When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021 prompting the sudden and dramatic exit of the US military, Donald Trump blamed Joe Biden for the “disaster” and Biden, in turn, criticised the Afghan military for giving so easily.
Now, an investigative report by the New York Times has found that Washington had laid the groundwork for “its defeat long before the Afghan soldiers laid down their arms.”
The report claims that America had been recruiting, training and paying militias to help its forces fight off the Taliban as they inched closer to taking over Afghanistan. However, these militias were known for torturing innocent Afghan people by killing them in vendetta, razing entire villages and kidnapping them for ransom.
Northern Afghanistan, which was the first to fall, was the region where these hirings began. NYT conducted over 50 interviews in Kunduz that show ” how American support for the militias spelled disaster, not just in the province but also across the rest of northern
Afghanistan.”
How the militias grew in power
The US had started recruiting militias during the early years of its war in Afghanistan. It planned to capitalise on local resistance to the Taliban by training groups of men and often creating armed forces under the garb of police.
Most of these efforts proved problematic. Militias quickly became too powerful to disarm. Although they fought against the Taliban, they spent even more time battling one another, creating the chaotic civil war conditions that had originally enabled the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s.
Frustrated by the predatory behaviour of these militias, some Afghans began viewing the Taliban as protectors and eventually joined the insurgency.
Content retrieved from: https://www.firstpost.com/world/why-afghanistan-fell-to-taliban-so-swiftly-america-hired-militias-says-report-13847458.html.
