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LONDON: Nearly a year after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US forces, there is growing concern that the bankrupt, unstable and internationally isolated country may once again become a sanctuary for extremist groups. and could even become a launchpad for global terrorism.

The US withdrew from Afghanistan after reaching a volatile peace deal with the Taliban in August 2021, whose leaders promised never again to give asylum to extremist groups such as al-Qaeda who fought 9/11 from Afghan soil. attacks were planned.

The hope was that Afghanistan would not become the epicenter of international terrorism as it did in 2001, and that the conspiracy to carry out the horrors of 9/11 would never leave the country again.

But as with millions of Afghans in general, many South Asian observers were not convinced of the Taliban’s sincerity, believing instead that the country was being re-hijacked by a violent and insular radical group.

“I think Afghanistan has already become a hotbed of terrorism,” Ahmed Wali Masood, Afghanistan’s former ambassador to Britain, told Arab News.

“Already we can see many facets of terrorism, from al-Qaeda to Daesh. They are already living inside Afghanistan, they are being protected by the Taliban, they are being protected by the Taliban government inside Afghanistan.

Masood is the younger brother of Tajik guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Masood, regarded as Afghanistan’s national hero until the Taliban’s return to power last year.

“The US departure from Afghanistan was very unrealistic, very irresponsible, it was not coordinated well and the people of Afghanistan were ignored,” Ahmed Wali Massoud told Arab News.

“America has abandoned its allies, the people of Afghanistan, the security forces of Afghanistan, which they have helped for almost 20 years. He completely ignored them. They left him alone at the mercy of terrorism, Taliban, extremism.”

Today, Ahmed Wali Masood’s nephew, Ahmed Masood, leads the National Resistance Front against the Taliban in his native Panjshir, north of Kabul, where his father had opposed the Soviet Union and the Taliban decades earlier.

The recent fighting in Panjshir still does not represent a challenge to the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan, but it is the group’s most significant and sustained armed opposition since its return to power.

For Masood and others, the idea that, once in power, the Taliban would act less like an insurgent movement and more like a government for all Afghans, was not entirely grounded in reality.

Now political violence rages across the country, freedom of speech has been curtailed, and the rights of women and girls continue to be eroded, the mood of war-weary Afghans is one of deepening pessimism.

Responding to developments since last August, the US and global financial institutions have frozen Afghanistan’s assets, halted aid and loans, and called for the isolation of the Taliban regime.

As a result, the Afghan government is always on the verge of economic collapse and some parts of the country are reeling under famine. According to a UN-backed report released in May, nearly half the population – 20 million people – are experiencing acute hunger.

On Wednesday, the country faced a new humanitarian crisis when a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck the east of the country, killing more than 1,000 people and injuring 1,500 others. Most of the deaths occurred in Paktika, Khost and Nangarhar provinces.

Additionally, the Taliban finds itself grappling with a violent insurgency led by Daesh’s local suffrage, the Islamic State in Khorasan, or IS-K, which has repeatedly targeted members of minority communities, including Shias, Sikhs and Sufis, in recent months. repeatedly targeted.

A recently released UN report said IS-K has 1,500 to 4,000 fighters from Kunar, Nangarhar and possibly Nuristan provinces, “concentrated in remote areas”. Small, cryptic cells are located in the northern and northeastern provinces, including Badakhshan, Takhar, Jozhan, Kunduz and Faryab, according to the study.

According to scholars of political Islam, the Taliban is content with establishing an Islamic state within Afghanistan, while IS-K aims to create a single state for the entire Muslim world.

IS-K is trying to take advantage of differences within Taliban ranks over whether the group should embrace pragmatism or ideological correctness. Tensions have intensified in Afghanistan with the hodgepodge of organizations including Daesh, the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The Taliban’s dilemma as it tries to rule a country that has experienced 20 years of Western-led modernization, Kamran Bokhari predicted in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on August 27, 2021 Was.

