What the Taliban resurgence means for the Arab world
There have been mixed reactions in the Arab world to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Oman’s grand sheikh congratulated the Afghan people on what he described as a spectacular victory against aggressors.
Radical movements, especially in Syria and Gaza, viewed the Taliban’s return to Kabul as a Western defeat in the war against Islam. The Syrian-based Hayat Tahrir alSham, which considers itself a sister movement of the Taliban, saw the recent developments as representing the triumph of jihadism in Muslim countries.
But the ruling elite, especially in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have deep concerns about the Taliban’s return to power. The Saudis called on the Taliban to develop a comprehensive political arrangement that includes all segments of Afghan society. Similarly, the UAE expressed concerns over security and called on the Taliban to focus on bringing peace and stability.
But both the concerns and celebrations seem out of touch with the reality that the Taliban does not present a serious threat to Muslim countries outside of Afghanistan.
The Making of the Taliban
The Taliban are a homebred movement with foundations in Afghan conservative society. Unlike al-Qaida and the Islamic State, they have no aspirations outside of their home turf; their focus is solely on Afghanistan and their Pashtun compatriots in Pakistan.
The group was founded in 1994 by Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, an Afghan city near the Pakistani border. His project was supported in part by Saudi funding dedicated to religious schools. Omar had lost his right eye in a battle against the Soviets, which withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.
Appalled by Afghan’s rampant corruption, he assembled scores of students from religious schools to help him establish a puritan Islamic state. Adopting “the Taliban” as the name of their movement, they seized control in 1996 of the whole country except Badakhshan province in the northeast, which was controlled by the Northern Alliance.
After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the Taliban were removed from Kabul but continued to pursue a national project to end the occupation and reestablish a model Islamic political system. During peace talks in Qatar in 2020 that led to the agreement to end the war, the Taliban assured the U.S. that they would not provide shelter to alQaida fighters and that it would engage Afghanistan’s vulnerable populations in political and social integration talks.
But considering the group’s history, many Arabs didn’t take its promises seriously. The Taliban had told the U.S. after the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that they were committed to preventing Osama bin Laden from launching attacks on American assets from Afghanistan – though they also claimed that the U.S. provided no evidence implicating bin Laden in the two attacks. After 9/11, the Taliban refused to turn in bin Laden and other al-Qaida personnel, viewing them as allies that had helped liberate Afghanistan from Soviet invaders. Only three countries recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In 2004, when Mohammad bin Zayed became crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the UAE stopped supporting Islamic political movements.
Jihadism in Disarray
The Taliban was founded to promote civic values compatible with the teachings of Islam. Al-Qaida, on the other hand, was focused on combating Christians and Jews, whom it blamed – in addition to self-serving national governments – for the travails of Muslims.
In 1988, Osama bin Laden and other Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan established alQaida in Peshawar, Pakistan, as a decentralized, transnational movement. The group’s fighters eventually left Afghanistan and returned to their countries of origin, seeking to bring down unpopular regimes throughout the Arab world. In the wake of the Second Gulf War, they also launched alQaida’s first attack against the U.S. in 1993, detonating a bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City.
Al-Qaida and its affiliates have a presence in many parts of Asia and Africa, including the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus, India, Egypt’s Sinai, Somalia, North Africa and the Sahel countries.
However, they haven’t managed to bring down an existing government, largely because U.S. airstrikes and local security forces have kept them in check. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and targeted airstrikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, decimated al-Qaida’s backbone.
The group weakened and splintered, setting the stage for the rise of the Islamic State. Unlike al-Qaida, whose attacks primarily targeted the West and Israel, the Islamic State chose to deal with the enemy within, i.e., the nation-state.
Its history goes back to the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood splintered following the 1967 Six-Day War, leading to the emergence of many Islamic movements dedicated to toppling the secular Egyptian government and installing an Islamic state in its ruins.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant appeared in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and gathered momentum among alienated Sunni Arabs in Anbar province. In 2014, the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, with a force totaling just 1,500 men against more than 45,000 Iraqi troops.
U.S. airstrikes and ground forces halted their expansion toward Baghdad. With the participation of the peshmergas and the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, a U.S.-led coalition soundly defeated IS in Iraq by 2017 and in Syria a couple years later.
The Islamic State-Khorasan, the group responsible for last week’s attack on the Kabul airport, emerged in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. Khorasan is a historical region in Central Asia, where the group seeks to operate.
In addition to Afghanistan, the region includes Pakistan, India, Kashmir, eastern Iran and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, populated mainly by Muslim Uyghurs. IS-K’s membership is multinational and includes Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Chechens, Uyghurs, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. It has roughly 1,500 active members and does not have wide appeal among the Afghan population.
In 2018, the Taliban decisively defeated the group in the Battle of Darzab. Even though IS-K has demonstrated an ability to stage high concept, bloody operations, it does not have the military capability to conquer territory – though Afghanistan’s neighbors, namely China, fear that it might attract young recruits from their restive populations.
The Decline of Political Islam
Arab uprisings saw the rise of Islamic political parties in a number of Arab countries, but their popularity has steadily declined ever since.
In 2012, Mohammed Morsi, a candidate representing the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency in Egypt’s only democratic election since the 1952 military coup. A year later, the army ousted him, outlawed the Brotherhood and issued harsh prison terms for Brotherhood leaders and activists.
In Tunisia, which political observers described as an exception to the turmoil that plagued Arab states, President Kais Saied suspended the parliament last July and concentrated most state powers in his hands. The popularity of the Islamist Ennahda party peaked in the 2011 general elections, in which it received 37 percent of the vote.
In 2014, it received 28 percent, which declined to 20 percent in 2019. Charges of corruption and mismanagement have steadily chipped away at the party’s popular appeal.
In Morocco, King Mohammad VI placated protesters’ demands for political reforms by appointing a prime minister from the Justice and Development Party, which won 23 percent of the vote and the most seats in the 2011 elections. In 2016, the party won 27 percent of the vote and held on to the prime minister’s office.
The law prevents a single party from winning an absolute majority in Morocco, where the king still reigns supreme and the Justice and Development Party’s success did not translate into real political power.
In Yemen, the Islah Party, which in the last parliamentary elections in 2003 came in second to the ruling General People’s Congress party, lost much of its influence since the 2011 uprising. The surge of the Houthi rebels and their seizure of most Islah strongholds, in addition to the UAE’s hostility toward Sunni political Islam, made it irrelevant.
The Arab uprisings and the emergence of militant Islamic movements overshadowed other Islamic movements in the region that were focused on politics and opposed to violence.
There is no justification for Arab concerns that the Taliban takeover will make Afghanistan a refuge for Islamic movements, a base for militant training, and a launchpad for subversive activities.
The Taliban are not a transnational group, and Islamic movements in the Arab region should not expect to receive support from them. IS-K is focused on Central Asia, not the Arab world, but it’s still doubtful it can develop the capacity to mount serious attacks on Afghanistan’s neighbors.
Neither the Taliban nor the Central Asian states will allow the group to become a real threat. Afghans from different political leanings are self-contained people with a particularistic worldview. The events of the past decade indicate that militant Islam cannot win.