Taliban think they have already won, peace deal or not
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban’s swagger is unmistakable. From the recent bellicose speech of their deputy leader, boasting of “conquests,” to sneering references to the “foreign masters” of the “illegitimate” Kabul government, to the Taliban’s own website tally of “puppets” killed — Afghan soldiers — they are promoting a bold message:
We have already won the war.
And that belief, grounded in military and political reality, is shaping Afghanistan’s volatile present. On the eve of talks in Turkey next month over the country’s future, it is the elephant in the room: the half-acknowledged truth that the Taliban have the upper hand and are thus showing little outward interest in compromise, or of going along with the dominant American idea, power-sharing.
While the Taliban’s current rhetoric is also propaganda, the grim sense of Taliban supremacy is dictating the response of a desperate Afghan government and influencing Afghanistan’ s anxious foreign interlocutors. It contributes to the abandonment of dozens of checkpoints and falling morale among the Afghan security forces, already hammered by a “not sustainable” casualty rate of perhaps 3,000 amonth, a senior Western diplomat in Kabul said.
The group doesn’t hide its pride at having compelled its principal adversary for 20 years, the United States, to negotiate with the Taliban and, last year, to sign an agreement to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1. In exchange, the Taliban agreed to stop attacking foreign forces and to sever ties with international terrorist groups such as al-Qaida.
The Biden administration has yet to definitively say whether it will meet that deadline, just weeks away.
“No mujahed ever thought that one day we would face such an improved state, or that we will crush the arrogance of the rebellious emperors, and force them to admit their defeat at our hands,” the Taliban’ s deputy leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, said in a recent speech .“Fortunately, today, we and you are experiencing better circumstances .”
Nearly every day, the Taliban’s website features reports of purported defections to its side, though the details are likely exaggerated, just as both the Taliban and the Afghan government exaggerate each other’s casualties. “59 enemy personnel switch sides to Islamic Emirate,” read one recent headline.
Having outlasted the allpowerful Americans, the rest is child’s play, in the Taliban’s view. The game is essentially over.
“They think they have beaten the Americans, so they can beat the other Afghan forces as well and get control over the country,” said Jawed Kohistani, an Afghan analyst and former security official in Kabul.
The Taliban, who governed most of the country from 1996 to 2001, are not interested in true power-sharing, Mr. Kohistani said. “They are planning to restore their Islamic emirate,” he added, “and they will punish all those involved in corruption and land grabbing.”
Antonio Giustozzi, a leading Taliban expert, disputed the idea that the Taliban are necessarily bent on reimposing a similarly hard-line Islamic regime. “As long as they can get to power through a political agreement, between establishing the emirate and democracy, there are options,” he said. “The aim would be to become the dominant power.”
The Taliban know that Afghanistan, an aid-dependent state, 80% of whose expenditures are funded from international donors, cannot afford the isolation of that era, analysts said.
Just as the Taliban have become increasingly sophisticated in their use of social media, online propaganda and a pugnacious English-language website — although they still often ban smartphones in are as they control — so has their language evolved to reflect the current moment.
With the decisive shift in their military fortunes, their words have become assertive and victorious, a posture that would have been impossible a mere three years ago, analysts said.
The corollary to such posturing is the Afghan government’s insistence that it expects a deadly endgame with the insurgency. Government officials rarely claimed that and not the Taliban are the victors, because they can’t. Evidence of Taliban ascendancy, in the insurgents’ steady offensive in the countryside, their systematic encroachment on cities and their overrunning of military bases, is too prevalent.
U.S. negotiators are pushing ideas of compromise and power-sharing, but government officials are largely resistant to them — in part because any interim government would most likely require Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, to step down. He has steadfastly refused to even consider it.
Instead, the government employs back-to-the-wall language indicating that the bloody struggle will only intensify. Earlier this month, a senior official told reporters insidethe intensively guarded presidential palace complex that a compromise, coalition government — recently proposed to both sides by Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. peace envoy — would merely be used by the Taliban as a “Trojan horse” for the seizure of power.
It was “totally unrealistic” to think the insurgents would agree to it, “knowing their psychology,” the official said. “I am not promising a better situation in the future. But wewill continue fighting.”