[The militants engage the former
officials Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, as well as Moscow, to seek help
in building an “inclusive” government while cementing their rule.]
By Roger Cohen
Little in the Taliban’s history
suggests readiness to compromise on their harsh Islamist principles or to share
power, but the United States has warned the militant group that going it alone
will result in continuous conflict and isolation. In this context, Mr. Karzai,
who led the county between 2001 and 2014, appears to have emerged as a possible
mediator.
Mr. Karzai, 63, a wily maneuverer
who as president fell out with the United States over American drone attacks,
corruption allegations and other issues, has stepped into the void left by the
flight a week ago of President Ashraf Ghani. He has met with Taliban leaders,
including Khalil Haqqani, who has been designated as a terrorist by the United
States, and is working closely with Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the former
Afghan’s government’s peace delegation.
A Taliban leader described as the
acting governor of Kabul, Mullah Abdul Rahman Mansour, talked over the weekend
with Mr. Karzai and Mr. Abdullah. A growing number of senior Taliban have been
seen in Kabul in recent days to discuss the shape of the next government, among
them Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s chief diplomat and a senior
official in the group’s government in the 1990s.
A deputy within the Taliban’s
cultural affairs committee, Ahmadullah Waseq, said Saturday that although the
Taliban officials were mostly talking among themselves to prepare for more
formal negotiations, “we will talk with other parties to form an inclusive
government acceptable to all Afghans.”
A delegation of Taliban leaders
also visited the Russian Embassy in Kabul, asking officials there to pass along
an offer of negotiations to a group of Afghan leaders holding out in northern
Afghanistan, the Russian ambassador, Dmitri Zhirnov, told a
Russian television interviewer on Saturday.
How the United States will view Mr.
Karzai’s re-emergence was unclear. So, too, was whether Afghans would
believe the
sudden professed moderation of the Taliban, whose oppression of women
and brutality have been hallmarks of their fundamentalism.
A week after the Taliban overran
the country and the two-decade long American attempt to shape a democratic
Afghanistan collapsed, there was no sign of any cabinet taking form.
Chaos still engulfed the nation’s
capital, a fiasco whose political fallout President Biden is struggling to
contain. In an afternoon news conference at the White House, Mr. Biden defended
the administration’s widely criticized evacuation effort.
“Altogether, we lifted
approximately 11,000 people out of Kabul in less than 36 hours,” he said. “It’s
an incredible operation.”
The president seemed to suggest
that the U.S. forces defending the Kabul airport were extending the security
perimeter, saying that the military has made “tactical changes” to increase
security. Mr. Biden also said that the Aug. 31 deadline for removing all
American troops could be extended if necessary.
Mr. Biden said he did not know
whether the Taliban could be trusted to form an “inclusive” government and rule
with greater moderation than in their first time in power. But he said that
they had “by and large” given Americans access to the airport, and that if they
wanted to govern Afghanistan effectively, they would need help from the United
States and other nations.
“The Taliban has to make a
fundamental decision,” he said. “Is the Taliban going to attempt to be able to
unite and provide for the well-being of the people of Afghanistan, which no one
group has ever done since before — for hundreds of years? And if it does, it’s
going to need everything from additional help in terms of economic assistance,
trade and a whole range of things.”
Mr. Biden has vowed to get every
American out of Afghanistan, though how many that may be is unknown.
“We cannot give you a precise
number,” Jake
Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, said on CNN’s “State of
the Union” on Sunday. In another interview, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he
estimated that “roughly a few thousand” Americans were trying to leave
Afghanistan.
Aside from American citizens, the
president has vowed to redouble efforts to save Afghans who worked with the
United States and are likely to be targeted by the Taliban.
The British Defense Ministry, which
has troops at the airport, said Sunday that seven Afghan civilians had died in
the crowds, where people
have been trampled to death, among them a 2-year-old girl. “Conditions on
the ground remain extremely challenging,” the ministry said.
In a phone interview, Jane Ferguson
of the PBS NewsHour, one of the few Western correspondents still in Kabul,
said: “The scenes are apocalyptic. People are fainting and dying. Children are
going missing.”
Every death at the Kabul airport,
every child with a teddy-bear backpack separated from a parent, every Afghan
supporter of the United States who is marooned, reinforces the impression of an
unplanned United States withdrawal that was too precipitous and based on a disastrous
misjudgment of the capacities of the American- and NATO-trained government
military forces. They simply melted away.
Violent scenes at the airport have
become grimly commonplace as Afghan desperation meets a dearth of flights and
American disarray as to how to deal with overwhelming demand for protection and
asylum.
In an effort to speed the
evacuation, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered six commercial
airlines to provide passenger jets to help with the growing U.S. military
operation evacuating
Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul, the Afghan capital, the Pentagon
said on Sunday.
Mr. Austin activated Stage 1 of the
Civil Reserve Air Fleet, created in 1952 after the Berlin airlift, to provide
airliners to help ferry passengers arriving at bases in the Middle East from
Afghanistan, John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.
The current activation is for 18
planes: four from United Airlines; three each from American Airlines, Atlas
Air, Delta Air Lines and Omni Air; and two from Hawaiian Airlines. The civilian
planes will not fly into or out of Kabul, where a rapidly deteriorating
security situation has hampered evacuation flights.
At Kabul airport, the presence of
Taliban fighters around the perimeter mingling with British and other Western
forces created an impression “like a very strange dream,” Ms. Ferguson said. It
underscored how, in a moment, with scarcely a shot fired, Afghanistan was lost,
the Taliban entered Kabul and the white flag of the Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan was hoisted.
Still, resistance remains among the
Afghan leaders who have taken refuge in the Panjshir Valley, a rugged gorge
where Afghan fighters resisted the Taliban for years during Afghanistan’s civil
war in the 1990s. Former Afghan officials put the number of fighters holed up
today in the Panjshir at 2,000 to 2,500 men, but they are isolated and lack
logistical support.
A former first vice president, Amrullah
Saleh, who is based there, now claims to be the “caretaker president” under
Afghanistan’s U.S.-brokered Constitution of 2004, because President Ghani has
fled the country. The Panjshiris have said they intend to resist a takeover of
the valley unless the Taliban agree to an inclusive government.
The Taliban’s request that Russia
mediate negotiations with the holdouts appeared to underscore America’s
weakening strategic position in Afghanistan. The Taliban has this year
intensified ties with the Kremlin as the pre-eminent
power in Central Asia.
Since being toppled in 2001, the
Taliban have gained diplomatic experience and are aware of how international
isolation crippled the economy in their previous rule from 1996 to 2001. Still,
any attempt to be “inclusive” will face opposition from hard-liners that even
Mr. Karzai will be hard-pressed to finesse.
If Mr. Karzai is perhaps less hated
by the Taliban than was his successor, Mr. Ghani, he is nonetheless regarded
with deep suspicion. Up to now there appears to be no reason to believe he has
made headway in his pursuit of a peaceful transition acceptable to a majority
of Afghans.
Reporting was contributed by Sharif
Hassan, Jim Huylebroek, Michael Shear, Andrew E. Kramer, Matthew Rosenberg and
Thomas Kaplan.