“I’m smoking too much these days. I used to smoke a pack a week and now I smoke half a day”, confesses Bill Roggio, director of Long War Journal, a publication of the think tank Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD) on the war against terrorism with a special focus on Afghanistan. Through its maps, the publication has served as a source for consulting the advance of the Taliban in a multitude of international media.
Roggio has been monitoring Taliban and al-Qaeda activity in Afghanistan for years, and now closely follows the latest news coming out of Afghanistan. Roggio served in the U.S. Army from ’91 to ’97 and was subsequently embedded as a journalist with several armies in various international conflicts, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
The analyst details the mistakes of the last four U.S. administrations, explains the collapse of the Afghan Army and analyzes the Taliban strategy and the future of the resistance.
He has followed the Taliban for years. After your first press conference and other statements showing a more moderate face, would you say they have changed?
The Taliban have changed, but not in the way people expect. It is still a brutal, repressive and totalitarian regime, but what has changed is that it has become more politically savvy and has an effective and sophisticated media campaign that is able to fool naive Western reporters and politicians.
In fact, the latest UN monitoring report says that the Taliban still has links to Al Qaeda.
That’s something my colleague Tom Joscelyn and I have covered and documented for years and the UN is right. The links between al Qaeda and the Taliban are as strong today as they have ever been. Al Qaeda has played a key role in this offensive, especially in the north, where it has helped regional jihadist groups integrate with the Taliban to enhance their fighting power and to reach out to communities in the north.is Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen.
This is another issue on which the Taliban have managed to deceive Western officials and some journalists. They say they will not allow their territory to be used to carry out attacks against the West, but that is the same lie they told before 9/11.
Will Afghanistan again become a threat to the rest of the world in terms of terrorism?
That threat never went away. Al Qaeda has always been there fighting alongside the Taliban. In recent years, even after the US-Taliban agreement [of February 2020], US and Afghan forces have killed several senior al-Qaeda leaders, including a member of the central shura who was the editor of al-Sahab, their main media outlet.
Biden has blamed the Taliban victory on the Afghan army for an unwillingness to fight, but various estimates put the number of police and army officers killed during the war at more than 60,000 – what do you make of that claim?
President Biden has left the Afghan people, the military and their former president in the lurch. It is shameful. The Afghan Army has proven itself unequal to the defense of the country, but it has made sacrifices. Tens of thousands of people have died fighting the Taliban, who emptied and weakened the Afghan army before this offensive began.
The Afghan military and security forces were demoralized by the announcement of the Doha deal with the Taliban under President Trump and then by President Biden’s withdrawal. Biden shares the blame for this and it is shameful for him to speak that way about an ally who made great sacrifices to help make Afghanistan less of a threat to the West.
The president also said that the military was as strong and capable as any other military in the world. Was that a political statement or was it really a bad intelligence assessment?
One of the biggest problems that we’ve had in Afghanistan is not understanding theThe Taliban and their maximalist goal of re-establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. We thought that there was a peace to be achieved and that there was no military solution when they did have a military solution.
This has been a huge intelligence failure on many levels and this is one of them. The United States has been unable to properly assess the Afghan Army and its combat capability. On the other hand, perhaps they also did not care about the possibility of collapse because they expected a political solution to be reached between the two sides when there really was none.
And why was the Afghan Army’s defeat so rapid?
In 2014, when the US transferred security to the Afghan Army, meaning that they would be the ones doing the ground operations with US and NATO support, the Taliban’s strategy was to take control of the rural areas and then use that power to expand.
Meanwhile, the strategy of the United States, NATO and the Afghan government was to defend the cities and ignore the rural areas, which they said were not important because they controlled the bulk of the population. That played into the hands of the Taliban, who were intact in these areas and expanded their influence. They even entered cities twice.
The U.S. commanders dismissed this and instead of realizing that they had a problem in the rural areas that had to be solved, what they did was to redouble their talks with the Taliban. General Miller [the last US commander in Afghanistan] literally said that the real sign of success was not the military situation, but the state of the negotiations. Meanwhile, Afghan forces were under siege by the Taliban, who were weakening the army in those contested areas.
The day before President Biden gave his speech announcing the withdrawal in April, the Taliban controlled 73 districts and contested 210 out of a total of 407. By the end of June, the Taliban controlled more than 220 districts and the number of contested districts dropped to about 100. I would say that the Afghan Army was defeated even before the Taliban launched their offensive. It was a matter of the Taliban flipping the switch and going on the offensive. By the end of July, the Taliban controlled some 230 districts and then shifted their focus to the cities. On August 5, the first city fell and the rest fell like dominoes.
