Taliban takeover: why Afghanistan is heading for civil war

The Taliban advances continue across Afghanistan despite soaring temperatures – reaching 50 degrees Celsius in the desert areas of Helmand and the South. The cohorts of fighters are closing in on the great historic capitals – Kandahar, Herat, Ghazni and Mazar e Sahrif – but no major centre has yet fallen.

The mayhem and pillage is cruel, murdering and maiming women and children, targeting minorities like the Shiite Hazara, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turcmen. There is method in the discrimination – the aim seems to be to cow the minorities before the main battles for the capitals are joined.

This is not just a story of Afghan against Afghan, according to Western intelligence sources. One prominent European policy director told me he thought the attacks on the Hazara was largely the work of new groups of ISIS, heirs of the Islamic State. Another eminent expert told a London seminar a week ago that there are at least 500 hardened and experienced Al Qaeda fighters based in the north of the country.

The diplomatic face of the Taliban, still technically in desultory negotiations in Qatar, has declared it is for a peaceful settlement. Talking down the other side of the mouth the leadership is saying it wants nothing short of its own version of an Islamic regime, so all trappings of the present constitution in Afghanistan – parliament, judiciary and minority rights for women, must go. Back to the stone age – a regime of recrimination and stoning such as that witnessed in Kabul under Mullah Omar’s Taliban from 1996 to 2001, only worse.

To reinforce the point, UNAMA the UN mission to Afghanistan, has just reported that the past 12 months were the worst period for indiscriminate killing of civilians for years – most of the bloodshed being caused by the reconstituted Taliban. By mid-year 2021 there were 5,183 civilian casualties. Last week the Taliban deliberately targeted and killed one of Afghanistan’s favourite television comedians – whom they dragged from his house on the outskirts of Kandahar. Half the number of dead recorded by UNAMA were girls and boys.

If the Taliban take control by force, Afghanistan risks becoming “a pariah state”, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned during a visit this past week to Pakistan: “An Afghanistan that does not respect the rights of its people, an Afghanistan that commits atrocities against its own people, would become a pariah state.” He was saying it in the country that is the Taliban’s principal backer, Pakistan. But the statement itself, plus the accompanying sentiments from President Biden, is as vapid as it is self-serving. By running away from Afghanistan Biden has compounded the twists and turns of 20 years poor of tactics and regional policies with a strategic blunder of global proportions. The men of caution in team Biden, including Blinken, Lloyd Austin the defence secretary, security adviser Jake Sullivan and Biden himself, are deceiving themselves if they think that America will not feel the consequences of what is now likely to follow in Afghanistan. Though not the same pattern, perhaps, this could be as lethal as the atrocities carried out by the last terrorist franchise, Bin Laden’s al Qaeda, that took up lodging with the last Taliban regime in Kabul, which culminated in 9/11.

Biden has compounded the impression of isolationist inertia by announcing the withdrawal of the last tranche of some 2,500 US combat troops from Iraq by the end of the year. Meanwhile Russia and China have been making overtures to different sections of the Taliban leadership, including entertaining a Taliban diplomatic delegation in Beijing this week. From Moscow, the signal is more mixed. The hand of diplomacy has been extended, sure. But at the same time the Russian military has sent tanks and troops to the borders of Tajikistan and Afghanistan on the pretext of “manoeuvres with an ally and friendly nation.”

But who are the Taliban this time round? How are they recruited, commanded and controlled? Who is paying them, and supplying them with arms and training? What are the numbers of foreign fighters – a key element among the Mujahedeen of the ‘80s and the Talib cohorts from Pakistan in the ‘90s?

These questions have barely been addressed in reports from the scene, where reporters have been putting their lives on the line. The tactics and schemes of manoeuvre are quite different from the way the Taliban came into Kabul in 1996. There seems a real sense of strategy.

They first attacked the North East, the territory of the Tajiks and the Northern Alliance, sworn enemies of the Pashtun–dominated Taliban. “It’s the area where Ahmed Shah Massoud ruled and the Taliban never got control in the ‘90s,” a leading European diplomat tells me. “The Massoud clan is still very present, but the Taliban deliberately blocked the crossings and access for the Alliance to their fellow Tajiks in Tajikistan.” They have done the same to seize the crossings into Uzbekistan, from south of Herat into Iran, from Spin Boldak, and the access to Pakistan, and to the Baluch border areas.

