Enemies

Drawings by Charles and Louis Haghe, from James Atkinson's Sketches in Afghanistan, 1842, via The New York Times.

So it seems we are now in a certain sense allies of the Taliban, by enemy-of-my-enemy standards, as the ISIS-K mounts a lethal suicide attack on the Kabul airport in order to demonstrate the weakness and incompetence of the Taliban, and 13 US service members are among the victims. Indeed, from the ISIS-K standpoint, we were already allies—they've been mocking the Taliban online for getting Afghanistan "on a silver platter" from the US, and suggesting that the US expects something from them in return. Which is also true in a certain sense: the Taliban are supposed to be protecting the American evacuation operations, right in the March 2020 agreement, which is what the negotiations over the last weeks have been about:

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qa’ida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies...

"But you can't stop us from threatening them!" says ISIS-Khorasan. That's what the attack was meant to demonstrate.

And by extension, we're allies, in a certain sense, with al-Qa'eda, the international group that has always been allied with the Taliban since the beginning (when the 9/11 attacks were masterminded from Afghanistan), and is unalterably opposed to ISIS.

This isn't the first time, either. The original ISIS or ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), formed, as we were remembering last week, after Proconsul Paul Bremer had all the Iraqi Baathist officers fired from the Iraqi army and they went off to join the theocratic Sunni insurgency in the western provinces and eventually in Syria, broke violently with al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia, renamed as the "Nusra Front", US allies in the stand against the Syrian Assad regime. We've been allies with al-Qa'eda in Syria ever since we got there. What we're seeing today is reflections of the same process in Afghanistan.

I want to lean hard into this because I think it moves us toward an understanding of an issue that's bigger and sort of all over the place at the moment, of what these groups are and what "we" are and what it means for us to interact—the dumb debate as to whether the Taliban may have "changed" since 2001, and the interesting debate as to where we can and can't trust them, where I've been arguing for trusting them rather more than a lot of the on-the-ground advocates have been willing to contemplate, because I seem to think I know something the on-the-ground advocates don't, which sounds crazy arrogant.

Then again, you know, the opinions of on-the-ground experts differ, and I'm going back to Sarah Chayes, who has restarted (h/t djchevron) a sort-of-defunct blog, after noticing a pattern that nobody else seemed to be noticing: some familiar faces in Kabul that weren't the Taliban but seemed to be relevant to whatever the Taliban was doing, in the form of former president Hamid Karzai (a key figure, she says, in the original appearance of the Taliban when they emerged in the mid-1990s from their madrasas in Quetta, Pakistan, under the aegis of Pakistan's notorious ISI), and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the "CEO" of the Afghan government in a bizarre settlement of an election dispute with now ex-President Ghani (I thought Abdullah was probably the legitimate winner but can't at the moment remember why), with his extensive connections to the non-Islamist northern warlords. and the the smooth-talking grandson abominable Taliban commandeer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and others forming a "coordinating committee" negotiating the Taliban's return to power, and the US negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad (why did Biden keep him on, of all people, from the Trump team?). 

Chayes was seeing criminals taking advantage of an opportunity to retain the institutional corruption, I think, and the dark influence of Pakistani intelligence, but I found myself thinking in the first place that Pakistan would have a legitimate interest in a stable Afghanistan, and so would everybody else (i.e., Russia, China, Takikistan and Uzbekistan, Iran, and Turkey, as Lyse Doucette/BBC is pointing out on the radio as I type), and perhaps these moves could end up working like an effort to coopt the Taliban into something more like a normal political movement, a Big Taliban Tent if you like, in which the rural appeal of the Original Taliban (which is every bit as real as the rural appeal of red-state Republicanism, I'm afraid) could be coordinated with policy ideas that could actually do the country some good.

So here's WaPo on Wednesday, looking as if the Taliban has the same idea:

KABUL — The Taliban is scrambling to reach a deal with former Afghan officials to establish a government that could gain international recognition, keep aid money flowing into the country and restore access to billions of dollars in international reserves.

Taliban leaders have shuttled between more than a dozen meetings over the past week with the few former Afghan officials who remain in Kabul, including former president Hamid Karzai; Abdullah Abdullah, former leader of national reconciliation council; and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former warlord-turned-politician. The meetings have been held in the presidential palace, former government offices and private compounds.

For the Taliban, a political agreement could help the group avoid again becoming an international pariah, which would push one of the world's poorest countries even further into poverty. For the former Afghan leaders, a deal would give them a share of power in Afghanistan’s new government.

And according to the folks at The Cradle, a remarkable source of news on West Asia that I've just been getting to know,

Taliban Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid announced on 25 August that the group hopes to reach a peace agreement with resistance fighters in the Panjshir Valley, the last region of Afghanistan not under Taliban control.

“We are in contact with the people of Panjshir,” Mujahid told Afghan media, adding that “we are in talks with elders, influencers and jihadist leaders. The talks will soon solve the problem without war.”

Mujahid went on to say that the Taliban is ready to extend amnesty to resistance leaders, inviting them to Kabul to leave [sic] a “comfortable and decent” life.

My fantasy of the other day, of the departure of American troops as the indispensable first step toward an authentic nation-building moment for Afghanistan, wants to come true.