Peter Galbraith, former UN Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan and the first US Ambassador to Croatia, spoke to N1 on Monday about the ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan as Taliban forces took power.

Commenting on his own earlier words that the US has no real partner in Afghanistan, Galbraith said: “That is exactly what happened. The United States has embarked on a counter-insurgency strategy. For the strategy to work, they had to have a local partner, and the government of Afghanistan both on the national level and quite often on the local level, was corrupt, ineffective, and involved in fraudulent elections, so it was also illegitimate. It collapsed like a house of cards.”

David H. Petraeus, former commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, was the architect of a failed strategy, Galbraith said.

“The whole idea behind the strategy was to go into an area, clear the enemy out, and establish security. That was held by the NATO and the security forces of Afghanistan. And then you build administration, and you can have economic development. However, the security forces couldn’t hold, and in fact there was never a case of competent local administration. It was corrupt… so the whole thing was a total failure. It was a failure of a strategy that cost about $2 trillion,” he said.

Asked whether the lives of the members of Afghan military and police, trained by the international forces, are in danger now that the Taliban took power in the country, Galbraith said: “They came to believe they would not be killed. Otherwise I have to imagine they would have fought. The problem is that in the collapse it became clear that Afghanistan was a lost cause – and nobody wants to fight and risk their life for a lost cause.”

He rejected the accusations that the war in Afghanistan ended once the United States lost interest in their continued presence there.

“I think a fairer way to describe what happened is that after 20 years, two trillion dollars, more than 2,000 American lives lost, and thousands of Afghan casualties, the Afghan government and military couldn’t stand up on their own even for a few days. If we had continued our presence it wouldn’t be any different in another five or ten years. The whole project didn’t work. Any reasonable person would think that the Afghan military, which counted 300,000, was much better equipped than the Taliban, would be able to defeat them,” he said.

The Afghan military and government were corrupt, he stressed, adding there was a failure to supply logistics, including food and ammunition. “The whole system collapsed.”

“I do think there was another problem – the United States and its coalition partners created a Western-style army that depended on elaborate logistics,” Galbraith said.

We can expect a new wave of refugees, he said. “Most of the people in Afghanistan do not want the Taliban (in power).

Half the population are women and girls, they’re going to do worse, and 15 percent of the population are Shia Muslims who live in the central highlands, an area that the Taliban has not taken so far, and they are afraid of oppression, even genocide because the Taliban, who are a Sunni Jihadi movement, see them as apostates. So yes, I think we can expect a lot of people will leave. The least we can do right now is provide for all those who worked with the international coalition,” he said.