Afghanistan's Future & Regional Geo-Political/Geo-Economic Options

Following a fortnight of targetted conciliatory statements issued by Taliban spokespersons Zabihullah Mujahid and Suhail Shaheen on mainstream English-language Indian TV channels, the Taliban’s head of political office in Doha, Sher Mohammed Abbas Stanekzai in an audio-visual Facebook post in Pashto spoke about the end of the war in Afghanistan and plans for forming an Islamic Emirate based on Shariah. Here is his message:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4pn7cqolEE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkf_x7v82w

He also spoke about relations with key countries in the region, including China, India, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. “India is very important for this subcontinent. We want to continue our cultural, economic and trade ties with India like in the past… Trade with India through Pakistan is very important for us. With India, trade through air corridors will also remain open.” Interestingly, Stanekzai did not say anything about Afghanistan’s support for or participation in the  International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC) project, which brings together India, Iran, Russia and recently Uzbekistan. Perhaps Akhunzada will bring up the INSTC project whenever he broadcasts his detailed views on the future of Afghanistan-Iran ties.

India’s Imperatives

Unfortunately, for most New Delhi-based commentators (especially former Indian diplomats and retired senior military officers), the Taliban’s ascendancy in Kabul continues to be seen through the lens of the India-Pakistan conflict and India’s friction with China, making the fall of the India-friendly Ashraf Ghani government a significant challenge to India’s national security imperatives. Many of them in New Delhi are describing the US military withdrawal and the subsequent Taliban takeover of Kabul as a triumph of Pakistan’s Afghan policy. India chaired the special session of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) earlier last week and pushed for a resolution calling for the immediate cessation of all hostilities in Afghanistan and the establishment of a new government that is united, inclusive and representative. Before the Taliban takeover, there was discussion in New Delhi about possible full-spectrum engagement with the Taliban at Doha, while maintaining support for the Ashraf Ghani government. However, with the fall of Kabul on August 15, India is now primarily concerned about regional fallout. India’s principal concerns regarding the Taliban revolved around the future of the Taliban’s relationship with Pakistan, whether the group ceases violence and how it manages its links with trans-national terrorist groups that threaten India. It is my considered assessment that India evacuated all her diplomatic personnel and Indian nationals (based in Kabul, Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad) by special military flights from Kabul rather prematurely. While it is acceptable that India withdrew the bulk of its diplomatic staff and citizens, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) should have left the door half-open by maintaining a Charge d’Affaires there along a skeletal support staff at the Embassy, since India as an all-inclusive democracy is rightly to be expected to place a premium on enduring people-to-people ties. India has also offered special emergency visas for Afghan nationals, with the priority of Hindu and Sikh Afghans. India has also offered to allow Afghan citizens to stay in India as refugees while being processed for resettlement to third countries.

Another widespread falsehood is that India has not maintained any communications channel with the Taliban. It may be recalled that the former Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef was granted a visa by the Govt of India to attend the the TEHELKA Group-organised annual THiNK festival in Goa November 2013 in Goa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGHyK_E5EOg&t=116s

And here is Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef again spelling out the Taliban’s perception of India last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtwooGcRuRA

Needless to say, the Doha-based Zaeef has been used by India as an unofficial interlocutor since 2013. Looking to the future, India’s expectations from Afghanistan are likely to be similar to those of Russia, i.e. both want the Emirate of Afghanistan to adopt, at the very least, MINIMALLY CIVILISED attitudes and governance norms. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described the recent events in Afghanistan as constituting “the revenge of history” over “modernity and globalism.” After all, both India and Russia have full diplomatic ties with countries like Israel, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and the People’s Republic of China—countries that are not exactly ‘model’ states as far as the human rights records go. However, both India and Russia will not establish formal diplomatic ties with Kabul until the 135 members of the Taliban gouping are removed from the UN Sanctions List. Unlike Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and many other similar groups, the Taliban is not specifically listed on any UN sanctions list, but it remains sanctioned nonetheless. In 2011 the sanctions regime established in UNSCR-1267 was split up to create separate tracks for the Taliban (UNSCR-1988) and Al Qaeda (UNSCR-1989) in part to provide momentum to the Afghan-led peace process by creating incentives for the Taliban to improve its behaviour. This split, however, has created some of the confusion. The original criteria for listing Al Qaeda were for supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and it strains credulity to think that the UN Security Council had not intended to impose sanctions on the Taliban itself via UNSCR-1267, given that the asset freeze language is clear. Therefore, statements from the Security Council and key member-states support the existence of the broader assets-freeze on the Taliban.

