Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum, the former vice president now in exile, has said that US support is required to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, who he says “deceived us”.
“The Taliban deceived us — they should be dealt with by force,” Dostum who is a member of the exiled opposition group the National Resistance Council for Salvation of Afghanistan told The Rolling Stone in a recent interview.
“We don’t need American tanks or planes; we just need their political support. If I get that and can’t teach them [Taliban] a lesson, then my name is not Dostum.” He said.
A few months before the Taliban takeover of the northern Balkh province in August 2021, Dostum along with other northern political and jihadi leaders, who helped the US topple the first Taliban regime in the late 1990s, returned to the battlefield to defend the Taliban who were rapidly closing.
But at the peak of the Taliban’s offensive, Dostum narrated to Rolling Stone, he was poisoned by “unknown enemies” forcing him to leave the battleground and be transferred to Turkey for treatment, where he still resides today.
“It was really bad — it nearly killed him,” his son, Batur Dostum told Rolling Stone.
While the Taliban fighters were advancing toward Dostum’s home province Jowzjan, Dostum’s older son, Yar Mohammad Dostum, tried to hold the line in the capital Sheberghan, but it was not successful. The Taliban captured Sheberghan in early August after Nimruz’s Zaranj first fell to the group’s fighters.
On August 15, the Taliban seized Kabul and declared victory as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country to Uzbekistan and the US and NATO forces were hastily evacuating thousands of people who had rushed to the Kabul airport to flee the country.
Dostum accused President Ghani’s “incompetent” leadership of the collapse of the country.
“We were in the hands of a person who could not rally people who were against the Taliban. I am a military man and know every part of Afghanistan,” he said in the interview. “I had the ability and could do the job easily. Instead, Ghani was backbiting me … and the Americans did not listen to me because of him.”
In those final moments, Dostum indicated that he also implored senior US officials and the CIA station chief in Kabul to provide him with support.
“I told them Ghani can’t do anything, that Kabul will fall unless I am provided with air support and munitions. They did not give me a single bullet,” Dostum stated.
