New Delhi: As Indians celebrate 76 years of Independence Tuesday, Afghans continue to mourn the death of their republic for the second year in a row.
On 15 August, 2021, the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan as American troops withdrew from the country following a 20-year war.
Having enjoyed power from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban — since regaining power in 2021 — seem to have reverted back to its familiar Pashtun-centred rule, with a harsh interpretation of Sharia (Muslim personal law).
Authoritarian policies have returned, according to reports, including restrictions on women, ethnic minorities, media, rights groups and more.
The reinstallation of the Ministry for Vice and Virtue – which ruthlessly enforces decrees through public beatings and imprisonment – is just one example.
However, there are some differences in Taliban 2.0, say analysts.
These include tensions with its traditional ally Pakistan, being more media and politically “savvy” this time around and the challenge of Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISI-K), a UN-designated terrorist organisation.
The Taliban has also placed its own officials in over 14 diplomatic missions across the world such as in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia and China. But this year’s power tussle in the Afghan embassy in Delhi — between the Taliban and Afghanistan’s previous democratic government — shows how it hasn’t been successful everywhere.
The international community remains wary of recognising the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” under Taliban rule.
When it had first come to power in the mid-1990s, only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and UAE had officially recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. This time around, however, no country has recognised the group as such. Many nations though continue to have a presence in Afghanistan, including Western powers. India too has a “technical team” in Kabul, though New Delhi’s approach towards Taliban 2.0 seems a little unclear.
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s remarks in April this year about the need for discussions on recognition of Afghanistan’s Taliban government has made the issue all the more murky.
As far as regional consensus goes, Afghanistan continues to be a topic of discussion at groupings such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Fears of the country becoming a breeding ground for terrorism have been shared by most regional players, even Pakistan which is already dealing with the security menace that is the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
There have been calls for India, China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and others to have a unified approach to Afghanistan but so far, it appears to be a long shot.
“There’s an old Chinese expression: ‘sleeping in the same bed and dreaming different dreams’. That’s the issue with regional consensus on Afghanistan — all of its neighbours have different vested interests,” Vijay Nambiar, India’s ambassador to Afghanistan between 1990 and 1992, told ThePrint.
Other experts have sought to question the West in this scenario.
“Regional neighbours should cooperate in dealing with problems that concern and affect them. But when the West places the burden for it on the region they have failed once and left, as if they had no responsibility for it over the decades, there is a problem,” Gautam Mukhopadhaya, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2013, told ThePrint.
He added: “They (West) cannot wash their hands of it.”
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What’s different about Taliban 2.0?
In 1996, it was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s that allowed the Taliban — a pro-Pashto, Sunni Islamist group — to assume control of the country and rule until 2001. In 2021, it was the US withdrawal from the country that paved the way for the group’s return.
However, much has changed between the Taliban of the mid-90s and the one today.
“The first Taliban regime was more focused on religious observances. They were agnostic about the geopolitics of Afghanistan which they virtually left to Pakistan. Pakistan’s objectives in Afghanistan were to send the country into a cognitive international black hole both economically and ideologically, so that they could use the country for strategic depth and as a training and launching pad for Islamic radicalism and terrorism, not just against India but also Central Asia, the Shias, etc,” explained Mukhopadhaya.
He added: “Today, there are tensions between the Taliban and Pakistan. The TTP is a major factor. It shares kinship ties and Pashtun values with the Taliban. It’s difficult for them to betray one another,” he added.
The TTP, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, is a banned terror outfit in Pakistan that has in the past two years posed a security headache for Islamabad. It has launched attacks in Pakistan and caused clashes at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
According to the UN, the Taliban has helped the TTP launch attacks in Pakistan, and a report published in Foreign Policy last month stated that the Taliban was selling American arms left behind in Afghanistan to the TTP as well.
Even resistance groups in Afghanistan are unhappy with Islamabad.
In September 2021, hundreds of protesters in Kabul called for “freedom” and “death to Pakistan”. They accused Islamabad of intruding into their country’s domestic affairs all these years.
But while the Taliban might be leveraging the TTP against Pakistan, it’s also dealing with its own irritant — the ISI-K.
The ISI-K has reportedly targeted Chinese and Russian assets in a bid for influence in Afghanistan. That said, the Taliban maintains good relations with terrorist groups like the al-Qaeda.
In fact, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was reportedly living in a house belonging to Taliban interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani in Kabul when a US drone strike killed him last year.
On the economic front, it has been argued that Western sanctions against Taliban leaders haven’t been as effective as before.
In a report for Brookings this February, Vanda Felbab-Brown, an American expert on internal and international organised crime, argued that the Taliban has in fact “stabilised” the Afghan economy.
“It firmed up the Afghan currency, reduced inflation, partially recovered imports, doubled exports, and collected customs and taxes far more successfully than the corrupt leaders of the Afghan Republic. But…stabilisation is one of a ‘famine equilibrium’,” she wrote.
What this means is that though certain macroeconomic factors may look alright, the economic situation is still so dire that a famine is possible in the absence of humanitarian aid. Not to mention, in 2023, food insecurity persists with 15.3 million Afghans not consuming enough food, according to data from the World Food Programme (WFP).
