Sudarsan Raghavan
By Sudarsan Raghavan
The Taliban in this northern province allows girls to attend school. It doesn’t execute soldiers or police. Its fighters are not Pashtun, the main ethnic group that bred and fueled the insurgency. Some members are even former mujahedeen, or freedom fighters, who once despised the Taliban and fought against its uprising.
“The Taliban here are against the ideology of the Taliban in the south,” explained Maizuddin Ahmedi, 20, a former Taliban member who reflects the local faction’s atypical nature: He has a Facebook page, tweets regularly and wears a beanie emblazoned with the letters “NY.” “They don’t behead soldiers.”
As the United States reshapes its military footprint in Afghanistan, the Taliban is transforming into a patchwork of forces with often conflicting ideals and motivations, looking less like the ultra-religious movement it started out as in the mid-1990s. The fragmentation may suggest the movement is weakening, but it is forcing Afghanistan’s government to confront an insurgency that is becoming increasingly diverse, scattered — and more lethal.
What is unfolding here in Badakhshan province offers a glimpse into these complexities — and the future of a conflict in which the US combat mission is formally over. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, this was the only province it was never able to control. Now, the insurgency is making inroads here and in other parts of the north, outside its strongholds in the south and east.
The Taliban in Badakhshan has gained strength precisely because it is different from the core insurgency. Its fighters are using their ethnic and tribal ties to gain recruits and popular support, while their knowledge of the landscape helps them outmaneuver Afghan security forces and control sources of funding.
“They are trying to make northern Afghanistan insecure,” Shah Waliullah Adeeb, the provincial governor, told a reporter in December. “By seizing areas in Badakhshan, they are trying to send a message that the national government is weak and inefficient, and helpless.”
America’s longest war has officially ended, at least in the form that manifested itself for the past 13 years, with tens of thousands of foreign troops, high-tech weaponry and countless airstrikes. The roughly 13,000 US and Nato soldiers who remain have shrunken capabilities and more restrictions, and their ranks are scheduled to grow even smaller by the end of the year.
But Afghanistan remains an unfinished conflict. In Iraq, the US withdrawal in 2009 coincided with a reduction in violence. Here, the bloodshed is rising. Last year, there were more civilian and security-force deaths than in any year since the US-led intervention ousted the Taliban government in 2001.
In Badakhshan, a struggle is underway to prevent the Taliban from gaining more territory in this strategic corner that borders three nations — Pakistan, China and Tajikistan — and is a gateway for the smuggling of opium to Europe. In the provincial capital, Faizabad, ringed by snow-covered mountains, lingers a sense of disbelief that the region is now as fragile as any other area of Afghanistan.
“We never expected the Taliban to rise up here,” said Gen Nazir Mohammed Nayazee, the mayor of Faizabad.
Nayazee, a former top mujahedeen commander, speaks with the authority of experience. He was shot twice fighting the Russians in the 1980s and wounded twice battling the Taliban in the 1990s.
In 1997, a year after it seized Kabul, the Taliban pushed northward. But it was stopped at Badakhshan’s borders by Nayazee and his mujahedeen forces. Under fire from cragged mountaintops, the Taliban could not break through the narrow passes. But in recent years, Afghan security forces have focused on fighting the militants in the south and east, leaving northern areas largely unprotected. In Badakhshan, security forces are ill-equipped and overstretched. When NATO troops departed the province in 2013, the Taliban seized more ground.
Today, the insurgents have injected themselves into seven districts, a quarter of the province. They number around 800 to 1,000 fighters, according to provincial officials, and their command center is a mere 40 miles east of Faizabad. They have set up a shadow government, and fighters man checkpoints in villages.
“The security forces can’t do anything against them,” said Sadiqullah Khaliqi, 26, a taxi driver who frequently travels through Taliban-controlled areas.
The Taliban here expresses allegiance to Mohammad Omar, the insurgency’s supreme leader, and is loosely aligned with the Taliban’s central command. It views the government as un-Islamic and a puppet of the West. But it otherwise shares little resemblance to its Pashtun brethren, who launched their revolt from the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
The Taliban here is predominantly local, a mix of ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, according to provincial officials and Ahmedi, the former Taliban member, who was interviewed two days after defecting. It also includes a small contingent of fighters from neighboring countries.
Many fighters, like Ahmedi, were unemployed and lured by the militants’ promise of salaries and food. Others are escaping the law or disputes with local officials. They also include disgruntled former mujahedeen fighters who found no place within the government.
Most were not even born or were children when the Taliban was created. That includes their top commander — Qari Fasihuddin — who is believed to be 27 or 28. And while the Taliban has imposed Islamic law in areas it controls, it has also allowed schooling for girls, satellite television and music — all forbidden under Taliban rule. It gets most of its financing, Ahmedi said, by taxing opium farmers and trucks ferrying marble from nearby mines.
“They are not mullahs,” said Nayazee, referring to religious scholars. “They are not ideological Taliban.”
To be sure, the Taliban has become increasingly disjointed. Omar has not been seen in years, and some analysts suspect he is dead. Founding commanders have been killed in battle or have defected, creating power vacuums and competing factions.
A UN report last year said the Taliban is “experiencing a range of divisions driven primarily by differences over political strategy.” Those divides, it continued, were “amplified” by factions that had acquired control over various funding sources and were able to “behave with increasing autonomy.”
Several Taliban groups have launched independent websites and social-media platforms, including some that sympathize with Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Internal rivalries have led to assassinations of Taliban leaders, the UN report said. In southern and eastern Afghanistan, some local Taliban commanders have banned polio vaccinations, fearing health workers were spies, even though the movement’s central command has approved the campaign.
