Dr. Stern is a research professor at Boston University and an author of “ISIS: The State of Terror.”
The New York Times
On New Year’s Day, a confused, disgruntled and indebted veteran drove into a crowd of joyful celebrants in New Orleans, killing 14 and injuring 35 more. The assailant said shortly before the attack that he had joined the Islamic State, the brutal terrorist movement that at one point controlled an area in the Middle East the size of Britain.
In its heyday, ISIS marketed itself as offering what one fighter called a “five-star jihad,” promising recruits a paradoxical mix of religious authenticity and material rewards, from free housing to a glamorous new identity to access to wives. At its height, it was the wealthiest terrorist organization in modern history.
Today, while the ISIS caliphate is gone, the group has cells and affiliates scattered across Africa, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Syria. It maintains an active online presence and is still a threat: With the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the authorities are concerned about a potential resurgence by ISIS there, while an offshoot in Afghanistan, ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for a significant attack last year in Russia and is believed to be behind another in Iran.
But the twisted heart of the utopia ISIS was trying to build, and all that it claimed to offer, no longer exists. So why would the group’s extreme ideology — rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims — appeal to a down-on-his-luck American veteran five years after the caliphate’s fall?
For 20 years, I’ve been studying Western recruits to domestic and transnational terrorist organizations. I’ve interviewed jihadis, white-nationalist terrorists and eco-terrorists to understand their motivations and to prevent future violence. In my view, the appeal of some of the most crucial elements that ISIS offered to vulnerable or confused Western recruits — doctrinal certainty, identity, redemption and revenge — is as strong as ever and will continue to resonate with people who can find it online.
Most of us, as adults, live in a state of spiritual confusion and uncertainty. We rarely get to choose between good and evil but often face a frustrating choice between actions that lead to marginally better or worse consequences. Rewards for good behavior are often ephemeral, and punishment for bad decisions is mostly of our own making.
To some, ISIS offered a seductive alternative: moral certitude, backed by brutal enforcement. From 2013 to 2019, an estimated 53,000 fighters from 80 countries traveled to ISIS-held territories in Syria and Iraq to be a part of what the group sold as an idealized Islamic state. An estimated 300 individuals from the United States either made their way to ISIS-held territory or tried to. Some foreign fighters became notorious for perpetrating the caliphate’s worst atrocities.
For sympathizers unable to make the journey, the chief spokesman for ISIS,’ Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, called for supporters around the world to attack nonbelievers at home. In a September 2014 speech, Mr. al-Adnani said that if you were unable to bomb or shoot the enemy disbeliever, you should “smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.” ISIS sympathizers began undertaking such vehicle attacks, including a truck assault in Nice, France, in 2016 that killed 86 people and injured 450. It was followed by many others.
In the last few hours before his suicidal rampage in New Orleans, the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, posted about his plans on Facebook. Perhaps the most telling recording was his confession that he had considered harming his family. “I don’t want you to think I spared you willingly,” he said. But Mr. Jabbar apparently worried that if he hurt only his family, news headlines might not focus on the “war between the believers and disbelievers” that he thought was taking place.
In my work, I have found that self-recruited, lone-actor terrorists are often motivated at least as much by personal grievance as their claimed ideals. In one recent study, many former violent extremists said that underlying social and emotional distress was as strong a factor in their radicalization as intellectual or religious adherence to extremist ideologies. Most reported having a history of mental health problems, such as depression, and suicidal ideation was common.
Obviously, most people experiencing a mental health crisis do not become lone-actor terrorists. But there is often so much distress in individuals carrying out attacks on their own that it is reasonable, in my view, to think of lone-actor terrorism as a crime of despair.
There is no single pathway into violent extremism, but many of the risk factors I’ve observed in my research seem to apply to Mr. Jabbar. He was a veteran who appeared to be having difficulty adjusting back to civilian life. He had been divorced for the third time. He had run-ins with the law. He may have been deeply distressed over his financial burdens. Revenge against his family — and a world that had disappointed him — appears to have been a significant part of his underlying motivation, with his allegiance to ISIS providing a perverse spiritual gloss.
The persistent appeal of ISIS in America was evident in a disturbing series of alleged plots in the last year alone: the arrest of an Afghan in Oklahoma accused of conspiring to commit an attack on Election Day; the arrest of an Arizona teenager accused of planning an attack on a Pride parade using a remote-controlled drone armed with explosives; the indictment of a Houston man on charges of attempting to provide material support to ISIS; and the arrest of an Idaho teenager accused of plotting to attack churches on behalf of ISIS. In December, the F.B.I., the National Counterterrorism Center and Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement that pro-ISIS messages were calling for attacks at large holiday gatherings, pointing out the previous use of vehicles to ram victims.
Years after its zenith, ISIS has demonstrated remarkable adaptability. As an organization, it may yet grow stronger. After its territorial defeat in 2019, stated U.S. military strategy shifted its focus from counterterrorism in the Middle East toward nation-state adversaries, notably China and Russia. But the underlying conditions that first enabled ISIS’ rise in the region persist: Weak states, unstable governments, large populations of underemployed youth, and religious and ethnic conflicts all continue to create fertile ground for extremism.
