Taliban and terror go hand in hand; any claim to the contrary is just a sad pretence
Terror is a cross that the Taliban will never shake off its back. No amount of recognition of their regime will erase public knowledge of their links with terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. In fact, both the Taliban and the United States will each face an uncomfortable question as long as terrorism remains a central issue in the southern Asian region. Did the US assume before withdrawing its troops that al-Qaeda, in the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, would not flex its muscles and possibly plan attacks on foreign lands? Does the Taliban assume that showing a moderate face to the world is enough to brush aside the fact that they have never formally announced that they would sever links with terrorist groups? Since the fall of Kabul, the Taliban have been careful about the kind of image they project before the world. There is a lot of window-dressing in terms of a Taliban leader allowing himself to be interviewed by a woman anchor of a news network or their leaders insisting at every opportunity that women would be allowed to work where their services are required. In their second brush with power, the least the Taliban want is negative publicity. However, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson let the cat out of the bag when he called a spade a spade: no one wants Afghanistan to become the “breeding ground of terror”. He went a step ahead to warn that he would work with the UN Security Council and Nato countries to stop Afghanistan from “lapsing back into terror”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the same thing, that “the international community must unite to make sure that Afghanistan is never again used as a platform or safe haven for terrorist organisations”. The Taliban were in talks with the Americans in 2019, even signed the Doha Agreement — that specifically talks about a Taliban promise not to encourage terror groups — but never formally confirmed or denied links with groups like al-Qaeda which they have decades-old links with. They will never live down the fact that they reportedly provided shelter to Osama bin Laden as he planned ‘9/11’. Reports are trickling in that the terror groups based in remote regions of Afghanistan may be breathing easy now that the Taliban are in control and the US is out of the country — that opens up a lot more hiding places for them than earlier. The relations between the two go back to the early 1990s when they shared a tough survival regimen in the hostile terrain and then came close through marriages. Those bonds are permanent. Even now, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the al-Qaeda, is said to be somewhere in Afghanistan. The worry is if these terrorist groups, exulting in the wake of the American departure, get a wild idea to use Afghanistan as a base to plan attacks abroad. What is the worth of a Taliban guarantee that such a thing would not come to pass?