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.
Since its emergence in 1994, the Taliban has morphed into twin insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This chronology charts the movement’s rise and the forces that have shaped its evolution. (Photo: Terence White/AFP/Getty Images)
Afghan President Mohammed Daud Khan (1973–78), advocating a greater Pashtunistan carved from Pakistan’s western provinces, lends covert support to Pashtun and Baloch separatists. Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1973–77) replies in kind, authorizing his intelligence services to shelter Afghan Islamist opposition leaders. This program, known as the “Afghan cell,” establishes the Pakistani intelligence service’s ties to an estimated five thousand Afghan Islamist militants, including those Pakistan will later sponsor as mujahadeen leaders. Daud uses this as a pretext to crack down on the domestic Islamist opposition. His repression and the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan's (PDPA) subsequent seizure of power, in 1978, push Afghan Islamists into Pakistan’s tribal regions. Many go to training camps in North and South Waziristan.
After the Taliban refused a U.S. ultimatum to hand over Osama bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks, U.S. special forces invaded alongside the Northern Alliance and some Afghan Pashtun forces. Mullah Omar’s regime disintegrated, and its leadership fled across the Pakistani border. Of an estimated sixty thousand rank and file, half are estimated to have been killed, wounded, or captured in late 2001 and early 2002. The remainder blended back into society or fled to the ethnic Pashtun- and Baloch-majority areas in Pakistan where many had lived as refugees during the Soviet occupation. Pakistan’s Deobandi JUI party began to mobilize tens of thousands of madrassa students to resist the U.S.-led invasion.
As Kandahar fell in December 2001, prominent Afghans at the UN-sponsored Bonn Conference shaped the contours of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government. A loya jirga (“grand council” in Pashto) convened delegates from across the country to elect a transitional administration in June 2002 and another to ratify a constitution in December 2003. The Taliban was not invited to the Bonn Conference and did not participate in the subsequent loya jirgas and elections. The new political order was thus constructed without the Taliban's participation.
Geopolitical Causes
The international coalition's seeming eagerness for a political transition signaled to Pakistan that outside military forces would soon depart. Apprehensive of a rerun of Afghanistan’s 1992–96 civil war, Pakistan’s leaders hedged with respect to the nascent government in Kabul's durability, especially once U.S. attention pivoted toward Iraq.
General Pervez Musharraf, who had taken power in Pakistan in a 1999 coup, embarked on what many analysts of Pakistani politics call a “double game.” He pledged to support Washington’s “global war on terror” and facilitate supply routes vital to military operations in Afghanistan but continued to cultivate Islamist militants, the Afghan Taliban among them, according to regional security experts. Since 2001, Pakistan has received more than $25 billion in direct aid and military reimbursements from the United States (PDF).
Pakistan's fraught relationship with India is central to understanding its relations with Afghanistan. In the years after 2001, Pakistan grew anxious as it perceived Kabul pursuing closer ties with New Delhi. (India has been rebuilding its economic and diplomatic networks in Afghanistan and is the fifth-largest government donor to Afghan development projects.)
Islamabad would prefer a degree of instability in Afghanistan to a stable central government friendly with New Delhi, analysts say. Indian interests have been a focus of attacks, and militant groups linked to Pakistan are suspected in attacks on India's embassy in Kabul and consulates in Jalalabad and Herat.
Mullah Omar relocated to Pakistan, where he has been monitored or protected by the ISI, according to some U.S. officials. He began to reconstitute the Taliban’s military and political hierarchy under the leadership council, which issues directives on his authority. Mullah Omar has not been seen since 2001 nor heard from since 2008. The Taliban's cultural commission produces annual statements on the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Fitr issued in his name.
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban, was given the title “commander of the faithful” by Afghan and Pakisani ulema—Islamic legal scholars—in 1996. The honorific, which dates to the Prophet’s early successors, connotes both spiritual and political authority. With it, Mullah Omar consolidated his control of the movement and sought to project its religious credentials to the broader Muslim world.
Since the U.S.-led invasion, Mullah Omar has hidden in Pakistan, but has remained incommunicado since 2008. He remains a source of the Taliban’s cohesion and its preeminent spiritual authority, though a deputy is believed to retain operational control of the movement.
TTP chief Mullah Fazlullah and al-Qaeda swear allegiance to Mullah Omar. (Photo: AP Photo)
The deputy amir is the operational commander of the Taliban. He has the power to appoint, shuffle, and sack shadow governors of Afghanistan’s provinces and districts, commanders, and squad leaders.
The office is held by Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, a former civil aviation minister in the Taliban government who succeeded Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in the top position.