“The Afghan Taliban must change, but cannot change without internal breakdown,” he wrote. “Such change … requires a long and tortuous process, and yet, change remains elusive.

“The risk of fracture is particularly acute when a movement has to abruptly change behavior for geopolitical reasons.”

On the one hand, the number of bombings across Afghanistan has declined since last August and Taliban 2.0 cannot be directly accused of sponsoring terrorism. On the other hand, the collapse of state power in some rural areas and the loss of Western Air support for anti-insurgency operations has been a blessing for extremist groups.

“Terrorist groups have benefited in many ways from the Taliban takeover,” Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program and senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center, told Arab News.

“It has fueled and activated an Islamic extremist network whose main goals are the expulsion of American troops from Muslim soil and the elimination of US-aligned governments. The takeover has also brought to power a group that has close ideological and operational links with a variety of extremist groups.

“This at least means that the Taliban will not seek to drive these groups out of Afghan territory, and in the case of one group it is targeting, IS-K, it has the discipline to act carefully and effectively. And there is a lack of capability. Anti-terrorism strategy.

“On a related note, the Taliban lacks the ability to operate air power, which was the main tool used by NATO forces and the Afghan military to manage the IS-K threat. In addition, the Taliban have a There is no ability to mitigate the acute economic crisis, and widespread privatization fosters a ripe environment for radicalization. This benefits IS-K.”

Since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the patience of the international community has flagged and attention has shifted to the war in Ukraine and the dangerous prospect of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO states.

Kugelman believes that terror threats emanating from Afghanistan were off the radar long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

“I would argue that the world was allowing the threat of terrorism in Afghanistan to escalate well before the Ukraine War, primarily as the US struggled to build up its ability to monitor and target terrorist threats in Afghanistan from outside the country, ‘ he told Arab News.

“This is no longer a major problem, given that the threat is not what it used to be. But if this neglect allows the threat of global terrorism in Afghanistan to slowly grow back and the US and its allies still have If there is no plan, then all bets are off and bigger problems could happen.”

Certainly, the situation in Afghanistan is still very different from the situation before 2001, when the entire al-Qaeda leadership was in the country with the guest of Mullah Omar, the founder and then leader of the Taliban, in the country.

Al-Qaeda and its then-leader Osama bin Laden were initially welcomed into Afghanistan by Mujahideen leader Abdul Rasool Sayyaf following bin Laden’s expulsion from Sudan.

In Afghanistan’s political and geographical isolation that the Taliban had inherited, al-Qaeda was able to independently plot its attacks against the US.

In April 2001, months before 9/11 and his own assassination at the hands of al-Qaeda operatives, Ahmed Shah Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, warning if the West continued to allow extremism. Then he will have to pay a heavy price. To thrive in Afghanistan.

Does that fatal speech have any relevance to the current state?

“While one should never be complacent, it is safe to say that the threat of global terrorism emanating from Afghanistan is not as serious today as Masood issued his warning in 2001,” Kugelman said.

“Al-Qaeda has become very vulnerable and the only other group in Afghanistan is a Daesh chapter with globally focused targets that currently cannot present a threat beyond the immediate region.

“That said, let’s be clear: With NATO forces from Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda-allied regime in power now, the ground for international terrorist groups to reorganize themselves is fertile in the medium term – and especially if we are in the new Let’s look at the flow of foreign fighters into Afghanistan who can shock the troops, weapons, money and tactical expertise for these groups.”

In exile in Europe, Ahmed Wali Massoud is convinced that the Trump and Biden administrations made a grave error in deciding whether to negotiate with the Taliban and withdraw from Afghanistan.

He believes that allowing the group to return to power will inevitably turn Afghanistan into a terror stronghold – a development that he is convinced, as warned by his brother, that he will not be able to trouble the West. Will come back for

“I think, by now, they must have realized after almost a year that they made a mistake, because now they know the Taliban is out of control,” Masood told Arab News.

“I think if the situation continues like this, they will pay a very high price. Of course, Afghanistan has already paid a very high price. But I’m pretty sure America will pay a very high price too.