The Taliban are presiding over a powder keg. It may be only a matter of time before disaster strikes.
The Taliban are presiding over a powder keg. It may be only a matter of time before disaster strikes.
L ast week’s rocket attack by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah that killed twelve Israeli children playing soccer is the latest atrocity in the aftermath of the horrifying Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. This conflict has cost the lives of countless innocent Israelis and Palestinians; emboldened Iran, the world’s chief state sponsor of terrorism; weakened the growing relationship between Israel and moderate Arab states in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords; and upended domestic politics across the West.
It took Hamas just over 16 years of controlling Gaza to bring on this catastrophe. If a recent report from the U.N. is any indication, it may take far less time before we see a similar cataclysm in Afghanistan.
The recently released annual United Nations report on Afghanistan by the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team (which, unlike other parts of the U.N., historically does good work) showcases alarming, if predictable, results. Far from former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s March 2020 claim that the Taliban would “work alongside of us to destroy” al-Qaeda, or President Joe Biden’s July 2021 claim that we had sufficient “over the horizon” capabilities to squelch terrorist threats in Afghanistan, what we now see is a thriving al-Qaeda, along with other serious terrorist threats, operating with almost complete impunity under the Taliban.
The report emphasizes that “despite a reduced profile, Al-Qaida disseminates propaganda to increase recruitment while working to rebuild its operational capability” in Afghanistan, that “experienced instructors have travelled into Afghanistan to enhance the security of dispersed cells,” and that “Al-Qaida prioritizes outreach and recruitment, particularly among those who previously worked alongside it or had been operational members” in previous years.
This is not generic boilerplate, but alarming language that indicates a looming catastrophe.
The report also warns us that al-Qaeda “continues to operate covertly in order to project the image of Taliban adherence to the provisions of the Doha Agreement to prevent the use of Afghan soil for terrorist purposes.” In so doing, it indirectly demonstrates a little understood fact: The Doha Agreement, even assuming it is fully followed — a dubious assumption, since there are no enforcement or verification provisions — only requires that the Taliban “not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”
Thus, strictly speaking, the Taliban could, under the terms of the agreement, allow al-Qaeda to build a terrorist army in Afghanistan, just so long as the group planned and launched its attacks on the United States and U.S. allies from across the border in Pakistan or Iran.
This is not far-fetched. Seif al-Adel — the successor to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the previous head of al-Qaeda who was killed by a U.S. drone in Afghanistan in 2022 — is believed by the State Department to be living in Iran. The relatively low profile al-Qaeda is keeping in Afghanistan is a fig leaf.
It was always fanciful to expect the Taliban to break from al-Qaeda. The Taliban have been interlinked with al-Qaeda for decades, bound to them by a pledge of allegiance, or “bay’ah,” repeatedly renewed through the years. In the cultural milieu of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, these are not empty words, but a binding oath.
Al-Qaeda is not the only threat percolating in Afghanistan. According to the U.N. report, the Islamic State — Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) is also a significant threat. While ISIS-K is a foe of the Taliban, the report states that the Taliban have been unable to defeat ISIS-K, that ISIS-K controls thousands of fighters in Afghanistan, and that some ISIS-K representatives seem to have infiltrated the Taliban’s bureaucracy. It also states that ISIS-K is working closely with other ISIS branches in Pakistan, India, and Uzbekistan, and emphasizes that ISIS-K is exporting its fighters further into Central Asia and beyond.
The threat from the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, also known as TTP or the Pakistani Taliban, is also alarming. Of course, Pakistan has long supported the Afghan Taliban as a hedge against Indian influence and Pashtun nationalism, and as a weapon against India.
But now, that support has come back to bite the Pakistanis. According to former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. Hussain Haqqani, now a U.S. citizen, the “success of the Taliban in Afghanistan has galvanized the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan,” which has launched hundreds of terrorist attacks in Pakistan. The U.N. report explains that TTP’s attacks are being conducted in conjunction with al-Qaeda.
In fact, according to the report, the TPP is now the largest terrorist group in Afghanistan, and there are meaningful fears that the partnership between TTP and al-Qaeda could transform into an “extra regional threat,” a particularly acute problem since, due to the ill-executed U.S. pullout from the country and the collapse of the Afghan army in 2021, TPP has access to “NATO calibre weapons.”
In other words, Afghanistan has become nothing short of a terrorist-run superstate, a terrorist safe-haven with few precedents beyond pre-9/11 Afghanistan and pre-October 7 Gaza.
Due to the religious and historical ties between the U.S. and the Holy Land, the events that take place there get a disproportionate amount of attention from the media and U.S. policy-makers. But regional politics in South and Central Asia are similar to Middle East politics in several important ways. The rivalry between Pakistan and India is just as fierce as the Iran-fueled Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Pakistan and India are nuclear-armed powers that have fought numerous wars over the Kashmir region, which is de-facto divided between them, with a small sliver controlled by China.
Jihadi forces in Afghanistan, supported by Pakistan, have long been a tool whose aim can be, and has been, shifted back and forth between Afghanistan and Kashmir. In the late 80s, Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami (HUJI), an Afghan Jihadi group that had been fighting the Soviets, changed its focus to Kashmir and made common cause with the Haqqani Network, now a part of the Taliban government. An influential 2011 report from a European think tank indicated that some of these same “Kashmir-oriented jihadist groups have become preoccupied with fighting against the Pakistani state or operations inside Afghanistan.”
There is every reason to think that now, having thrown off the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, these same radical groups will shift their focus yet again to Kashmir. The recent uptick in terrorist attacks in Kashmir, after a relative lull, shows that this possibility is very real.
Additionally, there is the role of Iran. While there are certainly tensions between Iran and both the Pakistani government and the Taliban, disputes have usually been muted and quickly moved past. (Indeed, the deputy minister of the Taliban traveled to Iran earlier this week.) Iran has influence in the Kashmir conflict, and the Iranian supreme leader has directly compared it to Gaza. Iran is certainly able, if it desires, to bring destruction to Kashmir as it has to Gaza.
Also concerning to Americans should be the fact that many of the same anti-Israel actors that are backing Hamas-friendly protesters in the U.S. have long acted in a similar manner to fan anti-India flames. Indeed, there is an entire cottage industry in the U.S. and abroad seeking to jointly deprecate Israel and India as uniquely villainous. Should the Kashmir conflict flare up again, there is every reason to believe that radical protests and domestic political disruptions similar to the ones sparked by the Gaza war would be seen in the U.S.
The ruination stemming from Hamas’s violent coup of 2007 in Gaza was entirely foreseeable. Shortly after 9/11, President George W. Bush rightly explained that America and its allies “must not allow the terrorists to develop new home bases,” and that we must “deny them sanctuary at every turn.”
Ignoring this warning led to disaster in Gaza. And given enough time, it will lead to a disaster in Afghanistan, too.