Fourteen years ago, on November 25th, 2001, I watched the Taliban surrender Kunduz to Northern Alliance forces. It was a tense and dramatic day. I entered the city, on foot, before dawn, with a column of mujahideen fighters, and, like them, was confused by the noise of aircraft taking off from the city’s airport. After daybreak, at a mustering point in the city, enraged mujahideen commanders told me that what we had heard was an exodus, by airplane, of large numbers of Pakistani and Al Qaeda fighters, as well as some senior Taliban figures, whom, they claimed, the Americans had allowed to leave the city.
At the time, the accusations struck me and other colleagues as unlikely: Why would our government allow Al Qaeda’s allies to escape its dragnet? Later on, however, my Washington-based colleague Seymour Hersh confirmed that the U.S. government had allowed Pakistan, which had secretly fostered the Taliban and Al Qaeda alliance, a face-saving retreat from Kunduz. It was one of the many murky episodes that made the U.S. military’s “defeat” of the Taliban seem less of one in those tumultuous early days of the “war on terror.” Deals were often cut between surrendering forces and the Northern Alliance, as we had previously seen in the northern city of Taloqan, where hundreds of well-armed Uzbek fighters for the other side were allowed to cross the battle lines, harbored by commanders who had come to agreements with them, given them safe refuge, and allowed them to keep their guns. Many, apparently, later made their way to the tribal territories of Pakistan, where they have fought on as Islamist extremists, in alliance with the Taliban, to this day.
The fall of Kunduz was a messy thing, and took place throughout the day. There were continuing firefights, as some Taliban units refused to stand down and others surrendered. Bodies lay here and there. We heard that, on the other side of the city, a large number of Taliban were surrendering to forces commanded by the redoubtable Uzbek Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. In the coming days, the news tricked out that many hundreds of those Taliban prisoners had died from asphyxiation after being locked in shipping containers by Dostum’s men.
Western reporters moved on from Kunduz, and few ever returned. In the coming years, as NATO moved into the country to help pacify it and protect it from the resurgent Taliban, Kunduz was assigned to a contingent of German peacekeeping troops. By the late 2000s, as the Taliban became increasingly strong throughout Afghanistan, they reappeared in the Kunduz countryside as well. American and British NATO commanders grumbled about the unwillingness of their Germans counterparts to engage the enemy, and claimed, apparently credibly, that one of the Germans’ initial stipulations for their Kunduz deployment was that they would not patrol outside their bases at night. To them, this policy amounted to a tacit green light from the Germans for the Taliban to roam throughout the province.
By 2010, security had so deteriorated in Kunduz that the U.S. military bolstered the German presence there with an additional twenty-five hundred troops. This was only a holding tactic, however, because by 2013 most of the NATO drawdown had taken place, and the Germans handed off Kunduz to the Afghan government forces, which, as we have seen this past week, have proved unable to hold the city without U.S. assistance.
First, on September 28th, Kunduz fell to the Taliban, making it the first Afghan provincial capital to revert to the militia’s control. The Taliban did what might have been expected: they roared around the streets in pickups, celebrating their victory; freed hundred of prisoners, including many militants; and declared Sharia law. Executions and abductions were also reported. Then, on October 1st, Kunduz was retaken by Afghan government forces, which had regrouped outside the city after failing to defend it. U.S. military aircraft helped by bombing the Taliban from the air, and American Special Forces assisted the Afghans on the ground. (NATO’s military forces ended their combat role in Afghanistan last year, but reduced numbers of troops have remained to train and assist the Afghan Army.)
On October 4th, a U.S. air strike resulted in the deaths of twenty-two civilians, including doctors and patients, at the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz. The Pentagon has acknowledged that its warplanes carried out the attack, but said that the Afghan military requested “air support” because it was taking fire from the hospital. Tragic as it is, the attack seems unlikely to have been an intentionally criminal action—or, for that matter, a war crime—as some have alleged. (Amy Davidson wrote about the attack on October 5th.)
The fact is that, in the aftermath of the drawdown in Afghanistan, U.S. forces have had to intervene to save a city that has fallen to Islamist extremists, much as they have had to intervene in the aftermath of the withdrawal from Iraq. And although Kunduz has been retaken for now, the outlook there, and throughout Afghanistan, is not promising. The Kunduz province is a bastion of ethnic Pashtuns—the Taliban’s main constituency—in the otherwise predominantly Tajik and Uzbek north. Within Afghanistan, it has strategic importance on par with Mosul in Iraq. In 2001, Kunduz was not only the Taliban’s last stand, but also one of Al Qaeda’s. The city fell to the Northern Alliance only on November 26th, weeks after the Taliban retreated from the capital, Kabul, and from Kandahar, the ultimate Taliban stronghold, in the deep south.
In a sense, however, the current situation raises the question: Did Kunduz—or much of the rest of Afghanistan, for that matter—ever really fall? And if it didn’t, what does that say about the decade-and-a-half-long American-led counterinsurgency campaign that has cost so much “in blood and treasure”—as American generals and politicians like to call the thousands of lives sacrificed and the trillions of dollars spent? The victims of the hospital airstrike are only the latest casualties in an ongoing Afghan war in which the Taliban, once again, are major players, and now seem as likely to win back power as they once appeared to have lost it.
