Taliban fall into a new era of isolation
Al Qaeda strike suggests group hasn’t reformed
Hours after a US drone strike killed the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, in downtown Kabul, Taliban security forces rushed to seal off the site. Green tarps were thrown over destroyed windows. Checkpoints were put up, and shops were closed.
But there was no hiding the damage that had been done to the Taliban’s nascent government, which had tried to shelter the world’s most wanted terrorist from the eyes of the US government.
The strike early Sunday morning — and the public revelation that the Taliban had sheltered a key plotter of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the heart of the Afghan capital — was a watershed moment for the group’s new government. And it underscored the reality of their rule: The Taliban have not fundamentally reformed from their first regime in the 1990s, when their hard-line policies and relationship with Al Qaeda turned the country into a pariah state.
Retaliation against Al Qaeda and the Taliban allies who sheltered the terrorist group drove the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001, beginning a two-decade-long war that ravaged the country. Now, the Taliban seems to be once more treading the same path, fueling criticism that their government should never be internationally recognized, and raising questions about whether a new era of US strikes in Afghanistan has begun.
A statement from the Taliban condemned the US strike, without specifically mentioning al-Zawahri or Al Qaeda. “It is an act against the interests of Afghanistan and the region,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban government. “Repeating such actions will damage the available opportunities.”
The strike comes at an already tenuous moment for the Taliban. Since seizing power, the group has promised to moderate as it seeks international recognition and aid from Western diplomats abroad, even while staying true to its hardline ideological beliefs at home.
In recent months, the government has enacted increasingly oppressive policies, including restricting women’s rights to travel and work. And it has reneged on an early promise to allow girls to attend secondary school, a stark echo of its first rule.
Those measures have increasingly turned international attitudes against the government and have cost the country millions in foreign aid, worsening its dire economic crisis. Now, the strike against Al Qaeda’s leader in the heart of Kabul has opened a new chapter for the Taliban government, seemingly cementing its international isolation.
The strike highlights what many analysts and experts have warned for months: that the Taliban have allowed terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, to exist freely on Afghan soil since the takeover despite an agreement with the United States in which the group pledged to keep Afghan territory from becoming a haven for terrorist plotting.
The Taliban’s history with Al Qaeda stretches back decades. Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s first leader in the 1990s, was largely deferential to Al Qaeda’s expanding existence in the country’s east during those years. Some Taliban factions had a closer relationship with the terrorist organization than others — especially the Haqqani network, whose senior leadership fought alongside and aided Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan war.
Both bin Laden and al-Zawahri pledged allegiance to the Taliban’s leaders over the years, though al-Zawahri’s most recent pledge — in 2016 after Haibatullah Akhundzada rose to become supreme leader of the Taliban — was never publicly accepted or rejected by the group.
Over the course of the US war in Afghanistan, US forces periodically killed Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, despite the group’s having been mostly driven out of the country or into hiding in the mountainous border regions with Pakistan.
But a larger drift back into Afghanistan began in more recent years. In 2015, US and Afghan commandos, backed by US air support, attacked an Al Qaeda training camp in the southern part of the country that military officials said was one of the largest ever discovered.