Baradar, a founding member of the Taliban, had largely overseen its post-2001 resurgence as an insurgency. He remains the most senior Taliban leader detained by Pakistan. President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan High Peace Council demanded Baradar's release in the hope of gaining his cooperation in reconciliation efforts.
The Taliban’s leadership council makes decisions for all “political and military affairs of the Emirate,” according to the Taliban’s code. The body is commonly referred to as the Quetta shura for the western Pakistani city near where it is commonly believed to have reconstituted itself in exile after the Taliban government was toppled in late 2001. The body is composed largely of the Taliban’s Kandahari clerical core who had fought together in the 1980s. In mid-2014, the UN’s Taliban monitoring team identified fifteen members of the body; there may be as many as thirty.
Under the auspices of the leadership council, the Taliban operates a shadow government that mirrors the structure of its toppled regime and attempts to portray the movement as a government-in-exile. Twelve national-level commission have mandates akin to those held by ministries during the Taliban’s stint in power, including finance, outreach, prisoners, ulema (clerical), health, education, and mines.
The Taliban operates shadow-government institutions beyond the national commissions, including mobile and static courts in areas where insurgents maintain a significant presence. The courts adjudicate matters on the basis of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. The judicial system has been described as the most successful of the Taliban’s civilian efforts, reflecting the movement’s preoccupation with justice as well as popular disenchantment with backlogged and corrupt government courts.
The military commissions preside over the Taliban insurgency, providing guidance, finances, and logistical support to commanders. Messengers carry messages from the Pakistan-based authorities to insurgents in the field.
From the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, the eastern military commission directs the insurgency in twenty provinces in Afghanistan’s north and east. These provinces are divided among six zonal commands, one of which is the Haqqani network’s.
From the western Pakistani city of Quetta, the western military commission directs the insurgency in southern and western Afghanistan. The fourteen Afghan provinces in its territory are divided among four zonal commands.
Field commanders maintain broad latitude, which allows them to be responsive to the local population and battlefield conditions. The smallest fighting units comprise some five to thirty members; they often cohere on the basis of family or tribal affiliations and are integrated into the military hierarchy. This structure’s origins lie in the mujahedeen fronts of the 1980s jihad.
The military commissions preside over the Taliban insurgency, providing guidance, finances, and logistical support to commanders. Messengers carry messages from the Pakistan-based authorities to insurgents in the field.
From the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, the eastern military commission directs the insurgency in twenty provinces in Afghanistan’s north and east. These provinces are divided among six zonal commands, one of which is the Haqqani network’s.
From the western Pakistani city of Quetta, the western military commission directs the insurgency in southern and western Afghanistan. The fourteen Afghan provinces in its territory are divided among four zonal commands.
Field commanders maintain broad latitude, which allows them to be responsive to the local population and battlefield conditions. The smallest fighting units comprise some five to thirty members; they often cohere on the basis of family or tribal affiliations and are integrated into the military hierarchy. This structure’s origins lie in the mujahedeen fronts of the 1980s jihad.
The Haqqani network is a semiautonomous faction of the Afghan Taliban that is responsible for some of the most lethal attacks on coalition forces and civilian targets in Afghanistan. The group is primarily active in the southeastern Afghan provinces of Greater Paktia, near Kabul, and was headquartered across the Pakistani border in the North Waziristan town of Miranshah until the Pakistani military launched operations there beginning in June 2014. The group has since relocated its headquarters closer to Peshawar.
The network historically has ties to Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, as well as to local Islamist parties. It also provides sanctuary to foreign jihadi outfits, including al-Qaeda, and is a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization. Its leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, recognizes Mullah Omar as a spiritual leader, but analysts debate the degree to which the network constitutes an insurgency distinct from the Afghan Taliban.
The Taliban gained support within Afghanistan as disaffection with the new government and large supporting international presence grew. Journalists and human rights groups have documented abuses inflicted by warlords, militias, and Afghan security forces, including land confiscation, extortion, wrongful detention, and exclusion from government jobs and development initiatives. Many Afghans saw the central government as indifferent to or complicit in these abuses, giving impunity to the security forces and warlords it depended on to extend its authority to the hinterland. Poor Afghan poppy farmers who have perceived eradication efforts as heavy-handed or punitive, or for whom there is no economically viable alternative, likewise turned to the insurgency. When U.S. General Stanley McChrystal took command of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the summer of 2009, he argued that civilian casualties caused by ISAF air strikes and combat units undermined counterinsurgency efforts and tightened the rules of engagement.
