move affect his presidency?
Des Roches: “That’s a good question. I think it’s going to damage it. The president can’t get anything done if he doesn’t get the cooperation of Congress and his control over Congress is razor thin. Most people in Washington think that he’s going to completely lose control over Congress by the next election if this infrastructure bill doesn't pass and isn’t seen as a big thing and then, he doesn’t have a whole lot of legacy except for not being Donald Trump.”
