Afghanistan on the brink of new civil war

The anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan is considered an Afghan national holiday. This year, leaders of the movement "Taliban" urged the residents of the country " to expel the United States from Afghanistan , just like 25 years ago Mujahideens expelled the USSR" , reports Reuters. By the end of this year, the main part of the international coalition forces are to leave Afghanistan. However, the situation with the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan after the termination of the combat mission forces under NATO command is not quite clear yet.

Russian experts are also concerned about the uncertainty. Most of them believe that the situation will deteriorate , and some believe that there may arise the question about the existence of Afghanistan as a united country . Chief editor of the journal " Problems of National Strategy " Ajdar Kurtov doesn’t share such extreme pessimistic viewpoints, but admits that the entire history of Afghanistan shows that after relative stability within the centralized state it often gets divided into separate khanates.

 “Now we are analyzing the situation which has arisen since the end of 2001 after the U.S. and their allies brought troops to this country under the pretext of the need to eliminate international terrorism, al-Qaeda and, to a lesser extent, the Taliban”, Mr Kurtov says. “The presence of the world's largest country in terms of the military aspect, the United States, for over 10 years showed that the limits of the power of the United States still exist, and the goals set back in 2001 have not been achieved either in the military sense, because different groups of rebels - usually referred to as the Taliban, although it is not quite correct, because there are different groups of anti-government, anti-Karzai forces that fight in Afghanistan - the rebels are quite efficient and control, by some estimates, up to a quarter of the country. They are able to perform military operations even in specially protected areas in the Afghan capital Kabul, while the Afghan government, the pro-American Karzai government failed, while in power, to implement a successful cycle of reforms to make Afghanistan a more stable state.”

 Moreover, Mr Kurtov states that this government “possesses all the typical vices of eastern authoritarian rule, starting with corruption and ending with rightful allegations that some government members and relatives of the Afghan President are implicated in drug trafficking.”

So even if 15,000 soldiers of the Americans and the allies stay in Afghanistan, it won’t be sufficient to control the security situation. “Afghanistan will face a new round of civil war. Deprived of military, technical and financial assistance, the government of Hamid Korzai or his successor is unlikely to be able to control security in Afghanistan. This means again that Afghanistan will plunge into the chaos that we saw in the first half of the 1990s - a war of different warlords against each other.”