Dating back to its founders' roots in the anti-Soviet jihad, an essential theme in Taliban discourse is justice. Though the movement has grown broadly unpopular as it has become increasingly associated with violence and instability, it has retained, to some degree, a reputation for delivering swift justice that first launched it to power. Annual Eid al-Fitr statements highlight government-sanctioned corruption and injustice. Likewise, the Taliban operates shadow courts (PDF), adjudicating disputes where insurgents maintain a substantial presence as an alternative to overwhelmed and often corrupt official courts.
Afghan Taliban propaganda has capitalized on these sources of alienation, railing against foreign forces and the central government, which it calls an illegitimate dependent of the West. In a country whose literacy rate is estimated at less than one-third of the population, the Taliban disseminates its message in poetry, music, and video, transmitted through cassettes and DVDs—the very media that the Taliban prohibited during its rule. A website bearing the name of the Taliban’s self-proclaimed "Islamic Emirate" publishes videos and statements. The Taliban conveys threats through night letters, or leaflets, and text messages.
As the Afghan Taliban’s insurgency took shape, a parallel Pakistani Taliban insurgency arose on the other side of the 1,500-mile-long border, stretching from the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP, since renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) through the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Pakistani Taliban militants have focused on waging a violent campaign against the Pakistani state and all those they consider rivals. With ties to al-Qaeda and the sectarian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the TTP is implicated in the surge in violence against Pakistani Shias, whose beliefs it considers heretical.
Under U.S. pressure to rid the FATA of al-Qaeda, the Pakistani military conducted operations in the territory for the first time in July 2002. These incursions turned many militants against the state. So too have Pakistani security forces’ actions against residents suspected of aiding Pakistan’s Taliban. Their operations have entailed mass displacement, and international human rights groups and journalists have implicated Pakistani security forces in torture, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, and forced disappearances. These abuses, for which the FATA’s frontier legal status offers little means of redress, has left tribal-area residents stuck between two forces seemingly indifferent to their rights.
Two particular incidents galvanized Pakistani Taliban factions to join forces against the state. In 2006, a CIA drone strike on a tribal-area madrassa reportedly killed eighty-three students. A year later, Pakistani special forces seized the Red Mosque in Islamabad, killing dozens of student vigilantes and militants who had occupied it. By late 2007, some thirty militant groups declared the formation of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Though nominally loyal to Mullah Omar, they have ignored his reported entreaties to de-escalate their fight with Pakistan.
For many years, Pakistan sought to contain the rebellion by negotiating truces with some militant groups while fighting others. The United States, among others, criticized these deals, saying they allowed Taliban factions to consolidate control. They also elevated the militants' status as interlocutors while undermining the political agents and tribal intermediaries who had long been central to the FATA’s governance, according to some regional analysts. Taliban assassination campaigns targeting tribal elders have further undermined governance there.
The 350,000-strong Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) has assumed the primary role in combating the Afghan Taliban at a time when quality of life for many Afghans has seen some gradual improvements. Progress in areas like education, media freedom, and women's rights is enjoyed by many Afghans, particularly in urban centers, but remains fragile.
But the future success of Afghan forces is not assured. A June 2014 UN report observed that the Afghan Taliban appears to be expanding its control of pockets in the south, east, and north of the country. Withdrawals of international soldiers have "generally coincided with a deterioration of Kabul's reach in outlying districts," the International Crisis Group reported in May 2014, and an independent assessment of the ANSF commissioned by the Pentagon anticipates that trend will accelerate in the coming years.
The Afghan Taliban’s leadership exerts command and control from Pakistan but delegates tactical decision-making to regional commanders and councils. Quetta’s cleric-dominated command is most robust nearby in the Taliban’s southern heartland—in the Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and Uruzgan provinces. In the east, the semiautonomous Haqqani network is predominant; Pakistan’s ISI has historically had a closer operating relationship with the Haqqani network than with the Kandahari leadership. (In late 2014, the Pakistani military declared its intention to target the Haqqani network.)
The Taliban has also expanded military operations in northern Afghanistan, underpinning its claim that it wages a national insurgency. Insurgents affiliated with Gulbuddin Hekmatayar, commander of the mujahadeen party-turned-insurgent group Hezb-i Islami, remain a small but significant element in northeastern Afghanistan.
An Adaptive Insurgency?
The Afghan Taliban insurgency has sought to broaden its appeal by projecting a more benign image and claiming to recognize some international norms. Mullah Omar ruled in 2006 that local commanders should use discretion on whether to impose the proscriptions that characterized past Taliban rule. For instance, TV, music, and female education and employment could be permitted, and fighters may facilitate polio vaccinations. That same year, the Taliban’s leadership issued a code of conduct as it grew concerned that insurgents’ brutality and corruption was undermining the movement’s argument that it alone could bring Afghanistan security and justice.
