Brian M Downing
Negotiations to settle the war in Afghanistan might be leading somewhere. A major Taliban official has taken part and the Trump administration is looking to get out of the failed venture. Should an agreement come, the Taliban will govern large parts of the south and east. They have taken those areas over the last 15 years or so and neither Kabul nor Washington can retake them. Taliban-stan already exists, an agreement will make it official.
Some peace agreements end war and usher in tranquility and prosperity. Some don’t. What are the prospects of a stable Taliban-stan in coming years?
Rentier state
Though seemingly at war since the days of the Anglo-Russian rivalry of the early 19th century, Afghanistan has seen periods of tranquility and prosperity. Those periods were the product of the Kabul government strategically disbursing money to local powerholders. The money came less from indigenous taxation than from foreign powers, usually Britain or Russia. Afghanistan in its best days was a rentier state of sorts.
Soviet subsidies after the 1988 withdrawal helped Kabul retain good ties with certain areas and reestablish them in others. With the USSR’s collapse in 1991, however, subsidies dried up and Afghanistan descended into anarchy and warlordism.
A settlement today will have to replicate the rentier arrangement. The money would come from several foreign powers, chiefly the US, China, Russia, and Iran. The US wants to see a modicum of success from its long presence. China owns much of the country’s considerable mineralogical wealth and wants to exploit it in peace. Russia and Iran want a stable government that will prevent the spread of international jihad.
Kabul will disburse money to Taliban officials in the south and east who will use it to rebuild the region and develop the economy. In exchange, the Taliban will abide by the settlement. Money may one day come from the country’s iron, copper, oil, and rare earths, reducing the need for foreign money but holding together rentier dynamics. Perhaps the money can attenuate the Taliban’s harsher governing methods. Perhaps not as they will have considerable autonomy.
Disarray
Successful transition to a rentier state will be difficult. The Taliban are not a unified political-military organization. There are two high councils, at least, but beneath them are scores of levies, hired bands, and aligned groups of varying allegiances and dispositions. Commanders differ in tactics and goals – and probably in what the country should look like.
Many fighters will remain under Taliban control only while there are foreign troops in their district. With a settlement, many will break free of the Taliban councils, raising the prospect of brigandage and warlordism.
Even in areas deemed under solid Taliban control there are tribes and clans that oppose them. The reasons may be of recent vintage or date back to antagonisms and vendettas from before the Soviet invasion or even back to the days of British expeditions. Feuds last a long time there.
Foreign powers have been using Afghan groups for centuries – Persia, Britain, Russia. Intervention has become more convoluted since then. Pakistan has funded the Taliban since the early 90s when the movement established a measure of order and promised to connect wide-open countries in Central Asia to Pakistani ports. More recently, Iran and Russia have backed the Taliban. They want to gain influence with a likely winner and bleed the US at the same time. Saudi Arabia has begun supporting more internationalist Islamist bands in the hope that they will turn their guns on Iran.
Internationalism
There is no guarantee the Taliban will abandon the notion of seizing lands outside Afghanistan’s south and east or refrain from expanding into neighboring countries. At the zenith of its power, most of the Taliban favored building Islamist government inside Afghanistan and eschewing foreign efforts. Islamism in one country, it might be called. But the Taliban did have an internationalist wing that argued for hosting Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda outfit, the Islamist Movement of Uzbekistan, and several Kashmiri groups, including the one that struck Indian troops last month.
The presence of al Qaeda of course brought the US intervention in 2001 which sent the Taliban packing. However, the internationalist wing is thought to remain in shuras. Aligned internationalist groups, including al Qaeda, are still in eastern Afghanistan.
The Taliban might use a settlement to restore its forces and strengthen ties to internationalist groups. One goal would be to retake as much of Afghanistan as possible. That will prove exceptionally difficult as regional powers would intervene. A more attainable goal lies to the south. The Taliban are related to Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP) and the two Pashtun movements might seek to unite the lands divided by the arbitrary Durand Line. After all, many Pashtuns hold that Pakistan unfairly annexed Pashtun lands in 1947.
War-weariness might well have flagged internationalist sentiment, at least north of the Durand Line. However, 40 years of intermittent war has warped the region’s culture. Most young people know only war and see more honor and adventure in hefting a Kalashnikov than in tending a herd in the rocky hills of Taliban-stan.
© 2019 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.