The Taliban has outlasted the world’s most potent military forces and its two main factions now challenge the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. As U.S. troops draw down, the next phase of conflict will have consequences that extend far beyond the region.
The Taliban was toppled in Afghanistan in 2001 for harboring al-Qaeda, but it has not been defeated. With an estimated core of up to sixty thousand fighters, the Taliban remains the most vigorous insurgent group in Afghanistan and holds sway over civilians near its strongholds in the country’s south and east. It has also metastasized in neighboring Pakistan, where thousands of fighters in the country’s western tribal areas wage war against the government. Now, as the international combat mission in Afghanistan closes, the Taliban threatens to destabilize the region, harbor terrorist groups with global ambitions, and set back human rights and economic development in the areas where it prevails. Though the Taliban appears unlikely to dismantle the Afghan government and revive its emirate, it poses the most serious challenge to Kabul’s authority even as the United States winds down the longest war in its history and NATO scales back its largest-ever deployment outside of Europe. The insurgents’ resilience calls into question a state-building project that has cost its international backers hundreds of billions of dollars.
The U.S.-led military coalition has suffered nearly 3,500 dead and more than ten thousand wounded. Since 2001, at least twenty-one thousand Afghan civilians have been killed in conflict, and three million people have been displaced, according to the UN refugee agency. Afghan troops and police are dying at their highest rates ever.
The drawdown of international forces from Afghanistan also raises questions about Pakistan’s strategy in South Asia and its leverage over the Afghan Taliban. The insurgents could not have thrived without sanctuary in Pakistan, whose main intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, cultivated them in the 1990s and maintained ties to them after 2001 (PDF). Pakistan has long sought what its military doctrines call strategic depth: an amicable regime in Kabul, to avoid being encircled by its chief rival, India, to the east, and a pro-India Afghanistan to the west. Along with several foreign militant groups, Pakistani Taliban factions thrived in the sanctuaries along the frontier that the Pakistani military had set aside for the Afghan Taliban. But Pakistan does not control the Islamist militancy it helped enable, and its military is now fighting a movement whose primary aim differs from that of the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban has declared Islamabad apostate for aligning itself with post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and seeks revolution in Pakistan. Under the umbrella Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or Taliban Movement of Pakistan), these militants have attacked Pakistani security forces and civilians nationwide. Thousands of Sunni Islamic militants have established rudimentary bases along the Afghan-Pakistani border. There, they harbor al-Qaeda and affiliated jihadi groups and provide staging grounds for cross-border attacks against international troops and Afghan security forces. The India-oriented terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which launched the 2008 attack on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai and is believed to have ties to the ISI, has found refuge there, as has the anti-Shia group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. These groups are suspected by Western intelligence and Afghan officials of carrying out attacks in Afghanistan, including on U.S. and Indian targets. In June 2013, Afghan forces assumed responsibility from the international coalition for providing security, a prerequisite for the drawdown of tens of thousands of U.S.-led troops. Also in 2014, a presidential election brought the country’s first peaceful and democratic, if flawed, transfer of power. These developments might undercut the Taliban's claim to mount the preeminent resistance to foreign occuption, but the Taliban justifies the continuation of its armed campaign by asserting the government is illegitimate and un-Islamic, a puppet of the West. Meanwhile, the persistence of ineffective, corrupt, and often-mistrusted state institutions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, combined with mutual mistrust between the two countries, could give Taliban guerrillas an outsized impact on both countries' security, development, and democratization after the drawdown
We believe the war in Afghanistan will come to an end when all foreign invaders pull out of Afghanistan and a holy Islamic and independent regime prevails here.
