Playthings of Empire

How the Whitehouse Ignored Kabul's Warnings

On the 26th of August 2021, Abdur Rahman Logari detonated his suicide vest near the Abbey Gate in Kabul airport. Masses of 5 millimeter ball bearings propelled by 20 pounds of military grade explosives ripped through a densely packed crowd. Logari killed 170 men, women and children and injured 150 thronging to leave Kabul following the Taliban conquest of the capital eleven days earlier. 13 US servicemen were also killed trying to supervise their country's chaotic exit from Afghanistan. Two days later a US drone strike killed an entire Afghan family in the mistaken belief that the target was Logari, adding to the tragedy. The Abbey Gate attack was the Islamic State’s most successful operation in Afghanistan and President Biden said it was “the hardest of the hard days'' of his presidency. And perhaps more than that, the Abbey Gate attack may have inaugurated a terror group’s intention to play a much larger role in transnational terrorism.

A recent US military review concluded that Logari’s attack was not preventable at the tactical level despite the claims of many US servicemen. However, the findings are not a vindication of the Biden administration’s chaotic exit but a reminder of how the US-Afghan relationship had broken down. As US forces withdrew, many Afghan government officials told me that they had warned their US counterparts about the threat of ISIS. But it appears that the US had stopped listening to their warnings. And so many of the decisions taken by the Biden administration helped create the very conditions that culminated in the Abbey Gate attack.

One of the men who had warned them was the General Director of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) intelligence agency, Ahmad Zia Seraj. I met him in a London hotel in December 2023. He had arrived early for our meeting and waited in the hotel lobby patiently. You would never have thought that this polite man who did the school run every day had once been a spy chief, targeted by the Taliban for assassination. Now he was a refugee waiting for his residency papers and supporting his family while teaching at King's Centre for the Study of Intelligence. He had been a mere teenager the first time the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, fleeing to Peshawar, Pakistan, with his family and eking out a living as a weaver. After the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban he returned to his homeland.

When the Northern Alliance entered Kabul triumphant that year, he joined the NDS and rose to the position of acting director in 2019. It was President Ashraf Ghani who had promoted him. Admittedly, Ghani had initially been suspicious of Seraj’s background; he came from a pedigreed family of Mujahideen who had fought the USSR. In fact, Seraj’s uncle had been none other than Habibur Rahman, one of the founders of Afghanistan’s Muslim Youth movement, an Islamist organization active on university campuses in the 1970s that gave birth to most of the Mujahideen factions that fought the Soviet Union. But Ghani’s National Security Advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, soothed his fears.

Long before the US withdrawal, Seraj had been warning the American top brass about the threat of terrorism and Islamic State - Khorasan Province (IS-KP), the Afghan branch of ISIS, and is still doing so. The NDS had a very good picture of IS-KP and how other terror groups cross-pollinated and learned from each other’s experiences. “We had detainees from fifteen different nationalities in our NDS detention facilities”. In fact, Seraj knew Logari and had personally interrogated him due to his intelligence value. He knew him as Hamed and described him as a “bright, intelligent young man who spoke several languages fluently”. Logari was recruited online by a person he had never met over the Telegram messaging app. Seraj brought Logari religious scholars and even the young man’s father to dissuade him from his wish to become a suicide bomber but it was no use. “Once a person wants to become a suicide bomber, there’s nothing that can stop him”. Logari didn’t want freedom, he wanted paradise - now.

Seraj told me that he had shared everything the NDS had with the CIA, who would then brief NATO’s commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller, and other US officials. “Frankly speaking we were on the same page”. In fact, he warned anyone who would listen - whether the US, Pakistan, or Central Asian states - about the security threats. And those warnings were not alarmist; he had shared a paper at the tail end of 2023 predicting that we would see terror attacks outside of Afghanistan and conflict between Pakistan and the Taliban - and this later happened. If it was the case as Seraj maintains, that everyone was on the same page, why had the warning signs been ignored? Was it merely the fog of war, the unanticipated chaos or could there be something deeper that prevented the allies from acting appropriately?

During the postmortem of the chaotic US withdrawal, Biden blamed Trump and the failure of US military intelligence that didn’t anticipate the speed of the Taliban takeover. He also blamed the Afghan government and the unwillingness of the Afghan army to fight. It seemed to play on tropes and criticisms made by journalists and Afghans for decades; Afghanistan was run by corrupt politicians and warlords.

Trump had dealt Biden a bad hand when he came to office in January 2021. The Afghan-American relationship had been damaged ever since the Doha Accords were signed between the Americans and the Taliban in February 2020. The democratically elected Afghan government had been excluded from the accords and had never been part of the discussions. The accords stipulated that the United States would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021. The Taliban in turn promised to cut ties with Al-Qaeda and sit down for peace talks with the Kabul government.

