In Its Last Days in Kabul, U.S. Turns to Taliban as a Partner

20 many years back, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban. Nowadays, American forces, battered by one of the bloodiest assaults of the war, are relying for their very own protection on that similar group, whose associates they had been trying to eliminate just months before.

Fighters of the Taliban’s elite Badri 313 unit, dressed in the newest tactical gear, patrol the very same Kabul airport parking lot as U.S. Marines, divided by a handful of coils of razor wire. Farther absent, Taliban foot troopers pat down Afghans searching for to enter the facility and disperse crowds with whips and occasional gunfire in the air.

The Taliban’s important mission about the airport in the final times of the chaotic withdrawal is to hold off Islamic State, an even extra radical corporation, which killed 13 U.S. troops and practically 200 Afghans in a suicide bombing on Thursday.

In this arrangement, the 5,200 American forces in Afghanistan “use the Taliban as a software to secure us as a great deal as probable,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, mentioned just after Thursday’s attack. The Taliban and the U.S., he added, now share a “common purpose.”

Additional than that: The Taliban checkpoints on the way to the airport—in coordination with the U.S.—are screening Afghans whose earlier work with Western forces puts them in hazard of Taliban retribution. The Taliban are “providing the outer security cordon” for American forces, Gen. McKenzie mentioned, and have closed some streets at U.S. request, extending the checkpoints’ perimeter.