Thread by @Iyervval

Thread
1 Been talking to friends in Kabul - Mazar & Herat. In Herat almost all my friends are Shia. They are safe, there have been no massacres/reprisals. It seems that several of the Talibanis patrolling are also Shia. In Mazar they’re telling me some folks have been picked up

https://twitter.com/Iyervval/status/1427179710128087045

2 folks who were apparently close to General Dostum, but some have been released. In Kabul the Taliban have already visited the home of two of my more visible friends - told them they know about their “collaboration” with the Americans but as long as they don’t make trouble

3 they’ll be fine. In short the Shia, the Uzbeks & westernised atheist youth in Kabul have not been purged yet. Will reprisals happen at a later stage? Possibly. But it’s not happening now. Kabul, except for the scenes at the airport is calm. People who want to leave are not

4 being blocked. However the real surprise for a coming from friends in Islamabad. They seem to believe the Taliban pulled a fast one in them. They’re still not able to comprehend how the TB seized control so rapidly without any significant help from them. As one colleague put it

5 “if the fighting had been bitter & we would’ve had to help them their dependence on us, would’ve given us leverage ….now we have extremely limited leverage”. Almost all seem convinced that this sudden collapse in the space of a week was “staged” as a kind of mutual

6 Taliban-Afg Government “fuck you” to Pakistan. As a rule since my Islamabad friends tend to be paranoid I wouldn’t have taken this seriously. However as satellite imagery is confirming - the actual battle damage of Afghan army Artillery & Armour is negligible.

7 that means the Afghan army wasn’t defeated… heck they didn’t even fight - they coordinated a laying down of arms after a few hours of firing in the air. Infrastructure & home damage is minimal to non-existent - hallmarks of a staged non-battle. If we were to assume a morale

8 collapse it begs the question, how does morale collapse so suddenly across several battlefront - separated from each other by hundreds of kilometres simultaneously? Moreover why hasn’t the Afghan airforce chosen not to fly its planes from one air base to another as they fell

9 sequentially? Why did they ensure these would fall into Taliban hands, when unlike ground troops they didn’t need “safe passage”?This simply isn’t adding up - the Americans don’t know what hit them, the Pakistanis don’t know what hit them & the Afghans sure as hell don’t know

10 what hit them. I guess with a bit of time & retrospect things will become clearer in the coming weeks.

11 btw when I say “situation at the airport” it’s like a few lakh people - the images don’t capture how many people have actually lined up outside in waves. Even Kabulis don’t seem to know how many - but the satellite images are scary