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Leaving Afghanistan

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Special report by Andrew Quilty

KABUL — On Friday, 2 July, the last US aircraft departed Bagram Airfield, the largest American military base in Afghanistan.

The Americans departed with little notice or ceremony, perhaps concerned that what many perceive as abandonment of their Afghan allies might attract the kind of insider attack that plagued international forces during the height of the war around 2010. At the time of writing, only US, British and Turkish troops remained in the country. The final 80 Australian troops, the majority of whom had been providing military officer training at a base on the outskirts of Kabul, departed before the end of June.

Outside the fortified compounds of Kabul and Bagram, Afghan security forces have been routed in recent weeks by an ascendant Taliban.

In April, US President Biden announced the country’s final military withdrawal would begin 1 May. Since then, more than 100 of Afghanistan’s approximately 400 district centres have fallen under the control of the insurgents. The figures are especially concerning for the Afghan government because of the way that control has at times been ceded. There have been numerous reported instances of Afghan government forces—often besieged and out of ammunition, food and water—surrendering. With the surrenders come weapons, ammunition and fleets of armoured vehicles.

While government special forces have wrested back a handful of the districts, military momentum is undoubtedly in the Taliban’s favor. The majority of territory overrun by the insurgents has not been in the country’s south, where the movement began in the 1990s, however, but in the north, where the strongest resistance came during their reign between 1996 and 2001 and from where the US departments of State and Defense sourced the majority of their anti-Taliban allies after the 2001 invasion.

Peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the beginning of which, the US claimed, was required in order to ensure the withdrawal of international forces, have gone nowhere. Moreover, Kabul, now almost entirely bereft of US military support, has little leverage with which to pressure the Taliban at the increasingly irrelevant negotiating table

And so, once again, Afghanistan is left in a state of deep distress amid the actions of a foreign power. Fifty kilometres north of Kabul, Bagram Airfield speaks to this tragic history repeating itself.

BAF, as it is known to service men and women, was the nerve centre of US special forces-led counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakisan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The prison housed within became synonymous with the abuse and torture of Taliban detainees and those from transnational terror groups by US military and intelligence agencies.

Razed during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, the base was rebuilt by the US military following the attacks of 11 September 2001. But the base is far older: it was originally established by the Soviet Army in the 1950s.

 

From the archives

Asia matters

Anjan Sundaram

The Black Lives Matter movement has people across the world questioning their identity and history—asking who wrote their history, and whether they must now participate in creating history’s next iteration.

Unravelling identities involves pain—we all, to a degree, grow comfortable with our power or lack of it. And to succeed we learn to mimic the powerful. In the twenty-first century, to a degree, many people of colour have learned to become white.

It is common for those claiming to break free of their own shackles to become the new oppressors. They take the place of the powerful and leave the system that oppressed them largely untouched. It is as though the desire to be white stubbornly remains. And many revolutions fail for this precise reason—for a lack of imagination. For liberation is not only overthrow of the powerful; it requires a psychological examination and new creation. If the models of success and power that we know are Western, we are required to imagine something other than now arriving at ‘our turn to eat’.

Read more here

 

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We can’t get enough of Campuccino, a sharp, incisive and punchy newsletter about Cambodia. Every fortnight, Darathtey Din breaks down the major headlines in Cambodia, spicing it up with lesser told stories, cool images and funny tweets. An absolute must-read for anyone with even the vaguest interest in the Kingdom of Wonder. Check out past issues here

 

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