A strategic shock for the subcontinent
For the Taliban, Kabul has risen, not fallen. For Pakistan, this is its 1971 moment — but its influence will eventually wane
The sudden, surreal, collapse of the Afghan State in the face of a Taliban onslaught is a strategic shock to the subcontinent. Triggered by an expected but ill-executed departure of the United States (US) — typified by a 17-year-old football enthusiast, Zaki Anwari, falling to his death from a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III — this moment was long in the making. Undecided between the narrower counterterrorism and broader nationbuilding objectives, the US failed at both. But more than the failure of the US and the corrupt Afghan elite who fled when their country needed them most, it is the “victory” of the Taliban and its sponsor, Pakistan, which makes this moment significant.
Both these aspects ie, the Taliban’s largely unchallenged, almost preordained rise, and the concomitant success of Pakistan’s military establishment, which has long desired influence in Kabul, require unpacking. For these entities, Kabul has not fallen, it has risen. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan’s much-criticised statement that the Taliban are “breaking the chains of slavery”, offers important clues about South Asia’s geopolitical contours.
First, what does the Taliban’s rise mean, and what does it not?
It marks the (geo)political mainstreaming of fringe Islamists. Unlike the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), that made the cardinal mistake of simultaneously altering territorial boundaries and propagating global jihad, the Taliban focused its efforts on a territorially recognised nation-state and, in rhetoric, steers clear of global jihadists. That the United Kingdom (UK)’S chief of defence staff, Nick Carter, active in behind-the-scenes negotiations between Rawalpindi and pre-taliban Kabul, thinks that the Taliban are “country boys with honour at the heart” demonstrates how far the Taliban has come, with Pakistan’s support, in reshaping the world’s views about it.
The Taliban’s genius lies in its ability to navigate along, and manipulate, differences between ethnic nationalism and Islamist radicalism. Ever since its resurgence, the group kept international opinion divided on where the Taliban figured on this Islamist-versus-nationalist spectrum. Even now, big powers such as China, who are eager to engage with the Taliban, are demanding that it cuts ties with “terrorists” ie, the Turkistan Islamic Party, that China views as antithetical to its security. Islamabad too wants the Taliban to cut ties with the Tehrik-e-taliban Pakistan (TTP).
The irony is that such demands afford the Taliban leverage vis-à-vis both Islamabad and Beijing — not the other way round.
For a group that has come to power after humiliating the US, and that knows Beijing is unlikely to use military force in Afghanistan given the risks, the Taliban has little incentive to cut the cord with foreign Islamists to whom it owes battlefield gratitude. This doesn’t mean that the Taliban will suddenly take a global Islamist turn. It will not. But it will extract a heavy price, including aid and diplomatic recognition, for every foreign Islamist it targets on behalf of an external power. In that sense, the Taliban, an internationally connected Islamist group, doesn’t need to send fighters to Kashmir or Xinjiang. It just needs to be and let them be.
Second, what does this mean for Pakistan, and how does that impact the regional geopolitical environment?
Fifty years after losing East Pakistan in 1971, Rawalpindi has finally, to its mind, achieved a strategic win that it deeply desired. Unlike on its eastern front, Pakistan doesn’t have a strategic adversary to its west anymore. In this context, Islamabad’s advocacy of an inclusive government in Kabul with the Taliban setting the terms of compromise is an attempt to limit a blowback and prevent Afghanistan’s implosion akin to that in the 1990s. Only time will tell whether this will be a Pyrrhic victory. But it certainly came at a huge human and material cost, which Pakistani officers and the Taliban term “collateral damage”.
Pakistan’s official mind, including within the military, remains divided about the Taliban. Not in a strategic sense, but in an operational sense ie, how far the Taliban will go to accepting Pakistan’s demands on the TTP and limiting any Indian presence.
Islamabad’s fencing of its western border needs to be seen in this light. It is as much to prevent large waves of Afghan migrants, including TTP militants, from entering Pakistan, as it is to neutralise Afghan political resistance over the Durand Line —which the Taliban didn’t recognise in the 1996-2001 period.
To manage the Taliban’s internal diversity and frictions was relatively easier for Rawalpindi when the group operated from Pakistan’s territory. Now that the Taliban are transitioning into administrators whose political practices will be shaped as much by their ideological make as by the requirements and desires of the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s influence is likely to wane, if not disappear. Given the Taliban’s connections with and affinity towards Islamist for tions within Pakistan, its rise is li to empower such elements furt shifting the country’s political crum even further to the Right.
There is no clear answer as to Pakistan will deal with a Talibantrolled Afghanistan, especially if Pakistan sentiment, rife am Afghans, receives the Taliban’s p cal blessing in the months to co This is why the Taliban’s rise shock for the entire region, and just for India, which has certainly out for now.
Kabul’s fall not only betrays vacuousness of the Us-led lib democratic project, but also prom to be a high point from whereon P stan’s influence over the Tali becomes somewhat illusory, the leading to unintended second-o political and security effects diff to accurately ascertain for now.