A commander in the Afghan National Army shares his perspective on the country's collapse.
For most of us, Aug. 15 was the day we heard the news. For some, as Arash Azizzada writes, it was the day their lives fell apart. Azizzada, a community organizer based in Los Angeles who has been coordinating efforts to evacuate Afghans from Kabul, details what's happening on the ground — and says it's not even close to the "amnesty" the Taliban has described. "Friends and family we've tried to evacuate have been shot and beaten up by the Taliban, despite American promises of security at the airport," he writes. "In the absence of guidance, it has fallen to us, using our phones and laptops, to figure out how to rescue Afghans scrambling for their lives." |
But stories like this weren't among the earliest narratives about the situation, at least in the United States. Almost immediately after the Taliban took Kabul, there was a post-mortem — one with a political scalpel. "Democrats are panicked that the debacle in Afghanistan will shake American voters' confidence in not only President Biden but also the rest of the party, potentially costing it control of the Senate and the House in 2022," writes Frank Bruni, who argues that they are fixating on the wrong thing. "Their political fate is nothing next to the fate of Afghans on the wrong side of the Taliban." |
Sami Sadat, a commander in the Afghan National Army, is one of those people. "For 11 months, as commander of 215 Maiwand Corps, I led 15,000 men in combat operations against the Taliban in southwestern Afghanistan," he writes. "I've lost hundreds of officers and soldiers. That's why, as exhausted and frustrated as I am, I wanted to offer a practical perspective and defend the honor of the Afghan Army." The narrative within the United States had reached his ears; he listened to President Biden's account of what happened, how the Afghan forces collapsed, "sometimes without trying to fight." |
"But we fought, bravely," says Sadat, "until the end." |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment