General Sir Nick Carter, who is Chief of the Defence Staff, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that “everybody got it wrong” about the speed of the Taliban’s takeover of the country.
His comments come following remarks by General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Saturday where he warned that civil war in Afghanistan was “likely.”
Carter suggested on Sunday that divisions among the Taliban were already becoming apparent.
He specifically highlighted conflict between the group’s Political Commission, based in the Qatari city of Doha, and the Haqqani Network, which is based in Pakistan and has ties to al-Qaeda.
“The Taliban are going to struggle with governing the country,” Carter said. “It’s one thing achieving a unity of purpose to knock a government over, it’s quite another trying to govern a country.”
“And what we have seen is that it is factionalizing and you’ve got a real rift between the Haqqanis, the southerners from Kandahar and the Political Commission, who’ve been resident in Doha for so many years. Whether they can pull that together or not is the really interesting question at the moment,” the general said
Carter warned that if the Taliban can’t form an effective government “all bets are off” in terms of terror groups. Milley issued a similar warning about the growth of terror groups in the context of a civil war.
“If the Political Commission is able to form an inclusive government, it is possible that they may govern less repressively – we have to wait and see,” Carter said.
“At the moment they suffer from what we military call ‘catastrophic success’. They were not expecting to be in government as quickly as they have appeared and the reality is they are trying to find their feet,” he went on.
“We need to wait and see how this happens and recognize that they’re probably going to need a bit of help in order to run a modern state effectively. And if they behave, perhaps they will get some help,” Carter said.
The general also commented on the speed at which the Taliban took over the country and the failure to predict it. Along with other military leaders of coalition forces, Carter has faced criticism for the nature of the troop withdrawal.
“I think everybody got it wrong is the straight answer,” he said. “Even the Taliban didn’t expect things to change as quickly as they did.”
“I don’t think we realized quite what the Taliban were up to. They weren’t really fighting for the cities they eventually captured, they were negotiating for them. And I think you’ll find a lot of money changed hands as they managed to buy off those who might have fought for them,” Carter said.
