Haqqani Afghanistan: Year 2 (part 2)
The security situation in Afghanistan is difficult. On the one hand, the Afghan Daesh is the Taliban regime's main threat, attacks by the terrorist organisation have been frequent, and the fight against the terrorist organisation led by Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani has avoided a second year more deadly than the first because he knows that any member of the Taliban government is a target of the terrorist organisation. Added to this is the regime's insecurity about Pakistan's accusations that the Afghan border area serves as a safe haven for the Taliban terrorist organisation Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan or TTP, which has led to tensions between the two countries and an edict weeks ago by the regime's highest spiritual authority Hibatullah Akunzada to avoid using Afghanistan to attack Pakistan because it is haram and not jihad.
INTRODUCTION
Security has also been another important factor that the Taliban regime tries to convey, and insecurity has been the most prevalent. The government has tried to sell the idea that the country and especially its capital is a safe place. Sirajuddin Haqqani in an interview to an Indian media in July 2022 said that "the land of Afghanistan will not be used against any country" (1) in order to gain international recognition, but the reality is that attacks by the Afghan Daesh have been continuous. Diplomatic personnel, minorities, militias, members of the interim government, all have been targeted by the terrorist organisation. If we add to this the growing problem that is causing, according to the Pakistani military high command (2), the existence on Afghan soil of Pakistani Taliban terrorists, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who use the border area of Afghanistan as a sanctuary in contravention of the Doha agreements, putting the security of both countries at risk, as their predecessors of the first Taliban regime did years ago with Al Qaeda.
HAQQANI AFGHANISTAN: YEAR 2
The regime and particularly its government, despite the frantic diplomatic work and meetings it is conducting with many countries, remains internationally unrecognised two years after its entry into Kabul. The minimum conditions that must be in place for countries to recognise it have not been met, and it does not appear that any steps will be taken in the future in any area of the government, which is made up of members who came from the insurgency and who have no political experience in managing a country's economic resources or governance. For example, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mullah Yaqoob, Minister of Interior and Minister of Defence respectively, have led the insurgency until its entry into Kabul in August 2021, but now find themselves in the very different job of running the political side of the country's administration and doing counterinsurgency work, as the Afghan Daesh gives them no respite.
SECURITY VERSUS INSECURITY
According to an annual 2022 study by the Institute for Economics and Peace on terrorist activities in 163 countries and their security, which measures a series of parameters between 1 and 10 points, Afghanistan with more than 600 deaths during 2022 ranks No. 1 in that analysis with 8,822 points (3), followed by Burkina Faso with 8,564. Spain would be in 60th place with 2,712.
Insecurity has become another major problem for the Taliban regime, which is trying to convince neighbouring countries that Afghanistan is a safe country in order to continue to have diplomatic relations and thus keep its consulates and embassies open in Kabul, such as China, Iran, Turkey, Japan, Pakistan and Russia, among others. Sirajuddin Haqqani offered them security, as he did in October 2022 to Ambassador Takashi Okadasi at the reopening of the Japanese embassy.
The trust and operability of these delegations was very important to Sirajuddin because it meant de facto recognition of the government, even though they were targeted by the Afghan Daesh, the Taliban's biggest enemy, which carried out an attack in September 2022 at the entrance gate of the Russian embassy, killing six people (4), In December 2022, the head of the Pakistani diplomatic delegation Ubaidur Rehman Nizamani, who escaped unharmed from an assassination attempt as he walked through the embassy compound, was more fortunate.
With regard to embassy security in Kabul, in July this year a joint Civil Guard-Canadian Mounted Police (5) counter-terrorism operation took place in Toronto, Canada, in which a 34-year-old individual was arrested for having sworn allegiance to Daesh leader Abu Ibrahim al Hashemi al Qurashi, who was killed in a clash with US special forces in Idlib, Syria, in early February 2022. He was reportedly in communication with a Da'esh member on an encrypted communication platform in order to plan terrorist attacks on embassies in Afghanistan.
But there is another important factor adding to this climate of insecurity, and that is the Pakistani Taliban of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Pursued by the Pakistani authorities, they have complained to the Taliban regime that part of the Afghan border is used as a sanctuary or safe haven for Pakistani terrorists. This has contributed to poor relations with the Pakistani state.
Pakistan suffered one of its worst attacks in late January 2023, targeting the Peshawar mosque in Pakistan, killing more than 100 people (6), mostly policemen praying inside the premises. The Pakistani authorities directly blamed the massacre on the TTP, which never claimed responsibility for the attack.
