There’s more than one way, as they say, to skin a cat. Having suffered a public humiliation of rare proportions with the Taliban conquest of Afghanistan in summer 2021, the United States is resorting to more distant but potentially more effective ways of weakening the Afghan emirate. Where a military occupation proved unable to build a stable Afghan state – the speed of whose collapse in the summer came as a shock even to its American suzerains – Washington’s diplomatic weight might help pressure Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in more diverse ways. Linked in large part to extraneous issues – including its worry of China’s possible influence and its longrunning alliance with India – the United States’ interest in Afghanistan remains, and with American military presence out even such rivals as Russia, Iran, and China are unwilling to commit to stick out their necks for a Taliban emirate facing multiple challenges.

The collapse of the fractious vassal regime that the United States had propped up for twenty years in Kabul gave lie to the longstanding but empty boast that Washington had supported an independent, patriotic Afghan government. Fond as it was of attacking its opposition as vassals of Pakistan, Iran, or whatever other convenient foreign enemy came to mind, the Afghan government of 2001-21 was installed, funded, militarily protected by, and heavily reliant on the longest foreign occupation anywhere in decades.

Not only was Afghan independence under such conditions an open contradiction, but it had tragic long-term repercussions – rendering the country overwhelmingly dependent on both foreign aid and the diplomatic largesse of the United States. As long as the United States, which began its occupation as the unipolar state in world affairs and continues to retain preeminent international clout, backed it, even the weakest and most pliant regime in Kabul could playact on the international stage as the legitimate voice of the Afghan people. Once a Kabul regime, however otherwise successful, fell foul of Washington – as the Taliban emirate clearly has, no less in 2021 than in 2001 – no government is willing to openly stick out their necks in its support. Thus  months after one of the most comprehensive ejections of a foreign occupation in living memory, the Taliban emirate is still flailing on the international stage to prove its legitimacy.

Regional challenges

This is not helped by the fact that few other states have any particular fondness for the Taliban. The friendliest of foreign governments, Pakistan, has always been constrained by both regional and domestic considerations; China is willing to cooperate if absolutely necessary with the Taliban movement largely to indulge Islamabad, but no more than conditionally.

India is implacably hostile for a sweeping array of reasons that have little strictly to do with Afghanistan – these include its regional hostility to Pakistan, its fascist government’s long-running suspicions of Muslims at large and politicized Muslims for whom the Taliban have long been caricatured as the worst representation, and its foreign alliances. Closely allied in the 1990s with Russia, and since the 2000s with the United States, India in both periods encouraged its allies’ hostility to the Taliban movement. A considerable amount of the outrage, a great bulk of it outright misinformation, on Afghanistan this last summer was generated by Indian state media and the ruling party’s online propaganda.

Nor are Iran and Russia, which derived considerable satisfaction from and latterly lent some support to the United States’ struggle in Afghanistan, likely to help the Taliban movement. It is not remembered enough that both Tehran and Moscow were in the 1990s along with New Delhi the major regional powers behind the Taliban’s opponents and their international isolation; indeed, the United States more or less usurped this alliance when it entered the Afghan fray in 2001.

Foreign ministers Sergei Lavrov of Russia and Javad Zarif of Iran are just two of the senior state officials who cut their teeth in the 1990s drumming up opposition to the Taliban. Russia militarily helped the Taliban’s opposition in the 1990s, while Iran did the same with the American invasion in 2001. Their unease with the American presence by the 2010s prompted a reversal of sorts – with Iran assisting the Taliban against a rival faction in western Afghanistan and Russia triggering diplomacy in 2018 – but this was very much a tactical policy aimed at getting the United States out. Once the Americans had left Afghanistan, Moscow and Tehran no longer had any common interest with the emirate.

While Taliban leaders spent much of the three years preceding their takeover in talks with other neighbouring states to varying extents – Uzbekistan has reciprocated politely, and its rival Tajikistan has not – there appears little alternative but to continue their long, often strained, but intact relation with Pakistan. This relationship survived the 2001 invasion – where, to Taliban indignation, Islamabad saw itself compelled to jump onto the American bandwagon but nonetheless turned a crucial blind eye to early Taliban operations and refuge in western Pakistan. If Pakistan had hedged its bets between the United States and the Taliban, the Afghan insurgents hedged their bets between Islamabad and militants nestling in northwest Pakistan – the largely Arab Al Qaida network, the Uzbekistani Harkatul-Jihad, and the burgeoning umbrella of local Pashtun clansmen and ideologues that became known, more than a little misleadingly, as the “Pakistani Taliban”.