The deal had been engineered by Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad. Although Khalilzad was an experienced diplomat and served under various US presidents including Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, his rough and tumble diplomacy was not liked in Kabul. The US envoy had reached out to the Taliban without consulting the Afghan government and had promised the Taliban things that the Afghan government had never agreed to and did not even know about. As Abdullah Khanjani, the government’s Deputy Minister for Peace told me,, “One of the key strategic problems with the whole structure of the peace process was that the Americans did not integrate the Afghan state and Afghan voices into it". By negotiating directly with the Taliban they undermined the Afghan government.

The negotiations empowered and legitimized the Taliban. According to Khanjani, with the Doha Accords, “a strategic propaganda opportunity was given to the Taliban, as an insurgent group. [US Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo sat there to endorse the deal with the legitimacy of being ex-CIA. And this was a shock to everyone. It was a game changer for the Taliban. And this also normalized the Taliban and [changed] the international system of power relations". A green light was given for other countries to follow suit.

The Doha Accords also set the stage for the Abbey Gate attack.The terms of the deal included a prisoner swap where the Taliban received 5,000 prisoners in exchange for 1,000 captives they had been holding . The Afghan government was incensed by the condition. They had not been party to that agreement and the US seemed to be treating Afghanistan as if it was not a sovereign nation but a plaything of empire; to be tossed about as the empire wished. One day after the accords were signed in Doha, President Ghani told reporters that “the government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners". He added that 400 of those prisoners were “a threat to the world”. Seraj told me that many of those prisoners were involved in high profile attacks including those on the German embassy in 2017, the Intercontinental Hotel in January 2018 and the G4S compound in November 2018. Some of those released, according to a senior government official, were not Taliban fighters but belonged to IS-KP and were related to the Taliban through familial and tribal links. Their release would mean that many would return to the insurgency. It was these sorts of actions that created the conditions for the Abbey Gate attack on 26th August.

Neither the preliminary intra-Afghan peace talks in Doha nor the prisoner swap that followed resulted in a reduction in violence. Instead they gnawed away at the state and created the conditions for chaos that was to come. According to Shuja Jamal, international relations director at the Afghan government’s National Security Council, over 21,000 Afghan army soldiers were killed, injured, taken prisoner or deserted between March and October 2020. Attacks on soft targets like journalists and politicians increased as well.

But perhaps more importantly, the prisoner swap demoralized the NDS - the very agency that the US needed to share vital local information. The officers who had interrogated the prisoners could now be identified and targeted by the Taliban and IS-KP. As Seraj pointed out, many of the NDS officers who sat face to face with the terrorists didn’t want to endanger their life anymore with interrogations and debriefings if “the prisoners would be released”. It likely damaged information sharing between Washington and Kabul.

After the signing of the US-Taliban peace deal in February 2020, “You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it," Seraj said. He had always wanted to model the NDS on the CIA and focus purely on intelligence gathering with some counter-terror capabilities but in the circumstances, this proved impossible. Instead Ghani tasked him with strengthening citizen militias that could resist the coming Taliban onslaught. But accepting the task, which he felt should be the military’s remit, made the NDS cumbersome. They were now working with local mayors and tribal and security chiefs on sourcing weapons instead of being the eyes and ears of the republic. As government forces neared collapse more problems piled up on Seraj’s desk. Instead of focusing on the enemy, the NDS were forced to investigate corruption allegations against these militias. “80 percent of our work fell to investigating those charges, while the enemy was at the gates".

The US withdrawal meant reducing the air support given to Afghan forces. “Our forces,” said Seraj, “had become so addicted to air support, that without it, it was very difficult for them to fight". It meant that the Afghan army could not stop the Taliban advance, resulting in the swift collapse of the republic. The Taliban made the situation even more difficult by deliberately targeting Afghan pilots and many were unwilling to fly. Due to a domestic skill shortage the Afghan government tried to source foreign contractors who could service their aircraft but with little success. In December 2020, National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib flew to Azerbaijan to buy drones which Baku had used to devastating effect against the Armenians in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War weeks earlier, but to no avail. Kabul also reached out to Turkey and the US, wanting to set up a special operations team that could deploy Predator and Reaper drones to provide the necessary air support but the US was reluctant to accede to their requests.

