A little less than two years ago the Taliban was a fragmented — albeit lethal — collection of competing interests, a group at war with itself as often as it was at war with the Afghan government.
It had been beaten down by nearly two decades of war and stumbled along following the death of its infamous leader Mullah Omar.
That was then, this is now.
Today’s Taliban — the juggernaut which has swept across much of northern, western and southern Afghanistan this summer — is a cohesive, well-organized insurgency that in the opinion of some experts could only have had its fractured parts bolted back together with outside help.
The breathless collapse in recent days of provincial capitals — including the southern city of Kandahar where so much Canadian blood and treasure was spilled — may have come as a shock to many Western nations.
In many ways, it does not surprise those who are steeped in the shifting politics and alliances of Afghan tribal culture.
‘The New Taliban’
Sean Maloney, a professor of history at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont., has taken to calling them “The New Taliban” — a sophisticated, vicious force with 40 per cent of its ranks filled with foreign fighters, he estimates.
Many of the Afghan troops who’ve encountered the Taliban 2.0 have noticed that they are not the traditional Pashtuns who filled the original militant ranks, but include many Urdu speakers among the insurgents. Urdu is a language more common to Pakistan and northern India.
Farnaz, age 7, stands inside a tent at a makeshift camp in Kabul. Afghans from rural areas have been seeking refuge in the city as the Taliban sweeps across the country. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
“There’s no way, I believe, the disparate elements inside Afghanistan worked together to create this coalition we’re confronted with right now,” said Maloney, who served as an expert adviser on Afghanistan to the commander of the Canadian Army. “There had to be external support for that.”
Perhaps more significantly, the melting away of NATO-trained Afghan National Army units, especially in Kandahar, is likely being driven by the complex web of tribal politics and allegiances – something Western military commanders struggled to understand and appreciate through nearly two decades, said Maloney.
Some of the more important tribes who could have stood in the way of the Taliban have declared themselves neutral and that could have only been achieved through negotiation and perhaps even buying them off ahead of time.
“They had to do months of preparation to get some of that,” said Maloney. “This isn’t like some Nazi blitzkrieg in the same way, with tanks overrunning everything. There had to be significant preparations for this.”
Pashtun tribes always back a winner — someone that looks like a winner, he said.
Dwindling number of options
One tribe apparently sitting on the sidelines is the Popalzai, which counts former Afghan president Hamid Karzai among its luminaries.
Maloney said he’s mystified as to how the current Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, did not see this coming nor attempted to counter it.
Maloney said he does not see a military option for Ghani to turn the crisis around, especially since the Taliban has captured vast swathes in the north, which remained unconquered when the militant group ran the country in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
That region acted as a springboard for the U.S-led invasion of 2001 and eventual ouster of the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks.
Retired lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie, who served as NATO commander in Afghanistan and as the head of the Canadian Army over a decade ago, said the withdrawal of U.S. forces, particularly the loss of air support, was also a contributing factor in the swift decline of the Afghan army.
Afghan troops being mentored by Canadian soldiers study map reading in the field during an operation to clear the Taliban from Adamzai, a village south of Kandahar City in the spring of 2010. (Murray Brewster/The Canadian Press)
“If you take away the final element of international support from soldiers and air power, then the Afghan soldiers might well lose hope,” said Leslie. “And I suspect and submit that’s exactly what’s happened, which destroyed their will to resist.”
The departure of U.S. troops was the centrepiece of a deal reached between former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration and the Taliban, which has from the outset demanded the withdrawal of all foreign forces before it would talk to the Afghan government.
Peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Ghani government have puttered along with no substantial progress for a year.
U.S. leaving without a ‘credible peace plan’
The new U.S. administration under President Joe Biden promised to live up to the terms, guaranteeing the last remaining American and NATO troops would be gone by Sept. 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of the attacks that drew the U.S. into Afghanistan in the first place.
Anthony Cordesman, one of the world’s leading experts on Afghanistan at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said both administrations had access to the classified intelligence about the Afghan government’s weakness and the reconstitution of the Taliban.
In a report published last week, he argued they had to know this was coming.
“Both the Trump and Biden administrations seem to have used peace negotiations as a political cover for withdrawal, and they did so without ever advancing any credible peace plan and with no real peace negotiations taking place,” Cordesman wrote.
“Both administrations should clearly have seen the probable consequences and the likelihood of a ‘worst case’ contingency. One can argue the wisdom of their choices to withdraw, but scarcely on a partisan basis.”
MONTREAL – A Quebec political party has voted to support one of its members facing backlash for saying that racialized people are regularly disparaged at the provincial legislature.
Québec solidaire members adopted an emergency resolution at the party’s convention late Sunday condemning the hate directed at Haroun Bouazzi, without endorsing his comments.
Bouazzi, who represents a Montreal riding, had told a community group that he hears comments every day at the legislature that portray North African, Muslim, Black or Indigenous people as the “other,” and that paint their cultures are dangerous or inferior.
Other political parties have said Bouazzi’s remarks labelled elected officials as racists, and the co-leaders of his own party had rebuked him for his “clumsy and exaggerated” comments.
Bouazzi, who has said he never intended to describe his colleagues as racist, thanked his party for their support and for their commitment to the fight against systemic racism.
