The New York Times reports:

The Taliban were inching closer, encroaching on land that had once seemed secure, the American officer warned. Four of his men had just been killed, and he needed Afghans willing to fight back.

“Who will stand up?” the officer implored a crowd of 150 Afghan elders.

The people in Kunduz Province were largely supportive of the Americans and opposed to the Taliban. But recruiting police officers was slow going and, by the summer of 2009, local officials and the American officer — a lieutenant colonel from the Georgia National Guard — landed on a risky approach: hiring private militias.

A murmur of discontent passed through the crowd.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” an old man stood up and said, according to four people at the meeting. “We have seen this before. The militias will become a bigger problem than the Taliban.”

Over the grumbling, a onetime warlord named Mohammad Omar sprung up and denounced the others as cowards.

“I will fight the Taliban!” he shouted.

The gathering in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, is not registered in any official history of the war. But people across the province say this seemingly unremarkable moment reshaped the conflict in ways that Washington has never truly understood.

For years, the Americans supported militias in the north to fight the Taliban. But the effort backfired — those groups preyed on the populace with such cruelty that they turned a one-time stronghold of the United States into a bastion of the insurgency. People came to see the militias, and by extensions the Americans, as a source of torment, not salvation.

Mr. Omar, for example, who was known as the Wall Breaker, became the poster child of an abusive militia commander, marauding his way into local lore by robbing, kidnapping and killing rivals and neighbors under the auspices of keeping them safe from the Taliban.

And he was just one of thousands of militia fighters unleashed in northern Afghanistan by the Americans and their allies — openly, covertly and sometimes inadvertently.

The consequences came to a head during the chaotic American withdrawal in 2021. The north was expected to be America’s rear guard, a place where values like democracy and women’s rights might have taken hold.

Instead, it capitulated in a matter of days — the first region to fall to the Taliban.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has blamed President Biden for the messy end to America’s longest war, vowing to fire “every single senior official” responsible for the disastrous exit. Mr. Biden, by contrast, blames the Afghans for surrendering to the Taliban so quickly.

“Political leaders gave up and fled the country,” Mr. Biden said after the withdrawal. “The Afghan military collapsed.”

But both renderings miss a more fundamental reason for the rapid fall: In places like Kunduz, a New York Times investigation found, the United States set the conditions for its defeat long before the Afghan soldiers laid down their arms. [Continue reading…]