The offensive was clear from May, could the US have done anything then?
What would have been needed is for President Biden to renounce his withdrawal policy, and he wasn’t going to do that. An immediate change would have been necessary within a month. The US would have had to deploy combat forces and launch a massive air campaign against the Taliban. That’s the only thing that probably would have stopped this.
What future do you see for the resistance organized in the Panjshir Valley and led by Vice President Amrullah Saleh?
Saleh is a leader and Panjshir has historically always been a bastion of resistance to the Taliban. He has significant challenges ahead of him. First of all, he is isolated. It is an island in a Taliban sea. Secondly, the supply lines have been cut off. Right now it has the war materiel for the short term. I’m sure Panjshir was probably prepared and stockpiled materiel as the rest of the country fell, but at some point things like fuel, ammunition, spare parts… and it will diminish the ability, for example, to be able to fly whatever helicopters and planes they have. Moreover, it has no external support at the moment, least of all from the US, which is approaching the Taliban to evacuate its personnel.
It will also be important what the Russians will do and that will dictate the behaviour of the Istani, especially Tajikistan. Saleh and the Panjshir resistance are mainly Tajik. Before September 11, 2001, Panjshir and Badakhshan were the only provinces controlled by the Northern Alliance – the anti-Taliban coalition. Badakhshan was the headquarters of the Northern Alliance and is now under Taliban control, but there are doubts about how well garrisoned it is by the fundamentalists, so Saleh could take advantage.
As the former head of the intelligence services, Saleh also has contacts throughout the country. There are tens of thousands of soldiers and intelligence personnel who are putting their necks on the line. The Taliban are hunting some of them, but these people can give Saleh a lifeline. Saleh has the ability to reach out to them and try to organize them, but it’s a complicated task.
For the Taliban, crushing him should be their top priority, even before securing their hold on Kabul because any hint of resistance is a direct threat to their ability to take total control of the country.
He argues that the US agreement with the Taliban signed by the Trump Administration was a terrible mistake Why?
It legitimized the Taliban and delegitimized the Afghan government. It showed the Afghan people, the military and the government that the U.S. was no longer on their side and gave the Taliban the right to control the country.The US was confident that, once the US began to withdraw, it would be able to implement its final strategy to retake Afghanistan.
From the US point of view, we’ve had three administrations in a row whose primary objective has been to get out of Afghanistan. What the last two administrations, the Trump and Biden administrations, did was try to buy time, as in Vietnam. They hoped that the Afghan government could fight for years and then point the finger at them without there being a direct line between withdrawal and the collapse of the government. That deal failed because by the time President Biden announced the withdrawal, the Taliban were already on their way to Kabul.
Did the deal tie Biden’s hands as the president argues?
He was not bound by the agreement. It was not a treaty ratified by Congress. He has to take responsibility for his decision. This decision is his decision. He could have dismissed Trump’s bad deal, which he admits it was Why as president of the United States would you adhere to a deal that you consider bad and has no binding legal authority? It’s cynical of Biden to blame his predecessor for a decision that is his own. He has had seven months to develop his strategy.
He also criticizes the troop surge ordered by Obama at the time, why?
The surge was flawed for multiple reasons. It did not address the threat from Pakistan, which was the Taliban’s safe haven. It also set a time limit and did not address the situation against the Taliban throughout the country, but focused on the south. He said that the troop surge would end in 18 months, so he sends the message to the Taliban that they just have to hold on.
During this period of time more American soldiers were killed than in the rest of the war in Afghanistan. Anyone with half a brain would have known it was destined to fail.
We’ve gone over the failures of Biden, Trump and Obama What about the Bush Administration – any big mistakes in their Afghan strategy?
The Bush Administration’s failure was to form the wrong Afghan government and build the wrong Afghan army. It needed a government for Afghanistan and not a Western-style government. It needed an army for Afghanistan, not a Western Afghan army. It did not need a centralized, hierarchical government like we have in the West, but it needed a more flexible federal government, probably led by someone respected by all who would devolve power to the provinces.
For their part, the military was to be organized in a similar way. A sort of National Guard for the provinces where you have the locals fighting for their homes and their areas. Then there could be regional commands to support the provinces, and finally a centralized military command that could support the regions. Kind of like a strategic reserve army.
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