The success of the Taliban in recapturing key locations in Sangin in southern Afghanistan — an area that is a graveyard of western interventionist military strategies and their serious miscalculations since 2006 — once again begs the question of just how will the Afghanistan government of Ashraf Gani surmount this persistent problem?
Though the Afghan government in recent times has made some progress in talks with its neighbours — particularly China — on a Taliban-tamed future, as well on the possible blowback of American troop-withdrawal in 2016, the fact remains that decades of foreign military interventions have arguably wedged Afghanistan more painfully between a rock and a hard place.
And now with the trophy of Sangin, with its opium trade that runs into billions of dollars every year, nearly back with the Taliban, the decades-old schisms in Afghanistan’s embattled history are once again in gaping view. Sangin is a grim reminder of how a clear lack of policy and little understanding of its shifting tribal affiliations can be a deadly mistake for interventionist powers, with the United Kingdom military assistance to Afghanistan alone having cost 106 lives in four years.
Sangin not only offers lessons to powers like the United States, UK and Nato on how not to embark on ill-informed military interventions, it is also a litmus test for Afghanistan’s ability to control the Taliban and steer the country back on to the path to stability on its own steam.
