Protests against the Taliban broke out in several Afghan cities Wednesday, with the militants struggling to contain the uprisings even as they were consolidating power in Kabul.
The tenuous, fluid situation in the capital was reflected in the fresh chaos that broke out outside Kabul‘s only functioning international airport, as Taliban fighters clashed with throngs of desperate Afghans seeking access to U.S. and allied military evacuation flights.
With questions continuing to swirl around the rapid dissolution of U.S.-trained Afghan security forces, meanwhile, there were signs of potential life Wednesday among former Taliban rivals the Northern Alliance, a group of armed rebels that had allied with American forces invading Afghanistan back in 2001.
The developments, which seemed to underscore a new normal of unease and uncertainty under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, came a day after the militant group’s leaders went on a publicity blitz in Kabul calling for calm and promising “amnesty” for Afghans who had worked with the fallen U.S.-aligned government.
Uncertainty over the Taliban‘s assurances hung heavily over talks in Kabul on Wednesday between the militants and several former senior officials of the fallen Afghan government, including former Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, who had previously headed months of failed reconciliation talks with the militants.
Sources close to Mr. Karzai and Mr. Abdullah said the two met Wednesday with Anas Haqqani, a senior leader in a powerful Taliban faction called the Haqqani Network. That network, once allied to the U.S. during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, was blamed for a series of devastating suicide attacks amid the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
The direction of the talks is unclear. Taliban leaders say the goal is to form an “inclusive, Islamic government,” but the group’s leadership and real motivations remain deeply obscure. Fears are mounting the group’s true intention is to remake the hardline authoritarian theocracy and Islamist police state it wielded over Afghans the last time it controlled Kabul, prior to the U.S. invasion two decades ago.
Such fears have driven the Biden administration to freeze Afghan government accounts in the United States and halt direct aid payments to the government in Kabul. The administration has also kept in place the State Department’s designation of the Taliban as a foreign terrorist organization, a reality that could complicate any future foreign aid flows to Kabul.
The Biden administration’s mismanagement of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan came under deeper scrutiny in Washington on Wednesday. A clutch of influential Republicans are now demanding answers to why the Taliban was able to so easily sack Kabul and why chaos involving fleeing Afghans was allowed to unfold.
Those questions have swirled among GOP and even some Democratic members since Monday, when Reps Michael T. McCaul of Texas, Devin Nunes of California, and Mike Rogers of Alabama, the top Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Armed Services committees asserted in a letter to the White House that the “disaster that is now unfolding” in Afghanistan was avoidable.
“For months, your administration ignored assessments and dire warnings by your military and intelligence community, ignored repeated congressional requests for details regarding contingency planning [and] ignored calls by Afghan partners,” the lawmakers wrote, venting frustration that Mr. Biden had set an arbitrary, unrealistic timeline for the U.S. troop withdrawal that paved the way for an easy Taliban takeover of Kabul.
The Pentagon’s role has also come under increasing scrutiny.
The Air Force has opened a formal review of what led a C-17 transport aircraft to take off from Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday with people clinging to its landing gear — a scene that resulted in Afghan civilians falling to their deaths.
With video of those deaths watched around the world, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) is now conducting a “thorough” examination of the incident, which involved a C-17 that had been sent to deliver cargo to U.S. forces securing the airport the day after Kabul fell.
A statement by the Air Force on Tuesday said human remains were discovered in the wheel well of the C-17 once it had returned from Kabul to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The service said the C-17 had been surrounded on the runway in Kabul before its crew was able to offload the plane’s cargo. Throngs of Afghans had flooded the tarmac in a scene of panic and chaos before the C-17 had landed.
The scene inside the Kabul‘s airport was far calmer on Wednesday, a day after a surge of more than 4,000 U.S. Marines restored order to the tarmac and began a massive evacuation mission now underway. However, there was violence outside on Wednesday as Taliban fighters now controlling the streets around the airport clashed with Afghans desperate to gain access to evacuation flights.
The Pentagon has said the goal is to move as many as 9,000 passengers a day out of Kabul. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby has said the Biden administration set a deadline of Aug. 31 to complete the evacuation amid uncertainty over the extent to which the Taliban may seek to violently halt the operation.
Some 18 American C-17s took off from the airport with about 2,000 passengers between Tuesday and Wednesday, of which 325 were U.S. citizens. The remaining numbers were Afghan civilians and some NATO personnel.
Protesting Taliban rule
The tense situation around the airport came as Afghans in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar and Khost held marches and carried the national flag that had — prior to the Taliban takeover of Kabul — been flown by the U.S.-aligned government in the Afghan capital.
While the protests were scattered and not necessarily indicative of a national uprising, they signaled the first serious pushback against the Taliban since the militants retook control of Kabul.
The rallies Wednesday in Nangarhar and Khost devolved into clashes between protesters and Taliban fighters, according to Afghanistan’s Tolo news outlet, which reported that at least one demonstrator was killed in the northeastern city of Jalalabad, near the center of Nangarhar province.
Other reports claimed protesters were angry at Taliban efforts to replace the national flag. The Associated Press reported that dozens of Afghans had gathered in Jalalabad and a nearby market town to raise the tricolor national flag, a day before Afghanistan’s Independence Day, which commemorates the 1919 treaty that ended British rule.
The demonstrators lowered the Taliban flag — a white banner with an Islamic inscription — that the militants have raised in the areas they captured around Afghanistan during recent weeks.
Video footage circulating online Wednesday showed Taliban fighters firing into the air and attacking people with batons to disperse the crowd in Jalalabad. Babrak Amirzada, a reporter for a local news agency, said the Taliban beat him and a TV cameraman from another agency.
The incidents undercut an image of moderation that at least some Taliban leaders have been trying to project since seizing control and forcing Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to flee to the United Arab Emirates.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid held a press conference in the Afghan capital on Tuesday to assert the group will now honor women’s rights, albeit within the norms of what the Taliban defines as Islamic law.
While Mr. Mujahid provided few specific details, he said the Taliban also hopes to allow private media to “remain independent” as long as they don’t “work against national values.”
While the Taliban have insisted they will respect human rights, unlike during their previously draconian rule, Wednesday’s attack on demonstrators and journalists in Jalalabad came as many Afghans were hiding at home or trying to flee the country, fearful of abuses by the loosely controlled militant organization.
Civil war in the making?
Many people have expressed dread that the two-decade Western experiment to remake Afghanistan will not survive the resurgent Taliban, who took control of the country in a blitz that took just days.
Wednesday’s developments have raised questions about the prospect of a possible civil war between largely Pashtun Taliban and anti-Taliban ethnic groups and warlords.
Mr. Ghani’s hasty departure has underscored the fractured nature of the anti-Taliban movement in Afghanistan, where there now appears to be no organized opposition to the militants who’ve swept back to power in Kabul.
However, videos circulating Wednesday from the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital, a stronghold of the Northern Alliance militias that allied with the U.S. during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, appeared to show potential opposition figures gathering there. That area is in the only province that has not fallen to the Taliban.
Those figures include members of the deposed government — Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who asserted on Twitter that he is the country’s rightful president, and Defense Minister Gen. Bismillah Mohammadi — as well as Ahmad Massoud, the son of the slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.
In an opinion piece published by The Washington Post, Mr. Massoud asked for weapons and aid to fight the Taliban.
“I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps, with mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban,” he wrote. “The Taliban is not a problem for the Afghan people alone. Under Taliban control, Afghanistan will without doubt become Ground Zero of radical Islamist terrorism; plots against democracies will be hatched here once again.”
• Joseph Clark and Mike Glenn contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.
