LONDON (WSJ) – Undercover Taliban agents – often clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and sporting sunglasses – spent years infiltrating Afghan government ministries, universities, businesses and aid organizations to expedite the movement’s takeover of the country, according to a new report.
Then, as U.S. forces were completing their chaotic withdrawal in August, the operatives stepped out of the shadows in Kabul and other big cities across Afghanistan, helping the Taliban rapidly seize control from the inside.
The pivotal role played by these clandestine cells is becoming apparent only now, three months after the U.S. pullout. At the time, Afghan cities fell one after another with little resistance from the U.S.-backed government’s troops. Kabul collapsed in a matter of hours, with hardly a shot fired.
“We had agents in every organization and department,” boasted Mawlawi Mohammad Salim Saad, a senior Taliban leader who directed suicide-bombing operations and assassinations inside the Afghan capital before its fall. “The units we had already present in Kabul took control of the strategic locations.”
Saad’s men belong to the so-called Badri force of the Haqqani network, a part of the Taliban that is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.
The 20-year war in Afghanistan was often seen as a fight between bands of Taliban insurgents and Afghan and U.S. troops struggling to control rural terrain. The endgame, however, was won by a large underground network of urban operatives.
On Aug. 15, after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul, it was these men who seized the capital city while the Taliban’s more-conventional forces remained outside.
The cells fanned out to seize other government and military installations and reached Kabul airport, where the U.S. was mounting a massive evacuation effort. They took control of the airport’s perimeter until better-armed Taliban troops arrived from the countryside in the morning. One agent, Mullah Rahim, was even dispatched to secure the Afghan Institute of Archaeology and its treasures from potential looters.