Party co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois said after Sunday’s closed-door debate that he considers the matter to be closed.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 18, 2024.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Democrats who control both chambers of the Virginia legislature are hoping to make good on promises made on the campaign trail, including becoming the first Southern state to expand constitutional protections for abortion access.
The House Privileges and Elections Committee advanced three proposed constitutional amendments Wednesday, including a measure to protect reproductive rights. Its members also discussed measures to repeal a now-defunct state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and ways to revise Virginia’s process to restore voting rights for people who served time for felony crimes.
“This meeting was an important next step considering the moment in history we find ourselves in,” Democratic Del. Cia Price, the committee chair, said during a news conference. “We have urgent threats to our freedoms that could impact constituents in all of the districts we serve.”
The at-times raucous meeting will pave the way for the House and Senate to take up the resolutions early next year after lawmakers tabled the measures last January. Democrats previously said the move was standard practice, given that amendments are typically introduced in odd-numbered years. But Republican Minority Leader Todd Gilbert said Wednesday the committee should not have delved into the amendments before next year’s legislative session. He said the resolutions, particularly the abortion amendment, need further vetting.
“No one who is still serving remembers it being done in this way ever,” Gilbert said after the meeting. “Certainly not for something this important. This is as big and weighty an issue as it gets.”
The Democrats’ legislative lineup comes after Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, to the dismay of voting-rights advocates, rolled back a process to restore people’s civil rights after they completed sentences for felonies. Virginia is the only state that permanently bans anyone convicted of a felony from voting unless a governor restores their rights.
“This amendment creates a process that is bounded by transparent rules and criteria that will apply to everybody — it’s not left to the discretion of a single individual,” Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, the patron of the voting rights resolution, which passed along party lines, said at the news conference.
Though Democrats have sparred with the governor over their legislative agenda, constitutional amendments put forth by lawmakers do not require his signature, allowing the Democrat-led House and Senate to bypass Youngkin’s blessing.
Instead, the General Assembly must pass proposed amendments twice in at least two years, with a legislative election sandwiched between each statehouse session. After that, the public can vote by referendum on the issues. The cumbersome process will likely hinge upon the success of all three amendments on Democrats’ ability to preserve their edge in the House and Senate, where they hold razor-thin majorities.
It’s not the first time lawmakers have attempted to champion the three amendments. Republicans in a House subcommittee killed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights in 2022, a year after the measure passed in a Democrat-led House. The same subcommittee also struck down legislation supporting a constitutional amendment to repeal an amendment from 2006 banning marriage equality.
On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers voted 16-5 in favor of legislation protecting same-sex marriage, with four Republicans supporting the resolution.
“To say the least, voters enacted this (amendment) in 2006, and we have had 100,000 voters a year become of voting age since then,” said Del. Mark Sickles, who sponsored the amendment as one of the first openly gay men serving in the General Assembly. “Many people have changed their opinions of this as the years have passed.”
A constitutional amendment protecting abortion previously passed the Senate in 2023 but died in a Republican-led House. On Wednesday, the amendment passed on party lines.
If successful, the resolution proposed by House Majority Leader Charniele Herring would be part of a growing trend of reproductive rights-related ballot questions given to voters. Since 2022, 18 questions have gone before voters across the U.S., and they have sided with abortion rights advocates 14 times.
The voters have approved constitutional amendments ensuring the right to abortion until fetal viability in nine states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Vermont. Voters also passed a right-to-abortion measure in Nevada in 2024, but it must be passed again in 2026 to be added to the state constitution.
As lawmakers debated the measure, roughly 18 members spoke. Mercedes Perkins, at 38 weeks pregnant, described the importance of women making decisions about their own bodies. Rhea Simon, another Virginia resident, anecdotally described how reproductive health care shaped her life.
Then all at once, more than 50 people lined up to speak against the abortion amendment.
“Let’s do the compassionate thing and care for mothers and all unborn children,” resident Sheila Furey said.
The audience gave a collective “Amen,” followed by a round of applause.
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Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
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Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative.
NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting him in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research and the social safety net programs Medicare and Medicaid.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the appointment. Kennedy, he said, would “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Kennedy, a former Democrat who ran as an independent in this year’s presidential race, abandoned his bid after striking a deal to give Trump his endorsement with a promise to have a role in health policy in the administration.
He and Trump have since become good friends, with Kennedy frequently receiving loud applause at Trump’s rallies.
The expected appointment was first reported by Politico Thursday.
A longtime vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is an attorney who has built a loyal following over several decades of people who admire his lawsuits against major pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. He has pushed for tighter regulations around the ingredients in foods.
With the Trump campaign, he worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, with his message of making food healthier in the U.S., promising to model regulations imposed in Europe. In a nod to Trump’s original campaign slogan, he named the effort “Make America Healthy Again.”
It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.
Kennedy’s stance on vaccines has also made him a controversial figure among Democrats and some Republicans, raising question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a GOP-controlled Senate. Kennedy has espoused misinformation around the safety of vaccines, including pushing a totally discredited theory that childhood vaccines cause autism.
He also has said he would recommend removing fluoride from drinking water. The addition of the material has been cited as leading to improved dental health.
HHS has more than 80,000 employees across the country. It houses the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