In addition, Pakistan was working to undermine the Afghan government. Although the US and Pakistan were allies, Islamabad had always viewed the US presence in Afghanistan as a threat to its nuclear arsenal, which it needed to counter its hostile neighbour, India. As a result it could not support the US backed government in Kabul and instead supported or at the very least, provided sanctuary to the Taliban. Seraj had confronted his Pakistani counterparts on the issue many times but they would often deny or deflect the issue. Seraj gave me an example of the German embassy bombing in May 2017 which killed and wounded 800 civilians. It was organized by a young man, Nusrat Bahir, who lived in Quetta, Pakistan. Bahir’s team trained on the Pakistani side of the Chaman border before carrying out the attack. All the perpetrators were caught except Bahir who fled to Quetta. These very same perpetrators were among those released as a result of the Doha agreement.

The Trump administration aggravated the situation in other ways. After the US assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 the situation in Afghanistan became more volatile. Iran wanted revenge and allowed the Taliban to open up an office in Mashhad in northeastern Iran. Seraj said that “ there was a strong commitment from the Iranians to help the Taliban. It's not that the Taliban are very friendly to them, it was just to see the US leave, and Taliban were used as a tool to expedite that process”.

When Biden came to office in January 2021 he pledged to “lead not merely by example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security”. Hamdullah Mohib, the Afghan National Security advisor told me, “there was a lot of optimism about the incoming administration”. Kabul hoped that Biden would be more reasonable. However as Alexander Ward shows in his latest book, The Internationalists:The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump, Biden had always been consistent about getting out of the nation-building business. After a review he pressed ahead with Trump’s withdrawal policy, albeit with a slight delay. American troops would now leave by the end of August 2021.

Biden made the hand that Trump had dealt him even worse, at least from the perspective of his Afghan partners. The fact that they kept Khalilzad, Trump’s special envoy, on was a sign to Mohib that they would get more of the same. “He would be their fall guy”. Moreover, as if to rub salt in the Afghans’ wounds, a scathing letter from the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was leaked. It urged Ghani to return to the negotiating table, humiliating and alienating the Kabul government further. It showed the world how the US treated their ‘partners’ and destroyed any good will left between Washington and Kabul. Afghan government delegations visited both Moscow and Tehran, apparently exploring other political options.

In February 2021, Seraj invited regional intelligence chiefs to a secret conference and urged them to support his government. He warned that the reverberations of a Taliban victory would be felt by all of them. Many of the extremist groups that plagued them, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), had close ties with the Taliban. The response was muted. “Those were the days when the popularity of the government was so low in Afghanistan,” Seraj recalled, “the neighbours didn’t take us seriously because they knew the government was dying".

In June 2021 Biden gave the order to withdraw. It was to be done as fast as possible. Washington wanted to reduce the risk to its own troops but in its eagerness to leave created the chaos where suicide bombers would flourish and move undetected. The US assessed that the Afghan army would hold out long enough to come to a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. But they didn’t take into account Pakistan’s role.

Intense clashes between the Taliban and the Afghan army broke out in Wardak and other areas. In June 2021, the Taliban took more territory and there was fighting in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Speaking two years later, Fazli Rafi, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, told me that the government assessed that these attacks had a professional command and control structure. “The Taliban knew guerrilla warfare but this time the Taliban were attacking in 24 different provinces with three different districts in each. That was over a hundred battle fronts. We assessed that the Taliban could only attack five provinces. This was the work of a professional army – and Pakistan was implicated”. On June 22nd, Seraj’s overwhelming fear was realised. Sher Khan Bandar, the main crossing point on the border with Tajikistan, fell to the Taliban. The dam had been breached. The Afghan government could no longer control its own borders. It was now a case of salvaging whatever one could from the flood.

Even at the height of the crisis, the president tried to sidestep ministers he felt were close to the Americans. Ghani had become very suspicious of ministers and political leaders. According to insiders, he felt that many Afghan leaders had private back channels with the US and the Taliban and were pursuing their own agendas. But marginalising the ministers compromised the command and control chain and led to more chaos. When ministers ordered the commanders to do something, the latter responded by saying that the president had told them otherwise. Even in such trying times, when unity was of the essence , that animosity manifested itself.

On July 2nd, US troops withdrew from Bagram air base after twenty years. The base, forty miles from Kabul, had been a key entry point for American hardware and personnel. Only a few troops stayed behind to protect the US embassy. By the end of July the southern cities of Herat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were scenes of intense fighting. In the first week of August the Taliban assassinated Dawa Khan Menapal, President Ghani’s public relations chief. Reports of Taliban fighters settling old tribal scores on the Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan heightened the fear.