Pakistan’s Conundrum

As far as Pakistan goes, on August 16, Pakistan’s National Security Committee, chaired by Prime Minister Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi, reiterated Islamabad's commitment to an inclusive political settlement representing all Afghan ethnic groups as the way forward. The Pakistani Foreign Office’s official statement also lauded the fact that the Taliban had averted major bloodshed and violence in Afghanistan, and it called on all parties in Afghanistan to respect the rule of law, protect fundamental human rights and ensure that Afghan soil is not used by any terrorist grouping against any country. Pakistan has not yet officially recognised the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan and has largely evacuated its diplomatic personnel. In contrast to the careful official statements, there is a sense of triumphalism within Pakistan that its policy of hedging and supporting the Taliban has paid off. Through the lens of its rivalry with India, the Taliban victory is seen as the defeat of a pro-India Afghan government. Also, many right-wing Pakistani politicians are painting the Taliban ascendancy as a pan-Islamist victory over the superpower United States, a theme that plays well to right-of-centre domestic politics. In recent remarks, PM Niazi said that the Afghans are breaking “the shackles of slavery,” referring to Western cultural imposition and democratic values on Afghanistan. His comments have been controversial and seen as a tacit approval of the Taliban’s preference for an Emirate that does not tolerate any form of elections and democratic processes, but Pakistan insists that his statements were taken out of context. Within the Pakistani intelligentsia, there are pragmatic voices worried about the future security implications. There is significant worry about the extremist religiosity’s spillover into Pakistan, especially amid the re-emergence of the TTP and the emboldening of other violent sectarian groups. With Pakistani leverage over the Taliban evolving, Pakistan continues to push for a political settlement that allows for Taliban legitimacy but includes other Afghan groups like the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. Early last week, a group of non-Pashtun former Northern Alliance Afghan Tajik politicians met with Pakistani leaders in Islamabad to discuss the possibilities of engaging with the Taliban to form a new “inclusive” government. Worried about a spillover from the fighting, Pakistan had shut its side of the border prior to the Taliban's takeover. But after a brief closure, it was re-opened for trade and restricted pedestrian movement.

Despite all this, it has always been and continues to be Afghanistan that constitutes the principal existential threat to Pakistan. After all, Afghanistan was the only country that had formally opposed the creation of Pakistan at the UN. And this was due to the geopolitical cartography drawn by the then British Colonial administrator led by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand in 1893 through a pact with the then Amir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman, covering a vast stretch of terrains both rugged as well as plains (though strategically significant) of over around 1,519 miles. One of the major legal implications of the Durand line Agreement of 1893 is that the delimitation of territories which created a de facto frontier (not boundary) between Afghanistan and India. As part of the Agreement, the Amir retained his position in the Wakhan Corridor, thus separating the Tzarist Russian and British troops. At the same time, he also ensured his control over the “Asmar district and the Wazir district of Birmal”. On the other hand, the Amir as part of the Treaty had agreed to transfer Pashtun-dominated regions like “Chitral, Swat, New Chaman, Khabiar Pass, Chagai, North Waziristan”, etc. The Treaty was not ratified by any legislative bodies of either sides, and hence it is legally untenable. The Durand Line and the boundary (administrative border) between the Tribal Agencies and Settled Districts of the North-West Frontier Province (now Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province) were simply delineating zones of influence and responsibility. Thus, it can be stated that it was not a legally-binding demarcated and delineated international boundary (IB) at all, but was rather a de-facto arrangement keeping the geopolitical developments in mind at that point of time. In 1921 Afghanistan and British Colonial administration signed another agreement that provided a three-year term for the Treaty and “revocation” of the Treaty if “both the parties agree”. In addition, legal luminaries and scholars have stated that the British colonial administration “signed the treaty using duress” in 1893, hence any law which was signed “under duress is invalid” in the domain of International Law.

Up until 2017, Pakistan tried in vain to legalise the status of the Durand Line by making it a legally-binding IB by requesting the Taliban’s political office in Doha, Qatar, to issue a statement to this effect. But the Taliban rebuffed Islamabad and instead told Pakistan to settle this issue with the Ashraf Ghani government. Kabul too refused to acknowledge the legality of the Durand Line and only after this did the Pakistan Army begin to fence the 2,611km-long (1,622-mile) Durand Line. The physical barrier between the two countries comprises two sets of chain-link fences separated by a 2-metre (6.5-feet) space that has been filled with concertina wire-coils. The double-fence is about 4 metres (13-feet) high. The Pakistan Army has installed surveillance cameras to check any movement along the fence.

In a further blow to Pakistan, the Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid has stated that Kabul will not hand over TTP and Baloch separatists residing within Afghanistan to Islamabad and will instead encourage reconciliation negotiations between Pakistan and its separatist groups.