No single solution exists for preventing terrorist attacks. But actions can be taken to reduce their impact, as well as their frequency. For cases like New Orleans, prevention is critical.
Perpetrators of targeted violence often “leak” their intentions ahead of time to family, friends, social media and even to the authorities, creating the opportunity for communities to step in to help people who are at risk. One approach to preventing violence like the attack in New Orleans builds on public health models that aim to reduce the rates of suicide, domestic violence and drunken driving. For it to prevent terrorist attacks, the authorities have to educate the public about the importance of bystander reporting and “off ramps” from violent radicalization.
The New Orleans attack serves as a grim reminder that the ISIS digital caliphate is still able to transform personal crises into public tragedy. The alarming reality is that many other people remain vulnerable to similar paths of radicalization.
2024 was another busy year for AAN as we tried to make sense of developments in Afghanistan. Our 51 publications ranged from snapshots of daily life – the Helmand labourer who, with his wife, took in an impoverished widow and her children, or the female student coming home for the holidays for the first time since the fall of the Islamic Republic – to in-depth reports, such as the effect of Pakistan’s fencing of the Durand Line on cross-border communities, or the place of poetry in Islamic Emirate propaganda. We also have exciting plans for 2025. Here, AAN’sKate Clark looks back at 2024 – what we wrote and what you read – and introduces some of our research agenda for the coming year.
What we wrote in 2024
In 2024, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) pushed onwards with consolidating its rule over Afghanistan, with new rules governing the lives of its citizens, women and girls in particular, and efforts to manage the economy and improve relations with the neighbours. We followed all these trends, often taking a sideways look at developments. So, for example, we fleshed out a major report on the macro-economy with interviews with businessmen and women on how they were navigating what the World Bank called a “stagnant economy.” We used the IEA ministries’ own reporting on their work to delve into how the Emirate wants to be perceived. In a report on the hugely consequential subject of remittances, we ended with a look at the social ramifications of younger men from Loya Paktia earning such good wages in the Gulf that it gave them greater power within the family, helping drive progressive change. We looked at the Emirate’s limiting of employment for female teachers through the lens of one district in Badakhshan, poor and isolated Shughnan. Its decades-long export of male and female teachers and literacy to other districts and to provinces is now severely curtailed, with huge consequences for the district’s economy and the well-being of many of its women.
Part of what we hope to bring to any research on Afghanistan is context, including providing a ‘long view’. In 2024, we marked a hundred years since the Khost Rebellion, when Pashtun tribes and mullahs sought to overthrow Amir Amanullah in what became a bloody contest between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernisers’ that continues to this day. Our first publication of 2025 partly followed the same theme with a look at the PDPA, founded 60 years ago, and how that same contest of ideas spawned a decades-long armed conflict, which was internationalised by the Soviet invasion and Western and other support to the mujahedin.
In 2024, we surveyed the various accountability mechanisms which could give some satisfaction to the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity that all governments and armed opposition groups have perpetrated since the PDPA’s 1978 coup d’état. We also looked at the various international legal instruments women’s rights activists hope to deploy against the Emirate (for example, in this report).
Also notable in 2024, was the publication of an updated edition of the Afghanistan Analyst Bibliography, compiled by Christian Bleuer. This is an invaluable resource for those studying and researching contemporary Afghanistan, particularly the post-1979 period. It now covers some 8,000 titles.
What sort of reports were prominent in 2024?
Individual researchers at AAN generally focus on what interests them in the hope that this keeps our publications lively and fresh. At the same time, we try to cover a broad range of topics, aiming to cover eight thematic categories:
Culture and Context
Economy, Development and the Environment
International Engagement
Migration
Political Landscape
Regional Relations
Rights and Freedoms
War and Peace
As can be seen in the table below, which shows how many reports in 2024 fell into each of our eight categories, War and Peace – which topped the list in 2021, when two out of every five reports fell into this category, as did 14 of our 20 most-read reports that year – has quite fallen away as a topic. We published nothing in this category in 2024. Instead, reports about Rights and Freedoms and those tackling the Economy, Development and the Environment were at the fore.
Publications by Thematic Category
Rights and Freedoms
12
Economy, Development, Environment
10
Context and Culture
8
International Engagement
6
Migration
6
Political Landscape
5
Regional Relations
2
War and Peace
0
Resources (a bibliography of Afghanistan)
1
Dossier (of reports on international relations and aid)
1
Total
51
What you were reading in 2024
As to what you, our readers, were interested in, publications on women’s lives and possible international legal actions against the Emirate featured strongly in the list of AAN’s twenty most-read reports (see below). Also in our top-twenty were reports that delved into IEA thinking: ‘New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul’, by Sabawoon Samim from 2023, was again among the most-read reports. His interviews with five former fighters now living in the capital were a surprisingly positive read. They liked the modern facilities and cleanliness of the capital, its ethnic diversity and people’s devotion to Islam, but found office life dull. They longed for the freedom of the ‘jihad’.
