A New Conflict of Interests Has Emerged In Post-NATO Afghanistan
Taliban
Is Trying To Maintain a Secret Rapport with Al Qaida
Main
Points:
1. Taliban has
ideological affinity with Al Qaida and the ISIS.
2. Taliban had
given a safe sanctuary to Al Zawahiri.
3. Taliban
leaders have always paid allegiance to Al Qaida.
-----
New
Age Islam Staff Writer
8 August
2022
File
photo of Ayman al-Zawahiri, head of al-Qaeda | Commons
----
Recent
developments in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan indicate a new power play in
Afghanistan. The US has claimed that it has annihilated Al Qaida's leader Aiman
Al Zawahiri who had been hiding in Afghanistan. If it is true, then the US was
true in saying that the Taliban had not honoured its promise that it would not
allow any terrorist organisation to operate from its land.
On the
other hand the hostility between the Taliban and the ISIS has intensified and
they have entered into a direct confrontation in recent months. The ISIS had
attacked a Gurudwara in June though the attack was foiled by the Taliban
security guards. A few days ago the Taliban destroyed a hide out of the ISIS
causing collateral damage. The Taliban had attacked the ISIS fighters claiming
the former was planning to carry out attacks on Shia processions during Ashura.
However,
the Taliban could not prevent them and the ISIS attacked an Ashura procession
of Shias killing 8 people and injuring a dozen. Last week, before the
conference in Tajikistan participated by the US, UK, China, Russia, Japan etc
on Afghanistan, the Taliban had claimed that the security issues had been
resolved and that the minorities were now safe in Afghanistan.
They had
therefore, appealed to the Sikh and Hindu communities to return to Afghanistan.
They had made the claim only to assure the world community of the safety and
security of minorities in Afghanistan to get humanitarian aid and loans from
world bodies and to get its money that has been lying frozen in the US and
European banks back to the country. But the ISIS attack on Shias on Ashura has
left them black faced. Though the Taliban have tried to make Shias believe that
they have changed their view about them, Shias do not believe them. During
their earlier stint from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban had persecuted Shia Hazaras.
In Pakistan, their ideological partners, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have
persecuted them attacking their processions, schools, school vans carrying Shia
children calling them snakelings and cemeteries. Attacks on Shia processions in
Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan has been a regular affair.
Since
Taliban have been educated in sectarian madrasas in Pakistan, Shias of
Afghanistan do not believe Taliban's claim of change of mind towards them. They
say Taliban's Takfiri ideology declares Shias Kafir worthy to be killed. They
are pretending to have changed only to show to the world community that they
honour international commitments and not to be isolated by the world community.
They now realise that running violent campaigns from mountains and jungles is a
different thing and being part of a government is an altogether different
matter.
A
government in this modern world cannot be run in isolation but has to be
accountable to the world community. The Taliban are caught in this dilemma
which compels them to take up arms against their ideological partners ISIS but
in vain. The presence of Al Qaida leader Al Zawahiri in Afghanistan is another
proof that the Taliban cannot shed its ideology or dump their ideological
friends. The hostility of Taliban towards the ISIS is for two reasons. One, as
Taliban have backed TTP and have them shelter in Afghanistan, Pakistan is
trying to use the ISIS to destabilise the Taliban and cause them embarrassment
before the world community. Two, Pakistan have long used Taliban as a policy of
strategic depth against the US and India. But as the Taliban have softened its
stand towards India and refused to play to its tunes Pakistan is now trying to
use the ISIS against Taliban.
Otherwise,
Taliban have not taken any stand against the ISIS before on the issue of its
attack on Shias. Attacks on Shias in Pakistan may also become a political and
diplomatic issue between Iran and Afghanistan as Iran won't tolerate
persecution of Shias in Afghanistan. Iran is hosting 3 lakh Afghan refugees for
decades. Therefore, Taliban have been caught between the proverbial devil and
the deep blue sea. Praveen Swami's article delves into Taliban's on and off
relationship with Al Qaida and it's ramifications in the politics of the
region.