If it is established that Afghanistan's border area is used as a safe haven by the TTP Taliban, it would mean that the Taliban regime's authorities are not complying with one of the most important points of the Doha agreements in which Afghanistan pledged not to be a safe haven for terrorist organisations.
On the other hand, the Taliban regime authorities have tried not to interfere in the Pakistani government's war with the Pakistani Taliban, but the fact is that the Taliban links are obvious, remembering that Sirajuddin Haqqani grew up in the North Waziristan province of Pakistan. The interior minister and intelligence chief is apparently trying to maintain a dangerous balance between his historical ally and his ideological brethren. In fact, Sirajuddin chaired the key meeting in May this year where a ceasefire was reached between the two sides, which was broken months later by the TTP.
The truth is that Sirajuddin Haqqani is unwilling to pursue his Pakistani ideological brethren because of the problems that this could cause him with his own militias and even that disgruntled Taliban could join the ranks of Daesh. This unwillingness is also creating a conflict with Pakistan, which could even move into Afghan territory if it becomes clear that the Taliban regime is unwilling to pursue the TTP. Therefore, Sirajuddin, in a meeting on 20 August in the town of Uruzgan with clerics and tribal leaders, warned Pakistan that relations between the two allied countries could deteriorate if any operation is carried out in Afghan territory, especially because it is an internal Pakistani problem, he said (7).
Some time ago, at the end of April 2022, after a TTP attack in the Pakistani province of North Waziristan bordering Afghanistan, in which eight policemen were killed, the Pakistani army carried out a drone attack in the Afghan border area near the provinces of Khost and Kunar, causing more than 40 deaths (8).
All this, as mentioned above, has put the Taliban regime in the crosshairs of the Doha agreements. The highest authority of the Taliban regime Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar signed among the conditions for a lasting peace the commitment that Afghanistan would never again become a terrorist sanctuary.
To conclude this section, the second year of Taliban rule, like the first, has also been a serious security problem for the ethnic Hazara Shi'a minority, whose representatives were not only not included in the Taliban government, but whose Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani was unable to provide security for their gatherings and places of worship. Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a global report in 2022 in which it was reflected how the Hazara minority had been targeted by the Afghan Daesh with more than 700 deaths during 2022. As an example, the attack of 30 September 2022 committed by the Afghan Daesh against a school of Hazara girls who were doing some paperwork to enter university, killing 53 people, most of them women and girls (9).
CONCLUSIONS
The insecurity conveyed by the Taliban regime is a serious problem for the Taliban, as many international commercial and economic investments rely on the country having sufficient security for them. It is therefore very important for the regime to fight terrorism. Daesh, despite having committed fewer attacks during the last year of the Taliban regime, seems uncontrollable in a country that has been suffering from terrorism for decades, and it is well known that the terrorist organisation's attacks are aimed at bringing down the regime.
Similarly, their ideological brethren in the Pakistani Taliban are causing a real problem for Pakistan, which accuses the Afghan Taliban regime of hiding in its territory beyond the Pakistani border, in contravention of the Doha agreements. This issue may cause a serious problem between the two countries in the future given the fragile balance that the Afghan Taliban regime is trying to maintain between its ally and its ideological Pakistani brother. Finally, the highest spiritual authority of the Taliban regime based in Kandahar, Haibatullah Akunzada, has had no choice but to issue an edict a few weeks ago to the Taliban who have sworn allegiance to him, which states that no attack on neighbouring nations can originate from Afghan soil, as it would be a forbidden act and not jihad (10). What Akunzada does not mention is whether he considers attacks organised by the Pakistani Taliban on Pakistani border territory against Pakistani military forces in Waziristan to be jihad. As this article draws to a close, the TTP carried out an attack that killed six Pakistani soldiers in the border province of South Waziristan (11).
The Taliban regime signed in the Doha agreements that Afghan soil cannot be a safe haven for terrorists, but this agreement must be implemented and taken over by the Taliban regime. The Al Qaeda leader lived in Kabul until his death in 2022 and the constant Pakistani protests that some Afghan border cities serve as safe havens for Pakistani terrorists could be further evidence that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is a country where the security conditions for international recognition are not in place. In the Doha agreements it committed itself to fighting terrorism, but it only does so against the Afghan Daesh, not only because it is written in those agreements, but for internal survival reasons, as it is ultimately the enemy that could complicate the Taliban regime's existence in the future, which would lead the unstable country to a total destabilisation that would imply an even greater risk than now exists for all neighbouring and Western countries.
Luis Montero Molina is a political scientist, analyst at Sec2Crime and the OCATRY observatory.
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