Scrutiny of the Emirates’ international relations, including the various meetings and summits aimed at, but typically failing, to strengthen engagement, were widely read (for example here and here), as were some important reports on climate change, including a detailed and practical look at how to mitigate the risk of flooding. Publications from previous years have also proven evergreen: two reports on the cultural history of hashish in Afghanistan, on its production and consumption, both published in 2019, were in our top twenty, as were two reports from 2016 – on the origins of ISKP and the Afghan practice of ‘paying’ for wives.
As for readers of our reports in Dari and Pashto, a rare look at the portrayal of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks again topped that most-read list (English version: ‘From ‘Slavers’ to ‘Warlords’: Descriptions of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks in Western writing’), while a scholarly article on Afghanistan’s largest standing Buddhist stupa, at Topdara just north of Kabul, was popular with both Dari and English readers (again, see the list at the end of this report).
The year ahead
Readers wanting to better understand Taleban thinking will (hopefully) be pleased that we will be publishing a full translation of the Emirate’s 45,000-word-long Law to Promulgate Virtue and Prevent Vice (a basic translation was one of the twenty most-read publications in 2024), as well as a commentary by Islamic scholar John Butt. His 2023 report, the IEA’s Chief Justice’s theory of jurisprudence, about the key Emirate text (written in Arabic), Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance), was our seventh most-read publication last year. We also hope to publish a review of Taleban narratives about themselves, writings in Pashto about their fight with the foreign forces and Afghan army, their time in prisons and the impact of the insurgency on fighters’ families.
We will continue to carry out research on the lives of women and girls, including publishing a major report about what Afghan men think of IEA restrictions on women and a new dossier bringing together all our reports on women since July 2021. That 2021 dossier, published three weeks before the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, topped our 2024 list of most-read publications – interest in Afghan women is undoubtedly still strong, and we hope to keep exploring new developments. One current piece of research, for example, is on women’s inheritance rights, which are explicitly laid out in the Quran and promoted by the Emirate, but blocked by cultural norms which consider it shameful for a woman to ask for her rightful inheritance.
In 2025, as in 2024, it seems inevitable that reports falling into the categories of Economy, Development and the Environment, and International Engagement (or non-engagement) will feature in our attempt to make sense of Afghanistan. Global warming is increasingly endangering Afghan lives and livelihoods, while Afghanistan is shut out of much of the help available to mitigate the climate crisis for the poorest countries. At the same time, the level of international aid – so crucial to many families, as well as the macro-economy – is only likely to diminish further and to remain focussed on humanitarian needs. A new American president comes into office this month. Whether Donald Trump turns out to be active or indifferent to Afghanistan, there will be consequences – for good or ill. Analysis of internal dynamics, such as how the Emirate raises and spends revenue, will also remain crucial to understanding the impact of the Afghan government on its citizens’ lives.
However complex the subject, we will continue to try to present topics, at least partially, through the experiences of individuals, whether via the first-person accounts of The Daily Hustle series, or as integral elements of our longer, in-depth research. Watch out for forthcoming reports on blood feuds, mining, the Emirate’s ban on begging and how the lives of village mullahs have changed over recent decades.
Finally, at the start of January, we wish all our readers – and Afghanistan – a very happy 2025.
The Taliban uses the success of its men’s team as propaganda – cricket’s powerbrokers should pursue a collective boycott
“There’s all types of lines you can draw. We’ve drawn a line.” So explained Mike Baird, the chair of Cricket Australia, last month in explaining the governing body’s stance on playing against Afghanistan, the country that has just banned women from looking out of windows.
According to a new decree from the Taliban government, new buildings must not be constructed with windows through which women can be seen. Existing buildings with windows must be walled up or covered. “Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesperson for the government.
ECB urged to boycott Afghanistan game in Champions Trophy by UK politicians
At present Cricket Australia – in common with the England and Wales Cricket Board – are refusing to schedule bilateral series against Afghanistan out of concern for “the deterioration of basic human rights for women in Afghanistan”. But, confusingly, both countries are perfectly happy to play them in global competitions – Australia at last year’s Twenty20 World Cup, England at next month’s Champions Trophy.
Which, however you square it, is a weirdly precise place to draw your moral line. Our concern for the women and girls of Afghanistan apparently kicks in at 1.5 cricket matches. Two or more games in a single sitting: an unconscionable act of collusion in a murderous, misogynist, medieval death cult. Fewer than two: all right lads, crack on.
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At which point, we run into the equivocation and realpolitik of the cricketing establishment, arguing against a sporting boycott of Afghanistan on the grounds that it would extinguish the hope and joy generated by the men’s team over the past two decades, while achieving little tangible benefit.
“I don’t think it would make a jot of difference to the ruling party there to kick them out,” the outgoing International Cricket Council chair Greg Barclay said last month. Which, you have to say, is a pretty high bar to set for sporting activism. Fair enough, wave your banners. But until you’re actually capable of literally overthrowing the Taliban, then stop wasting our time.
We are warned not to punish the richly gifted men’s team for the sins of their government, as if the dignity and humanity of 20 million Afghan women were simply acceptable collateral damage against the wider backdrop of Rashid Khan’s availability for the next T20 World Cup. We are reminded that Afghanistan had little culture of women’s cricket before 2021 in any case, with the implication that – basically – the erasure of an entire international team is no great loss in the grander scheme of things.
