KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – Afghanistan’s interior minister said on Saturday that Afghan security forces could hold their ground even if US troops withdrew, challenging a warning from the United States and predicting a withdrawal of rapid territorial gains for the Taliban will yield.
Masoud Andarabi’s comments in an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday were the first government response to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s warning issued in a sharply worded letter to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani last weekend.
In the letter in which Ghani called for efforts to bring peace to the Taliban, Blinken said: “I am concerned that the security situation will worsen and that the Taliban may achieve rapid territorial gains” after the US military withdrew.
Andarabi said the national security forces in Afghanistan could own territory, but that they would likely suffer huge losses to keep remote checkpoints without US air support.
“The Afghan security forces are capable of defending the capital and the cities and areas we are currently in,” he said. “We think the Afghan security forces have proved to the Taliban this year that they will not be able to obtain land.”
Although the Taliban did not attack the US or NATO forces as a condition of the agreement, the Afghan national security forces had a scathing assault.
Andarabi was questioned in the strongly strengthened Interior Ministry and also reiterated his government’s warning against a hasty US withdrawal from the war-torn country, saying that the Taliban’s ties with al-Qaeda remain intact and that a rapid retirement global terrorism fight will worsen.
He said Afghan national security forces, backed by US aid, had so far put pressure on terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, including the local branch of the Islamic State.
A hasty ‘unpredictable withdrawal could certainly provide an opportunity for those terrorists … to threaten the world’, he said from inside the complex, protected by concrete walls, barbed wire and a phalanx of security guards.
The warning comes as Washington revises an agreement the Trump administration signed with the Taliban more than a year ago, calling for the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops to be withdrawn on May 1st.
The agreement also calls on the Taliban to sever ties with terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda. U.S. officials have said in the past that progress has been seen, but that more is needed without expanding it.
No decision has been taken on the review, but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is trying to establish a peaceful peace process between the government and the Taliban’s armed opposition, has warned the Afghan president that all options still on the table, and that he should increase the peace efforts.
Since the US signed the agreement with the Taliban, violence has increased, with poverty and high unemployment increasing crime. Despite billions of dollars in international aid to Afghanistan since the collapse of the Taliban government in 2001, 72% of the 37 million people in Afghanistan live below the poverty line, and survive on $ 1.90 or less per day. Unemployment is about 30 percent.
Residents of the Afghan capital, Kabul, are terrorized by runaway crime, bombings and assassinations, and bitterly complaining about security failures.
Andarabi sympathized with the citizens’ complaints, but he said nearly 70 percent of the police in Afghanistan were fighting the Taliban, which defended efforts to maintain law and order. Police are deploying more than 100 Taliban attacks across the country every day, he added.
Even the United Nations Security Council has expressed concern about the targeted killings, targeting civil society activists, journalists, lawyers and judges. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for many, but the Taliban and the government blame each other for the increase in attacks.
At a news conference on Friday, the UN Security Council “requested that these targeted attacks be stopped immediately and stressed the urgent need to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
Andarabi said progress had been made in curbing the violence over the past month, with more than 400 arrests.
But he stressed that Afghanistan still needed a lot of support from the international community, including the United States and NATO, in war and peacetime.
For example, it will take great effort to reintegrate the tens of thousands of armed men who roam the country into a peacetime society – no matter what faction they come from, he said. Police are facing a scary fight against narcotics in a country that produces more than 4,000 tonnes of opium __ the raw material used to make heroin __ more than any other opium-producing country combined. Andarabi, the peace says, will free the police to fight the drug war which is also fueling the rising crime rate of Afghanistan.