While our troops were in Kabul and while our people are stranded in Afghanistan, we can't do much to reverse our defeat in Afghanistan. But there is still a will to fight the Taliban among Afghans.
There is hope amidst the ruins of our Afghanistan debacle:
The Taliban have control over 32 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. But one, Panjshir, is firmly in government hands, and a second is contested, with at least three districts retaken by Northern Resistance forces on August 20. We should not as a nation be rushing to raise the white flag of surrender to the Taliban and throw our Afghan allies under the bus before the Taliban even get the flagpole erected and the bus started. Under both international law and the Afghan Constitution, the lawful President of Afghanistan is now First Vice President Amrullah Saleh, and he is in Panshir Province with a force of some 10,000 men, including about 6,000 commandos. Defense Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi is there as well. They have at least five operational helicopters and a number of armored vehicles. They have been stockpiling ammunition and supplies for four years.
Obviously, the author means the recognized pre-Taliban government controls Panjshir. I wonder if Panjshir was the rally point given that I thought the government had only 8,000 commandos. Having 6,000 there is a solid basis for conducting and training resistance.
This is the kind of resistance I hoped might form to prevent the Taliban from taking Kabul. That didn't happen but there is no reason for America to unconditionally surrender to the Taliban.
Afghans were too frightened of holding all they held without the American fire and logistics support they needed to hold those cities and bases. Especially in defense of a corrupt government they viewed as too inept to survive without American support:
Just because they would not fight for the corrupt and incompetent Ashraf Ghani does not mean they want the Taliban in power.
Oh, and there is this life-or-death motivation to fight the Taliban:
When Taliban troops seized control of the Afghan capital two weeks ago, the invading units made a beeline for two critical targets: the headquarters of the National Security Directorate and the Ministry of Communications.
Their aim — recounted by two Afghan officials who had been briefed separately on the raid — was to secure the files of Afghan intelligence officers and their informers, and to obtain the means of tracking the telephone numbers of Afghan citizens.
Which is shocking to a lot of people on the left who think Taliban 2.0 is a globalist, Davos-loving reincarnation of nuanced Islamism.
Afghans are willing to resist the Taliban where and how they think the chances are better. And many have a lot of incentive to fight.
Maybe based on that resistance, the anti-Taliban people come to some agreement that is better for them and for America than the defeat we have right now.
Work the problem.
Or are we truly too defeated to help those who would fight our common enemy?
UPDATE: Resistance is not futile:
The Taliban discovered that declaring they now control Afghanistan is easier said than done. The resistance in the north is still there and difficult to hide in an age of cellphone videos and the World Wide Web. Despite a growing number of inaccurate claims of victory against the resistance, the opposition is often public, with daily cell phone videos of anti-Taliban and anti-Pakistan demonstrations still taking place in major cities. The Taliban is trying seize weapons held my many civilians while also imposing the hated lifestyle rules on men and women. Another category of inaccurate reporting is the continuing delays forming a Taliban government. The five-year old and under-reported Taliban civil war continues and is preventing the formation of a new government to officially take over.
This disorder and growing popular resistance is a major embarrassment for Pakistan which thought 2021 would be a repeat of 1995. Back then Pakistan created a militia of fanatical Afghan religious students by recruiting from refugee camps in Pakistan. Led by Afghan adults, often teachers at those schools, the armed students (Taliban in Pushtun), were sent to Afghanistan to defeat the other factions in the civil war there.
For some reason a lot of defenders of abandoning Afghanistan are eager to assume the Taliban instantly have total control of the territory and people.
The Taliban are trying to control an Afghanistan very different from the one they lost after 2001.
