Representative Mike Waltz describes his efforts to back anti-Taliban resistance fighters, in the absence of White House leadership.
Representative Mike Waltz describes his efforts to back anti-Taliban resistance fighters, in the absence of White House leadership.
T he completion of Washington’s pullout from Afghanistan leaves President Biden’s team with two very challenging tasks going forward: evacuating those Americans and Afghan allies still left in the country and continuing to degrade the ability of al-Qaeda and ISIS-K to carry out attacks internationally.
Biden officials seem to have credulously cast their lot with what they hope to be a newly reformed Taliban. Yet they could find some natural allies in Panjshir Valley, just 50 miles north of Kabul, who would help — if only the administration were not loath to support them.
Representative Michael Waltz is working to change that mindset and is seeking support for the Panjshir resistance forces. That starts with legislative language he’s promoting to explicitly prohibit the administration from officially recognizing a Taliban-led government, and it encompasses a broader effort to marshal his congressional colleagues, foreign governments, and even the private sector to support anti-Taliban fighters in the Panjshir.
“We’re working with some of our allies — I don’t want to get ahead of that process — who have seemed to indicate a willingness to start pushing humanitarian aid into that corridor,” the Florida Republican told National Review in an interview on Tuesday. He’s introducing an amendment during a defense-bill markup Wednesday to bar Taliban recognition and to direct the Pentagon to “give us their plan for over-the-horizon counterterrorism, this new term that sprung up in the last couple of months that in my 25 years I’ve never heard of and think is a clever talking point but doesn’t really work in reality without a local entity on the ground.”
He added that efforts to help Panjshir will also have to come from the private sector, given the administration’s abdication of responsibility, and that a number of private groups that assisted in the evacuation effort are “shifting towards continuing to support this bulwark against what we know is going to come, which is a massive and significant threat from ISIS and al-Qaeda.”
That bulwark is led by former Afghan vice president Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud, the son of a famous resistance fighter from the Taliban’s first reign over two decades ago. (Waltz is in contact with both.) They are plotting their next steps, for which they hope to find international support. Saleh appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News last week, to convey a message directly to Americans. He said al-Qaeda and the Taliban have not parted ways, Pakistan is sponsoring the Taliban, and the Panjshir opposition invites Americans left behind in Afghanistan to seek protection in the valley.
In other words, Saleh and Massoud make for natural U.S. partners, as officials reckon with a terrorist threat that, counter to the claims of Biden and his top aides, is far from extinguished.
But ensuring the survival of Panjshir’s budding opposition won’t be easy, as Waltz conceded to me. Their forces exist in a precarious limbo right now. Although the province’s leaders spent months stockpiling weapons for what they predicted would be a protracted fight with an ascendant Taliban, the valley is surrounded by Taliban-held territory. When a group of resistance fighters, the Northern Alliance, fought the Taliban two decades ago, it controlled a much larger swath of Afghanistan, bordering the country’s neighbors.
On Wednesday, a top Taliban official, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said on Twitter that his group’s talks with the Panjshir opposition had fallen through: “Now that the talks have failed and Mujahiddin (Taliban) have surrounded Panjshir, there are still people inside that don’t want the problems to be solved peacefully.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that new clashes around Panjshir Province had caused casualties on both sides. The current situation is perilous.
But Saleh, Massoud, and their fighters remain defiant. On Monday, the National Resistance Forces, a Massoud-linked group, announced that it killed seven Taliban fighters in clashes at the western entrance to Panjshir. Ultimately, the resistance’s survival might very well be determinative of U.S. capabilities to degrade the ongoing threat from jihadists in Afghanistan. But without the administration’s help, there’s only so much Panjshir’s friends can do.
Waltz said the focus now is on “providing that humanitarian or non-lethal support,” whether by air drops or other avenues, stressing the strategic value of their resistance effort, especially in the wake of the full U.S. military withdrawal.
“They’re providing a sanctuary now for military units, for at-risk Afghans, journalists, civil-society leaders, female politicians. Afghanistan’s not exactly a wealthy place to start with, and now, to support these kind of refugees that are flowing in is going to be significant,” he said. Waltz also noted that Panjshir’s opposition faction is attempting to connect to parts of central Afghanistan with large populations of Hazaras, a persecuted ethnic minority group.
But Panjshir’s role as a sanctuary area is more important than ever from a humanitarian perspective, as the Taliban begin to escalate a wave of reprisal killings. NBC reported that the U.S. government has evacuated only 8,500 Afghans who worked with U.S. forces, and the Wall Street Journal revealed that the U.S. left “the majority” of the 100,000 Afghan interpreters and other eligible applicants for U.S. visas.
Further, Waltz said Panjshir’s role as a front in counterterrorism operations will be key — and this will require the administration’s support.
“In the longer term, as part of the over-the-horizon counterterrorism plan, we will be pushing the administration more on keeping a local ally alive and viable, much as we did to Kurds in Iraq, so that we have someone to work with that is still willing to fight and fight against these terrorist entities,” he said.
In a White House address to mark the completion of the Afghan withdrawal yesterday, Biden pledged to “maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries” and claimed “we just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it.” But Waltz is skeptical of the so-called over-the-horizon capabilities the president keeps touting.
Waltz hopes that Afghanistan’s neighbors get involved as part of that mission. But on the home front, a crucial battle takes place this week, with the defense-bill markup.
Congressional Democrats have yet to say much about Panjshir, but they can’t be written off just yet. The administration is on a “slippery slope” already, Waltz noted, since it’s illegal to provide aid to any government that comes to power via a military coup. “There’s certainly a lot of bipartisan support in Congress for not recognizing the Taliban/al-Qaeda government, and to continue to support those that are willing to stand with us against terrorism.”