afghanistanworsened, and for many Afghans the conflict now seems to be endless as
well as irresolvable. Despite more than 100,000 foreign troops and billions
of dollars of military assistance from the world’s most powerful nations,
the Taliban and a plethora of other insurgent groups pose an increasing
threat to the government and are even more radicalized than they were
prior to September 2001. The best the Pentagon planners can now hope
for is that the government will hold on to the areas it currently controls.
Or, as John F. Sopko, Inspector General of sigar, remarked shortly after
President Donald Trump took office, ‘We may be defining success as the
absence of failure.’ 37
Viewed from August 2017, even this scenario is looking over -optimistic.
The Taliban are the de facto government in many rural districts and are
continuing to make substantial gains, not only in the Helmand and south-
ern provinces but in central and northern Afghanistan too. The Taliban,
supported by foreign jihadists, have twice overrun the city of Qunduz and
many settlements in southern Faryab, Sar-i Pul and northern Badghis are
out of government control, while Daesh has mounted a series of attacks
in Jaujan Ghur and Nangahar. In Helmand province Musa Qal‘a has
changed hands several times and Lashkargah, Girishk and other towns
are virtually under siege. The Taliban too have mounted a series of attacks
in Ghazni, Logar and Nangahar. In the spring of 2014 an al-Jazeera jour-
nalist filmed Taliban and local insurgents walking freely in the streets of
Charkh in the Logar within sight of the ana garrison, less than an hour’s
drive from Kabul.
In late 2016 Taliban suicide bombers even infiltrated the Bagram air
base and killed two u.s. soldiers and two American contractors. In the
spring of 2017 the Taliban killed at least 140 Afghan soldiers in the army
base in Mazar-i Sharif. Suicide attacks and car bombs are now almost a
weekly occurrence in Kabul, despite the capital being the most militarized
city in Afghanistan. In June 2017 a massive truck bomb exploded in Kabul’s
Shahr-i Nau, killing around 150 people and devastating the area around the
German, Iranian and Turkish embassies. Since 2016 attacks by insurgents
have also been marked by massacres, especially of Hazaras and Shi‘as. At
the time of writing insurgents control around 30 per cent of Afghanistan’s
rural districts, with another 11 per cent listed as ‘contested’. 38
The record of the ana and the police in countering insurgents’ attacks
is poor, to say the least. When the Taliban overran Qunduz in September
2015, the ana and local police fled, leaving former mujahidin commanders
to defend their settlements as best they could. In 2016 the Taliban stormed
a Hazara garrison in the Behsud district of Wardak, killing, mutilating and