To be blessed with this kind of benign adult wisdom! And yet, even to address this argument on its own terms is to subject it to greater strain than it can remotely handle. The very existence of the men’s team – pretty much the only representative side given official blessing – is evidence enough of its propaganda value.
High-ranking Taliban officials have posted photos with the team at official functions, called senior players to congratulate them after wins, allowed games to be shown on big screens in public parks to a grateful male-only audience. This is politics: how could it not be? Cricket is uniquely popular among the young Pashtun men who form the backbone of the Taliban’s appeal. This is the only reason the fun police have allowed it to continue: this team is now essentially a client outfit, a PR offensive, a form of cricketing diplomacy.
And of course the easy targets here are the empty shirts at the ECB, Cricket Australia and the ICC, trapped between two forms of countervailing cowardice. Cancelling a loss-making bilateral tour costs nothing. Boycotting a big tournament game has significant implications for broadcasters, sponsors and future commercial value.
But of course the ICC is basically an events management company now, a governing body that has largely given up on governance. The ECB and Cricket Australia are peripheral figures here, merely underlined by the response from the former’s chief executive, Richard Gould to calls for a full boycott. The centre of gravity in this issue, as with pretty much everything in cricket these days, is India. And so the relevant question here is less what “should” happen than: what is the realistic range of possibilities that Jay Shah, the new ICC chair and acolyte of Narendra Modi, will allow to happen?
Officially, the Modi government does not recognise the new Afghan regime. In reality, the past couple of years have seen a pragmatic rapprochement, in defiance of the cultural and religious divides between the two countries. Diplomatic ties were restored in June 2022. Meanwhile, the Afghan embassy in Delhi and its two consulates in Mumbai and Hyderabad are said to have passed quietly into the control of pro-Taliban officials.
Driven by an ever-present fear of Chinese influence, and encouraged by a slight frosting of relations with Pakistan, the Modi government has spotted an opportunity to build bridges. Naturally, cricket has played a prominent role in diplomatic ties: Afghanistan play their home matches in Greater Noida just outside Delhi, India invited them to play a white-ball series in January, and when Afghanistan reached the T20 World Cup semi-finals last summer they issued a statement thanking India for their “continuous help in capacity-building of the Afghan cricket team”.
And so, if India are overly perturbed by the disappearance of women’s rights under the Taliban, let’s just say it’s not immediately apparent. Afghan players continue to staff the Indian Premier League. Afghan men’s teams continue to be welcome to tour India, to use Indian facilities and draw on Indian expertise. The Afghan economy has collapsed since 2021 and is in desperate need of new trade partnerships. Anyone want to connect the dots here?
None of which is to argue against the power of the sporting boycott. But to focus on unilateral gesture at the expense of collective action is essentially to acquiesce to the status quo. To oppose the iron age misogyny of the Taliban must also be to oppose the structures of capitalist power that keep it in place, from the commercial cowardice of sporting administrators to the cynical collaboration of the Modi government. Too much? Too hard? Too radical? Then, like the factotums who run the game, you’ve also chosen to draw your line in an entirely pragmatic place.
Dignity and humanity of Afghan women must be worth more than game of cricket
Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA).
The Washington Post
January 6, 2025
Especially for girls, hope is difficult to come by. But it has not been extinguished.
This past December marked two years since women could attend college in Afghanistan. March will mark three years since girls could go to school past sixth grade. And only a few weeks ago, the Taliban barred women from studying to become midwives or nurses.
For a long time, Afghanistan was the country with the highest rate of maternal mortality. That’s no longer the case — that awful distinction is now held by South Sudan. But Afghanistan’s rate remains the highest of any nation outside Africa. And that’s only on the national level. Certain remote regions of Afghanistan see a maternal mortality rate that’s much higher than the national one, particularly regions such as Badakhshan in the northeast.
A few weeks ago, I talked to a 13-year-old girl in Badakhshan over Zoom.
She was telling me about her parents. Both are nurses. Her mother was no longer permitted to work in a clinic, but she could see patients at their home, and she saw many of them. These home visits inspired the girl.
“I want to be an OB/GYN,” she told me. “Women die here when they give birth. So many women die here. If I become a doctor, I can serve my people and I can change that.”
“If I don’t find a way to study, I’ll have a dark future here,” she said. “I’ll keep trying. Failure is a part of life. I have lots of plans. I will make them happen. I’m going to build a clinic in this village someday.”
“I want to study. I want to go to school. I’m living in a place that is two seasons under the snow,” she said. She’s right. Winters last a long time in Badakhshan.
Two days after the girl and I spoke, the Taliban issued their decree forbidding women to become nurses like the girl’s mother.
A different 13-year-old girl told me that she dreams of leaving Afghanistan to study. She said she sees many girls her age hoping to find some way out of their homeland, too, though via a different path. They are looking to find Afghan men living overseas to whom they can offer themselves as wives. Thirteen-year-old girls.
Some girls reach for the humor in anger. They bitterly mock the Taliban in private. One girl told me how proud she was to already be a graduate, which means she made it through sixth grade. What an accomplishment. And now a whole world of opportunity awaits.
