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| The leader of Haqqani network. |
Three Taliban commanders have been released today, on
Tuesday, by the Afghan government as part of a prisoner swap involving two
Western hostages. Reportedly, the militant leaders, including senior Taliban
leader Anas Haqqani, had landed in Qatar, which hosts the Taliban political
office.
In exchange, two university professors identified as US
citizen Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks were reportedly released later
on Tuesday. The pair had been held by the Taliban for three years. "The
two professors are safely freed and are being taken care of now," an Afghan
official told [1] Reuters news agency.
Kevin King and Timothy Weeks were kidnapped in August 2016
from outside the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul where both worked
as professors. They appeared in a hostage video a year later looking disheveled
and pleading with their governments to secure their release.
The developments come after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani
announced a week ago that Haqqani, whose elder brother is the deputy Taliban
leader and head of the Haqqani Network, a Taliban affiliate, and the two other
commanders would be freed.
Renewed efforts to end the country's 18-year conflict have
been stepped up recently, with US special representative for Afghanistan Zalmay
Khalilzad visiting Pakistan last month to meet the Taliban's top negotiator,
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close aide to the Taliban’s deceased leader
Mullah Omar.
Baradar was released
from captivity [2] in October last year by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies
and was allowed to join his family in Afghanistan. He was captured in a joint
US-Pakistan intelligence-based operation in the southern port city of Karachi
in 2010.
His release was a longstanding demand of the US-backed Kabul
government because he is regarded as a comparatively moderate Taliban leader
who could play a positive role in the peace process between the Afghan
government and the Taliban.
Alongside the issues of Taliban providing guarantees that it
would not allow Afghan soil to be used by transnational terrorists, al-Qaeda
and the Islamic State Khorasan, the Taliban holding direct negotiations with
the US-backed Afghan government – which the Taliban regards as an American
stooge and hence refuse to recognize – a permanent ceasefire and the formation
of a mutually acceptable interim government, a few other minor issues, such as
the exchange and release of prisoners, removing travel restrictions on the
Taliban leadership and unfreezing its bank accounts were on the agenda of the
peace talks, before Donald Trump abruptly ended the negotiations in September.
In announcing the cancellation of the peace talks with the
Taliban in September, Trump cited a Taliban attack in Kabul in which 12 people,
including a US soldier, were killed, though that was only an ostensible excuse
because the death toll of American soldiers in Afghanistan already stood at 2,372
in July 2018.
Fact of the matter is that the biggest stumbling block in
the peace talks has been the American deep state. The bureaucracy of the Pentagon,
the State Department and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, tried their
best to thwart the nuclear negotiations with North Korea and Trump’s Syria
withdrawal last year, and their subversive antics are hampering the Afghanistan
drawdown too.
Regarding the presence of transnational terrorist networks
on the Afghan soil, the al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has already been killed
in a May 2011 raid of the US Navy Seals in the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan
and its second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri is on the run. Besides, the number
of al-Qaeda’s Arab militants in the Af-Pak region does not exceed more than a
few hundred and are hence inconsequential.
Though the homegrown insurgent movements comprising ethnic
Pashtun militants, such as the Taliban and its breakaway factions, including
the Islamic State Khorasan, are a much larger menace. According to a recent
report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
(SIGAR), the US-backed Afghan government controls only half of Afghanistan’s
territory.
It’s worth noting, however, that SIGAR is a US-based
governmental agency that often inflates figures. Factually, the government’s
writ does not extend beyond a third of Afghanistan. In many cases, the Afghan
government controls district centers of provinces and outlying rural areas are
either controlled by the Taliban or are contested.
The so-called “Khorasan Province” of the Islamic State in
the Af-Pak region is nothing more than a coalition of several breakaway
factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits
that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s late chief Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi in order to enhance their prestige, and draw funds and followers,
but which doesn’t have any organizational and operational association with the
Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq.
The total strength of the Islamic State-Khorasan is
estimated to be between 3,000 to 5,000 fighters. By comparison, the strength of
the Taliban is estimated to be between 60,000 to 80,000 militants. The Islamic
State-Khorasan was formed as a merger between several breakaway factions of the
Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in early 2015. Later, the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan (IMU), a Pakistani terrorist group Jundullah and Chinese Uyghur
militants pledged allegiance to it.
In 2017, the Islamic State-Khorasan split into two factions.
One faction, based in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, is led by a
Pakistani militant commander Aslam Farooqi, and the other faction, based in the
northern provinces of Afghanistan, is led by a former Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan (IMU) commander Moawiya. The latter faction also includes Uzbek,
Tajik, Uyghur and Baloch militants.
If we take a cursory look at the insurgency in Afghanistan,
the Bush administration toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the
Northern Alliance in October 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack.
Since the beginning, however, Afghanistan was an area of lesser priority for
the Bush administration.
The number of US troops stationed in Afghanistan did not
exceed beyond 30,000 during George Bush’s tenure as president, and soon after
occupying Afghanistan, Washington invaded Iraq in March 2003 and American
resources and focus shifted to Iraq.
It was the Obama administration that made the Afghanistan
conflict the bedrock of its foreign policy in 2009 along with fulfilling
then-President Obama’s electoral pledge of withdrawing American forces from
Iraq in December 2011. At the height of the surge of the US troops in
Afghanistan in 2010, the American troops numbered around 100,000, with an
additional 40,000 troops from the rest of the international coalition, but they
still could not manage to have a lasting effect on the relentless Taliban
insurgency.
The Taliban are known to be diehard fighters who are adept
at hit-and-run guerrilla tactics and have a much better understanding of the
Afghan territory compared to foreigners. Even by their standards, however, the
Taliban insurgency seems to be on steroids during the last several years.
The Taliban have managed to overrun and hold vast swathes of
territory not only in the traditional Pashtun heartland of southern
Afghanistan, such as Helmand, but have also made significant inroads into the
northern provinces of Afghanistan which are the traditional strongholds of the
Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups.
In October 2016, for instance, the Taliban mounted brazen
attacks on the Gormach district of northwestern Faryab province, the Tirankot
district of Uruzgan province and briefly
captured [3] the district-center of the northern Kunduz province, before
they were repelled with the help of the US air power.
The main reason of the surge in the Taliban attacks during
the last several years appears to be the drawdown of the American troops which number
only 14,000, and the number has reportedly been further reduced by several
thousand even after the cancellation of the peace talks with the Taliban in
September, indicating impending resumption of the dialogue process as is
obvious from the release of Kevin King and Timothy Weeks on Tuesday.
Footnotes:
[1] Taliban commanders 'land in Qatar' as part of prisoner
swap move:
[2] Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Baradar released by
Pakistan:
[3] Concerted Taliban onslaughts on Kunduz, Faryab, Uruzgan,
Farah and Helmand:
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