KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban’s swagger is unmistakable.
From the recent bellicose speech of their deputy leader, boasting of
“conquests,” to sneering references to the “foreign masters” of the “illegitimate”
Kabul government, to the Taliban’s own website tally of “puppets” killed —
Afghan soldiers — they are promoting a bold message:
اضافة اعلان
We have already won the war.
And that belief, grounded in military and political reality,
is shaping Afghanistan’s volatile present. On the eve of talks in Turkey next
month over the country’s future, it is the elephant in the room: the
half-acknowledged truth that the Taliban have the upper hand and are thus
showing little outward interest in compromise, or of going along with the
dominant American idea, power-sharing.
While the Taliban’s current rhetoric is also propaganda, the
grim sense of Taliban supremacy is dictating the response of a desperate Afghan
government and influencing Afghanistan’s anxious foreign interlocutors. It
contributes to the abandonment of dozens of checkpoints and falling morale
among the Afghan security forces, already hammered by a “not sustainable”
casualty rate of perhaps 3,000 a month, a senior Western diplomat in Kabul
said.
The group doesn’t hide its pride at having compelled its
principal adversary for 20 years, the United States, to negotiate with the
Taliban and, last year, to sign an agreement to completely withdraw US troops
from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. In exchange, the Taliban agreed to stop
attacking foreign forces and to sever ties with international terrorist groups
such as al-Qaida.
The Biden administration has yet to definitively say whether
it will meet that deadline, just weeks away.
“No mujahed ever thought that one day we would face such an
improved state, or that we will crush the arrogance of the rebellious emperors,
and force them to admit their defeat at our hands,” the Taliban’s deputy
leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, said in a recent speech. “Fortunately, today, we and
you are experiencing better circumstances.”
Nearly every day, the Taliban’s website features reports of
purported defections to its side, though the details are likely exaggerated,
just as both the Taliban and the Afghan government exaggerate each other’s
casualties. “59 enemy personnel switch sides to Islamic Emirate,” read one
recent headline.
Having outlasted the all-powerful Americans, the rest is
child’s play, in the Taliban’s view. The game is essentially over.
“They think they have beaten the Americans, so they can beat
the other Afghan forces as well, and get control over the country,” said Jawed
Kohistani, an Afghan analyst and former security official in Kabul.
The Taliban, who governed most of the country from 1996 to
2001, are not interested in true sharing-power, Kohistani said. “They are
planning to restore their Islamic emirate,” he added, “and they will punish all
those involved in corruption and land grabbing.”
Antonio Giustozzi, a leading Taliban expert, disputed the
idea that the Taliban are necessarily bent on reimposing a similarly hard-line
Islamic regime. “As long as they can get to power through a political
agreement, between establishing the emirate and democracy, there are options,”
he said. “The aim would be to become the dominant power.”
With the decisive shift in their military fortunes, their
words have become assertive and victorious, a posture that would have been
impossible a mere three years ago, analysts say.
The corollary to such posturing is the Afghan government’s
insistence that it expects a deadly endgame with the insurgency. Government
officials rarely claim that they and not the Taliban are the victors, because
they can’t. Evidence of Taliban ascendancy, in the insurgents’ steady offensive
in the countryside, their systematic encroachment on cities and their
overrunning of military bases, is too prevalent.
US negotiators are pushing ideas of compromise and
power-sharing, but government officials are largely resistant to them — in part
because any interim government would most likely require Afghanistan’s
president, Ashraf Ghani, to step down. He has steadfastly refused to even
consider it.
Instead, the government employs back-to-the-wall language
indicating that the bloody struggle will only intensify. Earlier this month, a
senior official told reporters inside the intensively guarded presidential
palace complex that a compromise, coalition government — recently proposed to
both sides by Zalmay Khalilzad, the US peace envoy — would merely be used by
the Taliban as a “Trojan horse” for the seizure of power.
It was “totally unrealistic” to think the insurgents would
agree to it, “knowing their psychology,” the official said. “I am not promising
a better situation in the future. But we will continue fighting.”
Ghani sounded a largely pessimistic note in remarks to the
Aspen Institute in January. “In their eschatology, Afghanistan is the place
where the final battle takes place,” he said of the Taliban.
We “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” he said.
The Ghani administration’s bleak outlook also reflects the
insurgent group’s territorial gains. In December, nearly 200 checkpoints in
Kandahar, the Taliban’s historic stronghold, were abandoned by Afghan security
forces, according to the US government’s Afghanistan watchdog.
“I think they are 90 percent right,” said Giustozzi, of the
insurgent group’s claims of victory. “Clearly the war has been lost. Clearly
things have gone in the wrong direction. Things have worsened under Ghani. The
trend is in their favor.”
Some analysts caution that while the Taliban may think they
have won, other armed actors in the Afghan equation will make a forced takeover
difficult. That was the experience 25 years ago, when the Taliban were forced
to battle warlords principally in the north and east, and failed to gain total
control over the entire country.
A militia in central Afghanistan led by Abdul Ghani Alipur,
a local warlord, has already inflamed hostility with the government in recent
months. And longtime power brokers in the country’s west and north have rallied
fighters to defend against the Taliban, if necessary.
Meanwhile, the Taliban rely on fear to keep local
populations in rural areas quiescent. An effective tool is the insurgents’
hidden network of ad hoc underground prisons where torture and punishment are
meted out to those suspected of working for, or with, the government.
But the Taliban are also viewed by some as being less
corrupt than Afghan officials. The group’s judges adjudicate civil and property
disputes, perhaps more efficiently than the government’s faltering
institutions.
In some areas under Taliban control, they have permitted
schools for girls to continue operating, Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the
Afghanistan Analysts Network, pointed out in a recent paper — though, he notes,
this may be driven more by political imperative than a softening of ideology.