Anarchy prevailed in Afghanistan in 1994. The Soviet Union's Red Army had pulled out five years prior, and international support for the anti-Soviet jihad, led by U.S. and Saudi intelligence operatives, waned soon after. Afghanistan, awash in arms, had neither a functioning government nor a productive economy. In the post-Soviet power vacuum, mujahadeen, warlords who had made common cause against Soviet forces, jockeyed for power and spoils, and the government led by the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan collapsed in 1992. Civil war engulfed Afghanistan, leaving appalling carnage but no clear victor. A small clerical movement emerged to protect residents from the banditry and extortion that had become routine. These vigilantes in western Kandahar called themselves the Taliban, Pashto for “seekers of knowledge.” Their ranks were soon reinforced by thousands of their co-ethnics, Pashtuns educated in Deobandi madrassas, or seminaries, along Pakistan’s western frontier. These madrassas proliferated under President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1977–88) and served some of the millions of Afghan refugees who had been displaced by more than a decade of unrest. They were sponsored by the religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami (JUI), which mobilized its students to take up arms with the Taliban. The Taliban was welcomed by a war-weary public as it expanded out from Kandahar. The movement established order on the basis of Hanafi Islamic jurisprudence influenced by Pashtun custom, which meshed with the rural mores of southern Afghanistan. Pakistan assumed a crucial role in cultivating the Taliban. Under the command of Mullah Mohammad Omar, an Afghan ethnic Pashtun who had served as a junior mujahadeen commander during the anti-Soviet jihad, the Taliban swept through southern Afghanistan in 1994. The ISI shifted its support from the major mujahadeen party it had bet on to Mullah Omar's group. Pakistan believed that with ideological and material means of persuasion, including funds and arms, it could manipulate Taliban clerics and thus ensure a stable and acquiescent Afghanistan, as well as secure routes to open trade to the newly independent Central Asian states, writes journalist Ahmed Rashid. Another outside force of looming importance for Afghanistan was al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi who had bankrolled and facilitated fighters known as the Afghan Arabs during the anti-Soviet fight, was expelled from Sudan in 1996. He returned to Afghanistan seeking a sanctuary from which he could build up his terrorist group. Mullah Omar protected bin Laden even as the al-Qaeda leader’s international fugitive status grew over the late 1990s. Bin Laden provided resources and technical capacities to the Taliban, and Mullah Omar was won over by his claim to be a righteous mujahid and revolutionary icon, according to researchers who study the Taliban. Some analysts also attribute Mullah Omar's offer of refuge to bin Laden, despite an international bounty, to the obligation under pashtunwali (PDF), the pre-Islamic tribal code, to provide guests unconditional hospitality. (Many members of the Taliban later faulted Mullah Omar’s protection of bin Laden for the U.S.-led invasion that toppled their state.) Pakistan's ISI likely approved of or facilitated bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan, the congressionally mandated 9/11 Commission found, since some of its Islamist militant proxies who were oriented toward jihad in India-administered Kashmir trained in bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. Once the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, it declared Afghanistan an Islamic emirate and Mullah Omar its head of state and installed clerics to helm national institutions. With an emphasis on policing morality, the Taliban established the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which attempted to enforce its puritanical interpretation of sharia. Police beat Afghans who defied the Taliban’s edicts and mores, including those mandating full beards for men and head-to-toe burqas for women. The Taliban shuttered girls’ schools and forbade women from working, so many women widowed during the anti-Soviet jihad were forced to beg in the streets and many schools were closed for lack of teachers. By 1998, the Taliban had come to control 90 percent of the country. After nearly two decades of conflict, resources were scarce and Afghanistan remained at the lowest rungs of global human development rankings. Under protocol with the Taliban, the United Nations ran a country-wide humanitarian program in Afghanistan, but came at loggerheads with the regime over restrictions it imposed in the name of Islamization. Taliban-governed Afghanistan became an international pariah for its human rights abuses and refusal to surrender bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda on international watch lists. The Taliban’s severe strictures were alien to many Afghans, and after the Taliban captured Kabul, the Northern Alliance became Afghanistan's main military and political opposition. The alliance, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, drew its support mainly from the ethnic Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara communities. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were the only states to recognize the Taliban regime, and the Northern Alliance held Afghanistan's seat at the United Nations. Pressed into a small corner of northern and northeastern Afghanistan, Massoud’s alliance struggled to hold out against the Taliban from 1998 to 2001. Assisting their Taliban protectors, al-Qaeda agents assassinated Massoud two days before the 9/11 attacks that would quickly end the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan.
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