Others keep working to get out despite the obstacles. One girl told me she was taking online classes to learn to code when she realized they wouldn’t help her get into any international university, as she still lacked some sort of widely accepted credential. Which is why she and a small group of her friends are working with a teacher online to get their GEDs, the U.S.-based high school certification.
I’ve spoken to girls who climb up on the roofs of their homes every day to get a usable cellular signal. One girl from the provinces would even climb into the hills so that she could be alone and speak freely.
As parents of older teens in the United States will know, it’s early decision and early action season for college acceptances. Recently, an Afghan high school student I had come to know, a girl enrolled outside of Afghanistan, invited me to virtually join her and her family on the morning she would learn whether she had been accepted to the college of her choice. There was a lot of excitement and plenty of nerves. The morning came and there I was online with this girl and her family who were dialing in from Badakhshan.
I saw her father, mother and siblings by the illumination of a solar-powered light. They were gathered near a sawdust-burning stove. There was a little girl there who looked quite young. I learned later that she’s 4, and she’s the student’s little sister. The sisters have seen each other in person only once ever.
We all watched as the student — their sister, their daughter — opened the message she’d received from the school she wanted so badly to attend.
Silence for a moment and then jubilation. She was laughing. We all were. I saw her father’s and her mother’s faces so clearly: They were crying. Happiness. Pride. She’d gotten in. She’d done it.
It’s easy to say there’s not much hope to be found in Afghanistan today. And there’s not. But hope is not extinct. It exists only in small bursts, in hidden places, under the snow. It exists in the relentless spirit of girls on winter rooftops. It exists in the faces of a father and mother in the Badakhshan cold, sitting by a sawdust stove, warmed and illuminated by a girl and a dream that she made real.
It’s rare and precious. But it exists.
A long time under the snow for the women of Afghanistan
For two decades, they were close allies. Why are relations between Pakistan and the Taliban so tense now?
When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed delivered a triumphant news conference at the Torkham crossing with Afghanistan.
He claimed that the Taliban’s swift ascendance to power would create “a new bloc” and the region would reach great global importance. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister at the time, equated the Taliban’s return to power with Afghans having “broken the shackles of slavery”.
For nearly 20 years, the Afghan Taliban fought a sophisticated and sustained revolt, confronted – at one point – by a United States-led coalition of more than 40 countries in Afghanistan. In that period, Taliban leaders and fighters found sanctuary inside Pakistan across the regions bordering Afghanistan. Taliban leaders also formed a presence in, and links with, major cities in Pakistan such as Quetta, Peshawar and later, Karachi.
Many Taliban leaders and many fighters are graduates of Pakistani Islamic religious schools, including the Darul Uloom Haqqania, where Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement, reportedly studied. In Pakistan, the Taliban found an ecosystem fostering organic relationships across the spectrum of Pakistani society, enabling the group to reorganise and initiate a lethal uprising that began around 2003. Without Pakistan’s support and sanctuary, the successful uprising by the Taliban would have been highly unlikely.
Given this background, what explains the recent deterioration of bilateral relations, with the Pakistani military conducting air strikes inside Afghanistan this week – only the latest evidence of the tensions between Islamabad and the Afghan Taliban?
Historical and current factors
Afghanistan has a complicated history with Pakistan. While Pakistan welcomed the Taliban in Kabul as a natural ally, the Taliban government is proving to be less cooperative than Pakistan had hoped, aligning itself with nationalist rhetoric to galvanise support from the wider Afghan society. Taliban leaders are also eager to transform from a fighter group to a government, ostensibly an ongoing endeavour, and forging relations beyond heavy reliance on Pakistan.
The Durand Line, a colonial-era boundary dividing the regions and communities between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, has never been formally recognised by any Afghan state after Pakistan’s establishment in 1947. The Durand Line is internationally recognised as a border between the two countries, and Pakistan has fenced it almost entirely. Yet, in Afghanistan, the Durand Line has become an emotive issue because it divides Pashtuns on the two sides of the border.
The Taliban government in the 1990s did not endorse the Durand Line, and the current Taliban regime is following its predecessors. In Pakistan, this is seen as a nuisance and a challenge to the doctrine of Pakistan’s ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan.
With the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan, the armed rebellion arena has seemingly shifted to Pakistan. There has been a significant spike in militant attacks on Pakistani security and police forces since 2022 – particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.
Most of the attacks are claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the so-called Pakistan Taliban. TTP and Afghan Taliban carved symbiotic relations for years, sharing sanctuary, tactics and resources, often in Waziristan and other Pakistani regions bordering Afghanistan.
Pakistan treated the Afghan Taliban as ‘friends’ after 2001, partly to weaken any sense of cross-border Pashtun nationalism and hoping to leverage its influence on the Taliban in developments within Afghanistan and in relations with the US. In 2011, Michael Mullen, the US military chief at the time, stated that the Haqqani Network – a key component of the Afghan Taliban – was a “veritable arm” of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency. Analysts predicted, as it was feared, that Pakistan’s support for the Taliban to seize power in Afghanistan would lead to a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ with Pakistani fighter groups and other violent nonstate actors feeling emboldened, not weakened, as a result.
