The new Taliban: what can we expect?

The Taliban’s lightning offensive in Afghanistan has sent shockwaves across the world. Even the fighters themselves, many experts say, did not expect the group to win this quickly.

The deadly explosions at Kabul airport on Thursday are an alarming sign of the chaos that is likely to ensue in the wake of their victory. 

The Taliban was not responsible for the attack. Rather, it was the work of one of its sworn enemies: ISIS-K, an ISIS affiliate operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose members include some disaffected former Taliban fighters. But it doesn’t bode well for the future of Afghanistan under Taliban rule. 

The big question now is what exactly does Taliban 2.0 stand for? How will the group govern the country, and have its views really moderated over the last 20 years? 

While this new, social media-savvy Taliban has clearly evolved, there are also ominous signs that any talk of moderation reflects little more than the group’s improved PR strategy.

To understand what the allegedly new Taliban stands for, we first need some historical context. And, crucially, we also need to recognise the flawed logic in the question itself: it implies the Taliban is a homogenous group. In reality, it is a highly fragmented organisation and riven with internal contradictions. It’s central to grasp this point when considering what Taliban rule might look like moving forwards. 

In the past week, some of the most notorious Taliban leaders have returned to Kabul as they prepare to rule over their hastily resurrected Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. 

They include Khalil Haqqani, one of America’s most wanted terrorists with a $5m bounty on his head. Haqqani is one of three Taliban deputy leaders and head of the Haqqani Network, often considered the most violent militant group associated with the Taliban. 

Another deputy leader to resurface in Kabul is Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group’s political chief and its most public face. This is his first time on Afghan soil in over a decade.

We’ve heard nothing yet from Haibatullah Akhundzada, the overall leader, who hasn’t been seen in years. And there is still no news of the group’s third deputy: Muhammad Yaqoob, the military operational commander and son of the Taliban founder Mullah Omar, who died in 2013. 

In the coming weeks, Baradar will be leading efforts to build a model for governing the country. Baradar, who is now in his early fifties and has been instrumental to the movement since its creation, is the perfect figure to tell the wider story of the Taliban’s rise, demise, and dramatic resurgence. 

Born into an influential Pashtun tribe in southern Afghanistan, Baradar was one of many US-backed mujahideen fighters who opposed the Russians during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. 

The Taliban – which means the “students” in Pashto, one of the two official languages of the country  – emerged during the civil war which broke out after the mujahideen had seen off the Soviets. 

In 1994, Baradar, alongside his brother-in-law Mullah Mohammad Omar, a local imam, set up a madrassa (religious school) in Kandahar, where they preached a hardline form of Sunni Islam. This formed the Taliban: a posse of religious scholars, united in their anger against corrupt local warlords. 

The movement, which swept to power in 1996, governed on the basis of a radical interpretation of Sharia law. This included removing women from public life, amputations for those found guilty of theft, public executions of convicted murderers and adulterers and persecution of religious – especially Shia – minorities.

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan, accusing the Taliban government of providing a safe haven for al-Qaeda member and 9/11 prime suspect Osama Bin Laden. By this time, Baradar was deputy minister of defence. Within months, the Taliban had been defeated and Baradar, like much of the group, fled to Pakistan.

By 2010, the Obama administration persuaded Pakistan’s intelligence agency to arrest Baradar. But eight years later, he was freed from jail at the request of Trump’s Afghan envoy, who wanted him to lead the peace negotiations. 

Baradar twice met Mike Pompeo, then Secretary of State, and spoke directly with Trump by telephone from the Taliban’s political office in Doha. 

Baradar is thought to be a highly effective strategist, with enormous political skills. He has gained a reputation for being a conciliator, and the “moderate face” of the group – hence why the US felt more comfortable doing a deal with him. 

He has an air of calm, according to some individuals who met him at the time. Carter Malkasian, a former adviser to US military commanders in Afghanistan who sat in on a couple rounds of negotiations in 2019, says he is quiet but fully engaged: “He has a charisma about him without saying much at all. Part of it is his eyes, how he looks at you when you’re talking..he cares about what you’re saying.”

It was Baradar’s signature on the peace deal struck between the Taliban and US in February 2020 which committed the US to withdrawal while the Taliban pledged to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base for global terror attacks and promised to enter into peace negotiations with the Afghan government. 

The envisioned power-sharing deal between the Afghan government and Taliban never happened. What is more, the Kabul bombing has cast doubt on the Taliban’s ability to prevent terror attacks both at home and abroad, even if they wished to do so.

What else can we say about what a country governed by the Taliban 2.0 might look like? 

Since capturing Kabul, the group has attempted to project an image of civilised leaders, ones who have vowed to build an “inclusive Islamic government” for Afghanistan. But how different will things be this time round?

Crucially, the Doha deal gave this new Taliban force a glimpse of international legitimacy. 

During its previous rule, only three states – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirate (UAE) – officially recognised it as the lawful government of Afghanistan. 

But, in February 2020, The New York Times published an op-ed by Baradar in which he wrote: “Afghanistan cannot afford to live in isolation. The new Afghanistan will be a responsible member of the international community.”

This time round, Taliban leaders seem to have recognised that they need better diplomatic relations with the wider world if they are to retain power and to receive foreign aid – upon which Afghanistan relies. Some hope that this pragmatic attitude could moderate their behaviour.

