Thread by @theHessam

This past weekend, I re-read “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes” by @Anand_Gopal_ for the 2nd time.

What an amazing and insightful book. Here is one of the most eye-opening things I learned from it: 🧵

Within months after the US-led invasion in 2001, the Taliban effectively vanished. Al-Qaeda leaders fled to Pakistan, but the Taliban - realizing they had no chance of victory - accepted the new order. They acknowledged Karzai as interim president, surrendered arms, and ...

retreated from politics with no plans to return. They even denounced fund-raising efforts by religious clerics in Pakistan to revive the Taliban. It wasn’t a just scheme to hold-out in hiding. They genuinely ceased to exist.

So what led to revival of Taliban several years later?

Here was the dilemma. The US was there to "fight terrorism". But without the Taliban or AlQaeda there, there was no enemy. They needed targets to bomb, homes to raid, and people to imprison. This created an incentive for local politicians to “create enemies where there were none”

...and report their political rivals to US intelligence branding them as terrorists. These false intelligence reports were typically rewarded with money, business contracts, and more access to American troops which meant more political power to wield US military in their favor.

In one telling case, January 2002, two competing political groups of pro-American Afghan political officials were simultaneously massacred, arrested, and tortured by US marines. Each group had falsely tipped off the Americans, portraying the other group as Talibs.

Soon Afghanistan was riddled with a bunch of regional repressive strongmen, like Gul Agha Sherzai and Jan Mohammad Khan, who fed their enemies and dissidents to the target-hungry American war machine and buffed up their own private militia with US dollars.

Things were different in places with less US military presence. In northern Afghanistan or Istalif, for example, political rivals could not call in US troops to settle their feuds. American troops in the south brought instability, violence, and cycles of revenge.

US troops raided homes and detained and tortured village elders and tribal leaders, many of whom were sympathetic to the US. This violence had nothing to do with the Taliban and everything to do with local politics which grew more sectarian in such circumstances.

Many of the pre-Taliban war criminals had rose to power again, with full US backing, pretending to fight terrorists. Police forces morphed into the same militias and gangs of the civil war days. They'd ransack shops and homes, loot travelers, and in some cases rape and murder.

It was in this atmosphere of resentment and that the Taliban re-emerged in 2004 and grew in the years to come.

The repression led to more resentment. The resentment led some to seek revenge against the US and Afghan government by joining the Taliban.

The book covers the story of a former Talib that renounced all former ties with the group and set up a local business. Police repeatedly beat him, threatened him with torture and took all his savings. He and his fellow villagers ultimately joined the Taliban.

The resurgence of the Taliban made the US even more dependent on private Afghan militiamen (which ironically would sometimes pay the Taliban to withhold their attacks - meaning that the US indirectly paid the Taliban for security).

The Taliban are in power today, not "despite 20 years of US presence", but precisely because of the form of US presence and the political order that ensued. It is a mess we created, not one that we failed to fix out of incompetency or lack of resources.

Here is the Farsi version of the thread:

https://twitter.com/hessamBeFarsi/status/1427603563388325901