In June 2013 the Taliban said it established an office mandated with investigating and punishing cases of civilian casualties. It cooperates with the UN’s biannual reporting on civilian protection, contributing to it at times and rebutting its findings in others. Nevertheless, the Taliban considers government workers, including judges, prosecutors, civil servants, teachers, and health workers, and anti-Taliban clerics above all, permissible targets for assassination, and has picked up its attacks on international humanitarian organizations (PDF).
Profiteers and Ideologues
Sympathetic private donors from the Gulf and some Afghan émigrés helped finance the Taliban’s resurgence, which required wages for its foot soldiers. The insurgency has since diversified its income with ventures that have given small Afghan Taliban networks greater autonomy vis-à-vis the central leadership, whose legitimacy has been diminished in the eyes of some of the rank and file because of the perception that it has grown beholden to Pakistan while in exile.
Persistent insecurity in Afghanistan has created opportunities for profiteering, and some Taliban factions have adopted warlord-like behavior. Taliban factions levy taxes, extort companies—including international military and development contractors—in protection rackets, exploit natural resources, and traffic opium poppy. (Afghanistan, which remains the world’s top producer of opium poppies, grew a record crop in 2014, according to the UN’s drug agency, despite international counternarcotics efforts to which the United States has contributed $7.6 billion.) Such opportunism has shifted the Taliban from “a group based on religiously couched ideology to a coalition of increasingly criminalized networks, guided by the profit motive,” the UN’s Taliban monitoring team reported in June 2014. In 2012, the panel estimated the group’s annual revenue at $400 million.
The 2009–2012 surge that brought U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to more than a hundred thousand coincided with stepped-up kill-or-capture missions. Pakistani arrests wiped out many mid-level commanders, weakening the chain of command. Some analysts believe that the younger leaders who have filled their ranks are more ideological, more lethal, and less likely to compromise on a political settlement.
Taliban leaders who favor reconciling with Kabul have found themselves vulnerable. Kabul has charged that Islamabad has spoiled opportunities for talks. Some prominent Taliban officials who have advocated for reconciliation or engaged with Kabul have been assassinated, the UN reports.
Metastasis in Pakistan
The Pakistani Taliban remain less constrained by a desire to build political legitimacy, but also more fractious than its Afghan counterpart, regional experts say. In Pakistan the Taliban has waged a lethal campaign against girls’ education and polio vaccination, accusing public-health teams of conspiring with the West to sterilize Muslims.
Pakistani ground offensives and the U.S. drone campaign, which took out successive TTP leaders Beithullah and Hakimullah Mehsud, have put the Pakistani Taliban under pressure. Under Hakimullah's successor, Mullah Fazlullah—former chief of the Swat Taliban—leadership squabbles have splintered the tribally diverse umbrella group.
In the summer of 2014, the Pakistani military launched a long-anticipated offensive on North Waziristan, long a hotbed for the Haqqani network and other militant groups. The United States escalated drone strikes in support of the Pakistani operations. Already under pressure, various factions left the TTP umbrella. Meanwhile, some foreign fighters have left the region to fight in Syria.
Cooperation or Competition Ahead?
Afghanistan and Pakistan’s mutual mistrust continues to stymie a resolution to their respective insurgencies: Pakistan has called for Afghanistan to hand over Fazlullah, who has accessed hideouts in Afghanistan when under pressure in Pakistan. Kabul accuses Islamabad of protecting Afghan Taliban, including the Haqqani network; the Haqqanis fled North Waziristan ahead of the 2014 offensive, and have since reestablished their military infrastructuctre and intensified their suicide bombing campaign in Kabul. Afghanistan also objects to Pakistani forces shelling Afghan territory. The rocket fire, targeting Pakistani militants fleeing tribal-area offensives, has reportedly killed, wounded, and displaced Afghan civilians who live along the border.
Though united by similar worldviews and reported linkages among their ranks, the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans’ divergent objectives make it unlikely that they will make common cause in the near term, according to many experts who have studied the conflict. The downsizing of the U.S.-NATO security umbrella in Afghanistan could heighten both Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s incentives to use insurgent proxies for leverage against one another.
More than two decades of Taliban rule and insurgency have challenged the Afghan and Pakistani governments, posing dilemmas for regional and global powers as well. As the international military presence winds down in Afghanistan, questions remain about the prospects for regional security and lasting peace.
Can a settlement with the Afghan Taliban be negotiated?