Iran’s Leverage

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s top concerns include stemming the flow of migrants and refugees, containing narcotics trafficking, maintaining cross-border trade, mitigating the threat from the Islamic State Wilayat Khorasan (IS-WK) branch, sharing water resources and ensuring the safety of Afghanistan’s Shia Hazara minority. To deal with the influx of Afghan refugees, Iran has set up temporary camps in three border provinces—Razavi Khorasan, South Khorasan, and Sistan-Balochistan. As of 2020, Iran already hosted some 950,000 documented Afghan refugees and at least 2 million more undocumented Afghans. Iran had already taken precautions on the ground. Earlier this month, Teheran reduced staff at its Embassy in Kabul and evacuated staff from three out of four of its Consulates to the capital. Only guards and local workers remained in Jalalabad, Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif. Diplomats remained in the Herat Consulate after the Taliban took control of the western city, but are safe. However, Teheran has enough reasons to feel confident about the cards that it holds, i.e. with each passing day, as Afghanistan’s stockpiles of perishable commodities and foodgrains gets reduced to dangerous levels and Kabul’s purchasing powers get greatly diminished, the Taliban will will have no other choice but to ask for humanitarian assistance from any and all quarters, especially through Iran’s Chabahar-based FTIZ. Consequently, India can confidently expect such a request to emanate from Kabul anytime now and India is likely to reciprocate by sending emergency shipments of foodgrains to a grateful Kabul.

The CARs’ Collective Stance

The Central Asian Republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan lived with the Taliban in the 1990s and will adjust to living with them again. Leaders of these four countries had no particular interest in maintaining the status quo in Afghanistan and no motivation for supporting the weak, fragmented and corrupt government in Kabul. An Afghanistan engulfed in civil war would pose serious security and economic challenges to Central Asia. A descent into chaos could return Afghanistan to a hub for Jihadist and criminal groupings that would greatly destabilise the entire region and impede any progress on South-Central Asia economic connectivity, trade and transit. The Taliban, on the other hand, are trying to position themselves to be a centralised and strong government in Afghanistan—something that the Central Asian, Russian and Iranian leaders are very familiar with. As long as the Taliban are willing and able to fight the IS-WK group and eliminate or contain other transnational violent extremist groups such as Al Qaida and the remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; secure their borders; and provide for safe passage of goods and trade between Central and South Asia, the Central Asian Republics are likely to adjust to working with them again, of course after Russia’s approval. The Taliban has even promised to eliminate the narcotics trade. The frontline Central Asian countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have all reacted with a demonstrative flexing of military muscle by shoring up border security. Afghan Army special operations forces and Afghan Air Force pilots have fled in large numbers to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as have several bureaucrats dealing with internal security, national defence and civilian provincial governors. Tajikistan has already accepted Afghan refugees and has also requested support from the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) in anticipation of more refugee flows across the IB. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, on the other hand, have been very cautious in opening up their IBs for refugees, with the Uzbek authorities even turning back Afghan Army personnel who had escaped to Uzbekistan after their bases were overrun by Taliban combatants earlier this month.

China’s Predictable Mercantile Attitude

On the heels of the Taliban takeover, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that China desired a “soft landing” for Afghanistan. What did Beijing’s top diplomat mean? Wang’s words highlight China’s paramount priority for Afghanistan: stability above all else. What Beijing fears most is a period of uncertainty during which the country devolves into protracted chaos marked by widespread violence, a humanitarian catastrophe of epic scale and an Afghanistan that is once again an epicenter and exporter of transnational terrorism. While never comfortable with the US military presence in Afghanistan—which via the Wakhan Corridor abuts China’s westernmost and sensitive frontier province of Xinjiang—Beijing had privately hoped that Washington DC’s efforts would bring lasting stability to the troubled country. However, today, Beijing’s leaders view the abrupt US exit from Afghanistan with mixed emotions. Beijing’s Communist totalitarian rulers are pragmatists and have long been agnostic about who governs Afghanistan as long as China’s vital interests are safeguarded. Today, these vital interests boil down to a smooth transition to a new national-unity government that can maintain stability and domestic order. Over the years Beijing has shrewdly continued to engage diplomatically with the Taliban, most recently welcoming a high-level delegation to Tianjin last July. Beijing is actively pursuing an accommodation with the new authorities in Kabul as it seeks assurances that a Taliban administration will neither foment trouble in Xinjiang nor disrupt China’s Belt & Road Initiative-related economic endeavours in Afghanistan.