The significance and implications of tensions
It is unlikely that the Taliban would accept any Pakistani demands for action against TTP leaders in Afghanistan’s border areas with Pakistan. Crucially, such action would disrupt the Taliban’s equilibrium with TTP and open space for other more extreme groups such as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). The Taliban leaders are deploying the same logic that Pakistan used for nearly two decades, dismissing demands by the former Afghan government and the US to curb Taliban activities inside its territories. Like Pakistan then, the Taliban now argue that the TTP is an internal Pakistani issue and that Islamabad must resolve its problems domestically.
The Pakistani army will most likely continue bombing the Afghan territory with impunity, faced only with minor international condemnation. There is a growing international precedence, unfortunately. Countries such as Israel conduct cross-border air strikes, claiming security threats. In addition, the Pakistani army, as the long-term guardian of security in the country, is under tremendous pressure to demonstrate tangible action in countering militancy and protecting the country’s infrastructure, including Chinese-invested economic projects in Balochistan. Attacking Afghan territory allows for political messaging to the Pakistani population to centre on an externally enabled ‘enemy’. It also insulates the state from engaging with the growing domestic demands for political and socioeconomic empowerment, especially by Pakistani Pashtuns.
Meanwhile, the Taliban government in Afghanistan lacks resources, an organised army and any meaningful international partnerships to push back against Pakistan’s assertiveness. In March 2024, a senior Taliban military leader stated that the US maintained control over Afghan airspace, explaining the occasional appearance of US drones in Afghan skies.
While the Taliban leaders have promised ‘retaliation’, it is unclear how they can do that against a militarily powerful neighbour that also happens to be their long-term strategic supporter. Pakistan also maintains other levers of influence against the Taliban: Most trade into landlocked Afghanistan flows through Pakistan, and Pakistan has hosted millions of Afghan refugees for decades.
However, Pakistan’s military action inside Afghanistan will fuel anti-Pakistani sentiments among the Afghan population and further alienate Pakistani Pashtuns. As the Afghan case demonstrates, insurgencies feed on societal resentment, deprivation and youth disillusionment.
Solutions require leaders to illustrate boldness to address long-term grievances. A reactionary show of force might make newsworthy momentary gestures, but achieving peace is usually an art of wisdom and patience. Ironically, Pakistan and Afghanistan offer workable pathways for regional economic integration, connecting Central Asia and South Asia regions. Sadly, the lack of political will and vision among leaders for a generation and the securitisation of bilateral relations have hindered prosperity for more than 300 million people in both countries.
Source: Al Jazeera
Analysis: Why have Pakistan’s ties with the Afghan Taliban turned frigid?
Mr. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012.
The New York Times
January 2, 2025
The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.
As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.
In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.
As our own agency winds down and we prepare to release our final report this year, we raise a fundamental and too rarely asked question: Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests, until, eventually, two presidents — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — concluded it was not.
The incoming Trump administration, Congress and the long-suffering American taxpayer must ask how this happened so that the United States can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones.
We should start with what “success” in Afghanistan was ever supposed to mean. I believe many Americans who worked there over the years wanted to not only achieve important U.S. strategic interests — such as eliminating a haven for terrorists — but also secure a better future for the Afghan people.
But a perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.
They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success. (The same, of course, is true in Washington, where unspent allocations are tantamount to failure, leading to budget cuts.) Accountability for how money was spent was poor. One general told us that he faced a challenge: How to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in just over a month? Returning the money was not an option. Another official we spoke to said he refused to cancel a multimillion-dollar building project that field commanders did not want, because the funding had to be spent. The building was never used.
As one former U.S. military adviser told my office, the entire system became a self-licking ice cream cone: More money was always being spent to justify previous spending. Old staff departed, new staff arrived with “better” ideas, and new iterations of the same old solutions were repeated, for years. At the same time, many of the problems the U.S. programs faced were simply beyond our control. The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban showed that the United States could not buy favorable Afghan perceptions of the country’s corrupt leaders and government, or of America’s intentions.
Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility.
Our final report will detail what many experts and senior government officials now say to us, with hindsight: that these entrenched, fundamental challenges doomed any real possibility of long-term success. Some argued that decisions made as early as 2002 — such as partnering with warlords and refusing to include the Taliban in discussions about Afghanistan’s future — set a course for inevitable failure. Others blamed poor interagency coordination, rampant Afghan corruption, ignorance of local culture and the distance between U.S. goals and Afghanistan’s realities.
There were key moments when American officials could have come clean. Before the United States began, in 2014, to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghans, a succession of U.S. generals and officials made optimistic claims that Afghan forces would be effective in fighting the Taliban, that corruption and human rights abuses were contained and that Afghan elections were democratic and fair — assessments that did not align with my agency’s reporting to Congress or basic reality. In 2013, one senior official even suggested that Afghanistan might prove to be the most successful reconstruction effort over the last quarter-century.
The fall of Kunduz in 2015 — which represented the first time since 2001 that the Taliban regained control of a major city — should have punctured the delusion that Afghan forces could hold their own. But building those forces had been the cornerstone of the U.S. reconstruction effort, whose success would pave the way for eventual U.S. withdrawal. The rosy narrative had to be maintained.
