THE FRAGMENTED ‘TALIBAN’
The withdrawal of US-led NATO forces from Afghanistan has created an air of uncertainty in the country and its larger neighbourhood. The narrative that has come to dominate the international media is that this effectively constitutes the ‘return’ (if not ‘the victory’) of the Taliban. The dominance of the idea of the ‘return’ of the Taliban obscures the fact that the regime that was toppled in 2000-01 was different from the entity that now appears to have prevailed in the scramble for power once the forces of occupation had left. The Taliban is neither the ideological monolith of the Islamist militia it is made out to be, nor is it exclusively the handmaiden of the Pakistani deep state that it is taken to be. It is essential to understand its fragmented nature to be able to comprehend what is beginning to unfold in Afghanistan, and why the Taliban is unlikely to be able to reimpose the kind of regime it had put together in the 1990s.
The Taliban that Was
The Taliban (lit. Students in Dari, sing. Talib ) emerged onto the political landscape of post-Soviet Afghanistan out of nowhere in the autumn 1994. At that time the rank and file of the Taliban constituted largely of Pakhtun refugees domiciled in Pakistan from the 1980s, trained and educated in the deeply traditionalist Deobandi madraseh of Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwah, mobilized by Mullah Muhammad Omar, a local cleric based in Kandahar. The Taliban were armed and (arguably even trained) by Islamabad largely with resources made available by the USA during the years Soviet occupation, and pushed into the middle of the Afghanistan civil war of 1990s. Pakistani support proved crucial to the swift victory of the Taliban, overwhelming the various regional and tribal factions exhausted by almost interminable conflict since 1979. The Pakhtun-speaking Taliban rallied round the single-largest ethnic group of the Pakhtuns against the multi-ethnic Northern Alliance, seizing Kandahar and then Kabul and much of the rest of the country. They established a very repressive order where the harsh tribal codes of the Pakhtun countryside were imposed under the banner of an Islamic emirate.
The Taliban were resisted by the Northern Alliance led by the Tajik leaders Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Masood, the Uzbegs led by Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Shi‘i Hazaras under the banner of Hizb-e Wahdat as much as the equally traditional Pakhtun and a one-time ally of Islamabad, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In their struggle for domination over these myriad tribal and ethnic groups, the Taliban were aided and abetted by foreign veterans of the Afghan jihad , such as the al-Qaeda led by Usama bin Laden. By the time Laden took up the banner of ‘global jihad’ right into the US mainland during 9/11, the last bastion of resistance to the Taliban – Ahmed Shah Masood – had fallen, and had it not been for the US intervention in the Afghan civil war the Taliban may have succeeded in establishing their military dominance in the whole country. However, once Kabul refused to hand Laden over to the USA after 9/11, American support reinvigorated and reinforced the resistance to the Pakhtun-dominated Taliban and eventually toppled it.
The Taliban that Wasn’t
As the US established its military dominance in Afghanistan and instituted a multi-ethnic government under the anti-Taliban Pakhtun Hamid Karzai, the Taliban leadership (viz. Mullah Muhammad Omar, Mullah Mansour, Hibatullah Akhundzadeh, etc) retreated into Pakistan, and the rank-and-file virtually walked back into the woodwork of tribal Afghan countryside. Out of power, the core of the former Taliban regime reconfigured itself into the Quetta Shura (Quetta Council), named after the town in Balochistan where it was located, desperately trying to survive as the Americans hammered their local leadership in Afghanistan.
The attempt at military subjugation of the Taliban rank-and-file in the country, however, had many unintended victims by way of “collateral damage” and produced a backlash from the depths of the Pakhtun society. This coincided with growing disaffection from the provinces against the corrupt Hamid Karzai administration, which failed to equitably redistribute resources made available by the Americans – thereby fatally weakening the authority of the government at Kabul. The military resistance that surfaced in response was broadly branded by the Americans and their Afghan allies as ‘Taliban’, even though the Quetta Shura enjoyed little authority over it.
This resistance was largely home-grown in Afghanistan, but when it emerged, a militant group (the Haqqani network) based in Miran Shah in FATA of Pakistan led by Jalaluddin Haqqani began to take the fight to the Karzai regime, aligning with many militant Islamist outfits based in Pakistan (such as the Lashkar-e Taiyyaba and Jaish-e Muhammad and the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan). The Haqqani network joined ranks with the provincial resistance in Afghanistan itself, and the Islamist militants in Pakistan, to operate freely on either side of the Durrand Line – hence inviting retribution from Pakistan, but its trans-border lines of operation allowed its militants (both Afghan and Pakistani) to hide in each other’s areas. By 2012 the Haqqani network operated in tandem not only with the Pakhtun resistance in the South but also the Tajik and Uzbeg resistance forces in the north, and came to be known as the Miran Shah Shura of the Taliban – despite being for all practical purposes a distinct entity from the original Pakhtun Taliban (i.e. the Quetta Shura).