What policies has Taliban implemented?
Days after the Taliban assumed power in 2021, spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid had held the group’s first press conference where he said: “Our sisters, our men have the same rights… they are going to be working with us, shoulder to shoulder with us.”
But the rhetoric has reportedly not matched policies — much like the Taliban of the mid-1990s.
Restrictions on women began as early as September 2021 when the Taliban dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and subsequently, banned women and girls from pursuing higher education.
The move sparked widespread international outrage and has still not been reversed.
In December 2021, the group passed a decree banning forced marriage in Afghanistan but a UN report of August 2022 found that child marriages and gender discrimination have only spiked in the nation since the Taliban takeover.
In recent weeks, hair and beauty salons have also been ordered shut — another nail in the coffin of Afghan women’s rights.
Innocuous activities such as kite-flying, pigeon-racing and playing music in wedding halls have been reportedly outlawed with the view that they are incongruent with Islamic law.
An overhaul in education, such as slashing salaries of professors and insisting they should be fluent in both Dari and Pashto languages, has triggered an exodus of Afghanistan’s brightest minds.
“The Taliban isn’t inclined towards well-educated individuals. They prefer people educated in religious madrasas,” Aziz Amin — former principal secretary to Afghanistan’s ousted president, Ashraf Ghani — who has taken asylum in the UK, had told ThePrint last year.
The Taliban’s ban on opium cultivation and its trade, first announced in April last year, is perhaps the most interesting policy, because Afghanistan is one of the world’s major producers of illicit drugs.
A UN report in June, however, indicated that the ban has only driven up the prices of drugs, providing big profits for major farmers. It added that Taliban officials remain “closely” involved in drug production and trafficking.
Rights groups also claim the Taliban continues to turn a “blind eye” to farmers producing their crops in the southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, and Uruzgan, where most of the country’s opium is produced.
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What lies ahead for Taliban?
There are two major factions in the Taliban leadership — one sits in capital Kabul and the other in Kandahar.
The Kandahar group mainly comprises loyalist clerics close to Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada, who remains elusive. They are more religiously conservative and seem uninterested in engaging the international community.
However, the Kabul-based faction, dominated by the Haqqanis (Afghan Islamist group), is argued to be more “modern”, concerned with international recognition and economic assistance from foreign powers and taking their outreach to foreign media.
In May last year, Sirajuddin Haqqani was interviewed by CNN‘s Christiane Amanpour. Much of his words were familiar rhetoric, but his presence itself was a stark contrast to Hibatullah’s disdain for being in the public eye.
Though unverified, reports emerged that Haqqani and Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, son of the late Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, pushed back against Hibatullah’s restrictions on women — indicating shifts in ideology between the two factions.
Experts like Nambiar are pessimistic about long-term cooperation between the two factions.
“The factions may be working together now but they will continue to bicker. I don’t see any long-term coexistence,” he said.
The Haqqanis are “far closer” to the Pakistanis and also hold the upper hand when it comes to negotiations between the TTP and the Pakistani government, added the former diplomat.
What is India’s approach to Taliban?
India and Afghanistan share historical and cultural ties that have coloured much of the bilateral relationship. Many Afghans choose India for higher education and whenever trouble rears its head there, many flee to India for refuge.
Much of India’s approach to the first Taliban regime was directed by fears of the group’s close ties with Pakistan’s intelligence arm.
The 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines flight 814 was a good illustration of this. The plane was hijacked by five militants of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, an anti-India terror group then operating out of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and was flown to a number of locations in India before being diverted to Kandahar. The Taliban are believed to have thwarted any rescue attempt by the Indian government.
However, New Delhi’s approach towards Taliban 2.0 seems a little unclear.
While it continues to provide much-needed humanitarian assistance, especially wheat to Afghanistan, joint infrastructure projects remain stalled and e-visas have reportedly mostly been extended to Afghans from Hindu and Sikh faiths.
Also, over 2,000 Afghan students stuck in the war-torn country, who have got admission into Indian institutes, have been refused visas, according to media reports, while countries like Japan are actively working with groups like Aga Khan Foundation to help students realise their academic dreams.
“India’s position on the Taliban is the same as elsewhere in the region — which is to deal with the ‘reality’ of its current dominance so long as it is not anti-India, primarily for its security interests. It is a security-centric and realist policy in which it is trying to preserve its equities,” said Mukhopadhaya.
Things got murky in May this year, when questions emerged over whether India is open to having a Taliban representative in the Afghan embassy in Delhi.
When a power tussle emerged after one of the staff members — under the aegis of the Taliban regime — attempted to assume power in the ambassador’s absence, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) did not intervene. Instead, it termed the matter an “internal affair of the Afghan embassy” and one that should be sorted out by the parties involved.
Afghan ambassador to India, Farid Mamundzay (appointed by the Ashraf Ghani government), expects the “uncertainty” surrounding Afghan diplomatic missions across the world to “persist”.
“The future for many diplomatic missions around the world remains uncertain and this uncertainty is likely to persist until a stable and internationally-recognised government is formed in Kabul,” he told ThePrint.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)