Former U.S. Military Adviser on the Taliban’s Strategy

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What do you attribute it? How do you see the steps that were taken that led to where we are now?

SARAH CHAYES, FORMER ADVISER, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE: Well, what I would say is, it’s not so much especially the Taliban who used this time so strategically. It was the Pakistani military intelligence agency, which is the organization that really ginned up the Taliban in the first place back in the early 1990s. And starting about 2003, I began seeing signs that the ISI, which is the acronym of that agency, that the ISI was reconstituting the Taliban. And, at that time, no Taliban could even stay inside Afghanistan. They would run in, do one attack, and then run back out across the border. And then, as time went on, I watched quite a sophisticated campaign plan develop that responded well to where NATO forces had positioned themselves. And I watched that develop over a matter of years. And it was sometimes discouraging to speak to NATO officers or U.S. officers who were saying, oh, the Taliban are just opportunistic. They’re like water in a plastic bag. You squish it in one place and it pops out somewhere else. And I said, no, they’re not. They’re actually executing quite a strategic plan. And I guess I’d say, in terms of today, the same thing is true. Look how — look at the simultaneous surrender and defeat of Afghan government forces and civilian leaders all around the country almost at the same time. Look at the focus on the north first and then the south. Look at the people who flooded across the border from Pakistan into the border town of Spin Buldak. And I would say, do we really think that this ragtag militia, as we have been told the Taliban were, that they are conducted such an effective campaign with such obvious planning? I don’t think so. I think they had help from the Pakistani military intelligence agency.

AMANPOUR: So, let’s quickly —