The Taliban seeks recognition as a legitimate political actor, but vital questions about its aims remain unanswered. Does the movement’s leadership seek to restore its toppled emirate, or would it accept the constitution of the extant Islamic republic? Would the Taliban renounce terrorism and formally break with al-Qaeda? Would disparate factions, many of which have been enriched by ongoing conflict, respect a deal reached by their exiled leadership?
Afghan leaders, for their part, would need to consider what concessions they could accept in service of a peace deal. Many actors, including women’s rights activists and the political successors to the Northern Alliance, will be leery of diluting the rights and power they have amassed since 2001.
Though a reconciliation process would likely be Afghan-led and comprise many domestic constituencies, major powers with divergent interests could spoil a deal if they feel sidelined.
Successive civilian governments in Pakistan have publicly stated their support for an Afghan-led reconciliation process, but Islamabad will insist on a sizable role in such talks. Because the Afghan Taliban’s leadership resides in FATA and Balochistan, Pakistan would likely want a role in negotiations. A successful deal will require buy-in from the Pakistani military’s high command and its affiliated intelligence agencies, which are poised to lose their clout if the Taliban agrees to demobilize as a condition of joining the government.
U.S. policymakers must decide if they can tolerate an Afghan government that incorporates the Taliban. To the extent that their strategic priorities are to ensure that Afghanistan is stable and no longer provides sanctuary to international terrorist organizations, policymakers would welcome a negotiated settlement in which the Taliban renounces al-Qaeda. But a deal that cedes districts to Taliban authority or rolls back civil rights is likely to face resistance in Washington.
India will continue to oppose a negotiated settlement that brings the Taliban into Afghanistan’s political fold. New Delhi views the Taliban as enablers of anti-Hindu and anti-India terrorist groups and an agent of Pakistani influence.
Would an expanded international military mission improve Afghan security?
The United States and its NATO-ISAF allies face the decision of whether to withdraw from Afghanistan according to announced timetables or adopt a more flexible approach based on lingering questions about the capabilities of Afghan security forces. They also must debate the scope of their post-2014 mission.
Officially, that mission is “to train, advise, and assist Afghan forces and to conduct counterterrorism operations against the remnants of al Qaeda,” but reporting in late 2014 suggested that President Obama broadened the mission to permit combat activities that target the Taliban and other militant groups.
The continuation of a combat support role for international forces could lower the ANSF’s high casualty rate and deter the Taliban from its most brazen attacks. It could help sustain Afghan forces as they build up their capacities in close-air support, logistics, and medical evacuations. It might also ensure that the U.S. Congress maintains steady appropriations to keep the ANSF fiscally viable.
An extended U.S. military presence might also contribute to regional stability by maintaining Washington’s ability to conduct counterterrorism operations along the Afghan-Pakistani border. And by signaling its ongoing investment in Afghan security, the United States might abate Pakistani fears of instability or even civil war across its border. This would lower the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment’s incentives to maintain ties to Afghan militants as a hedge against the possibility of state failure in Kabul, analysts say.
Conversely, accelerating the withdrawal of foreign forces could undercut the Taliban’s most resonant raison d’être: a defensive jihad against foreign occupation. Withdrawal could accelerate negotiations because the Taliban does not expect the foreign presence to be indefinite and may not negotiate until the post-ISAF balance of force becomes apparent.
International troop levels after 2014 are planned to be fewer than fifteen thousand and to drop to just a few thousand by the end of 2016. Noting that this level will be less than a tenth of the peak, some analysts argue that these troops are unlikely to alter the conflict’s trajectory, and that United States and NATO-ISAF members should cut their losses and fully withdraw.
Afghanistan is dependent on aid and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Its revenue collection is hobbled by incapacity and corruption, and the state can only pay for a fraction of its expenditures. Even with extensive international assistance, Afghanistan missed payroll for its civil servants once in 2014, an indicator of Kabul’s fiscal shortfall.
Donor countries and multilateral lending institutions will have to decide whether to enforce anticorruption and anti–money laundering conditions on their aid commitments. Doing so could create incentives for Afghan officials to root out graft, setting the country, one of the world’s most corrupt, toward better governance. But following through on these conditions could jeopardize steady payments to Afghan security forces (and thus their cohesion) and government provision of limited services, which may in turn spur instability, reduce investor confidence, and hasten an economic crisis.
Domestic efforts to upend patronage and boost the state’s legitimacy, such as those advocated by President Ashraf Ghani, risk alienating officials and warlords on whom Kabul depends to maintain control in far-flung areas.
These fiscal pressures, combined with the expectation that international aid will not long continue near its present levels, may incentivize the Afghan government to pursue negotiations with the Taliban, since stability is a prerequisite for investment and many development projects. Donors may have a short-term interest in generously funding the military and police: In 2012 ISAF and Afghanistan agreed that the ANSF’s ranks should be reduced by a third, but such cuts depend on Afghanistan first achieving greater stability.
