Why Afghanistan Is Going To Fall To The Taliban Again. And It's Not Why You Think.
"I'm afraid I don't see how the U.S. can helpfully respond in Afghanistan, at this point."

ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
Doctors Without Borders staff huddle together after a U.S. airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afhanistan on Oct. 3, 2015.
Last week, the Taliban began the process of retaking Afghanistan, starting with the northern city of Kunduz. The U.S. and Afghan governments have since been battling to recapture it -- a fight that included the U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital that killed at least 12 medical staff, along with at least seven patients, on Saturday.

The Taliban has since charged that Afghan intelligence purposely gave the U.S. the hospital's coordinates. Even the possibility that such an accusation is true -- and the duration of the sustained attack suggests that something unusual happened -- points toward the reason that Afghanistan is headed back toward Taliban control: The government is thoroughly corrupt, and the U.S. has been unwilling to take measures to address the situation. While a handful of civilian and military leaders identified corruption as an existential threat to the country, the problem remains unsolved.

After covering the invasion of Afghanistan, former NPR journalist Sarah Chayes decided to stay in the country to try to help turn it around. She opened a business in Kandahar and probably spent more time living directly with the Afghan people -- without security guards -- than any other American since 2001. Chayes ultimately went to work for coalition forces in the region, sharing the fundamental insight she'd gained: Corruption was eroding public support of the government. She won audiences with all the right people, and even made some converts, but ultimately, her counsel wasn't taken by the U.S. government as a whole.

Chayes turned her experience into the groundbreaking book Thieves of State, which forecasts that corrupt governments will continue to be the targets of insurgents who win public support. Like the Iraqi army did in Mosul and elsewhere a year earlier, the Afghan army and police in Kunduz simply melted away.

Support -- or, at least, a lack of opposition -- from the local population has been key to the Taliban's success. Over a period of a few years, the Taliban gradually crept closer to Kunduz and ultimately embedded its militants in the suburbs. Then, in less than a day, they took over the city.

Reporting from the region makes it clear that the Afghan government lost the population as a result of its corruption. The way it erodes public support is intuitive: Imagine that you are an Afghan civilian generally opposed to the extremism of the Taliban. Yet for nearly everything you need to do -- travel to and from work, transport merchandise, enroll in school, open a business -- you get shaken down, often by somebody of a different ethnicity. The Taliban, with all its piety, at least might not be corrupt, you start to think. As The New York Times reported last week:
Over the past few years, faith in the government and the warlords who were allied with the government, never strong, has rapidly diminished. Militias and Afghan Local Police forces installed by the American Special Forces were largely unaccountable. They extorted protection money from farmers, and committed rapes and robberies. But because they had guns and the backing of local strongmen close to the government, people’s complaints were ignored.

In Khanabad, a district southeast of Kunduz City, for instance, residents complained that the local militias were worse than the Taliban in part because while the Taliban would only demand payment once for a harvest, there was often more than one militia, each demanding its own share.

Over time, as villages threw their lot in with the Taliban, the insurgents’ cordon around Kunduz grew tighter. By last year the city felt so under siege that police officers were resistant to driving in a marked government vehicle for fear a Taliban fighter on a motorbike would slap a magnetic bomb on it.

Chayes has since moved back to the U.S. to work as a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I asked her a few questions about Kunduz and the future of Afghanistan, and she noted that this isn't the first time the coalition has accidentally slaughtered civilians in Kunduz, with devastating political repercussions.

What do you see as the connection between corruption and the fall of Kunduz and the surrounding area?

Like the Islamic State's capture of large parts of Iraq, the Taliban successes in and around Kunduz are the almost inevitable consequence of corrupt and abusive governance.  This is not a recent phenomenon.  Back in the spring of 2009, when I first looked closely at Kunduz, the governor was famous for his land grabs.  In an arid place like Afghanistan, almost entirely dependent on high-end agriculture, fruit growing and such, land is incredibly precious. Stealing someone's land is worse than murdering them.