Mapping The Journey Of A Still-Evolving Taliban

Since its removal from power in late 2001 and formation of a resilient insurgency, the Afghan Taliban has been described as comprising little more than a loose network, dis-organised, lacking a command-n-control hierarchy, and having “a tendency toward fragmentation”. This narrative was drawn in part from notions of disarmament and reconciliation that had been promoted, since at least 2005, by Afghanistan’s then President Hamid Karzai. From a counter-insurgency (COIN) perspective, it stood to reason that if a number of Taliban combatants were driven primarily by local grievances, rather than by the strict ideology that made the movement notorious during its previous Islamic Emirate regime (1996–2001), these members could perhaps be coaxed away from the insurgency. Afghans themselves have long drawn a distinction between the movement’s ideological, fighting core and its “part-time,” inactive, and other more pragmatically motivated members. The string of senior-level deaths and arrests in 2006 and 2007 that hinted at competitive backstabbing; the rampant criminality and notorious brutality among field commanders, in contravention of the Amir Mohd Omar’s issued guidance; some figures’ cultivation of financial resources and external relationships that ran contrary to the agenda of the Amir’s Quetta-based Shura—all took place well before Omar’s death, before suspicion, deception, and combatants’ faltering faith could be blamed for eroded cohesion.

In 2007 the Taliban reached a turning point when the group’s senior military commander, Mullah Dadullah Akhund, was killed in a raid by NATO special operations forces on May 13, 2007 in Helmand’s Girishk district. Dadullah was notoriously ruthless, having controversially introduced suicide bombings to the conflict, and had taken an unorthodox stance by actively engaging with the Western press, including making provocative statements of support for Al Qaeda. Reports of Dadullah’s death hinted that he had been betrayed, corresponding with rumours of antipathy among other leaders. The eventual death or arrest of three other senior figures during this period, and the Taliban’s later actions against commanders considered to have “gone rogue,” added to suspicions of behind-the-scenes internecine struggles. Of the several reasons why factionalism grew within the movement, one was the shift in the origins and distribution of external support and resources. Beginning around 2009, resources began to be dispersed more evenly across the leadership Shuras in Quetta, Peshawar, Miran Shah, Mashad, and “the North.” As the Taliban expanded its reach across the country, changing the way the movement connected to new local communities at the same time that its internal hierarchy was evolving, the grouping effectively experienced growing pains. The movement had expanded to the point that wholesale organisational adaptation, while necessary, left it less cohesive and vulnerable to external shocks. In any case, it was several years before another Taliban commander came into the public spotlight for disagreeing with the central leadership—even as it became increasingly clear that alternative centres of power were emerging within the grouping.

 By 2012, there were signs that growing factionalism was leading to fragmentation. Amid broader wrangling between the Shuras over financing and operations, tensions escalated between top military commander Mullah Zakir and his deputy Mullah Amir Mansour (the slain Dadullah’s younger brother), eventually resulting in Zakir’s demotion. Moreover, a faction was appearing to distance itself and emerging as a distinct group: claims had occasionally surfaced from the Mullah Dadullah Feda’i Mahaaz, or “Sacrificing Front,” ever since Amir Mansour had adopted his namesake and his command. The younger “Mansour Dadullah” was demoted and punished by the Taliban for disobedience, and thereafter his followers made the occasional claim of brutal attacks—including on a former Taliban Minister and High Peace Council member. There was no evidence at the time that the Mullah Dadullah Front had entirely separated itself from the Taliban, but by 2013 the splinter group appeared to have split once more: under a commander Najibullah, the Feda’i Mahaaz actively began to seek publicity, carrying out brutal high-profile killings. By 2014, a spokesperson was claiming that the Feda’i Mahaaz opposed the Taliban’s stance on peace talks, mocking the group as a “Qatari militia.” At a strategic level, the Taliban failed to respond in a unified fashion to the Afghan government’s 2014 elections, with subsequent reporting by international observers pointing to disparate agendas and approaches among the group’s regional commands. Disagreements over the use of violence, discordant political stances on peace talks and covert Pakistani patronage, and raw power struggles had all been fomenting for several years before the perfect storm of 2015 broke, comprising the leaked news of Mullah Omar’s death in Zaabul, the ensuing succession struggle, and the emergence of the Islamic State–Wilayat Khorasan (IS-WK). So what actually happened in 2015? Why did the Taliban fragment the way it did, and, just as important, why had it largely resumed its pre-2015 cohesiveness less than a year later?

