If one puts it all together, the Taliban remain vulnerable to Pakistani machinations and the spirit of jehadi camaraderie displayed by non-Afghan terror groups waging jehad elsewhere, including in Kashmir. Also, the last two decades of liberal democratic rule, howsoever flawed and afflicted with corruption and nepotism, has generated the impulses of liberty and dignity among average Afghan which the Taliban may find difficult to handle
The Taliban entered Kabul on August 15, 2021, the day India celebrated its 75th Independence Day. It was a bloodless takeover as government forces chose not to react. It happened too soon, proving most of the analysts wrong. There is speculation that it was all scripted and some backchannel was active between the Taliban and the US as well as the Kabul Government enabling the return of the Taliban without a shot being fired.
That a 300,000 plus Afghan National Defence and Security Force (ANDSF) offered no credible resistance tells us a lot about its incapability and lack of motivation to defend the system that was in place in Afghanistan for nearly two decades. US President Joe Biden was not off the mark when he stressed that.
Or was it the case that there was a larger game plan to disable them as Bismillah Muhammadi, the Defence Minister, said their hands were “tied behind their backs”! In any case, the Americans were perhaps holding their hands too tightly for them to acquire the confidence that was required to operate on their own to take on a guerrilla force like Taliban.
Be that as it may, it did seem as if the ANDSF forces were demoralised beyond redemption, once the US withdrew its hand of support and signed the February 2020 peace agreement, lending Taliban the legitimacy that they were craving for.
Post-deal, the popular support, mostly non-urban, cutting across ethnicities, visibly shifted towards the Taliban, away from Kabul, whetting Taliban’s appetite to grab more areas. They expedited their campaign, through the pandemics, while the government forces at the lower ranks either defected to the Taliban ranks or stayed quiet. The top ANDSF leadership cried hoarse and expressed its defiance in the social media, while the Taliban took cities after cities with aplomb. The Taliban “blitz”, as it is now being called, was thus inevitable.
Now that the Taliban are back in Kabul, there is a need for realistic assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. It is easy to conclude that the US made its choices based on domestic calculations and the sense of fatigue from prolonged Afghan operations. Biden could be right that they needed to pack off a decade ago after killing Bin Laden, because their primary aim was to degrade al-Qaeda and decapitate its leaders.
It is also true that the inertia of their largely counter-insurgency involvement dragged them down into the Afghan quicksand as the civil war deepened (after Bin-Laden’s killing) until they realised that there was no taker at home to be drawn into the vortex of a prolonged messy war. They needed an honourable exit.
The US desperation was leveraged well by the Taliban and their backers — primarily Pakistan and China (but also Iran and Russia) — to finally enable a dialogue that resulted in the February-2020 deal, whereby the US agreed to withdraw in return for lame assurances from the Taliban that they would not target foreign forces and let any terror group use Afghan soil to target the US and its allies. Importantly, they did not agree to declare ceasefire, nor showed their enthusiasm for intra-Afghan dialogue.
It is hard to imagine that the US could trust the Taliban with such moderation in a post-withdrawal scenario, and literally dump the system and the alternate leadership that it had put its money on for a long time, based on Taliban’s promise that they would keep their words. The US and its allies ignored calls for caution from their own analysts —even military leadership — and accepted it as fait accompli.
Other external players, including the regional ones, i.e., Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc, viewed it differently. They were more concerned about prolonged US presence than Taliban’s return. Their residual concerns about Taliban returning to their radical past were offset by their hope that
Taliban 2.0, as they call them, would behave.
Their reactions have been on expected lines. Most of them have expressed their desire/willingness to work with the Taliban-led government. Russians have even said gratuitously that Afghanistan is more peaceful now than it was under the Ghani administration!
Now that the Taliban are back, some of the top leaders of the government, who could afford, have fled Afghanistan fearing reprisal. Others, who wanted to flee spilled on to the tarmac at the Kabul airport. The visuals were disquieting. In contrast, gun-toting Taliban cadre were seen entering the presidential palace confidently and taking their turns to sit on the presidential chair!
Unsurprisingly, most of those, especially the educated middle class and women, who believed that the US and its allies were seeking their emancipation, are now saying that they feel “betrayed and
abandoned”.
Now it is time for everyone to guess what will be the future of Afghans, now that in the first press conference on August 18, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid has openly stated that they would respect women rights, forgive all those who opposed them and build relations with other countries according to Islamic and international laws.
