Al Jazeera: You recently said ‘the Taliban is the future, the Americans are the past in Afghanistan’. Isn’t that a little far-fetched?
Hamid Gul: The Americans are defeated. It isn’t necessarily because their firepower and their might has weakened, but it is because their own people are sick and tired [of engagement in Afghanistan]. There is fatigue now, fatigue is the threat and is the worst thing for a nation to suffer from. There is no way that the Americans can hold on to Afghanistan.
Some in Afghanistan believe that the extent of civilian casualties has empowered the Taliban’s resurgence.
It is not only that. While the civilian casualties have certainly made the Taliban a popular movement in Afghanistan – some 80 per cent of the population support them – the people of Afghanistan are fed up with corruption.
They are sick of the influence of warlords and drug barons, and the continued American occupation.
If it was a shot stint – come in and get out after completing the job – the situation would have been different. But the Americans didn’t do that. If they wanted to disperse al-Qaeda, they succeeded after the first year, and after that they should have pulled out. The fact they stayed on betrays their real intentions in Afghanistan until Barack Obama, the US president, came and started talking about withdrawal.
It was only last December that Obama announced that the US will pull out of Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton said the same thing, but there is a dichotomy.
On the one hand they say ‘We are not here to stay in Afghanistan’, but on the other hand they carry out surges and want to prop up and build the Afghan Army.
However, they don’t give the money to build the Afghan Army – just $140mn. Compare this to how much it costs the US to keep just one soldier in Afghanistan – $1mn dollars per soldier per year in Afghanistan. They have now about 68,000 US troops. It is currently costing them $65bn just to maintain these troops. There are another 30,000 US troops now coming, so it will cost the US $100bn a year to maintain its forces in Afghanistan.
The US is a heavily indebted nation so how are they going to afford this? Some 57 per cent of Americans in the polls say they don’t like this war and want their boys to return home. The Americans can’t take casualties, that is their problem. To compensate, they started employing security contractors, some 104,000 security contractors currently in Afghanistan.
What does this mean? Mercenaries to be used where troops cannot be deployed? We have already seen what mercenaries did in Iraq. The Americans are more and more inclined – because the US military cannot suffer casualties – to employ mercenaries, not just from the US but also from the local population.
This is a very dangerous trend if we are to believe that mercenaries can win wars and carry forward the political objectives of the country. This means that whoever has more money can employ more mercenaries, win wars, win territories, etc.
Given everything you have just said, how do you think the latest US and Nato offensive against the Taliban is going to play out?
It is not going to work. I think it is an ‘eye wash’, it has political purpose back home. But there is no political purpose for Afghanistan. They are saying that they are protecting the civilian population, but they are dislodging the civilians from their homes in very harsh weather conditions in Afghanistan.
The cold winds from the steppes of Central Asia sweep these regions. When you launch such military operations, the people are inevitably dislodged and their fields abandoned. In this situation, what are the Americans trying to achieve – I don’t know.
There is much ambiguity about their political objectives. Every military conflict must have a political purpose. I cannot discern that there is any political purpose.
read the rest here: An Interview With Hamid Gul The Mujahid Blog
though I don’t fully agree with all that Hamid Gul says, some of this points are right on!
We as Pakistanis need to really get our heads examined. We’ve been brainwashed by the media and our government, we call the TALIBAN jahil, hypocrites, kafirs, terrorists when they are the ones who support humanity! I’m not talking about the groups that have taken the taliban name and have abused it. I do not support terror nor do they! So please people, it’s time to read into it rather than listening to news only when bomb blasts occur and we start to throw names at the same groups who support our cause, which is PEACE. Anger is alright but at the same time don’t be fooled/misled/ignorant! Direct your anger and protests at the right groups, insh’Allah HAQ will rule.
May Allah help the mujahideen fighting for the good cause
May Allah crush the enemy, punish them in this life and the hereafter
May Allah give us the ability to tell right from wrong
May Allah send peace to the ummah
Ameen!