The tension implicit in these balancing acts was often turned into diplomatic opportunity when, for instance, the Taliban – and particularly the Haqqanis of southeast Afghanistan – mediated on Islamabad’s behalf with the Pakistani insurgency, or when Islamabad in turn attempted to mediate between the Taliban and Washington. The upshot was that Pakistan and the Taliban were obliged to overlook irritants in mutual hostility to the American-installed Kabul government and such regional backers as India. This is an older and firmer relation than the contemporaneous Iranian-Russian flirtation with the Taliban movement, one that both actors continue to uphold – Pakistan because alternative Afghan factions in Kabul have proven repeatedly hostile or inept, and the Taliban because Islamabad offers a lifeline to the international community as well as potential economic and political support.

Cauldron on the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland

One sticking point is the bubbling cauldron on the border between eastern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan – areas where the Taliban movement and Islamabad had historically struggled to assert themselves and often only loosely outsourced control. This was the region where the “Pakistani Taliban” insurgency sprang up, where repeated dissidents against both Kabul and Islamabad have often sheltered, and where the Daesh provincial “Khurasan” wing has sprung up. Though there were local reasons for the insurgency, by the 2010s it had formed links with the American-backed Afghan intelligence eager to punish Islamabad for harbouring the Afghan Taliban insurgency.

Daesh appeared in 2014 just as the “Pakistani Taliban” umbrella was crumbling against both internal tensions and an army assault; consequently, many Pakistani insurgents flocked to its banner, which mainly focused on attacking the Afghan Taliban insurgency. In 2018-20, Taliban forces mounted a fierce assault against the Daesh wing, which was left in tatters; today, led by the shadowy Pakistani doctor Shihab Sadiq, it holds minimal territory and operates largely by sporadic terrorism.

However, the “Pakistani Taliban” remnants who had not joined Daesh, led by the wily Mahsud ideologist Nur Wali, now found themselves at an advantage. They bided away the Taliban war against Daesh to rebuild into a smaller, more compact group with a more concretely Waziristan-focused agenda – unlike the loose umbrella that had marked the earlier insurgency in Pakistan. Wali abstained from joining Daesh – thus giving himself leverage and goodwill with the Taliban in Afghanistan – but continues to oppose the Pakistan regime.

This is a potential source of conflict between the neighbours: Taliban-ruled Kabul does not share Islamabad’s serious opposition to the Waziristan insurgency, but for Pakistan Wali represents as implacable an enemy as Daesh leader Shihab does for the Taliban emirate. On the other hand there is little to suggest Taliban support for Wali outside his own claims; such claims were often shared by his predecessors, many of whom did end up joining Daesh.

If Islamabad benefits politically from a Taliban takeover, the emirate very clearly can do with Pakistani assistance on the economic front. The Afghan economy for twenty years was enormously dependent on foreign aid, and the withdrawal of such aid is a nightmare for an emirate whose economic record was shaky in the best circumstances. Russia and Iran have little use left for the Taliban, China is noncommittal, and India hostile. Whatever assurances Taliban leaders give, the United States – and much of the international community that continues to follow its initiative – is obviously keen, whatever the costs to the Afghan people, to squeeze if not break the emirate by economic and diplomatic means.

Such means might reach military lengths as well. Certainly Washington has no wish for another invasion, but a number of Afghan opposition leaders continue to enjoy widespread political support abroad; just this week saw the latest opposition coalition proposed. The pointedly demonstrative but shortlived resistance launched by Panjsheri veterans of the ancien regime in September 2021 aroused little interest in the remainder of Afghanistan; the Taliban were on a military roll, and the putative leaders of alternative coalitions – largely militia leaders, oligarchs, or vassals of the United States – attracted insufficient loyalty to put up a fight. But if the economical squeeze continues, that might change – and in a wartorn land whose shortages do not include weapons, another civil war is a possibilty.

Ibrahim Moiz is a Independent writer at Ayaan Institute