Afghanistan is all but back in Taliban’s hands... and in Pakistan’s

Qala-i-Naw. Arghandab. Urozgan. Sar-i-Pul. Kunduz. Takhar. Maidan-e-Wardak…District after district across Afghanistan are falling like nine pins to the advancing forces of the Taliban, who now control an arc of territory along the western border all the way to the northern borders with China along the strategic Wakhan corridor in Badakshan, to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where they command no local support as they do in the south from their fellow Pashtuns.

In a see-saw battle that has seen the Taliban steadily claim control of over 85% of the country, villages are being retaken by the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF), only to be lost again to lightning strikes by the Taliban militia days later, setting off a panicked exodus to the cities, and mass surrenders of soldiery.

Set against the exit at dawn by US forces from its operational headquarters at Bagram Air Base on the Fourth of July— well before the September deadline first set by US President Joe Biden to end the ‘forever war’ — it only reinforces the Ashraf Ghani government’s charge that the hurried exit was part of a deal between the Taliban and the US special envoy to Afghanistan from the Donald Trump era, Zalmay Khalilzad, that would hand Afghanistan over to the Taliban on a platter.

While Biden’s focus remains placating his domestic audience, exiting Afghanistan after 20 years without a credible peace process in place comes at a high price. It opens geopolitical fault lines that will have repercussions across the region as the US’ rush to exit fails to factor the inherent danger to the region of the Taliban’s use of Chechen, Uighur and Uzbek militants as part of their frontline forces, reinforcing fears in Russia, China, Iran as much as in India of this Pakistan proxy regressing to its 90s avatar as the home of terror.

Insiders who track the Taliban’s new war machine have marked the well-orchestrated advance of the militia as coming in three waves. First comes Pakistan’s well-trained army, which flattens the ANDSF-held battlements in the district headquarters, followed by the irregular army of Chechens and other Central Asian Islamic militia, who have longstanding ties with the Taliban and are in the forefront of the current offensive. These irregulars lay siege to the area, disrupting supply lines, starving the ANDSF and the Afghan National Army of food until they surrender. The Chechens supervise the collection of all arms and ammunition, and high-tech equipment, including US-made tanks and missiles. The third wave, as the Pakistanis and the Islamic militants vanish, is led by the Taliban, who walk in and take control.

The Ashraf Ghani government, vilified for stealing the elections and robbing the country blind, and now left without US security cover, had only one bargaining chip— the 5,000-odd Taliban prisoners languishing in their jails. It lost that, too, when it was forced into releasing the prisoners by Khalilzad, who used the ruse to gain the trust of the Taliban, hoping to tie them down into the much talked up intra-Afghan deal— a deal that the ‘Ghani boys’ had hoped would give them a continuing stake and share in the power matrix.

Fact is, while Biden’s team continues to perpetuate the myth that the Taliban are open to a negotiated peace settlement, the opposite is true. The Taliban do not want an interim government, let alone an Iran-style governing council to oversee the so-called “transition.”

Given the blistering pace at which the Taliban changed the power equation in their favour on the ground, taking control of some 250 of the 400 districts, highways, toll booths and key access points across the country in less than eight weeks, it was more than obvious since the flawed February 2020 Taliban-US Doha peace agreement that their strategy would remain ‘making war while talking peace.’

Delhi’s misreading

In retrospect, Khalilzad’s repeated admonishments to Delhi to reach out to the Taliban should have been seen as an early warning from a ‘friendly’, a pointer of things to come. The US envoy may have been mistakenly banking on the assumption that the Taliban brought out of jails in Pakistan and Guantanamo Bay and ensconced in plush Doha, would play the US game, remain immune to Pakistan’s blandishments.

But Pakistan’s Army and its powerful counter-intelligence force, the Inter-Services Intelligence, which pulls the strings of the Quetta Shura, based in the Balochistan capital where Taliban families and wounded are sheltered, was not going to pass up the opportunity to resurrect their policy of strategic depth by retaking Afghanistan when the US forces exited.

Foreign minister S Jaishankar may have similarly misread the Doha Shura. He made multiple overtures to the Taliban, first in the Qatari capital last year, when he sent an emissary. The Talibs were quick to deflect, saying they preferred to deal with a more senior interlocutor. He attempted to reach out in Tehran last week, and again in Moscow. But coming late into the game, Jaishankar’s Tehran foray came just as the Taliban’s deputy chief negotiator Sher Mohammed Abbas Stanikzai fetched up in the Iranian capital on Wednesday to meet with former vice president Yunous Qanooni of the Northern Alliance, a known friend of India, co-opted by Islamabad. Jaishankar, sources say, asked Tehran to plead India’s cause. He did the same in Moscow, where a team of Talibs led by Sheikh Salahuddin Delawar began talks with Russian special envoy Zamir Kabulov, just as he arrived in the Russian capital.

Delhi has been repeatedly rebuffed. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said as much on Baaghi TV, while other top-level Taliban sources acknowledged that India had indeed reached out, seeking assurances its “investments” would be secure but that, contrary to reports in the Indian media, there had been no face-to-face meeting so far.