In fact, Zabihullah had given away a lot more in the run-up to the takeover of Kabul, offering clear hints of the type of government Taliban have in mind. The word “Islamic” is central to their thinking. In his interview to Tolo news on July 12, Zabihullah had made it very clear that the Taliban drew their inspirations from Shura-e-Ahl-al-hall-wal-aqd, which refers to council of religious scholars, those who are qualified to appoint or depose a caliph or ruler on behalf of the Ummah. He said they wanted an Islamic system “was not a secret thing” and the Taliban wanted to build a system “involving good people”, bound by the advice “given by experts”, led by a “Muslim” who is “honest, just, educated and… virtuous”, “should not be an embezzler, a robber….dictated to from abroad”, and “have deep knowledge of Islam”.
He could not hide his contempt for electoral politics (read democracy) and disputed the claim by the interviewer that elections led to successful republican systems in many Muslim countries. Citing the cases of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Algeria, he argued that none of these countries had a pleasant experience with elections. He held that Afghan media are being financed by vested interests and are busy “insulting individuals” rather than carrying out healthy criticism.
He also held that the deal did not disallow the Taliban to maintain relations with other Muslims, including al-Qaeda!
To quote him, “Nowhere in the agreement has it been mentioned that we have or don’t have ties with anyone… What has been agreed upon is that no threat should be posed from Afghan soil to the US and its allies… (and) the relation between Muslims… is (a matter of) faith”. To a pointed question that al-Qaeda operative Abul-Muslim all-Misri was killed in Andar district in Ghazni in areas under Taliban control, Mujahid denied his presence there, asked for evidence, and went on to say they did not “have the Interior Ministry and intelligence under (their) control to monitor all citizens, to know who is there and who is not”.
Mujahid also repudiated the argument that the deal forbade them from re-employing freed Taliban prisoners, saying the agreement did not say “that our prisoners should not return to the battlefield once they are released”. He also rejected the fatwa in 2018 by 100 religious scholars from 37 countries in Saudi Arabia not to shed Muslim blood in any Muslim country, as well as a similar declaration from Muslim scholars in Nigeria in 2020 that the war in Afghanistan was illegitimate based on Verse-94 of Surah An-Nisa, on the ground that (i) majority of those pronouncing such fatwa were government officials in various countries and were under US pressure; (ii) such fatwa could only be issued after listening to both sides and the Taliban were not present in any of these assemblies; (iii) jehad in Afghanistan started much before these fatwa were pronounced; and (iv) there were acclaimed religious scholars among the Taliban, who considered jehad in Afghanistan legitimate.
Mujahid was unapologetic about Taliban’s links with Pakistan and casually mentioned about the presence of Kashmiri Mujahideen in Pakistan, Afghanistan. If one puts it all together, the Taliban remain vulnerable to Pakistani machinations and the spirit of jehadi camaraderie displayed by non-Afghan terror groups waging jehad elsewhere, including in Kashmir.
As Afghanistan transits from a “Republic” to an “Emirate”, under Taliban stewardship, Amrullah Saleh, the most vocal critic of Taliban and first vice president in Ghani administration, has retired to the Panjshir valley to reequip and fight. Other ethnic leaders like Dostum, Ata Muhammad Noor, etc, must be licking their wounds and itching to return to the ring. The aspirational generation in the country has started pouring out on to the streets in various urban areas indicating their distrust of Taliban assurances.
Contained in Taliban’s assurances is a quiet admission that they were unsophisticated and overenthusiastic in applying Islamic laws in their previous avatar. They seem to have, like their al-Qaeda allies, moderated their stand on the Shias and women. However, their assurances remain untested so far. There are already reports of women in rural areas being forced to marry the Taliban cadre and incidents of gruesome murder and defiling of Indian journalist Danish Siddiqui signal a possible throwback to the 1990s.
The last two decades of liberal democratic rule, howsoever flawed and afflicted with corruption and nepotism, has generated the impulses of liberty and dignity among average Afghan which the Taliban may find difficult to handle.
Taliban’s way of dealing with popular demonstrations in favour of freedom and justice remains to be seen. They have already fired on them leading to casualties in some cases. There is every likelihood of the mask of moderation falling off the Taliban face in the coming days.
It also remains to be seen whether American bid to apply the brakes on funding and international community’s hint to recognise the Taliban only after it is sure of its intentions, will keep Taliban under check.
(Dr Ashok Behuria is a senior fellow at Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), New Delhi. The views are his own.)