![]() ![]() Players would work their way through a board, revealing cards as they go. The original game was a dungeon crawling RPG played out as a tabletop card game. The police officers who were supposed to be defending the area had long surrendered, retreated or had been paid off by the Taliban, as has occurred in many parts of the country over the past year.In terms of novel ideas, Hand of Fate 2 ranks pretty highly. In May, when the Taliban were breaching the outskirts of the southern city of Lashkar Gah, a hodgepodge group of border force soldiers were holding the line. More often than not, as is the case in any conflict since the beginning of time, the soldiers and police are fighting for each other, and for the lower-ranking leaders who inspire them to fight despite what hell lies ahead. Yet even amid what could be a complete surrender by the Afghan government and its forces, there are troops still fighting. Other experts say the Taliban have taken a bulk of their strength from Pakistan. officials say the Taliban numbers have swelled because of an influx of foreign fighters and an aggressive conscription campaign in captured territory. Now that number is even murkier as international forces and their intelligence capabilities withdraw. Official estimates have long sat at somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. ![]() Haleem was still alive and what remained of his comrades.Īs the Taliban carry out an almost uninterrupted sweep of the country, their strength has been in question. The heavy machine gun, for which his unit had very few bullets, broke later that night.Īs of Thursday, it was unclear if Mr. “How are we supposed to defeat the Taliban with this amount of ammunition?” he said. His special operations unit was at half strength - 15 out of 30 people - and several of his comrades who remained on the front were there because their villages had been captured. “We are drowning in corruption,” said Abdul Haleem, 38, a police officer on the Kandahar frontline earlier this month. On Friday, another prominent Afghan warlord and former governor, Mohammad Ismail Khan, who had resisted Taliban attacks in western Afghanistan for weeks and rallied many to his cause to push back the insurgent offensive, surrendered to the insurgents. The second city to fall this week was Sheberghan in Afghanistan’s north, a capital that was supposed to be defended by a formidable force under the command of Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum, an infamous warlord and a former Afghan vice president who has survived the past 40 years of war by cutting deals and switching sides. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of despair and feelings of abandonment. Officials often turned a blind eye to what was happening, knowing full well that the Afghan forces’ real manpower count was far lower than what was on the books, skewed by corruption and secrecy that they quietly accepted.Īnd when the Taliban started building momentum after the United States’ announcement of withdrawal, it only increased the belief that fighting in the security forces - fighting for President Ashraf Ghani’s government - wasn’t worth dying for. Soldiers and police officers have expressed ever-deeper resentment of the Afghan leadership. These shortfalls can be traced to numerous issues that sprung from the West’s insistence on building a fully modern military with all the logistical and supply complexities one requires, and which has proved unsustainable without the United States and its NATO allies. But even before that, the systemic weaknesses of the Afghan security forces - which on paper numbered somewhere around 300,000 people, but in recent days have totaled around just one-sixth of that, according to U.S. ![]()
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