European NATO leaders also blamed for Kabul debacle | Voice of America

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U.S. officials aren’t the only ones to be blamed for miscalculating the speed of the Taliban offensive. European leaders and their security advisers are also increasingly criticized for misjudging how quickly events would unfold in Afghanistan once President Joe Biden decides to withdraw US forces from the Central Asian country.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his top ministers are accused by their own party lawmakers as well as opposition politicians of failing to prepare evacuation plans ahead of a possible Taliban push when US and NATO troops were withdrawing.

With complaints hovering over the apparent lack of preparation for the evacuation and amid chaotic scenes at Kabul airport, a senior official in Johnson’s ruling Conservative Party, Tobias Ellwood, former British Defense Minister, spoke out. complained on Saturday about the lack of coordination between NATO governments.

Ellwood questioned the global thinking that NATO forces withdrew prior to the evacuation of the Afghan civilians they needed to get out. You don’t get your soldiers out first, you get the civilians out, then you fall back? he told “Times Radio”, a British station. We did it the other way around.

“Incompetence. Bad judgment. Lack of preparation. Opposed. Confusion. Complacency. Delay, such was the editorial judgment Sunday of the Britains Observer newspaper on what took place at Kabul airport, continuing chaos.

Pressure is mounting on UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to step down from running the UK evacuation program, lawmakers furious that he stayed on holiday with his family in Crete last week as the Taliban entered Kabul. Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told the BBC that Raab’s absence showed a lack of ministerial urgency.

Keir Starmer, leader of Britain’s main opposition Labor Party, said on Sunday that Boris Johnson’s government response was characterized by utter and utter complacency from start to finish.

Merkel under fire

Also in Germany, which withdrew its last contingent of around 570 troops from Afghanistan in June, Chancellor Angela Merkels’ government also faces a storm of criticism for not finalizing before the fall of evacuation plans for Kabul for Afghans who worked with German forces.

German soldiers line up for the last call in front of a Bundeswehr Airbus A400M cargo plane after returning from Afghanistan to Wunstorf airfield, Germany on June 30, 2021. (Hauke-Christian Dittrich / Pool via Reuters)

Senior German officials began discussing what to do with local hires, including translators, drivers and cooks, according to Der Spiegel magazine, but for weeks they were out of business. agreement on who deserved to be evacuated, whether it was the 50,000 Afghans who had worked for the German Military Mission since 2013 or just those who had worked the last two years.

There have been disputes for months over whether regular flights out of Kabul should be used, with evacuees paying for themselves, or whether the German government should arrange charter flights, according to meeting minutes viewed by Der Spiegel.

At various times over the past two months, as more towns and districts fell to the Taliban at an accelerating rate and Islamists moved closer to the Afghan capital, calls were made for Chancellor Merkel to intervene in inter-agency disputes.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel holds a protective mask during a press conference on current developments in Afghanistan at Chancellery in Berlin, Germany August 16, 2021 Odd Andersen / Pool via REUTERS

Four weeks ago, when half of Afghanistan had already fallen under Taliban control, lawmakers, from both government and opposition parties, sent a joint letter to Merkel asking her to finalize evacuation plans. We are launching an urgent appeal and therefore publicly because time is running out and Germany risks betraying its commitments to local hires in Afghanistan, they wrote.

Calculation errors

The inability to finalize evacuation plans is attributed to a miscalculation also made in Washington at the speed of the Taliban offensive as well as errors in judgment on when the Afghan government and army might. to give up. Like their American counterparts, European intelligence and security agencies believed they had more time.

Two weeks ago, General Nick Carter, the British Chief of Defense Staff, wrote in an article in The Times that it was far too early to deregister the country. There are more and more signs that the population is rallying to challenge, he said. At the end of July, the German intelligence service, commonly known by its German acronym BND, also suggested a much longer timeframe for a Taliban victory, saying it would take around three months, according to German media.

German intelligence officials predicted that Taliban fighters would besiege Kabul until the government surrendered. They were not counting on the sudden flight of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Forty-eight hours before the Taliban took over Kabul with barely a shot, the BND changed its mind but predicted that the capital would not fall until September 11.

Intel failures

One of the main reasons for the miscalculation is that the BND, like other Western intelligence agencies, apparently failed to adopt an infiltration strategy that the Taliban had launched months earlier consisting of move fighters stealthily into position in key cities ready to emerge in case of need, concede some European soldiers. officials speaking, on condition of anonymity, with VOA. In many cities, including Kabul, Taliban fighters were already on the ground.

And in some cases, in the ranks of the Afghan national army, explains Ali Nazari, spokesman for Ahmad Massoud, the son of a charismatic warlord assassinated by al-Qaeda, who forms a nascent anti-Taliban movement. in the mountainous region of Panjshir. . He says that the impression given by some Western reports of a Taliban blitzkrieg rolling through Afghanistan is false.

FILE – Afghan National Army commandos stand guard along a road amid ongoing fighting between the Taliban and Afghan security forces in the Enjil district of Herat province on August 1, 2021 .

There were a lot of Taliban loyalists in the military, a lot of sympathizers and supporters, he told VOA. They just surrendered to the Taliban. There was a conspiracy within the army itself, he adds.

Western intelligence agencies were also not fully aware, officials said, of the rapid progress the Taliban had made in the strike since May’s surrender agreements with local tribal chiefs and warlords as well as some. leaders of Afghan ethnic minorities, including the country of Hazara, which has long faced violent persecution by the Taliban for their ethnicity and membership of Shia Muslims.

Another factor has been the inability to appreciate the emptiness of the Afghan government and the demoralization of the country’s national army, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas admitted last week. There is no need to talk about it. All of us – the federal government, the intelligence services and the international community – have misjudged the situation, Maas said at a press conference in Berlin.

The Taliban are also surprised

In defense of Western, American and European officials, Taliban leaders also seem to have been taken aback by the ten days that shook the world. They, too, had not anticipated such rapid success with their two-month foreign military strategy, which saw them slowly tighten their grip on rural districts before securing regional capitals.

FILE – Taliban fighters fly their flag on patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 19, 2021.

It’s an unexpected victory, Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the Taliban’s leaders, said in a video message last week. Taliban leaders had negotiated a transitional agreement with Afghan President Ghani that would have delayed their entry into Kabul, notes Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, a research institute in Washington DC.

The Taliban were delighted with this as they did not believe they had the capacity to immediately take control of the city, Nasr, former US State Department senior adviser on Afghanistan, said in an online discussion hosted by the Asia Society, a global non-profit organization.

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