Could political reform in Afghanistan weaken the Taliban insurgency?
Political reforms could undermine the Taliban’s narrative that Kabul presides over a corrupt and abusive state, a claim that has gained some traction among Afghans. The September 2014 power-sharing agreement between President Ghani and CEO Abdullah Abdullah called for a loya jirga to amend the constitution. Diffusing power in what had been designed to be a highly centralized, winner-takes-all presidential system is one possible outcome.
Yet potential long-term gains for democratization and institution building could come at the expense of short-term security that some say is provided by patronage systems.
Likewise, a truth-and-reconciliation process risks alienating power brokers who buy in to the current system. President Ghani has advocated for making public an inquiry into human rights violations by all armed groups between 1978 and 2001. It is likely to implicate top officials currently in office, including Ghani’s running mate, Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former warlord associated with the anti-Taliban resistance.
Reintegration programs have been small and sapped by corruption, and have failed to protect Taliban defectors from retaliation. Redoubled efforts, if centered on Taliban strongholds and credibly guaranteeing participants’ security, could give the insurgency’s foot soldiers an out, reducing the Taliban’s ranks.
Can Pakistan reset its relations with Afghanistan—and with India?
Pakistan, which continues to fight anti-state militants on its side of the Durand Line, must decide whether it will maintain support for militant Islamist proxies in Afghanistan or abandon its longtime use of nonstate actors and reset its relations with Kabul.
In the view of many regional security experts, Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment, which maintains the Afghanistan portfolio, favors the status-quo policy as a hedge: If the Taliban makes major gains or a broader civil war breaks out and Kabul cannot hold Afghanistan together, Islamabad will have retained a channel to influence events across its border.
Pakistan’s most recent civilian governments have argued against cultivating so-called “good Taliban” while fighting “bad Taliban.” After the December 2014 attack on a military-run public school in Peshawar, Prime Minister Sharif emphasized that Pakistan would abandon the distinction and “continue the war against terrorism until the last terrorist is eliminated.”
Economic integration could lay the groundwork for rapprochement. Implementation of a 2010 transit-trade agreement and facilitation of bilateral trade could help build confidence in preparation for military and diplomatic cooperation. In Pakistan, such a shift in policy is formally the civilian government’s domain, but it is handicapped by the preferences of Pakistani’s military-intelligence establishment.
Normalizing relations will require Kabul to recognize the Durand Line or at least bury the issue to assuage Pakistan’s fears of irredentist claims, and Islamabad to abandon what the U.S. military says is its covert support for militants who undermine Afghan sovereignty.
Pakistan’s enduring rivalry with India, often pursued through unconventional warfare, has poisoned the Afghan-Pakistani relationship. So long as Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment fears any expanded role for India in Afghanistan as an existential security threat, it will remain hard to improve the Afghan-Pakistani relationship. Future stability in Afghanistan is contingent on Pakistan and India agreeing to “rules of the road” for economic, intelligence, and security activities there and a peaceful means of resolving activities that either side deems threatening.
What role will Pakistan play in counterterrorism and regional security?
Pakistan’s strategic debate and civil-military tussle also have implications for its domestic counterinsurgency operations. If Pakistan’s military-intelligence leadership differentiates among Taliban factions, tolerating or cutting deals with amenable militant outfits while attacking those it considers irreconcilable, it may avert more groups from taking up arms against the state, but will allow the continued radicalization of its tribal areas, deepen Kabul’s mistrust, and risk covert retaliation, regional experts say.
Pakistani leaders have privately assented to the U.S. targeted-killing program even as they have publicly condemned it. They must consider whether they will tolerate drone strikes to target the broad spectrum of militants in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the drawdown from Afghanistan will force Washington to consider their ongoing strategic value, as well as whether they will remain feasible once U.S. forces pull out of transfer air bases to their Afghan counterparts.
The United States has pressed Pakistan to combat the full spectrum of militants, including the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network, by revoking their sanctuary. Washington has pursued this aim by conditioning billions of dollars in Coalition Support Fund (CSF) reimbursements to the Pakistani military on it taking decisive action against these groups’ sanctuaries, an approach that has had mixed results.
The CSF is winding down, but the United States could attach similar conditions to security assistance. Likewise, foreign donors might tie future loans and grants to improved transparency and outcomes in eradicating the various militant jihadist organizations found throughout the country.
More drastic penalties Washington might consider for what it says is Pakistan's sponsorship of U.S.-designated terrorist organizations like the Haqqani network include sanctioning the ISI leadership and members of the military’s high command.
