‘Nobody was really in charge’

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Jul 21, 2023 View in browser   By Phelim Kine Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist shares an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. This week, D.C.-based China Correspondent Phelim Kine talks to a former senior Afghan government official about the trauma of exile and Afghanistan’s prospects under the boot heel of a triumphant Taliban. Follow Phelim on Twitter | Send ideas and insights to pkine@politico.com The Conversation On August 15, 2021, Ahmad Shuja Jamal, the director-general for international relations at Afghanistan’s National Security Council under then-President Ashraf Ghani, left his Kabul apartment to go to work. He never returned home. Within hours he and tens of thousands of his compatriots were fleeing for their lives as Afghan military forces around the capital melted away in the face of the Taliban advance. Jamal is one of the lucky ones — he made a last minute escape on a Turkish Airlines flight out of Kabul with nothing but the clothes he was wearing that day. He has since resettled in Melbourne, Australia with his Australian partner. His life story mirrors the blend of hope and tragedy that defines the Afghanistan experience of the past two decades. When he was six years old, Jamal and his family had fled the 1996 Taliban takeover and became refugees in Pakistan. He returned to Afghanistan and came of age there following the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. In that window of stability and relative freedom, he worked with Human Rights Watch, served as director for development at the American University of Afghanistan and by his early thirties had become a senior government official in the last years of the Ghani government. In exile he has co-written a recently published book, The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan, that tries to make sense of the factors that led to the Taliban victory. I spoke with Jamal about the agonies of exile, his lingering bitterness about the U.S. role in the Taliban’s takeover and the plight of Afghanistan’s lost generation of youth who grew up in a fragile liberal democracy but are now trapped in a pariah state inherently hostile to the rights and freedoms of the Afghanistan that collapsed in August 2021. The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.   JOIN 7/27 FOR A TALK ON WOMEN LEADERS IN THE NEW WORKPLACE: In the wake of the pandemic, U.S. lawmakers saw a unique opportunity to address the current childcare system, which has become increasingly unaffordable for millions of Americans, but the initial proposals went nowhere. With the launch of the Congressional Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Caucus in May, there may be a path to make childcare more affordable. Join Women Rule on July 27 to dive into this timely topic and more with featured speakers Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Reshma Saujani, Founder & CEO of Moms First and Founder of Girls Who Code. REGISTER HERE.     Tell me about your last day in Afghanistan I arrived at work at around 8:30 a.m. and reported to the Presidential Palace. At 11:00 a.m., I left the presidential palace to do a Covid test and left the clinic at 11:30 a.m. Within those 30 minutes the world had changed. All of a sudden everybody was on the street. Traffic was at a standstill. Social media was full of reports of “Oh, the Taliban had been sighted here” and “the police have left the police station there.” And this was even before President Ghani was reported to have fled the country. I asked my driver to drive us towards the presidential palace but it was impossible. I thought that if I can't go back to my office, I might as well just go home, which is about 12 kilometers from the palace. I was on that road for two hours but couldn't get home because of the traffic. I decided to turn around and go to the airport with the clothes on my back. And that's how I left. When I landed in Turkey they took us to this hotel for quarantine. I checked into my room and emptied everything in my pockets — my wallet and a set of keys. And it hit me at that moment that those keys are not going to open any doors for me at all from this moment on. What is life like for family, friends and colleagues who were unable to escape?  These are people for whom life as we knew it completely changed that morning of the 15th of August. Imagine losing all career prospects, losing your job, but also most of whatever deposit you had in a bank. And imagine losing friends and relatives who either fled Afghanistan to go to a neighboring country or to evacuate to places like Australia, the U.S. and Canada. Not only has your social life changed, but also your professional prospects have dimmed considerably. Your ability to earn a living, your financial situation has changed. You look into the next week, the next month and the next year and you see nothing but darkness. And that makes it very difficult for people to keep hope alive. What did those two decades of post-Taliban international intervention in Afghanistan mean to you and your generation? We experienced an Afghanistan full of opportunity and potential. All of a sudden, here you had a country where you are no longer a stranger and you could work and you could study and you could open a business. And there was a generation in the past 20 years that was born and came of age under those circumstances. A generation that has very little sense of what it was like before. And my fear is that especially the girls and the women of that generation are finding it extremely difficult to go from a country of relatively great potential and possibility for education and work to one with virtually no potential and possibility. How does that make you feel? There is a lot of anger inside of me as there is inside of a lot of other people from Afghanistan. There's a lot of hurt. There's a tremendous amount of frustration and disappointment. I've thought about whether I should feel betrayed by the president who left in his helicopter as I was in his presidential palace reporting for duty. I’ve thought a lot about whether I should feel angry at my own boss, the national security adviser, who loaded a number of his close associates on those helicopters without asking me or inquiring whether I was okay on that day. But it’s easy to assign blame and much more difficult to look at the broader factors beyond just individuals. How did Afghanistan — despite two decades of international support and training of its armed forces — fall so quickly to the Taliban? Nobody was really in charge. Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad, the former U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, had extracted a commitment from the Taliban in Doha that the Taliban fighters would not enter Kabul. And yet the Taliban in the final two weeks were advancing at a rapid clip. The Afghan president, along with his vice president and high-level officials, had decided they would stay in Kabul and resist. But in those final hours, the political class, including the president 's circle, concluded that it was impossible to defend Kabul. The Taliban in Doha were either unwilling or incapable of stopping their fighters from advancing into Kabul. And the Americans apparently were not able to hold them to account because they were too busy making their own evacuation-slash-withdrawal. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is a hot issue on Capitol Hill. What do you think of House Foreign Affairs Committee efforts to get details of the U.S. government decisions that led to the events of August 15, 2021? I know that this is occurring within a highly charged political context in Washington. But there's value in continuing to probe this series of decisions made by President Joe Biden that resulted in world-altering consequences for millions of people in Afghanistan and also for the thousands of U.S. military and civilian personnel who shared with Afghans a dream of a republic with liberal democratic values. But that inquiry would be misguided if it were limited only to one administration in one year. There were a lot of consequential moments in the years leading up to that under other administrations.   JOIN 7/26 FOR A TALK ON THE NEW ENERGY ECONOMY: Join POLITICO's lively discussion, "Powering a Clean Energy Economy," on July 26 to explore the effectiveness of consumer-targeted policies to boost sustainability and create clean energy jobs. How are the Inflation Reduction Act's provisions faring? Which strategies truly sway consumer behavior? Hear from featured speaker, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), among other experts. Don't miss this insightful event — register today and be part of the conversation driving America's clean energy future! REGISTER NOW.     Ahmad Massoud, one of the leaders of an armed resistance to Taliban rule, said in a virtual interview at the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday that the Taliban has rejected offers to negotiate with its opponents. What does that say about the country’s future? The Taliban’s increasing brutality and tyranny — with the impossibility of articulating political interests and seeing them reflected in the regime — means the only choice that is increasingly left for the people of Afghanistan is to mount an armed struggle. My fear is that the inevitability of that choice would lead Afghanistan down a much more difficult path than what we have now. Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard. SUBSCRIBE to the POLITICO newsletter family: D.C. Playbook | Brussels Playbook | London Playbook | Paris Playbook| Ottawa Playbook| EU Confidential | | Digital Bridge | China Watcher| Berlin Bulletin | D.C. Influence | EU Influence | London Influence | Paris Influence   Follow us

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