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Taliban Won’t Give Up Al-Qaeda, Not
After US Killing Al-Zawahiri. Kabul’s A Safe Haven
By
Praveen Swami
7 August,
2022
The phone
rang at the State Department soon after American cruise missiles slammed into
jihadist training camps in southern Afghanistan: the cleric who ruled the
Islamic Emirate was on the line from Kandahar. Mullah Muhammad Umar, a
declassified document records, “had no
specific message, but he did have some advice…To rebuild US popularity in the
Islamic world and because of his current domestic political difficulties,
Congress should force President [Bill] Clinton to resign.”
Forty-eight
hours earlier, on 20 August 1998, death squads despatched by the al-Qaeda chief
Osama Bin Laden had bombed United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
killing 241 people.
The
seventy-odd cruise missiles used in the strikes, each costing upwards of $1
million, had killed just six jihadists, according
to the memoirs of bin Laden’s bodyguard, Nasser
al-Bahri. For the Islamic Emirate, the blood was a small change. The one-eyed
cleric who led Afghanistan refused to hand over bin Laden, and never bothered
calling again.
Last
month’s killing of bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in his safe-house
in Kabul, illustrates a deeper truth: under the Taliban regime, the United
Nations sanctions
monitor warned earlier this summer, “al-Qaeda
enjoys greater freedom in Afghanistan.” The group isn’t mounting external
operations, like the Embassy bombings or 9/11. Instead, it is using its
Taliban-provided safe haven to rebuild.
For years,
Western advocates of peace with the Taliban insisted the organisation was
willing to sever its links to transnational terrorism, and reinvent itself as a
force for peace: Islamic Emirate interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is
believed to have provided al-Zawahiri with his home, even debuted as a New York Times columnist.
Things
haven’t gone that way, in part, because of deep ties between al-Qaeda and the
so-called Haqqani Network, made up mainly of leaders from eastern Afghanistan’s
Zadran clans. But the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban is deeper
than one faction. The durability of the relationship raises important questions
about the Taliban’s ideological goals—and if they will ever give up their
pursuit of transnational jihad.
Making
of the Haqqanis
From 1920
on, Afghanistan’s modernising King Amanullah Khan set in motion the forces that
eventually forged the Taliban. The king ordered an end to the seclusion of
women and founded co-educational schools. In an effort to build a united
national army, he ended exemptions the south-eastern Pashtun tribes had enjoyed
from military conscription. The king’s reforms enraged both tribal elites and
the clerical class.
Twice—in
1924 and in 1928—the Zadran, from which the Haqqanis drew, revolted against the
king. Further, crises erupted in the south, historian Sana
Haroon has recorded,
as ethnic Pashtuns joined in cleric-led insurrections against British imperial
power in North Waziristan. King Nadir Shah, Amanullah’s successor, had to roll
back his efforts at reform and state-building.
Khwaja
Muhammad Khan, the founding patriarch of the Haqqani family, represented the
pious trading class empowered by the failure of Afghan state-building. Khan
used part of the small fortune he made from trading with British India to
educate his four sons at the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania founded in 1947.
The
seminary, under the leadership of the Islamist politician Sami-ul-Haq, emerged
as the intellectual heart of the Islamist movement in Pakistan. Its
students—Fazl-ul-Rehman, Muhammad Yunus Khalis, and Mullah Umar himself—went to
command powerful jihadist formations. The founder of al-Qaeda in the Indian
Subcontinent, Uttar Pradesh-born Sana-ul-Haq, was also a student—and so, a
generation before him, was Khwaja Muhammad Khan’s son, Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Late in
1957, socialist Prime Minister Mohammad Daud Khan reignited the conflict with
the south-eastern tribes over women’s education. Jalaluddin would rise to
prominence as a key figure in the renewed jihad against the reform.