There emerged a third and a more numerous group, closely linked to the Haqqani network, the Peshawar Shura, drawing almost all its main figures from Afghan refugees in Pakistan, who aimed almost exclusively at driving out both the Americans and their Afghan ‘collaborators’ and reclaiming southern Afghanistan for the Pakhtuns, with little or no interest in Pakistan beyond the territories immediately south of the Durrand Line.
Even though in popular perception all these three (four, including the home-grown resistance that has never been to Pakistan) groups are part of the unitary structure of the Taliban, the term Taliban today denotes more an umbrella of groups and objectives than a single centrally controlled outfit. When the US began negotiating with the Taliban during the days of the Trump administration, it did so with the by-then much weakened Quetta Shura. Once the prospect of US withdrawal loomed, the Quetta Shura (led by Hibatullah Akhundzadeh since the death of Mullah Muhammad Omar in US attack) was able to persuade the Miran Shah and Peshawar Shuras to work in tandem with it on tactical refraining from targeting American forces, but continuing to fight for control against the Ashraf Ghani administration. It is the umbrella grouping of Taliban that is now reaching out for the levers of the government in Kabul.
The Taliban that May Be (or May Be Not)
It is frequently observed by the international media that the Taliban were the spawn of Pakistan, hence with the Taliban at the helm in Kabul, Islamabad is virtually programmed to benefit from this dispensation as it was from the last. There is little reason to dispute the statement with respect to the vintage of the organization as it stood in the 1990s. However, even the last Taliban government (which Islamabad helped put together and even man its bureaucracy) refused to be controlled by Islamabad once it had taken power – especially with respect to repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan, which Islamabad pressed for and Kabul resisted. However, the situation at present is still more complicated.
Indeed, the Taliban central leadership which has for the last year or so effectively combined the Quetta Shura, with the Miran Shah and the Peshawar Shuras appears to be holding up well together. All three factions, as their names suggest, were based in and operating out of Pakistan – but that does not ensure that they would necessarily take their cue from Islamabad. At least eight members of the highest echelons of the Quetta Shura actually spent much of the last two decades in Pakistani prisons, and often were only released at the behest of the Americans when the Trump administration wanted to open dialogue with the Taliban – to assume the prison experience would make them responsive to Islamabad is an unwise assumption.
The Taliban leadership council that has now begun to rule Afghanistan looks a lot different from the previous Taliban government. As earlier there is a collective leadership (hence a shura or council), but most of the top-level leaders from the 1990s have either died from natural causes, or have been eliminated by the American forces. Hence the new leadership is partly made up of tier-2 or tier-3 level of leaders from the original Taliban (by and large affiliated to the Quetta Shura) such as Hibatullah Akhundzadeh, the present leader, and partly of the next generation of the leadership of the 1990s – such as the two deputy leaders Sirajuddin Haqqani (one of the architects of the ‘Taliban’ insurgency of the last decade, nephew of Jalaluddin Haqqani) and Mullah Muhammad Yaqoob (yet to achieve anything of significance, son of Mullah Omar). In other words, this leadership is untested and uncertain of its own footing in the Afghan political landscape (except for Haqqani), and thus has tried to accommodate both those who have had some experience of being in power, and those who have never wielded it but have fought for it. This Taliban leadership did not really militarily win over Afghanistan as they may be said to have done in the 1990s; they simply stepped into the political vacuum left behind by American withdrawal.
There is yet another factor that contributes to Taliban’s military weakness in real terms, behind its façade of a victorious force. On a rough count, it is estimated that the core fighting strength of the Taliban stands presently at around 60-70,000, with another 90,000 being provided by local militia who have chosen to align with the Taliban for tactical reasons against a common enemy (the fourth group mentioned above, confusingly labelled as Taliban). Let alone all 150,000 plus being trained by Pakistan, not even all of the core 60,000 may have had such training; indeed, many may have not even have been to Pakistan at all. More than half of the ‘Taliban’ combatants seem to have been ‘trained’ on the ground, entering into the arena in response to the heavy-hand of American military presence, as well as gaining their combat experience contesting it. There are Tajiks, Uzbegs and Pakhtuns alike among this lot, whose alignment with the Taliban was purely tactical. If the new Taliban dispensation fails to accommodate this substantial segment of its fellow-riders, the value of such tactical alignment could evaporate quickly.
Conclusion
Behind its confident exterior, the Taliban is fully aware of its own relative weakness. This is presumably the reason why unlike in 1996, it is treading carefully, testing waters and speaking of inclusive government – opening negotiations where it can, fighting where it can’t. While the scale of the challenge may be less daunting than it used to be, but so is the momentum of Taliban military success than it was in 1996. The bomb blast at the Kabul airport carried out by the Islamic State of Khorasan (IS-K) seems to be putting both the Taliban and its fellow-riders on notice that there are other players in town as well. The Taliban is required to play its hand well to avert Afghanistan relapsing into another civil war. To manage that it needs uncharacteristic poise and moderation – optimists will say, only the urge to cling on to power might provide them with these.
