OPINION:
The Afghan government recently announced that its forces had withdrawn from the Bala Murghab district center in the remote Afghan province of Badghis and ceded it to the Taliban.
Most Americans have not heard of it, but the district represents a microcosm of what is happening in Afghanistan today. I was surprised by the news; not that the district had fallen, but that it had not happened earlier. From November 2011 to August 2012, I was the leader of an interagency District Support Team in Bala Murghab. I had enjoyed some success with the civil side of counterinsurgency in Iraq and hoped to apply that in Bala Murghab, but I soon found that the situations were vastly different.
The Murghab River Valley in Afghanistan is a remote area near the Turkmenistan border. It is the only Pashtun-dominated area of northwestern Afghanistan as it was ethnically cleansed and repopulated by Pashtuns as a security measure by Afghanistan’s Iron Emir early in the last century. The district’s river valley is isolated and can only be militarily accessed by helicopter or parachute delivered air drops.
The military portion of the NATO coalition that was assigned the mission of securing the Bala Murghab district included a U.S. Marine Special Operations team, an Italian alpine unit and a U.S. Army communications and logistics unit that were partnered with and mentoring an Afghan Army battalion (Kandak). NATO and Afghan forces had fought hard to drive the Taliban out of the district’s administrative center. By the time I arrived, they had created a security bubble about 10 miles along the valley north and south of the town.
However, it soon became obvious that winning the proverbial “hearts and minds” of the population would be much more difficult than what I had experienced in Iraq. Like much of rural Afghanistan, the Murghab River valley was living in the 14th century. There was no electricity, and no roads connected it with Kabul.
Landline phone service was non-existent and cellphone connectivity spotty at best. Consequently, the central government was hard pressed in delivering goods and services to the area absent NATO assistance. Fortunately, the valley is lush and relatively self-sufficient. Farmers were also making a side living growing poppies with seeds provided by the Taliban. American-driven Kabul government efforts to eradicate the poppy crops did nothing to win over the civilians.
A second problem was that the Pashtun population was highly conservative; and government attempts to get girls to go to school and engage women in civil society were met with suspicion, if not outright hostility. The general attitude was that the residents would accept any free stuff that the government gave them, but that most people just wanted to be left alone.
However, we made some progress in 10 months. We managed to clean up the highly corrupt national police force garrison, and to get the schools up and running. We were able to get a mobile training team in to give some professional entoring to the local judges and prosecutors.
The army psychological warfare team set up a local radio station that we hoped to transition to civilian control eventually and handed out hand crank-powered receivers to a large portion of the population. I believed that — if the national ring road could be completed in the district — that Bala Murghab could be held by the government if NATO development efforts could be continued for 18 months. That did not happen.
By late 2012, the Obama administration had made the decision that Bala Murghab’s security would be handed over entirely to the Afghans and that NATO military would be redeployed in early September. Our joint local civil-military assessment was that, without the Ring Road, the Kandak’s position was untenable. Near immediately after we withdrew, the security bubble collapsed to the limits of the district center and the Kandak commander cut a live-and-let-live deal with the local Taliban. That deal apparently held until the government decided to cut its losses in February and cede the district to Taliban control.
That is what is happening in much of rural Afghanistan today, but that does not mean the nation is lost to the Taliban. Bala Murghab is typical of the Pashtun-dominated rural areas of Afghanistan, but the bulk of the population lies in the urban areas and their suburbs. They want no part of Taliban rule. Consequently, the Biden administration’s suggestion of power sharing between the Kabul government is merely a recognition of ground truth.
• Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel who lectures on wargaming and alternative analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
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