It is true that a cadre of dissatisfied hard-liners defected to IS-WK from Taliban ranks, but these members were mostly localised in pockets of the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar. Ultimately, the movement’s most prominent ideological opponents of peace talks did not openly split from the group, despite a full year of tension and dysfunction within the leadership. Indeed, the highest-ranking defector from the Taliban in 2015, Mullah Rasoul, later announced that he was in favour of a peaceful settlement. Moreover, the highest-ranking leader publicly known to oppose talks in earlier years, Mullah Qayum Zakir, who never broke with the group, was promoted back into upper echelons of leadership after years of pariah status, at the same time that leadership Shuras finally affirmed their consensus in favour of peace talks in January 2020. Even as weak results led the US and Afghan governments to wind down the various stratagems intended to disarm and reconcile the Taliban combatants, hints of divide-and-defeat methods persisted—such as the US blacklisting the Haqqani Network without enforcing new sanctions against the “core” Taliban membership. By 2015, the Taliban had violently reasserted their presence across the country, but a confluence of events—the displacement of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) combatants across the eastern border, the related emergence of an IS-WK satellite, and the public revelation that Taliban founder Mullah Omar had been dead since 2013—sent shock-waves through the movement and halted faltering back-channel peace talks. While some well-informed observers speculated as to the group’s fragmented nature and the potential for open schisms, other scholars and practitioners rightly noted that insurgencies and extremist groups often grow more violent in the aftermath of leadership transitions as new leaders seek to establish credibility. An expectation of fragmentation persisted after the death due to a US drone-strike of a second Taliban leader, Mullah Omar’s successor, Mullah Akhtar Mansour in the Dalbandin area of Pakistan’s Balochistan province on May 21, 2016.

Mansour had managed to corral many high-ranking dissenters back into the fold, obtaining delayed and begrudging oaths of allegiance, but his tenure remained characterised by internal polarisation and discord. The very nature of Mansour’s death seemed to highlight the persistence of a “forcing fragmentation” strategy, even if US foreign policy circles had dropped most public emphasis on intentionally fragmenting the Taliban. In its place, however, the Afghan government rigorously took up the strategy. As late as 2017, then commander of US forces in Afghanistan General John W Nicholson noted that the long-term strategy of the Afghan security forces was “fight, fracture, talk.” Yet the paradigm of splitting insurgent groups persisted in some corners. Some continued to suggest that the key to a political settlement lay in the Taliban’s internal divisions. Others hopefully pointed to the Afghan government’s 2017 political settlement with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e Islami party (HIG) as a model for future agreements with the Taliban. These hopes leaned on an implicit characterisation of the HIG peace deal as successfully dividing Afghanistan’s insurgency, splitting Gulbuddin’s “reconcilable” combatants off from an “irreconcilable” Taliban. Afghan political figures then said as much since Hekmatyar’s return to Afghanistan, suggesting more than once that the Taliban should be negotiated with along similar terms. But this perspective ignores the fact that HIG had always been a rather separate and distinct movement from the Taliban, not a faction that was successfully “peeled off.”Even amid the fracas of 2015, the Taliban’s credibility was boosted under Mansour’s leadership after the provincial capital of Kunduz briefly fell, the most dramatic military achievement of the group since before 2001.

Cohesive groups requiring a strong horizontal network of ties is critical. It is not the ideal of loyalty to an Amir that constitutes the core strength of these horizontal ties, but the very nature of the Taliban’s Mahaaz structure (multiple fronts), and its continued relevance, that have made and keep the group so cohesive. The Mahaaz structure lacks intermediary ranks that might separate top figures from field commanders, operates via the direct collection and distribution of funds, serves as the predominant recruitment mechanism for the movement’s combatants, and functions through personalised relationships among the leadership. It is this structure has kept the movement intact despite the external pressures and internal factionalism, tribal tensions, and national expansion that it has faced over the past three decades. There was a period, just before the fractious year of 2015, when the Taliban’s institutional reforms appeared to have replaced its informal Mahaaz structure, down to the fundamental order of its military chain of command. Yet in the years since, the movement has returned to the reliability of Mahaaz networks even as it has institutionalised at a steady pace, a concurrent approach that has, over the years, somewhat confounded Afghanistan-watchers. This organisational contradiction may have come about as a result of the Taliban’s forays into military centralisation, which proved highly contentious and may have been at the root of faltering cohesion within the movement. This was likely because full military professionalisation of the movement would have removed the benefits the Mahaaz system afforded to each individual in the movement’s leadership. By preserving the Mahaaz structure, the Taliban’s leadership remains cohesive, and the organisation has instead increased institutionalisation through its civilian-oriented commissions and positions for governance, casualty recording and prevention, and information and media operations, including internal messaging and guidance. This practice has strengthened what the vertical ties between insurgents and the local rural communities that host them.

Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, upon assuming power on May 26, 2016, intentionally split operational control of the Taliban’s military forces between Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mullah Mohd Yaqoob (son of Mullah Mohammad Omar) in order to prevent the two from creating potentially powerful breakaway factions. An attempt on Haibatullah’s life (or at least the killing of his brother, a cleric in Quetta) in August 2019 appeared to barely affect the movement; such an affront to the core of the Taliban’s bond might have been expected to trigger a more visible response. Yaqoob took charge as chief of operations and the Afghanistan affairs portfolio. He has also set up a new financial commission to manage the Taliban’s expenditure. Among his supporters were Qayyum Zakir, who was influential in the narcotics-producing Afghan province of Helmand, and Ibrahim Sadar, a powerful voice in the Helmand Shura, or council. From the time of his initial bid for leadership, Yaqoob also enjoyed the backing of the Taliban’s Interior Minister and Kandahar’s shadow governor Sharafuddin Taqi (who was killed after a US air-strike close to the Musa Qala market on April 1, 2019). Yaqoob gained the loyalty and operational resources of the most vigorous Taliban factions in the south, where the Haqqani Network had always been unpopular.  Yaqoob favoured the peace process with the US and rapprochement with India. On the other hand, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the Haqqani Network and deputy leader of the Taliban, was and is an ally of Pakistan and Al Qaeda. Anas Haqqani is Sirajuddin’s brother. It is under the Haqqani Network’s patronage that Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), an extremist group based in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, is operating three training camps in Nangarhar province. With an estimated strength of 5,000 loyal combatants along with a sophisticated and independent financing network, the Haqqani Network remains a formidable threat in its own right. Even cut off from the broader Taliban grouping, it remains capable of inflicting significant damage. Then there are about 500 combatants active in Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nangarhar provinces that are loyal to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

Tectonic Policy-Shifts

The latter half of the previous decade witnessed the decisive steps required for achieving an end-state in Afghanistan. In 2016, the Republican Party-controlled US Congress passed legislation to block US$450 million in aid to Pakistan for failing to “demonstrate its commitment” and taking action against the Haqqani Network. The legislation which made $450 million of Coalition Support Fund (CSF) to Pakistan ineligible for the US Secretary of Defense’s waiver authority unless the Secretary provided a certification to the Congressional defence committees. There was a similar certification requirement in the year ending on September 31, 2016, but the amount was $300 million. The US Defense Secretary was not able to give necessary certification for the release of the CSF to Pakistan. According to the US National Defense Authorization Act 2017, of the total amount of reimbursement and support authorised for Pakistan during the period beginning on October 1, 2016 and ending on December 31, 2017, $450 million would not be eligible for a national security waiver unless the Secretary of Defence certified that Pakistan continued to conduct operations against the Haqqani Network. This was followed on August 21, 2017 by President Trump outlining his Afghanistan policy, saying that though his “original instinct was to pull out,” he will instead press ahead with an open-ended military commitment to prevent the emergence of “a vacuum for terrorists.” Differentiating his policy from Obama’s, Trump said that decisions about withdrawal will be based on “conditions on the ground,” rather than arbitrary timelines. He invited India to play a greater role in rebuilding Afghanistan, while castigating Pakistan for harbouring the Taliban insurgents. He also pledged to loosen restrictions on combat even as the UN reported a spike in civilian casualties caused by Afghan and coalition air-strikes. A political settlement with the Taliban, Trump said, was far off. In January 2018 the Taliban carried out a series of bold terror attacks in Kabul that killed more than 115 people amid a broader upsurge in violence. The attacks came as the Trump Administration implemented its Afghanistan plan, deploying troops across rural Afghanistan to advise Afghan National Army Brigades and launching relentless air-strikes against Opium laboratories to try to decimate the Taliban’s funding sources. The Administration also cut off security assistance worth billions of dollars to Pakistan for what President Trump called its “lies and deceit” in harbouring Taliban combatants. Furthermore, the Financial Action Rask Force (FATF) in June 2018 placed Pakistan on its ‘Grey List’ for failing to implement effective measures to stop terror-financing and money laundering practices and networks.

The financial strangulation had its desired effect and Pakistan began taking a series of corrective steps, starting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar being allowed to depart Pakistan for Qatar on October 25, 2018 on the solicitation of Qatar after Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani visited Islamabad and held meetings with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. On February 15, 2010, Abdul Ghani Baradar was arrested by Pakistani authorities in the southern port city of Karachi. The ISI took him into custody, promising the CIA that he would be handed over to them the next day. To the amazement of the ISI, Baradar subsequently disclosed to the ISI that his capture was arranged for him to negotiate a deal with the CIA unbeknownst to Mullah Omar and to the ISI. Mullah Baradar, was commander of the Taliban's formation in the western region (Herat) as well as Kabul. In 2001, he was the Deputy Minister of Defence. His wife is Mullah Mohd Omar’s sister. He was born in Weetmak village in Dehrawood district, in the Uruzgan province of Afghanistan, in 1968. But he is also part of the Popalzai branch of Durrani tribe, the same as Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the founder-King of Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Durrani (Abdali). This tribe is also close to the Ghilzai tribe, to which Mullah Umar belonged. In 1989, after the USSR’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the country was torn by civil war, Baradar set up a Madrassa in Kandahar with Mohd Omar. The duo then launched the Taliban movement in 1994 and came to power in 1996.