When the president fled Kabul on 15th August all the major cities had fallen. It was on that day that the Taliban opened the gates of Pul-i-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul. It was a momentous event. Countless mujahid leaders including Seraj’s family members had been imprisoned there in the past. Taliban militants, as well as hardened criminals, emerged into the sunlight to taste freedom, and amongst the prisoners was Logari.

Seraj was shocked by the president’s departure. Moments earlier, the president had called him personally saying “that we should not allow thieves and people to create chaos, we should use whatever force we still have to control the situation". At the time Seraj was in Kabul scrambling to secure the release of the governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, as well as trying to relieve Mazar-i-Sharif - the largest city in northern Afghanistan. When the Taliban entered Kabul, he made his way to the presidential palace with his side arm at the ready, intending to protect the Commander-in-Chief of the republic until the end. He expected a call from the president to join other ministers and officials at the palace and then wait for him to take a final decision on the right course of action. Ghani’s departure stunned him. He returned to the office and sat on his desk, numb. “I was speechless for twenty or thirty minutes''.

The WhatsApp groups Seraj was in fell silent. Ministers and senior civil servants all started to leave them. He received messages from his colleagues asking him about the news and for instructions. But what could he tell them? Should he ask them to fight the Taliban? “The elected government that we're fighting for has collapsed,” Seraj said. “So what was our legitimacy to stay on?” He continued to receive panicked messages from his colleagues asking for clarification, orders, and instructions but he had none to give, except that they lie low and find safety as best they possibly can. The republic was no more and they were now on their own. A US State Department contact got Seraj out of the country; eventually he joined his wife who was already in London.

As August passed and Seraj began to piece his life together, the chaos of Biden’s withdrawal became apparent. US soldiers guarded Kabul airport as desperate Afghans huddled around the airport hoping to flee the country while the Taliban consolidated their rule in Kabul. On 26th August, Logari infiltrated the crowd in Abbey Gate and blew himself up. In so many ways the attack could have been preventable if only the Americans had listened and not treated the country like a plaything of empire.

But what the West have lost sight of, embroiled as they are with conflicts in Ukraine and now Gaza, is that the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul has made the situation far more permissive for extremists. During their twenty years fighting against the former Afghan government and Western coalition forces, they have forged strong bonds with many of these extremist groups. Whilst the Taliban have broadly speaking local ambitions and should not be treated as a monolithic whole, there are elements within the Taliban that have strong extremist connections such as that of the Haqqani network. It means that a plethora of extremist groups can find relative sanctuary and safety in the country. In my conversation with Seraj in 2023, he had already warned of what the consequences for the region would be and it seems that many of his predictions have come to pass. The conflict between Pakistan and the Taliban in March 2024 is something that he had told me about. He also pointed out that we would witness an increase in terror attacks in the region. And indeed, we have seen this with the terror attacks in Kerman, Iran in January 2024 and Moscow in March 2024.

There are already many reports that al-Qaeda are rebuilding, unimpeded. The UN security council noted that eight new camps had been established in 2024. An organisation that appeared to be on life support, looking for a reason to exist, appears to be suddenly revived especially by the events in Gaza. From its earliest days, Afghanistan had always been seen by the terror group as a jumping off point where they could use the country as a base to swoop in like a force multiplier to whatever conflict that required their help. In a recent piece written by Al-Qaeda’s new leader, Sayf al-Adl, has called for attacks on Western and Zionist targets. Sayf al-Adl then is little different from Osama bin Laden in outlook. As Kévin Jackson noted in a tweet that there is little information on al-Qaeda’s capabilities however, Sayf al-Adl’s piece “speaks volumes about the group’s intent.” Moreover, the fact that such tracts can emerge seemingly under the patronage of Kabul, suggests that there may be tacit approval from some sections of the Taliban.

But al-Qaeda is being superseded by ISKP, the group behind the Abbey Gate attack. A recent paper ‘From Tajikistan to Moscow and Iran: Mapping the Local and Transnational Threat of Islamic State Khorasan’ suggests that the group which had once been a local Islamic State franchise are now increasingly taking a more transnational outlook. They have already carried out high profile attacks in Iran, Russia and Western military brass expect more attacks like that of Moscow in the US and Europe. Already there have been several ISKP arrests in Europe and the Euros present themselves as a perfect opportunity to carry out their goals. One hopes however, that the security services have learnt from the Abbey gate attack and have forged close relationships with the regional security services to combat the looming threat of ISKP and others.

I wrote a shorter piece here for Unherd

For those reading this as a forward, my name is Tam Hussein an award winning investigative journalist with a particular focus on conflict. The Blood Rep is my newsletter that covers security, jihadism, militancy and criminal networks. Do read my latest book The Darkness Inside.