WP-Bloomberg
By Sudarsan Raghavan
The Taliban in this northern province allows girls to attend school. It doesn’t execute soldiers or police. Its fighters are not Pashtun, the main ethnic group that bred and fueled the insurgency. Some members are even former mujahedeen, or freedom fighters, who once despised the Taliban and fought against its uprising.
“The Taliban here are against the ideology of the Taliban in the south,” explained Maizuddin Ahmedi, 20, a former Taliban member who reflects the local faction’s atypical nature: He has a Facebook page, tweets regularly and wears a beanie emblazoned with the letters “NY.” “They don’t behead soldiers.”
As the United States reshapes its military footprint in Afghanistan, the Taliban is transforming into a patchwork of forces with often conflicting ideals and motivations, looking less like the ultra-religious movement it started out as in the mid-1990s. The fragmentation may suggest the movement is weakening, but it is forcing Afghanistan’s government to confront an insurgency that is becoming increasingly diverse, scattered — and more lethal.
What is unfolding here in Badakhshan province offers a glimpse into these complexities — and the future of a conflict in which the US combat mission is formally over. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, this was the only province it was never able to control. Now, the insurgency is making inroads here and in other parts of the north, outside its strongholds in the south and east.
The Taliban in Badakhshan has gained strength precisely because it is different from the core insurgency. Its fighters are using their ethnic and tribal ties to gain recruits and popular support, while their knowledge of the landscape helps them outmaneuver Afghan security forces and control sources of funding.
“They are trying to make northern Afghanistan insecure,” Shah Waliullah Adeeb, the provincial governor, told a reporter in December. “By seizing areas in Badakhshan, they are trying to send a message that the national government is weak and inefficient, and helpless.”
America’s longest war has officially ended, at least in the form that manifested itself for the past 13 years, with tens of thousands of foreign troops, high-tech weaponry and countless airstrikes. The roughly 13,000 US and Nato soldiers who remain have shrunken capabilities and more restrictions, and their ranks are scheduled to grow even smaller by the end of the year.
But Afghanistan remains an unfinished conflict. In Iraq, the US withdrawal in 2009 coincided with a reduction in violence. Here, the bloodshed is rising. Last year, there were more civilian and security-force deaths than in any year since the US-led intervention ousted the Taliban government in 2001.
In Badakhshan, a struggle is underway to prevent the Taliban from gaining more territory in this strategic corner that borders three nations — Pakistan, China and Tajikistan — and is a gateway for the smuggling of opium to Europe. In the provincial capital, Faizabad, ringed by snow-covered mountains, lingers a sense of disbelief that the region is now as fragile as any other area of Afghanistan.
“We never expected the Taliban to rise up here,” said Gen Nazir Mohammed Nayazee, the mayor of Faizabad.
Nayazee, a former top mujahedeen commander, speaks with the authority of experience. He was shot twice fighting the Russians in the 1980s and wounded twice battling the Taliban in the 1990s.
In 1997, a year after it seized Kabul, the Taliban pushed northward. But it was stopped at Badakhshan’s borders by Nayazee and his mujahedeen forces. Under fire from cragged mountaintops, the Taliban could not break through the narrow passes. But in recent years, Afghan security forces have focused on fighting the militants in the south and east, leaving northern areas largely unprotected. In Badakhshan, security forces are ill-equipped and overstretched. When NATO troops departed the province in 2013, the Taliban seized more ground.
Today, the insurgents have injected themselves into seven districts, a quarter of the province. They number around 800 to 1,000 fighters, according to provincial officials, and their command center is a mere 40 miles east of Faizabad. They have set up a shadow government, and fighters man checkpoints in villages.
“The security forces can’t do anything against them,” said Sadiqullah Khaliqi, 26, a taxi driver who frequently travels through Taliban-controlled areas.
The Taliban here expresses allegiance to Mohammad Omar, the insurgency’s supreme leader, and is loosely aligned with the Taliban’s central command. It views the government as un-Islamic and a puppet of the West. But it otherwise shares little resemblance to its Pashtun brethren, who launched their revolt from the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
The Taliban here is predominantly local, a mix of ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, according to provincial officials and Ahmedi, the former Taliban member, who was interviewed two days after defecting. It also includes a small contingent of fighters from neighboring countries.
Many fighters, like Ahmedi, were unemployed and lured by the militants’ promise of salaries and food. Others are escaping the law or disputes with local officials. They also include disgruntled former mujahedeen fighters who found no place within the government.
Most were not even born or were children when the Taliban was created. That includes their top commander — Qari Fasihuddin — who is believed to be 27 or 28. And while the Taliban has imposed Islamic law in areas it controls, it has also allowed schooling for girls, satellite television and music — all forbidden under Taliban rule. It gets most of its financing, Ahmedi said, by taxing opium farmers and trucks ferrying marble from nearby mines.
“They are not mullahs,” said Nayazee, referring to religious scholars. “They are not ideological Taliban.”
To be sure, the Taliban has become increasingly disjointed. Omar has not been seen in years, and some analysts suspect he is dead. Founding commanders have been killed in battle or have defected, creating power vacuums and competing factions.
A UN report last year said the Taliban is “experiencing a range of divisions driven primarily by differences over political strategy.” Those divides, it continued, were “amplified” by factions that had acquired control over various funding sources and were able to “behave with increasing autonomy.”
Several Taliban groups have launched independent websites and social-media platforms, including some that sympathize with Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Internal rivalries have led to assassinations of Taliban leaders, the UN report said. In southern and eastern Afghanistan, some local Taliban commanders have banned polio vaccinations, fearing health workers were spies, even though the movement’s central command has approved the campaign.
WP-Bloomberg