The
Inter-Services Intelligence directorate played a key role in bringing about
Jalal Uddin’s rise. Former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, scholar
C. Christine Fair has recorded, used Islamist groups to undermine the Daud
regime. Frontier Corps’ Brigadier Naseerullah Babar, later defence minister of
Pakistan, set up military facilities that trained an estimated 5,000 jihad
volunteers to take on the Afghan State.
Brotherhood
of Global Jihad
From 1979,
when Soviet forces crossed the Amu Darya into Afghanistan, a small flow of Arab
volunteers travelled to Pakistan—joining the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania graduates.
The most influential of these would be Abdullah Azzam—who, as teacher at the
International Islamic University in Islamabad, would help Hafiz Muhammad Saeed
establish the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and mentored the young bin Laden. Fighting on
the frontlines, Azzam became an icon for a generation of jihadists.
Azzam’s
1987 book, Defence
of the Muslim Lands,
is considered among the seminal texts of the modern jihadist movement—in
particular, its assertion that fighting was obligatory on individual Muslims, a
proposition he made with the support of the chief cleric of Saudi Arabia,
Abdullah bin Baz.
The idea,
however, had already been promoted by the Dar-ul-Uloom jihadists for years. “If
the Islamic world truly wants to support and help us,” Jalaluddin Haqqani said
in 1980, “it should permit its young men to join our ranks. There is a tendency
in most of the Islamic countries which wish to help us to present aid and food
as a kind of jihad. Some even think that this is the best kind of jihad. This,
however, does not absolve the Muslim of the duty to offer himself for the
jihad.”
Vahid
Brown and Don Rassler have noted that this
declaration “was made years before Abdullah Azzam would issue his
‘revolutionary’ Fatwa.”
Five years
before Azzam would establish the kernel of al-Qaeda, its to-be leaders were
already training at Haqqani’s base at Zhawar. The Egyptian jihadists Mustafa
Hamid arrived in 1979, soon to be followed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s
Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen’s Fazlur Rehman Khalil. Thousands more came from Europe,
Central Asia and Kashmir.
“Jihad
continues to be a sacred duty until the infidels are defeated throughout the
world,” Haqqani declared in 1991. “God will not bless us for our past jihad.”
Abetted by Pakistan’s ISI, the United States Defence
Intelligence Agency recorded, al-Qaeda
would expand its presence after the Taliban took power in 1996.
An Iron
Alliance
Even though
the Haqqanis maintained an intimate relationship with al-Qaeda, the jihadist
group also enjoyed close ties with the Kandahar-based leaders of the group. In
2015, for example, United States forces bombed the largest
al-Qaeda camp ever detected, operating in the
mountains near Kandahar. In July 2014, Mullah Umar accepted a formal pledge of
allegiance from al-Zawahiri, affirming that al-Qaeda and its branches in all
locales are soldiers in his army acting under his victorious banner.
Mullah
Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, who succeeded Mullah Umar, publicly accepted
a pledge of allegiance ffrom al-Qaeda—which the Taliban
never repudiated, despite removing it from their website.
“The
Taliban’s policy is to avoid being seen with us or revealing any cooperation or
agreement between us and them,” the Libyan jihadist Attiyat
Abdel Rehman wrote in 2011. “That is for the purpose of
averting international and regional pressure and out of consideration for
regional dynamics. We defer to them in this regard.”
Even though
the eastern and southern factions of the Taliban are engaged in a
sometimes-brutal struggle for influence for power—with Sirajuddin competing
with Taliban emir Mullah Muhammad Haibatullah and Mullah Yakoob Omar—neither
side has shown any willingness to compromise its relationship with al-Qaeda.
From the
outset, some pragmatists within the Taliban have been willing to sacrifice
global Jihadism in the interests of international recognition and aid for
state-building. They’ve had little influence over the organisation, though. For
the Taliban, jihad isn’t a means—it is the end.
-----
Praveen
Swami is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are
personal.
(Edited by
Srinjoy Dey)
Source: Taliban Won’t Give Up Al-Qaeda, Not
After US Killing Al-Zawahiri. Kabul’s A Safe Haven
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/conflict-nato-afghanistan/d/127669
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