Why the Taliban
still can’t form a government
By Pepe Escobar
September 06, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House
- It looked like
everything was set for the Taliban to announce the new
government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan after this
Friday’s afternoon prayers. But then internal dissent prevailed.
That was compounded by
the adverse optics of a ragtag “resistance” in the Panjshir
Valley that is still not subdued. The “resistance” is de facto
led by a CIA asset, former vice president Amrullah Saleh.
The Taliban maintain
they have captured several districts and at least four
checkpoints at the Panjshir, controlling 20% of its territory.
Still, there’s no endgame in sight.
Supreme Leader
Haibatullah Akhundzada, a Kandahar religious scholar, is
expected to be the new power of the Islamic Emirate when it’s
finally formed. Mullah Baradar will likely preside just below
him as a presidential figure along with a 12-member governing
council known as a “shura.”
If that’s the case,
there would be certain similarities between the institutional
role of Akhundzada and Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran, even though
the theocratic frameworks, Sunni and Shiite, are completely
different.
Mullah Baradar,
co-founder of the Taliban with Mullah Omar in 1994 and
imprisoned in Guantanamo then Pakistan, has served as the
Taliban’s top diplomat as the head of its political office in
Doha.
He has also been a key
interlocutor in the protracted negotiations with the now-extinct
Kabul government and the expanded troika of Russia, China, the
US and Pakistan.
To call the
negotiations to form a new Afghan government fractious would be
a spectacular understatement. They have been managed, in
practice, by former president Hamid Karzai and ex-head of the
Reconciliation Council Abdullah Abdullah: a Pashtun and a Tajik
who have vast international experience.
Both Karzai and
Abdullah are shoo-ins to be part of the 12-member shura.
As the negotiations
seemed to advance, a frontal clash developed between the Taliban
political office in Doha and the Haqqani network regarding the
distribution of key government posts.
Add to it the role of
Mullah Yakoob, son of Mullah Omar, and the head of the powerful
Taliban military commission overseeing a massive network of
field commanders, among which he’s extremely well-respected.
Recently Yakoob had let
it leak that those “living in luxury in Doha” cannot dictate
terms to those involved in fighting on the ground. As if this
was not contentious enough, Yakoob also has serious problems
with the Haqqanis – who are now in charge of a key post:
security of Kabul via the so far ultra-diplomatic Khalil Haqqani.
Apart from the fact
that the Taliban amount to a complex collection of tribal and
regional warlords, the dissent illustrates the abyss between
what could roughly be explained as more Afghan
nationalist-centered and more Pakistani-centered factions.
In the latter case, the
key protagonists are the Haqqanis, who operate very close to
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
It’s a Sisyphean task,
to say the least, to create political legitimacy even in an
Afghanistan that is bound to be ruled by Afghans who rid the
nation of a foreign occupation.
Since 2002, both with
Karzai and then Ashraf Ghani, the regime in power for most
Afghans was regarded as an imposition by foreign occupiers
validated by dodgy elections.
In Afghanistan,
everything is about tribe, kin and clan. The Pashtuns are a vast
tribe with myriad subtribes that all adhere to the common
pashtunwali, a code of conduct that blends self-respect,
independence, justice, hospitality, love, forgiveness, revenge
and tolerance.
They will be in power
again, as during Taliban 1.0 from 1996 to 2001. The
Dari-speaking Tajiks, on the other hand, are non-tribal and form
the majority of urban residents of Kabul, Herat and
Mazar-i-Sharif.
Assuming it will
peacefully solve its internal Pashtun squabbles, a Taliban-led
government will necessarily need to conquer Tajik hearts and
minds among the nation’s traders, bureaucrats and educated
clergy.
Dari, derived from
Persian, has long been the language of government
administration, high culture and foreign relations in
Afghanistan. Now it will all be switched to Pashto again. This
is the schism the new government will have to bridge.
There are already
surprises on the horizon. The extremely well-connected Russian
ambassador in Kabul, Dmitry Zhirnov, revealed that he is
discussing the Panjshir stalemate with the Taliban.
Zhirnov noted that the
Taliban considered some of the demands of the Panjshiris as
“excessive” – as in they wanted too many seats in the government
and autonomy for some non-Pashtun provinces, Panjshir included.
It’s not far-fetched to
consider the widely-trusted Zhirnov could become a mediator not
only between Pashtuns and Panjshiris but even between opposed
Pashtun factions.
The delightful
historical irony will not be lost on those who remember the
1980s jihad of the unified mujahideen against the USSR.
Pepe Escobar
is correspondent-at-large at
Asia Times.
His latest book is
2030.
Follow him on
Facebook.
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