THE capture of Kunduz by the Taliban is an alarming development, which seems to speak as much about the ineffectiveness of the Afghan police and army as it does about the rising strength of the Talibs. Kunduz is a strategically important provincial capital that once had a population of some 300,000. However, many people fled earlier in the year when the Taliban began to press into the northern province. It was therefore clear, even to civilians, that at some point, an assault of the city itself was more than likely. Yet by all accounts the Afghan security forces were woefully unprepared for the attack. It is unclear how many Taliban were involved but some estimates put the number of attackers at more than a thousand. They also launched their operation from three sides. The side that they did not assault included the road that led to the airport. It was therefore to the airport that the governor, senior officials as well as police and army officials evacuated, followed by soldiers and law officers. This might have been clever tactics by the Taliban or more sinister reasons may lie behind this retreat. In a country that continues to be disfigured by corruption, the civil administration in Kunduz has not enjoyed a high reputation. The city sits on a major transport hub for the local opium trade. Civil society organizations in the capital Kabul have claimed that most police in the city were a law unto themselves and citizens tried to avoid having anything to do with them. The Afghan army is now launching a counterattack, which is confidently expected to push the rebels out of the city. US warplanes strafed, bombed and broke up a Talib advance on the airport on Wednesday. Moreover, the whole area is now under a high level of aerial surveillance, which it would appear was lacking when the Taliban were concentrating their forces for Monday's attack on the city. From a strategic point of view, the history of the endless fighting that has gripped Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979, shows the initiative has generally rested with those who held large areas of the countryside, while whoever held the urban centers was always on a back foot. If, as seems likely, the seizure of Kunduz was always seen as a temporary move, to demonstrate Taliban power, it can be expected that there will only be relatively limited resistance to government forces, before the rebels melt away back into the countryside. The Kunduz occupation seems to have a great to do with the need of the Taliban's new leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour to assert his position, not least because of the recent steady rise of groups declaring their allegiance to Daesh (so-called IS). Mansour appears, for now at least, to have overcome resistance to his elevation as Taliban chief. But some Taliban appear to have defected to join the largely foreign fighters of Daesh. The possibility of a repeat of Syria's barbarous three-cornered civil war cannot now be ruled out. But Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who this week completed his first full year in office, has no grounds to be hopeful about a bitter fight between the Taliban and Daesh. The abject performance of the army in Kunduz is a clear warning that not all Afghan troops are as disciplined and well-led as many of those in his capital.