Pakistan had by then assessed that if all went well, then the Taliban would be able to negotiate a treaty on the withdrawal of foreign military forces from Afghanistan by 2020. If that did happen, then extensive investments needed to be made on convincing the Taliban to have an all-inclusive national unity government operating from Kabul, failing which Afghanistan would once again descend into an unending civil war, which in turn would totally knock Pakistan’s already perilous economy off its legs. If this were to happen, then more than half of the Pakistan Army (PA) would be required to be deployed along the Durand Line to prevent it from being breached by successive influxes of fleeing Afghan refugees. This in turn would drastically alter the balance of military power in India’s favour along both the Working Boundary astride Jammu and the Line of Control (LoC) along Kashmir. Consequently, the PA under its Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa came up with the ‘Bajwa Doctrine 1.0’, which was publicly outlined by the PA COAS himself at the Munich Security Conference in February 2018 and again a month later in an informal discussion with selected Pakistani journalists on March 25. Key elements of this doctrine were the PA’s adherence to democracy, ensuring proper respect for all state institutions, exterminating terrorism, mainstreaming of the estimated 47,000 extremist Jihadists, and viewing the 18th Amendment to Pakistan’s Constitution (which delegated more autonomy to the provinces) with great skepticism. What he did not reveal then was that through the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, he had already initiated a series of parleys with India’s Research & Analysis Wing (R & AW) in London (because both India and Pakistan trusted the UK as a party entrusted with displaying ‘fairplay’), which were facilitated by the British Chief of the General Staff, Gen Sir Nicholas Carter, following a visit by Gen Bajwa to the UK in May 2017 where he gave a speech at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). This was followed by the PA’s Rawalpindi-based GHQ inviting the Indian Army’s Sanjay Vishwasrao, India’s Military Attache at the Indian High Commission to Pakistan to the Pakistan Day military parade on March 23 in Islamabad. Such signals were a way of conveying to India that: 1) Pakistan was sincere about its desire for seeing the emergence of an all-inclusive government of national unity in Afghanistan that would be at peace with all its immediate neighbours and neighbouring countries. 2) Pakistan was ready for adopting a modus vivendi regarding the issue Jammu & Kashmir, under which each party would keep what it already had and this would be formalised at a later day into a permanent solution.  

On January 26, 2019 the Afghan Taliban and US officials in Doha, Qatar, agreed on a preliminary draft of a likely peace accord, including US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 18 months. The talks between US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar centered on the US withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan in exchange for the Taliban pledging to block international terrorist groups from operating out of Afghan soil. The ramped-up diplomacy followed signals that President Trump planned to pull out 7,000 troops, about half the total US deployment. Khalilzad said that the US will insist that the Taliban agree to participate in an intra-Afghan dialogue on the country’s political structure, as well as a cease-fire. It was unclear whether Trump would condition the troop withdrawal on those terms. Events took a turn for the worse when the JeM orchestrated the Pulwama suicide bombing on February 14, 2019 and India militarily retaliated by conducting an air-strike of the JeM’s terrorist training camp at Jabba Top (at an elevation of 4,000 feet above sea-level) at Kagan Gali along the Kunhar River inside KPK. However, after India on August 5 that year converted Jammu & Kashmir from a State into a Union Territory (UT), carved off Ladakh as a separate UT and terminated the applicability of Articles 370 and 35A on J & K UT, the response from the PA was muted, since, according to the PA, Pakistan had never recognised the princely state of J & K’s accession to India on October 26, 1947. However, to allay the Pakistani public’s anger about such a muted response, the PA began putting both the WB and the LoC under stress by engaging in almost-daily shelling of areas along the WB and LoC—which continued for another 17 months. In addition, Gen Bajwa got a three-year extension of tenure as COAS in August 2016. On September 7, 2019 President Trump abruptly broke off peace talks a week after Khalilzad announced that an agreement had been reached in principle with Taliban leaders. In a tweet, Trump said that he cancelled a secret meeting with the Taliban and Afghan President Ghani at Camp David after a US soldier was killed in a Taliban attack. The Taliban said that it remained “committed to continuing negotiations,” but warned that the cancellation will cause an increase in the number of deaths.

