Looking at the UN report on the Taliban regime

Which are the foreign terrorist groups flourishing on Afghan soil? What are the internal dynamics within the Taliban post its ascension to power?

The story so far: A new report from the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) says that foreign terrorist organisations continue to enjoy safe haven under the new Taliban regime. The report adds that due to financial constraints, and possibly under political pressure not to embarrass the Taliban internationally at this juncture, the terrorist groups are currently in consolidation mode and not likely to launch major attacks outside Afghanistan before 2023.

The monitoring team assists the UNSC sanctions committee. Its report, circulated among committee members, informs the formulation of UN strategy in Afghanistan. India is currently the chair of the sanctions committee, which comprises all the 15 UNSC members. This report — the 13th overall — is the first since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. The UN team could not visit Afghanistan for evidence-gathering. This is the first of its reports not informed by official Afghan briefings. Instead, the team relied on consultations with UN member states, international and regional organisations, private sector financial institutions, and the work of bodies such as the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

Two India-focussed terrorist groups, Jaish-i-Mohammed (JiM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), are reported to have training camps in Afghanistan. While the JiM “maintains eight training camps in Nangarhar, three of which are directly under Taliban control,” the LeT was “said to maintain three camps in Kunar and Nangarhar”. Both the groups enjoy close links with the Taliban leadership, with the LeT having a history of providing finance and training expertise to Taliban operations.

The report also says that the al-Qaeda in Indian Sub-continent (AQIS) has 180-400 fighters in Afghanistan. “Fighters included nationals from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Pakistan,” says the report. While AQIS capabilities were “assessed as still weakened from losses as a result of the October 2015 joint United States-Afghan raid in Kandahar’s Shorabak district”, the outfit has also been forced to adopt a “less aggressive posture” due to financial constraints. The report notes that the name change of the AQIS magazine from ‘Nawa-i-Afghan Jihad’ to ‘Nawa-e-Gazwah-e-Hind’ suggests a “refocussing of AQIS from Afghanistan to Kashmir”.

The foremost internal division in the Taliban is between the moderate and hardline blocs. While the moderate bloc) wants working relationships with foreign partners and integration with the international system, the hardliners (consisting of senior Taliban leaders centralised around Hibatullah Akhundzada) have a more ideological stance, with little interest in international relations. Independent of both these blocs is the Haqqani Network which, while more aligned with the hardliners, is inclined towards a pragmatic rather than ideological approach to securing Taliban interests. According to the report, under the command of Hibatullah, various Taliban factions are manoeuvring for advantage, with the Haqqani Network cornering most of the influential posts in the administration.

The report believes the Kandahari (Durrani) Taliban to be in the ascendancy among the Taliban leadership, with Pashtuns getting precedence over non-Pashtuns. Several key Tajik and Uzbek commanders in the north have been replaced with Pashtuns from the south, and these decisions have come against the backdrop of an “organised campaign by Pashtuns to dislodge ethnic Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek communities from rich agricultural land in the north”.

Internal cohesion within the Taliban was easier to maintain during the insurgency period, when there was a “compelling common cause to expel foreign forces from Afghanistan”, the report notes. But now that they are in power, “the Taliban’s core identity of a Pashtun nationalist cause dominated by southern Taliban has again come to the fore, generating tension and conflict with other ethnic groups.”