[“We
have defeated the enemy.” The international community is scrambling to secure
peace in Afghanistan, but the Taliban believe they have the upper hand — and
are saying as much.]
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 U.S. 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 Qaeda.
The
Biden administration has yet to definitively say whether it will meet that
deadline, just weeks away.
“No
mujahid 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 power sharing, Mr. 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.”
The
Taliban know that Afghanistan, an aid-dependent state, 80 percent of whose
expenditures are funded from international donors, cannot afford the isolation of
that era, analysts say.
Just
as the Taliban have become increasingly sophisticated in their use of social
media, online propaganda and a pugnacious English-language website — though
they still often ban smartphones in areas they control — so has their language
evolved to reflect the current moment.
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.
American
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 American 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.”
Mr.
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 historical stronghold, were abandoned by Afghan security forces,
according to the U.S. government’s Afghanistan watchdog.
“I
think they are 90 percent right,” said Mr. 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.
Elsewhere,
the Taliban’s increasingly confident messaging has penetrated deep into its
rank-and-file, in large part because events have borne it out.
“People
said that it is not possible to fire on U.S. forces,” said Muslim Mohabat, a
former Taliban fighter from Watapor District in Kunar Province. “They would say
the barrel of the rifle would bend if you open fire on them, but we attacked
them, and nothing happened.”
“Then
we kept attacking them and forced them to leave the valley,” said Mr. Mohabat,
who fought in some of the most violent battles of the war with the United
States.
In
the insurgents’ view, their advances will inexorably lead to the end of the
Kabul government.
“On
the battlefield there is a sense that, ‘We’re stronger than ever,’” said Ashley
Jackson, a Taliban expert at the Overseas Development Institute. “Power-sharing
and democracy, these are anathema to their political culture.”
Fahim
Abed, Fatima Faizi and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.