The reality was that Taliban fighters with Cold War-era rifles and dirt bikes often outperformed Afghan government forces with state-of-the-art equipment and backing from U.S. air power. The Taliban were religiously motivated to rid the country of foreign invaders and what they perceived as a puppet government installed by Washington. The members of the Afghan military — beset by low morale, chronic logistical problems and pervasive corruption — were often motivated solely by their salaries, though they, of course, also suffered hugely in the fight.
Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue. Just six days before the Afghan government collapsed, the Pentagon press secretary declared that Afghanistan had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, even though the special inspector general’s office had been warning for years that no one really knew how many soldiers and policemen were available, nor what their operational capabilities were. As early as 2015, I informed Congress that corrupt Afghan officials were listing “ghost” soldiers and police officers on rosters and pocketing the salaries.
Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.
Special interests are a big part of the problem. President Dwight Eisenhower once warned of the growing influence of a “military-industrial complex.” Today, there are multiple complexes: development and humanitarian assistance, anti-corruption and transparency, protection for women and marginalized people, and many others. These are all good and noble causes, to be sure. But when it came to Afghanistan, organizations under these umbrellas, whether because of altruism or more selfish motivations, contributed to the overly optimistic assessments of the situation to keep the funds flowing. Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.
That delusion continues today. According to data provided to my office by the Treasury Department, since 2021 the United States has funneled $3.3 billion to Afghanistan through public international organizations, mainly United Nations offices, for humanitarian purposes. Some of this money helps the Afghan people, and some goes to the Taliban. In response to a congressional request, my office reported this year that between the American withdrawal in August 2021 and this past May, U.S.-funded partners paid at least $10.9 million in taxes and fees to Taliban authorities. In July, we reported that two out of five State Department bureaus were unable to show that their contractors working in Afghanistan in 2022 had been vetted sufficiently to ensure their work was not benefiting terrorist organizations.
Today, most aid to Afghanistan and other war-torn countries flows through United Nations offices that my agency has identified as having weak oversight. If we are to continue providing taxpayer dollars to these organizations, it must be made conditional on U.S. oversight agencies having full access to their projects and records to make sure funding reaches the people it is intended to help.
In Afghanistan, the office of the special inspector general was often the only government agency reliably reporting on the situation on the ground, and we faced stiff opposition from officials in the Departments of Defense and State, USAID and the organizations that supported their programs. We were able to do our work only because Congress granted us the freedom to operate independently. Inspectors general for the military, State Department and USAID, however, do not enjoy such autonomy. If we are going to fix a broken system that puts bureaucrats and special interests ahead of taxpayers, the first step is to make all federal inspectors general as fully independent as my office has been.
Ultimately, however, if we do not address the incentives in our government that impede truth-telling, we will keep pursuing projects both at home and overseas that do not work, rewarding those who rationalize failure while reporting success, and burning untold billions of dollars. American taxpayers deserve better.
John F. Sopko has served as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012; he was appointed by President Barack Obama and served under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. He has been a prosecutor, congressional counsel, law partner and senior federal government adviser.
America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion
The leftist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) irrevocably altered the country’s trajectory with its coup d’état in 1978, setting off a chain of events that would have lasting repercussions. The debate surrounding the extent of the Soviet Union’s influence on the party prior to this, as well as Moscow’s desire to see its rise to power, continues to this day. What is clear, however, is that the PDPA’s takeover of power and the subsequent Soviet military intervention in December 1979 touched off a shift of seismic proportions not only in Afghanistan’s political landscape but also in the lives of ordinary Afghans. Along with Western support for the mujahedin who opposed the party, the PDPA internationalised Afghanistan’s internal conflicts over modernisation and governance that would last four decades, marking it as the last ‘hot war’ in the context of the Cold War. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig looks at the party’s history, drawing from earlier AAN reports, as well as adding details from lesser known sources.
On 1 January 1965, 27 men[1] (apparently there were no women present) established the Hezb-e Demokratik-e Khalq-e Afghanistan as it was called in Dari, or De Afghanistan de Khalqo Dimukratik Gund in Pashto (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in English) during a meeting in a modest house in Sher Shah Mena, in the Karte-e Chahar neighbourhood, just south of Kabul University’s sprawling campus.[2]
The PDPA was one of the groups that took advantage of the political opening that followed the adoption of a new constitution in 1963. This constitution had transformed Afghanistan from a semi-absolute into a more constitutional monarchy that included elements of parliamentarianism – although not for the first time.[3] In principle, the new constitution allowed the formation of political parties for the first time in Afghanistan’s history. However, the law on political parties, which was passed by parliament, was never ratified by King Muhammad Zaher Shah. This left the emerging parties, including the PDPA, in legal limbo – and led some of them – not only those on the left but also Islamists – to contemplate violent means of taking power.
When parliamentary elections were held in 1965, none of these parties could field candidates under their own names, although their political affiliations were widely recognised due to their increased public activism.