On October 8, 2019 Gen Bajwa accompanied PM Niazi on a visit to Beijing where both of them met China’s President Xi Jinping, National People's Congress (NPC) chairman Li Zhanshu and Premier Li Keqiang. Separately, Gen Bajwa called on Xu Qiliang, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission and discussed China’s plan to engage in a major military standoff with India along eastern Ladakh (thereby tying down Indian military power along the Line of Actual Control, or LAC) until Pakistan finished conducting the Assembly elections in PoJK’s Gilgit-Baltistan  in November 2020 and the General Election in ‘Azad Kashmir’ in late July 2021. Finally, on February 29, 2020 the Doha Peace Agreement was inked between the Taliban and the US. The agreement said that intra-Afghan negotiations should begin the following month, but Afghan President Ghani insisted that the Taliban must meet his government’s own conditions before it enters talks. The US-Taliban deal did not call for an immediate cease-fire, and in the days after its signing, Taliban combatants carried out dozens of attacks on Afghan security forces. US forces responded with an air-strike against the Taliban in the southern province of Helmand. In May 2020, a Taliban spokesman made a shocking statement describing India’s revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy and subsequent military crackdown as an Indian “internal affair.” On February 25, 2021 a joint statement from the militaries of India and Pakistan proclaimed that both had agreed to strict adherence to the November 2003 ceasefire understanding along both the WB and LoC. Next, on April 23 in an ‘off-the-record’ interaction with about 35 selected journalists during an official iftar event, the PA’s COAS stated that Pakistan would be satisfied if India restored statehood to J & K and desisted from altering the UT’s demographic profile. This was an attempt to test the waters to see how Pakistan’s print and broadcast media and then the nation would react to actually ‘burying the past and moving ahead’ as dictated by geo-economic rather than geopolitical ground realities. Such official thinking on relations with India is said to have been influenced by the fact that wars did not produce a solution and neither did the Kashmir Jihad. Consequently, the PA is said to be thinking in terms of ‘strategic patience’. This policy was reportedly based on a realisation that a ‘hot LoC’ was posing a major drain on the economy. According to this ‘Bajwa 2.0 Doctrine’, Pakistan’s geo-economic vision centered on four fundamental pillars: lasting lasting peace at home and abroad; non-interference of any kind in the internal affairs of neighbouring and regional countries; stimulating intra-regional trade and connectivity; and ensuring sustainable development and prosperity through the creation of investment and economic poles in the region. 

By mid-August, it took just approximately 80,000 Taliban combatants (almost all of them Afghan-origin but Pakistan-based) a few days to convince the 300,699 troops (abruptly abandoned by the US military and civilian contractors) serving the Afghan government to surrender and fade away without any major fight. In fact, the Taliban’s military leadership (mostly Kandaharis) had since 2018 employed the Chanakyian stratagem of gradually causing the adversary’s deployment footprint to decrease from the outer edges before attacking the centre-of-gravity. Consequently, the Taliban began befriending the Tribal elders and provincial Governors of the bulk of the provinces all around Kabul before laying siege to Kabul. It may be recalled that: When Chanakya/Kautilya first met Chandragupta Maurya in Takshashila around 1516 BCE, Chandragupta had just failed in his fifth or sixth attempt to overthrow the Nanda dynasty by a coup in their capital Pataliputra in Magadha/Bihar and fled to the North West. Kautilya then asked him, when you eat a hot dish of rice do you plunge your fingers into the centre or do you start at the cool fringes.

Present-day Kandahar’s ancient name was ‘Quandhar’, derived from the name of the region of Gandhara. Even during the Mahabharata period, the Gandhara region was very much culturally and politically a part of India. King Œakuni, brother of Gandhârî, fought with the Pandavas in the Mahabharata War at Kurukshetra. The Gandhara kingdom covered portions of today’s northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. It was spread over the Pothohar Plateau, Peshawar Valley and the Kabul River-Valley. The word Gandhāra finds a mention in the Rig Veda, Uttara-Ramayana and Mahabharata. The word means Gandha (fragrance), i.e. the land of fragrances. It is said that Gandhara is one of the names of Lord Shiva as mentioned in the Sahastranaam (thousand names) that was obtained by Sri Krishna from Sage Upamanyu in the Mahabharata. The same was narrated to Yudhisthira, Bhishma and other members of the Kuru clan. It is possible that the devotees of Shiva were the first inhabitants of Gandhara. The people there lived on the banks of River Kabul (also Kabol or Kubhā) right till its confluence with the River Indus since the Vedic times. King Subala ruled Gandhara some 7,500 years ago. He had a daughter named Gandhari, who was married to the Prince of Hastinapur kingdom, Dhritrashtra. Gandhari also had a brother, Shakuni, who later took over the kingship of Gandhara after his father’s death. After losing the Mahabharata War, several Kaurava descendants settled in the Gandhara kingdom. Later, they slowly migrated to today’s Iraq and Saudi Arabia. With the spread of Buddhism in the Gandhara region, including parts of Asia, Shiva worship was slowly wiped out. A few Mauryan Kings ruled Gandhara for some time until the invading Muslims, including Mahmud Ghazni, took over the reins in the early 11th century.