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.