The Taliban foot soldiers have had substantial artillery covering fire, and some reports say they have had air cover, too – allegedly from Pakistani forces, though this has been vehemently denied by Islamabad. Pakistani forces, especially the semi-autonomous ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence agency, helped found the Taliban forces as they now are. Past commanders of the ISI such as Hamid Gul have boasted of this. When Nato forces were trying to hold the line across southern Afghanistan, the Pakistan military presence among Taliban cohorts was unmistakable. Once or twice bodies of Pakistan military were found, still with their tags and identity cards on them. Visiting a US battalion in the Kunar highlands in the east 10 years ago, the colonel reported to me that his own troops and those of the Afghan government regularly came under fire from Pakistan field artillery covering the incursions of the Haqqani network Taliban.

The Taliban forces are estimated at between 70,000 and 80,000. How many are local to the districts they fight in is not clear. Some will have been trained and radicalised from the Madrassas – religious schools – in the refugee communities inside Pakistan.

They now face the tough test of fighting through the roasting late summer, and then having to capture complex conurbations like Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar e Sharif. Taking it with fire and blood lust is one thing, but holding and running the place is quite another. I doubt if they are competent to do it, judging by their dismal performance in governance in the late ‘90s. I doubt that on the present showing they could take and hold Kabul this fighting season. Latest opinion soundings by the likes of Pew – which are pretty accurate despite the dreadful circumstances – suggest that up to 80 per cent of civilians don’t want the return of the Taliban at all.

What is likely to happen now? European intelligence agencies and diplomats suggest that there are three main scenarios. First, there is the possibility of a peace settlement out of Doha between the Taliban leadership of Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada and Sirajauddin Haqqani on the one hand and the present Kabul government of Ashraf Ghani. This is extremely unlikely.

The second scenario is the Taliban take Kabul and defeat the regime this autumn and immediately impose sharia law on all and sundry. This, too, is unlikely – they seem to lack the necessary manpower to hold the capital and more than a dozen provincial capitals besides.

The third scenario is thought the most likely. The Taliban begin the battles for the cities in the autumn, and more or less get stuck. General Sir Nick Carter, the UK’s defence chief, deeply experienced from 20 years in Afghanistan, thinks that the Taliban might be tempted to mount a knockout blow at the bulk of the Afghan national army in a set piece, or “meeting battle” for a strategic centre like Jalalabad. He thinks the Taliban could just lose such a duel. The consensus of the European intelligence agencies and diplomats, however, is that we are now in for years of grinding civil war with different factions and fragments fighting for their own corner, within and beyond Afghanistan itself.

This produces a further set of risks and perils, and they will be of no advantage in the long term to the current strategic sponsors of the Taliban, Pakistan especially. Recruiting, training and funding could become tricky. Ammunition and weapons seem copious now. Most are picked up from surrendering government troops, looted barracks and arsenals. But some seem to be coming from Pakistan and the more shadowy Taliban sponsors in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. A campaign lasting years will require deep sanctuaries inside Pakistan – the mountain regions in Afghanistan won’t suffice. The Taliban will rely increasingly on militant allies in Pakistan, the Tehrik – I – Taliban of Pakistan and the deep clan branches of the Haqqani. In turn they are linked to the Islamist militants of Kashmir, stemming from Lashkar e Taiba (who carried out the devastating attack on Mumbai in 2008) and the like. In the long term, and perhaps even in the short term, these are no friends of the Pakistan state, whatever the more fanciful confections of the ISI nationalists may believe.

The advantage to taking so many border crossings so quickly this summer is that the Taliban have instant access to funds from customs revenue. But as they try to rule the vast swathes of rural Afghanistan they will have to get to grips with the narco-economy, which accounts, conservatively, for about 60 per cent of current earnings in Afghanistan. Ironically the Taliban are the only organisation ever credited with controlling the opium industry – shutting it down for a year in 2000, the year before the roof fell in. Since then the problems of domestic consumption have exploded – with more than three million recognised addicts in Afghanistan now – most likely another underestimate.

Afghanistan’s problems won’t remain in Afghanistan. The new head of MI5, Ken McCallum, say he expects terrorist groups to reconstitute training camps in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. These will certainly provide technical innovations, training and help prepare networks of supporters for terrorist attacks in Europe says Professor Jytte Klausen, of Stanford University, whose book, Western Jihadism, is out in August.

By the precipitous cutting and running from Afghanistan, and abandoning the ill-thought out Afghan policy like a derelict building site, Joe Biden is doing himself and America no favours. However hard he slams down the shutters, Afghanistan’s poison is still more than likely to come in through America’s back door.