That probably explains why India has brought its Indo-Tibetan Border Police that it deploys to build roads, dams and other infra projects, to the safety of Kabul after the Indian-built Selma Dam was taken by the Taliban. India’s consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, once attacked by the Talibs, continues to function, as does its mission in Herat, under the protection of strongmen Ata Mohammed Noor and Ismail Khan. But Kandahar is under threat, and India on Saturday pulled back some 50 diplomatic staff and security personnel from there, shutting down the consulate at least temporarily.

Why India did not factor in the fallout when Khalilzad first began putting his plan for a US evacuation in motion more than three years ago, remains a mystery.

Khalilzad, who traded on his shared Pashtun ancestry with the Taliban to build trust, focused only on bringing the last of the 3,500 remaining US troops home, without ensuring that the Taliban had cut ties with Al-Qaeda. And in prioritising the safe exit of US troops without factoring in Afghanistan’s now all too certain descent into a bloody civil war and in giving international legitimacy to a group known for its brutal record in governance, Khalilzad resuscitated US ties with Cold War ally Pakistan, while leaving Russia, China, Iran and India out in the cold. The US’ new policeman is not just Pakistan, but Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, whom Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has steadily wooed at the expense of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Taliban’s early mentors.

Russia, which fears the rise of Islamic militancy in its Central Asian backyard, just as much as China, and now Iran, which has much to lose playing host as it does to thousands of Afghan refugees, are scrambling to forge a joint strategy.

Khalilzad, who repeatedly urged Delhi to reach out to the Taliban, may have been sending a message to the major players in the region that his preferred faction of the Taliban, the Doha-based Shura, would be the ones calling the shots in Kabul in the coming months. Except, the Doha Shura’s ties with Quetta and Rawalpindi remain robust. They knew full well that once the Afghan National Army and the ANDSF lost their eyes and ears — the technology, arms and air support that the US provided — Afghanistan would be theirs for the taking.

Worse still, it has given a green light to Pakistan, which has waited in the wings for 20 years to retake Afghanistan, which it has long seen as its strategic backyard, as it steps up plans to prey on India in Jammu and Kashmir while going through the charade of back-channel talks in the UAE, of which a fresh round took place only days ago.

Curiously, Pakistan’s civilian leadership, at odds with the military, has repeatedly warned that an Afghanistan run by the Taliban will have a destabilising effect within its own border states of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.

Forgotten playbook

As the Taliban militia took control of all the border crossing points and secured the north and the west to prevent a repeat of the reverses it suffered in these areas in the 90s, when they first rode in from Pakistan’s seminaries, it was clear they were working to a military playbook drawn up at Pakistan Army GHQ by the CIA’s preferred interlocutor, the Pakistan Army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa. And its primary aim was to choke supply lines from neighbouring Iran and the Central Asian states, the so-called ‘Stans’, to the militia raised by former Northern Alliance commanders in what is being called the ‘Second Resistance.’ India should have dusted off its own 1990s Afghan playbook.

That, of course, would not be to America’s liking. Biden, at his recent meeting in the White House, billed as a farewell visit, warned President Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah against arming their militia. But the first US rap on the knuckles came even earlier, when former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on a visit to Delhi along with Secretary of Defence Mark Esper in October 2020 for the ‘2+2 dialogue’, unequivocally warned India against propping up Ahmad Massood, the son of the famed Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massood, groomed to step into his father’s rather large shoes and lead the ‘Second Resistance.’

Pompeo’s alarm stemmed from the show of force by militias owing allegiance to Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose son Yar Mohammed now leads the feared Jumbish-e-Milli (while Dostum recuperates in Turkey after medical treatment), which was mirrored across the country in a string of provincial capitals. Herat strongman Ismail Khan, Hazara leader Mohammed Mohaqiq and Ata Mohammed Noor, the Tajik who heads the Jamiat-e-Islami of Massood in Mazar-i-Sharif, are flexing their muscles, stepping into the vacuum left by the retreating US and Afghan armies. Unlike the time they fought the Taliban under the command of Ahmed Shah Massood and were funded and armed by the CIA, Iran and India, today they are all fighting separate battles, with no unified strategy to counter the Taliban.

The US’ talk of setting up an ‘over the horizon’ defence capability and reinforcing Kabul’s defence by occupying the heights surrounding the capital, notwithstanding, Kabul is a city under siege.

The German embassy famously shipped home some 22,600 litres of alcohol, including 60,000 cans of beer, dubbed the ‘beer withdrawal.’ India plans to fly out all but essential staff, the scars of the 2008 Kabul embassy bombing and the shock of finding the home of its ambassador turned into a Taliban armoury, never far away.

The reinforced concrete barricades that ring the homes of diplomats and aid workers, and the presidential palace Arg, where President Ashraf Ghani and his arch-rival Abdullah Abdullah are ensconced but with plans to flee, will stand for nothing if the Taliban militia, which already has a chokehold on Kabul and controls all entry and exit points, moves in as expected. As one Kabul resident told me, “A skeleton force of police can be seen in the day, but at night, the Taliban take over.”

The last time the Taliban rolled into Kabul in 1996, they took it without a fight. This time may be no different.

(Neena Gopal, former Foreign Affairs Editor of Gulf News, had bunkered down at Bagram airbase in Kabul in late 2001, one of the first Indian journalists to cover the US ‘War on Terror’ and the Taliban’s exit then as they melted away into the countryside without a fight)