Two decades later, Taliban is still a threat
It was a cool, breezy night in November 2001 when I heard a pack of fighter jets thundering across the sky, followed by a loud thud of bombs and explosions. I was holed up along with four other journalists in a compound off a highway outside of Kandahar. It was my first personal look at NATO’S War on Terror in Afghanistan that I would end up covering for the next decade or so from various angles based in Pakistan.
Our group flew in to Quetta, Pakistan, from Dubai in a Dubai Air Force transport plane and our hosts, who were on a United Arab Emirates charity mission, were expecting a large refugee influx in the border areas. United States special forces along with Northern Alliance fighters had taken the northern city of Mazar-i-sharif just a day before and Taliban fleeing from the north and Kabul were assembling in Kandahar — their home base.
The next day we requested our host Abdur Rehman Subeh — a middle-aged bearded Emarati gentleman — to let us use his offices to interview Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil. It turned out Muttawakil had gone underground, but his deputy, Abdul Wali, was available for a chat on the condition that the questions were shown to him beforehand. We agreed, thinking that once the conversation started, it would be easy to go in our own direction.
In the afternoon, four men on two Yamaha light motorcycles arrived. Wali was one of them. The chat was boring and bullish. We were fed the usual Taliban talking points. But we found out the entire Taliban leadership was fleeing Kandahar instead of fortifying it.
We spent a few days in the compound, owned by a Pakistani tribal chieftain featuring a large creaking metal gate with a badly drawn fake copy of the United Nations insignia. The next day, we saw Taliban anti-aircraft gun posts around the area. Every Taliban fighter I met during that trip was full of concocted, fanciful stories of how they were winning the war against the U.S. and how last night, their archaic anti-aircraft systems shot U.S. F-16s and F-18s out of the skies.
The NATO forces got entangled in a drawn-out insurgency supported by Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) and military, with tribal chiefs used by the ISI as proxies, and border compounds like those where we stayed in used as hideouts and storage depots.
Working as a journalist with various organizations in Pakistan for the next decade, I witnessed, sometimes firsthand, how Pakistan’s military and ISI played consistent double-games with the U.S. and NATO, no matter who the army or intelligence chief was in Pakistan. I witnessed how the Taliban were harboured not only in the border areas, but in cities, too — often in plain sight.
Twenty-two years have passed since 9/11, and although the Taliban is once again firmly in control of Afghanistan, much has changed.
With leader Osama bin Laden gone, al-qaida maintains a sporadic presence in Afghanistan, but it’s a pale shadow of its menacing past. It has been decimated by NATO, with the help of the Pakistanis. (While Pakistan helped kill al-qaida, it harboured and nurtured the Taliban and other jihadi groups within its borders.
This policy is widely known as “good Taliban, bad Taliban” in Pakistan.)
Likewise, with caliph Abu Bakr al-baghdadi having been killed by the U.S. in 2019, the Islamic State seems to be but a shell of what it once was. One of the reasons for these successes is the fact that regimes sponsoring these groups in Pakistan and Iran are far more weak and internally bogged down. That’s why Iraq looks relatively calm, but Syria is stewing (though no longer an international focal point).
Afghanistan is a different story. It looks sedated, but not neutralized. This will be the case as long as the Taliban are in power and the regional power play in Central Asia and the Middle East continues. It is a powder keg, deprived of its oxygen that came from Pakistan, Iran and China, but volatile nonetheless. China, Iran, Pakistan and India all still have their hand in the pie, which makes Afghanistan a dormant volcano.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban face other terrorist outfits such as the Islamic State and Northern Alliance forces (remnants of the Afghan National Force who vanished in thin air when the U.S. departed the country and the Taliban pushed forward to take Kabul, the capital).
Can the Taliban still project power across borders into Europe and North America? If China, Pakistan and Iran start backing the current regime in Kabul, then all bets are off.
National Post Mohammed Rizwan is a former Pakistani journalist who has worked with numerous international media outlets, including the Washington Post, the Telegraph and the Khaleej Times. This column was co-authored with Raheel Raza, president of the Council of Muslims Facing Tomorrow.