The Taliban has taken root in tribal areas long excluded from Pakistan’s legal and economic mainstream. The FATA has no provinicial government, and state-appointed agents have broad executive and judicial authority and are unaccountable to the residents of their jurisdictions. The FATA’s criminal code, the Frontier Crimes Regulations that date to 1901, the era of British colonial rule, keeps alive the principle of collective tribal territorial responsibility—and with it, collective punishment. The FATA receives few allocations for public services relative to Pakistan’s provinces and lags behind the rest of the country in per-capita income and other development indicators.
Residents of the FATA and neighboring tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa often find themselves stuck between the Taliban and abusive security services. Introducing Pakistan’s civil penal code and replacing militarized counterinsurgency operations with policing, among other measures, could rewrite the population’s relationship with the state, making them fully fledged citizens rather than the occupants of a buffer zone.
The region’s economic integration with the rest of Pakistan, and the facilitation of trade with Afghanistan, could lift the region’s prospects, expand licit employment opportunities, and diminish the appeal of organized crime and militancy.
China seeks to expand its Asian sphere of influence, and as the U.S security umbrella in Afghanistan contracts, Beijing has signaled that it will take a more assertive role in South Asian security. In 2014 it appointed a special envoy for Afghanistan and has reportedly made back-channel contacts with the Taliban.
China seeks to boost trade and build infrastructure in Central and South Asia in what it calls a new Silk Road. It also has mining interests in Afghanistan. Insecurity impedes both.
Beijing is also contending with an Islamist insurgency among minority Uighurs in its western Xinjiang region. Some of these militants have found refuge in the Taliban-controlled areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
China has, perhaps, more leverage over Pakistan than any other big power, and Chinese assistance could help offset dwindling Western aid to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Beijing’s influence will be limited by its competition with India and its close ties to Islamabad, a relationship that will give many Afghans pause.
These discussion questions, essay questions, activities and assignments, and supplementary resources are designed to help educators use "The Taliban" InfoGuide in the classroom through an active, learner-centered approach.
Discussion Questions -Ideas for questions to use in facilitating full-class discussions, assigning small group discussion topics, or posting on a class discussion board. Questions allow students to critically reflect on the material provided in the InfoGuide and hone their communication skills.
Essay Questions -Suggestions for essay topics that enable students to dive deeper into the material found in the InfoGuide and conduct their own research and analysis.
Activities and Assignments -In-class activity ideas and homework assignments based on "The Taliban" InfoGuide that promote participatory learning and critical thinking. These can be adapted based on students' levels and classroom needs. For high school teachers, these activities are accompanied by a list and description of the Common Core State Standards they meet.
Experts
Steve CollDean, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Staff Writer, New Yorker
Rachel ReidRegional Manager for Advocacy for Middle East, North Africa, and Southwest Asia, Open Society Foundations
Michael SempleVisiting Research Professor, Queen's University Belfast
Abubakar SiddiqueSenior Correspondent, Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty
Experts
The Taliban's Origins and the Islamic Emirate
The Pashtun Question (2014)Journalist Abubakar Siddique traces the Taliban's expansion in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pashtun majorities there do not have a predilection for radicalism, he argues; rather, radicalization is an outcome of failed politics in Kabul and Islamabad.
Resolving the Pakistan-Afghanistan Stalemate (October 2006)Antagonistic relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan long predates the Taliban. Barnett R. Rubin and Abubakar Siddique propose a resolution of the border issues that would undermine each county's insurgencies.
An Enemy We Created (2012)Based on extensive fieldwork in Afghanistan, researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn deconstruct the view that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are inextricably linked.
How Tribal Are the Taleban [sic] (2012)Analyst Thomas Ruttig considers whether the Taliban is best considered primarily a Pashtun movement or an Islamist-nationalist movement that rejects tribal and ethnic identities.
Doing Pashto (2011)The Afghanistan Analysts Network provides a primer on pasthunwali, the Pashtun tribal code.
FATA Under FCR: An Imperial Black Law (n.d.)This primer on the Frontier Crimes Regulation explains the British-era code's implementation in Pakistan's tribal areas and proposes specific reforms.
Insurgency in Afghanistan (2001-present)
The Taliban Question (October 2014)In a concise history of the Taliban's post-2001 insurgency and its metastasis in Pakistan, journalist Zahid Hussain forecasts protracted conflict between Kabul and the Taliban will follow the international drawdown.
Afghanistan's Insurgency After the Transition (May 2014)The International Crisis Group argues that Afghanistan requires sustained U.S. training and international assistance to develop the "tools of survival" needed to confront "a growing, increasingly confident insurgency."
