Meet the Afghan general who wants to take on the Taliban

In rural Mason Neck, Virginia, among homes with Confederate flags hanging out front and towering pickup trucks occupying driveways, a stately brick mansion makes for an unexpected neighbor.

In the home’s front lawn, sitting amid manicured shrubs, rises an even more unusual sight: the flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. It is one that has not flown in its own country since 2021, when U.S. forces departed and top leaders fled, ceding control to the Taliban.

Former Afghan Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat believes he’ll once again see that flag ascend in Afghan skies.

This is his home, and also the hub for the Afghanistan United Front, an organization he founded — and largely self-funds — to “unite Afghans and return Afghanistan to the constitutional order, ensuring that Afghans can enjoy freedom, peace, and prosperity.”

Inside the house, behind Sadat’s desk, is another Afghan flag, one he took from the compound of the provincial governor of Helmand province when Sadat ordered the evacuation of the province’s capital city of Lashkar Gah on Aug. 12, 2021.

“We made a promise to take this flag back,” Sadat said in an interview with Military Times.

While few Afghan generals over the course of the 20-year war became internationally known, Sadat’s profile rose higher than most.

He was prominently featured in the 2022 National Geographic documentary Retrograde, which followed the officer, then in control of the entire Afghan Army, as he sought to hold the line amid crumbling order in the final days before the fall of Kabul.

Sadat, 39, is a polarizing figure. In his memoir “The Last Commander,” published in August by Bombardier books, he admits his blunt and combative manner garnered powerful enemies — including Ashraf Ghani, the last president of Afghanistan — and sometimes put him at odds with the U.S. generals ostensibly there to support Afghan military efforts.

In one of the book’s scenes, he describes telling off a U.S. Army one-star who demanded he and other Afghan soldiers be searched and turn over their weapons before entering their own headquarters for a mission briefing.

Ultimately, Sadat said he threatened to shut the general out of the meeting entirely.

“I walked in with all my combat gear on, carrying my M-4 rifle,” Sadat writes. “I hated myself for being so rude, but we needed to make a point. This was our war. America was a supporting partner.”

By Sadat’s account, the months prior to the 2020 Doha Agreement, a peace deal with the Taliban that set the stage for U.S. withdrawal, had yielded significant victories by the Afghan military in holding and retaking key territory.

Sadat felt the deal hamstrung Afghan forces, limiting their ability to engage with and pursue the Taliban just as their military efforts were gaining momentum. It was a feeling of betrayal, Sadat says in his book, that would only be compounded the following year as American forces began to withdraw.

In May 2021, all the contractors responsible for the Afghans’ fleet of Black Hawk helicopters left at the same time, without the handoff process needed to keep the aircraft maintained and flying, according to his memoir.

Sadat describes the pain of listening to U.S. troops blow up their remaining caches of ammunition, leaving none behind for Afghan allies. It makes his frustration and helplessness visceral.

“As a time when we were rationing every round, the sight of mortar shells being fired uselessly into the desert, one after another, was demoralizing,” he writes.

The Afghanistan United Front, or AUF, is itself something of an act of defiance. It shares many common aims with the National Resistance Front (NRF) of Afghanistan, led by former Afghan politician Ahmad Massoud and headquartered in Tajikistan.

Sadat said he reached out to Massoud soon after the fall of Afghanistan with interest in joining his movement, but the NRF had adopted an approach — and older Afghan flag — associated with mujahideen factions of the 1990s. Sadat insisted on standing behind Afghanistan’s last constitution, and its final flag.

NRF leaders perceived a power struggle, and Sadat ended up on his own. He now says he’s open to changes to the Afghan government once the people are back in control, but believes the guiding documents and symbols of the country must remain constant until then.

“We need something for now to bind our legal claim, and that is the constitution and a constitutional order,” he said.

The extent of Sadat’s network of allies is hard to ascertain. His book features advance praise from H.R. McMaster, a former U.S. national security advisor and retired Army lieutenant general who calls it “an invaluable perspective on the American self-defeat in Afghanistan.”

Sadat has also toured with Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and Thomas Kasza, a U.S. Army veteran who founded an organization to support Afghans who assisted special operations troops.

In 2022, Sadat met with House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and became a contributor to the Republican-led committee report on Afghanistan’s fall released in September.

Sadat said he aligns with the report’s perspective on President Joe Biden, whose “abandonment” of Afghanistan speaks, he believes, to Biden’s longstanding contempt for the country.

And while he remains in friendly communication with other U.S. military leaders he once worked with in Afghanistan, those individuals have made clear they are unable to get involved in his cause, he said.

Where he has the most support, meanwhile, is at the ground level of his home country, among the scattered Afghan military forces.

“We could mobilize tens of thousands of soldiers in a matter of months,” he said, adding that the Taliban’s suffocating rule in Afghanistan was also stirring up the fight in young men who’d never previously served. “We believe that thousands and thousands of fresh recruits will also rush to the call.”

Before that comes to fruition, lessons must be gleaned from failures of the past.

Sadat said he believes the HFAC Republicans’ report provided “a sense of accountability” for the U.S. government’s mistakes and failures in Afghanistan leading up to the country’s collapse. But he wishes the report probed deeper into the risk the Taliban pose today, not only to the Afghan people, but also to the Western world as the extremist movement gains strength and lends support to other radical Islamist groups.

“Another 9/11 attack and major global attacks is not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when, because they’re preparing,” Sadat said. “So, there are two ways the Americans can do this. One way is to support us, so we can go and … destroy them inside Afghanistan. The other way is, the Americans wait and fight them in Europe and the Middle East and inside America.”

It remains unclear when the time will be right for AUF to launch its planned political and military offensive against the Taliban. Sadat said he can’t discuss the timeline, but made clear the group can’t afford to wait forever.

An upcoming book tour that will usher him to locations across the United States — including stops in Texas, Arizona and New York — will, he hopes, raise more resources and awareness for the AUF to continue its work.

“As soon as we have enough resources, we’re going to go and start our campaign,” Sadat said.

“And in this, we’re not asking anyone’s permission.”