View From A Changed Perspective
"The Taliban became accustomed to fighting as insurgents, relying on a range of asymmetric attacks to target Afghan and .S. forces.""But it seems clear that the Taliban has not given much thought at all to how the equation changes as a counter-insurgent."Colin P. Clarke, analyst, Soufan Group, New York security firm
Sources: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, Uppsala Conflict Data Program
Now
that the Taliban in Afghanistan have speedily returned to the
administration of the country after its surprise ouster of the
West-supported government of the Republic of Afghanistan, now
transformed to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, they face the same
unforgiving dilemma that they had imposed on foreign troops stationed
for twenty years in the country attempting to haul it out of the dark
ages where Taliban Stage I had left it.
The
country's fragile economy has cratered, it did so as soon as the
Taliban retook power, when international aid suddenly dried up.
Countries and financial-aid groups that had formerly pledged aid to
Afghanistan withheld that aid until such time that they could assess the
direction of human rights under another Taliban administration. What
they have seen, despite Taliban promises to the contrary has not been
reassuring. The hard line Sharia-governing Taliban has reneged on its
initial placatory pledges.
Although
Western media is not invited to report from inside the country, there
are ample reports leaking out to the free world describing education
being once again withheld from girls and women. Girls in their early
teens are judged ripe for 'marriage'. The Taliban has been entering
homes with the intention of ordering young girls into marriage with
Talibs. Former government officials, members of the military and workers
have been hunted down in a violent reckoning. As have Afghan civilians
who worked with and for foreign embassies and troops.
But
as much as the Taliban trample human rights, and despite their
constant attacks and killings of Afghan police and military in the past
several years and in the months leading up to the American troop
withdrawal from the country along with other foreign nationals in
August, their mode of Islamist fundamentalism is too tepid and timid for
the group that established themselves in rural eastern Afghanistan,
Islamic State in Khorasan. ISIS has committed itself to continuing the
barbaric atrocities that distinguished its reign in Syria and Iraq.
The
Islamic State has now picked up where the Taliban left off, two months
ago when it became the ruling group in the country; no need any longer
to stage violent suicide attacks on government department buildings, or
targeting foreign embassies, or clinics and hospitals, since they now
administer the country and plan to establish good relations with their
neighbours, extended outward to charitably-funding foreign nations.
The
Islamic State-K violent rampages in Afghanistan have raised the level
of alert within the international community fearing its success in that
country will inevitably lead to once again inspiring
affiliates
abroad to mount new attacks in the West. In Kabul and other cities in
the north and the Taliban's southern heartland, Kandahar, suicide bombs
have proliferated. w\Within a period of several weeks alone, those
attacks have killed 90 people at minimum, wounding hundreds more.
Now
it is the Taliban feverishly trying to manage security to the
population of the country, and attempting to persuade the international
community it is committed to establishing law and order. For an
insurgency group that once set off bombs in crowded cities themselves,
the Taliban are now hard pressed to prevent those same bombs being
exploded by another terrorist group in the geography they now govern.
The
Taliban leadership has refused to cooperate in countering the Islamic
State, with the United States. Instead they are utilizing guerrilla
tactics in localized conflicts against a terrorist organization using
tactics very similar to those the Taliban itself maintained to gain its
advantage and finally realizing its goal. Its rival terrorist group
marginally more bloodthirsty is obviously just as determined to succeed
in its stab at conquest as was the Taliban, the terrorist group that
demonstrated it could overcome the support the elected Afghan government
was enjoying from a NATO coalition.
Jalalabad
has been the target of IS-K for several years, dispatching IS-K fighter
cells into the city from their haven in surrounding rural districts.
Between September 18 and October 28 Islamic State launched 54 attacks in
Afghanistan. Most of those assaults targeted Taliban security forces.
Previously the IS-K targets were fairly exclusively the civilian
population where minority groups of mostly Shiites were targeted for
attack and slaughter.
And
then, there is Pakistan. The Islamic State in Khorasan was established
in the east of Afghanistan in 2015 by the Pakistani Taliban. Where
Salafi Muslims of Sunni Islam live. Although Salafist Muslims are a
minority in Afghanistan, the majority Pashtun Taliban have tolerated
them although with suspicion, as fellow Sunni Muslims, fundamentalist
political Islamists, all.
"In every society if the economy is bad, people will do what they have to do to get by",
commented Faraidoon Momand, a local power broker in Jalalabad where the
failing economic situation drives recruitment for Islamic State and
Salafi fighters eagerly join Islamic State, planning to replace the
Taliban as too weak in Islam to properly govern Afghanistan.
The Islamic State in Afghanistan’s six-year fight against the Taliban is
now entering a new phase following America’s withdrawal. War on the Rocks |
Labels: Afghanistan, Conflict, Islamic State-Khorasan, Taliban, Terrorism
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