Shadow Justice (2012)Integrity Watch Afghanistan examines the Taliban's judicial system-the insurgent movement's most important civilian function-and how well it has withstood the pressures of counterinsurgency.
The Layha: Calling the Taleban [sic] to Account (July 2011)Analyst Kate Clark dissects the Taliban's code of conduct. She argues that when criticizing Taliban attacks, political actors should invoke not just international law, but the insurgent organization's own code.
How Opium Profits the Taliban (August 2009)Journalist Gretchen Peters explains the political economy of insurgency and the drug trade in southern and southwestern Afghanistan.
Strategic Empathy (2014)Washington's failure to grasp the Taliban's motivations led to a misguided approach to counterinsurgency and undermined the possibility of negotiations at the United States' moment of maximum leverage, argues analyst Matt Waldman.
Looking for Mullah Omar (2012)Journalist Steve Coll considers the prospects of U.S. negotiations with a Taliban leadership in hiding in Pakistani territory.
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011)In her book about a young Kabuli entrepreneur, CFR's Gayle Tzemach Lemmon discusses the importance of economically empowering women in conflict zones.
The Taliban Revival (2014)Analyst Hassan Abbas discusses the domestic and regional causes of the Taliban's post-2001 resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas.
Next-Gen Taliban (2008)Journalist Nicholas Schmidle reports on the rise of the TTP and Taliban-aligned political parties in Pakistan.
Pakistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance (July 2013)The Congressional Research Service provides an overview of U.S. assistance to Pakistan, with an emphasis on conditionality and other issues relevant to U.S. lawmakers.
Countering Militancy in PATA (January 2013)The International Crisis Group examines extremism in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the years following Pakistani military operations to reclaim the Swat Valley from the Taliban.
Separating the Taliban from Al-Qaeda (2011)Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn discuss in an NYU policy brief whether the Taliban would renounce al-Qaeda and forego the provision of sanctuary to international terrorist organization.
The Taliban in 2024 (2014)Scholar Michael Semple examines possible futures in which the Taliban can promote sharia and secure the interests of its clerical constituents and assesses the potential contours of a negotiated settlement with Kabul.
Afghanistan's Political Transition (October 2014)The International Crisis Group evaluates the Afghan state's resilience after the fall 2014 power-sharing agreement. Ghani is well-poised to talk with the Taliban, but doing so without Abdullah's buy-in could provoke a crisis.
Behind Closed Doors (November 2014)Gains in women's rights, though substantial, are yet to be consolidated and are jeopardized by the prospect of negotiations with the Taliban in which women are underrepresented, Oxfam argues.
Revisiting Chicago (June 2014)Highlighting Afghanistan's fiscal shortfall, economist William A. Byrd argues that international security funding must be kept steady after the drawdown. The reduction of Afghan force levels by a third, as NATO members called for in 2012, must be sequenced to follow a settlement with the Taliban.
No Exit from Pakistan (2013)CFR's Daniel S. Markey chronicles mutual antagonism in U.S.-Pakistan relations and offers options for future U.S. strategy.
Reorienting U.S. Pakistan Strategy (January 2014)Washington has conceived of its relations with Islamabad through the narrow "Af-Pak" lens for more than a decade. By integrating it instead into its broader Asia strategy, Washington can pursue a wider array of interests, Markey argues in a Council Special Report.
Resetting Pakistan's Relations with Afghanistan (October 2014)The Pakistani military's monopoly on the Afghanistan portfolio undermines the prospects for rapprochement, but Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif can improve bilateral relations by taking steps on economic ties and Afghan refugees, the International Crisis Group writes.
The Osama bin Laden File (2011)The nongovernmental National Security Archive compiles State Department and CIA cables on the al-Qaeda founder, including the Pakistani government's relationship with the Taliban regime that harbored him.
This publication was made possible by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.
Eleanor Albert, Stephen Biddle, Maria Casa, Janine Davidson, John Fletcher, Irina Faskianos, Glen Goldman, Bernard Gwertzman, Heather Khalifa, Tricia Miller Klapheke, James M. Lindsay, Jonathan Masters, James McBride, Dan Mudd, Patricia Moore Nicholas, Jeanne Park, Jeffrey Reinke, Michael Semple, Mohammed Sergie, Pir Shah, Lisa Shields, James West, Melinda Wuellner, Iva Zoric
Ali Al-Saadi/Getty, Mohammed Al-Shaikh/Getty, Erik De Castro/ Courtesy Reuters, Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty, B Mahur/Courtesy Reuters, Alex Majoli/Magnum, Mohsin Raza/Courtesy Reuters
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