The Taliban takeover and its implications for New Zealand – Stuff.co.nz

OPINION: If the fall of Kabul to the Taliban highlights anything, it is that successive American administrations since 9/11 have struggled to adapt US counter-terrorism policy to a post-Cold War security environment where the pattern of conflict goes beyond the confines of the state.

At the moment, the Biden administration finds itself taking much of blame for a devastating reverse in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic organisation that has had ties with terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State.

However, as President John F. Kennedy ruefully noted after the Bay of Pigs failure in 1961, victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.

The Talibans recapture of Afghanistan did not come out of a clear blue sky. It was at least 18 years in the making.

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Shortly after the 9/11 al Qaeda terror attacks in New York and Washington DC, a US-led coalition, which included New Zealand, launched its war on terror campaign in Afghanistan to decimate al Qaeda training camps there and destroy the Taliban regime that hosted them.

Almost immediately after 9/11, New Zealand deployed an elite Special Air Service (SAS) unit to Afghanistan.

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Kiwi troops patrolling a highway in Bamiyan province, Afghanistan, in 2009.

By late 2001, the Taliban was toppled and an interim Afghan administration under United Nations auspices paved the way for a new constitution and democratic elections.

In 2003, Helen Clarks Labour government dispatched a 140-strong New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) to the Bamiyan province in central part of the country.

It should be emphasised that multilateral co-operation played an important role in the early progress against al Qaeda and its Taliban allies, but the unilateral decision of the George W. Bush administration in March 2003 to lead a coalition of the willing to invade Iraq a state which had no connection to 9/11 and remove Saddam Husseins regime had disastrous long-term consequences.

Barry Iverson/The Life Images Co

The unilateral decision by the US to invade Iraq a state which had no connection to 9/11 and remove Saddam Husseins regime had disastrous long-term consequences, says Robert Patman.

Far from weakening global terrorism, the US invasion spawned a major insurgency in Iraq, provided a foothold for al Qaeda operatives in the country, fuelled anti-American sentiments in the Islamic world, and by 2006 directly contributed to a resurgence of Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the Afghanistan area.

President Barack Obama inherited two wars costing in excess of $3 trillion and largely financed by borrowing and the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. In specific terms, the Obama administration jettisoned the war on terror rhetoric, withdrew US combat troops from Iraq, and pursued an aggressive counterinsurgency effort against al Qaeda and the Taliban in their strongholds of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Despite killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, that administration was unable to break the resilience of the Taliban and also saw a significant widening of the terrorist threat with the rise of Islamic State (IS) during the Syrian civil war.

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Despite killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the Obama administration was unable to break the resilience of the Taliban.

New Zealands SAS unit was withdrawn from Kabul in 2012 and the Defence Force contingent was withdrawn from the Bamiyan PRT in 2013.

The Obama team envisaged a full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan but agreed in 2015 to delay that plan following a request from the then President Ashraf Ghani.

Condemning the Obama administrations approach to counterterrorism as weak, President Donald Trump pledged a drive against what he called Radical Islamic Terrorism, a term that appealed to anti-Muslim sentiments that surfaced in the US after 9/11.

Among other things, the Trump administration placed a travel ban on terror-prone Muslim majority states, oversaw the end of ISs territorial caliphate, backed Guantanamo Bay detention and torture, and signed a deal with the Taliban on February 29, 2020, without the consent of the Afghan government, for the complete withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan by May 2021.

Meanwhile, the six remaining NZDF personnel in Afghanistan were withdrawn four months ago to conclude what has been one of the longest-running military deployments in New Zealands history.

Rahmat Gul/AP

Taliban fighters patrol in Wazir Akbar Khan in the city of Kabul this week.

Thus, while the speed and ease of the Taliban victory in war-torn Afghanistan on August 15 shocked the Biden administration, it is clear that the US had not been prevailing for a long time in an $80 billion-plus counter-terrorism effort and that a number of US presidents had questioned its sustainability.

Recent events have prompted questions about the Defence Forces 20-year commitment to Afghanistan, costing an estimated NZ$300 million and 10 New Zealand lives.

It is claimed the NZDF should not be fighting other peoples wars, and that New Zealand only participated to please the US, a key partner in the intelligence-sharing arrangement known as the Five Eyes Alliance.

But the Clark government correctly recognised that 9/11 was a fundamental challenge to the international rules-based system on which New Zealand critically depends.

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Professor Robert Patman: The Taliban has to reckon with the fact Afghanistan is a very different country today from the one it previously ruled in 2001 ...

If New Zealand was simply in Afghanistan to win favour in Washington, it would have followed Australia and the UK in supporting the Bush administrations invasion of Iraq.

The Taliban has to reckon with the fact Afghanistan is a very different country today from the one it previously ruled in 2001 and New Zealand can take some satisfaction from the largely positive contribution it made in Bamiyan.

Nevertheless, the Taliban takeover is a major setback for international human rights and global security, and New Zealand and other like-minded small and middle powers will now have to look beyond the US and assume greater responsibility for safeguarding the rule of law globally from threats by Islamist or white supremacist terrorists.

Robert G. Patman is a Sesquicentennial Distinguished Chair and a specialist in International Relations at the University of Otago.

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The Taliban takeover and its implications for New Zealand - Stuff.co.nz