Present
By Wyatt Blevins, JMU ’22, Public Policy and Administration and Political Science, and Sarah Akers, JMU ’20 Justice Studies, Woodson Martin Democracy Program Fellow
Overview of the Current Conflict
The Taliban never fully relinquished their control; in fact they were emboldened by the November 17th, 2020 announcement by former President Trump that the US would greatly reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan. However, their momentum grew greatly in the beginning of August 2021. When they began taking control of various provinces, tens of thousands of Afghans fled to Kabul. This created even more chaos when the Taliban overtook Kabul less than 10 days later.
While the number of US troops in Afghanistan had decreased to around 2,500 at the time, many wondered why the US-supported Afghan army was defeated so easily. Over the past 20 years, the US has invested $83 billion in the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. Although not widely known, the Afghan military did stand and fight in some areas. In Lashkar Gah, Afghan troops faced repeated attacks from Taliban forces. Hundreds of Afghan troops were being sent in to restore order. However, on August 11th, a large car bomb detonated outside police headquarters; afterwards the fighting was largely over.
While some Afghan troops fought, others allowed the Taliban to take control to avoid further bloodshed. Motivation for some was self preservation. For example, in Ghazni, it has been strongly suggested that the police chief and governor allowed the Taliban to take control in exchange for their safe passage out of the city. When Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Taliban on August 14th, they faced little resistance from Afghan troops since most were headed to the border of Uzbekistan.
The Afghan military has been plagued by long-standing issues. Perhaps the most obvious is corruption. There have been significant problems with generals keeping pay meant for soldiers or pocketing money meant for food or supplies. Comparatively, the Taliban were reportedly paying Afghan soldiers who chose not to fight. Moreover, many Afghan troops have no way of contacting their families, and there is no support given to the families of deceased soldiers. Unsurprisingly, these conditions encouraged little loyalty to the Afghan government.
There were also problems outside of corruption that the military faced. Since 2001, over 66,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers have been killed while fighting. This high level of turnover has shortened the length and depth of basic training to keep a consistent number of soldiers and officers in the field.
Additionally, the education level of Afghan troops is much lower than should be expected. Many are illiterate even at the highest levels of leadership. This has created several problems with the ordering of supplies, upkeep of weapons, reading of maps, etc. Lastly, there was no organized system for delegating time off or vacations, which created high levels of burnout. All of these factors played a part in why the Afghan military seemed to fall to the Taliban so easily.
President Biden had also announced in April 2021 that all US troops would be removed from Afghanistan by August 31st, 2021, which did come to fruition. Therefore, the Afghan troops also knew they were soon to be on their own. With the withdrawal, the Afghan military crumbled, and thousands of Afghan refugees were pushed out of their homes. As of now, the United States has evacuated approximately 130,000 refugees from Afghanistan and is working to help relocate and resettle them across the Western World. The number that the United States is hoping to admit is around 50,000.
Afghan Refugee Crisis
The conflict and extreme uncertainty in Afghanistan has created a protracted refugee crisis. The UN reports that there are currently 6 million Afghans who have been displaced: 3.5 million are displaced within Afghanistan’s borders and 2.6 million are refugees in other countries. For the past 40 years, Afghans have had to deal with war and conflict, natural disasters, extreme poverty and food insecurity, and now a multi-year pandemic. In 2021 alone, more than 635,000 Afghans have been forced to flee. 80% of the newly displaced are women and children.
Afghans are now the third largest displaced population in the world (following Syrians and Venezuelans). The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi recently said, “Afghanistan’s displacement crisis is one of the largest and most protracted in UNHCR’s seven-decade history. We’re now seeing a third generation of Afghan children born in exile.”
With the current situation, no one can blame Afghans for fleeing. Their lives are, quite literally, at stake. The Taliban’s acting Minister of Education said in August that female and male students would no longer be allowed to study together. Many people suspect women will no longer be allowed to study at all, although it is unclear what the future holds for schools.
Furthermore, women that previously worked for the Afghan government feel their lives are in danger. The Taliban now have access to the previous government’s databases, so they have access to these women’s private information, including home addresses and family information. It has also been reported in a province west of Kabul that the Taliban have banned women from leaving their homes without a male relative. The UN has predicted that Afghanistan will see the highest number of documented civilian casualties in a single year since the UN began documenting such statistics.
Unfortunately, the Taliban is not the only threat Afghans are facing. According to the UN, 1 in 3 Afghans are already going hungry. Two million Afghan children are malnourished. This is due to many factors. The first is that Afghanistan is currently going through its second drought in the previous three years. 2021 has proved to be the driest year in the past 30 years. The World Food Programme reported that 40% of crops are lost and wheat has gone up in price by 25%.
The droughts are caused in part by climate change. Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average. The shortage of water has been a main source of the crisis. This has led to a shortage of safe drinking water but also the destruction of main crops in the nation. Farming is a main source of income for many as well, and this too has been lost.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, water has been used as a currency, especially with respect to the Taliban. The terrorist organization has destroyed dams in order to flood areas and has contaminated water in order to make it toxic to drink. They used their access to water to gain control of areas.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released a non-return advisory for Afghanistan on August 16th, 2021. This bars nations from forcibly returning Afghan nationals to Afghanistan. The UN agency stated that “states have a legal and moral responsibility to allow those fleeing Afghanistan to seek safety, and to not forcibly return refugees.” While many displaced Afghans never have the chance to leave the country, for the ones that do, where do they go?
The majority of Afghan refugees end up in Pakistan and Iran, which respectively hosts more than 1.4 million and 780,000 registered Afghan refugees. Europe has committed to take in a decent number of refugees, although there has been resistance from some who do not want a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. Switzerland has declined to take in large numbers of refugees directly from Afghanistan. The president of France said that they must protect themselves from “significant waves of illegal migrants.” It is unclear what direction Germany will take with their recent elections, since Chancellor Merkel stepped down, but they have already taken in 180,000 refugees.
Outside of Europe, Turkey is continuing to build a wall on its border to prevent illegal immigration, but have taken in 130,000 refugees. Canada has committed to resettling 40,000 refugees. Tajikistan announced they were preparing to take in 100,000 refugees from Afghanistan. Uzbekistan has closed its borders.
The Biden administration released $500 million under the 1962 Migration and Refugee Assistance Act in order to meet the “unexpected urgent refugee and migration needs” from the U.S. withdrawing from the area. This mostly applies to Afghans who aided the United States while in Afghanistan – the most common example being translators. Although it is unclear how many Afghan refugees the U.S. will welcome, the Biden administration has pledged to raise the refugee resettlement ceiling to 125,000 for 2022 after the Trump administration had it at an all time low of 15,000 for 2021.
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