We’ve already seen some small signs of a break from the past – for instance, the Taliban sat down for peace talks in which women participated. 

Another clear change is the way in which they have embraced – and indeed mastered – technological innovation to pursue their political and military goals. During the previous reign, the Taliban shunned modern technology as contrary to their ultra-orthodox ideologies. 

And the leaders and their supporters have managed to recapture the country without a single shot being fired. In recent weeks, they have also paid lip service to a less harsh approach towards women this time round. 

Many experts, however, are sceptical that they have really altered their worldview, and warn that this initial talk of respecting rights is just a PR strategy. 

In a recent press conference, the group insisted that free media will be protected and women’s rights will be guaranteed “within the limits of Islam”. But this latter phrasing appears deliberately open to interpretation, and leaves us none the wiser on what this will mean in practice for the lives of women in the country. Meanwhile, witness reports are already emerging of Taliban commanders demanding that communities turn over unmarried women to become “wives” for their fighters. 

These reports highlight another central issue: it is far too easy to overemphasise the Taliban’s coherence. Even if the reassurances offered by the Taliban’s political leadership in Doha about a more civilised rule were genuine, the extent to which these leaders are truly able to exert control over the thousands of Taliban militants on the ground is questionable. 

Indeed, we cannot explore in any depth what life under Taliban rule will look like or how much “they” have changed without acknowledging that the movement is made up of many different factions.  

As Sunday Times journalist Matthew Syed points out, Afghanistan is “an intensely tribal society with 14 ethnic groups mentioned in the national anthem alone.”

Thomas Ruttig, senior analyst at Afghanistan Analysts Network, describes the Taliban, which has “strong roots in segmented Pashtun tribal society” as effectively a “network of networks”. 

Some of these different “networks” – or ethnic groups – have competing interests. 

A Taliban political spokesperson from Doha, for instance, has promised on live TV to ban opium growth and trafficking. But, as Dr Mike Martin, a War Studies Fellow at King’s College London who spent two years in Helmand as a British Army officer, points out: “Good luck getting the Helmandis to go along with that.” There are Taliban from the southern Helmand region, he says, who make all of their money through drug trafficking. 

According to Dr Martin, there are already power struggles emerging between different groups on the ground in Kabul. Taliban from the southern regions of Helmand and Kandahar have started to take over checkpoints but Haqqani Taliban are also claiming “they are responsible for the security of Kabul.”

Nagieb Khaja, a Danish journalist on the ground, says he’s “talked to several Taliban from eastern Afghanistan,” in the past week who’ve told him that “there are frictions between them and those from the south” over women’s education. According to Khaja, those from Kandahar and Helmand “do not want women and big girls to be educated”. But Eastern groups of Haqqanis, Wardakis and Logaris are more resistant to shutting female education down. 

Ground fighters aside, these rifts extend to the very top. According to Dr Martin, fellow deputy Taliban leaders Yacoub and Haqqani “hate each other.”

Another crucial way in which Taliban members’ views may prove incoherent is in their willingness to abide by the Doha deal and cut ties with global terrorism. ISIS-K may be an enemy but there is evidence, including from the UN, that Taliban leaders have kept close ties with al-Qaeda.

On this issue, there are generational divides. According to Jen Kirby, VOX’s national security reporter, many younger fighters are keener to lend support to an international jihadist movement and wage a war on other countries. Older members, however, are acutely aware that “those ties were ultimately what dislodged them from power last time” and want to focus solely on imposing their rigorous religious rule on a single country.

Taliban divisions aren’t new. In the original Taliban movement of the 1990s, different views already coexisted, says Antonio Giustozzi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. But, he adds, they mattered less, “because the Taliban Emirate was run autocratically by Mullah Omar, who was taking all the key decisions.”

This is no longer the case. 

The Taliban has since adopted a collegial leadership model, meaning Haibatullah Akhundzada, the overall leader, must seek the consensus of a leadership council for any major decisions he takes.

Arguably the most crucial factor uniting all of these different Taliban factions was their aversion to western intervention. Without the presence of foreign troops, ideological splits and power struggles between different groups may well intensify.  

Another looming threat for the Taliban is Ahmad Massoud, founder of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF), who is already trying to marshal a resistance army in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul.

His vision for Afghanistan is an inclusive system of power-sharing that represents all of the country’s different ethnic groups.

Massoud’s father, nicknamed the “Lion of the Panjshir”, was a famous Afghan mujahideen commander, considered the epitome of a freedom fighter by many in the West. He led resistance groups from the Panjshir region first against the Soviet Union then as the main opposition to the Taliban during its previous rule. But he was assassinated by al-Qaeda when Massoud was only 12. 

British-educated Massoud claims he is “ready to follow in (his) father’s footsteps”, and has “stores of ammunition and arms” to take on the Taliban. The NRF has around 6,000 fighters so far but is calling on the wider world, especially France, for support. 

Thus the challenges ahead for the Taliban-led government are manifold: internal conflict, external threats from the likes of Massoud and ISIS-K, in addition to keeping the economy afloat and delivering services to 30 million people during a year of drought and the pandemic. 

Such a highly unstable situation makes it difficult to predict exactly what Afghanistan’s future will look like under Taliban rule. Or how long this second emirate will last. 

Capturing the country may have been the easy party. Governing it will likely prove much harder.