Most, if not all, of PDPA’s 27 founding members belonged to clandestine leftist study circles, or the so-called mahfels, most of which had sprung up in the early 1960s, with at least one mahfel dating back to 1956. There were 10 to 12 such circles in Kabul, with less than 70 members collectively, according to Tajik author Qozemsha Iskandarov.[4] Some of them counted military officers in their ranks, a fact that would prove to be significant in later coups.
Several of these circles aligned themselves with Marxism-Leninism, choosing the Soviet Union as their ideological guide. Some had more social democratic, non-revolutionary outlooks. There were also Maoist groups inspired by the People’s Republic of China, which were known locally as Sholayi, a nod to their publication Sho’la-ye Jawed (Eternal Flame), but they generally maintained their distance from the other groups.[5]
Among the reported PDPA founding members, only two came from the working class, as noted by Iskandarov – Muhammad Alam Kargar and Mulla [sic] Muhammad Isa Kargar – neither was elected to the party’s Central Committee, which was comprised of seven full and four alternate members – mainly of intellectuals, often school or university teachers. There were also several students present at the PDPA founding congress, according to one of the author’s sources, but the source could not remember whether they were ‘guests’ or party members.[6]
The host of the party’s founding congress, Nur Muhammad Tarakay,[7] was elected as the party’s leader. Born into a poor Pashtun family in 1917 in the Muqur district of Ghazni province, Tarakay was a schoolteacher with a background in social activism, mainly in rural Afghanistan. Babrak Karmal, a former student protest leader and son of a lieutenant general in the Afghan Army with ties to a branch of the monarchy and who was 12 years younger than Tarakay, was seated as his deputy. Both men would later become head of state, the latter directly instated by Soviet troops (more on this later).
From the outset, the party had ambitious goals. It published its first party programme in its short-lived newspaper, Khalq(The People), in 1966. The programme defined its primary political aim as the “establishment of a national democratic government” composed of “the national progressive democratic and patriotic forces, ie the working class, peasants and the national bourgeoisie.”[8] It clearly saw itself as part of, if not leading, this government. In Marxist-Leninist theory, a ’national democratic’ revolution constituted the first ‘stage theory’ of revolutionary change toward socialism. This was underscored by Tarakay when he described the PDPA as “the Party of workers and peasants,” representing “95 per cent” of the Afghan population, in his inaugural speech at the Party’s founding congress.[9]
While the PDPA avoided using Marxist-Leninist terminology in public and did not call itself Marxist or communist, there was little doubt about the party’s driving ideology internally. As Tarakay, in his 1965 speech at the congress, alluded: “Our party is the party of the working class … [it] struggles in conformance with the epoch-making ideology of the workers.” Furthermore, the PDPA defined itself in its 1966 programme as being part of the “struggle between world socialism and world imperialism, which was started by the [1917] Great Socialist October Revolution” in Russia.
At the time, none of the founders could have imagined that, 13 years later, the PDPA would be in power, shaking Afghanistan’s political and social foundations. While the 1978 coup d’état that brought the PDPA to power was not the first successful coup in Afghanistan’s history, it is the one that plunged the country into turmoil, setting into motion a series of events that reshaped Afghanistan’s future and fashioned its relations with the rest of the world for decades to come.
The PDPA’s early years – two factions and two coups
The PDPA did not arrive out of the blue on Afghanistan’s political landscape. The 1963 constitution opened the way for various political groups across the spectrum to engage in public activities, ranging from pro-royalist to leftist movements and from Islamists to ethno-nationalists. The rapid growth of the educated class resulted in profound changes in Afghanistan’s social fabric, which in turn resulted from Amanullah’s reforms in the 1920s. These reforms, which were not adequately embedded due to the stagnating, corrupt state bureaucracy that dominated until 1964 by the extended royal clan, led to the country’s educated youth turning into a fertile recruitment ground for political activism.
Some of these groups, particularly those on the left, saw themselves in the tradition of earlier modernists and reformists. The PDPA later referred to Afghanistan reclaiming its full independence under Amanullah in 1919 as the beginning of the struggle for the country’s “dispossessed and downtrodden” against “despotism and reactionary forces.” The elder statesman among those activists was historian Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghobar, a former official in Amir Amanullah’s government. Tarakay and Karmal were activists in the Wesh Zalmian/Jawanan-e Bedar (Awakened Youth) movement, which was active during a brief period of guarded political liberalisation during the premiership of Shah Mahmud Khanbetween 1947 and 1952.
The Wesh Zalmian movement had been motivated by the country’s “poverty and backwardness.” These two terms came up again in the 1966 PDPA party programme, where they were attributed to the “feudal system” the party vowed to abolish.[10] Poverty and backwardness were the two major domestic factors underpinning the mobilisation of reformist political groups (see also AAN’s report How It All Began: A short look at the pre-1979 origins of Afghanistan’s conflict).
A few years after the Wesh Zalmiyan movement was suppressed, the reformists who had not been incarcerated began to cautiously regroup. An “initial nucleus” emerged in 1963 from the mahfels, which soughtto set up a broad-based United National Front of Afghanistan, Lyakhovsky noted. In addition, Iskandarov writes of a meeting that took place on 17 Sunbula 1342 (8 September 1963) in the house of writer R.M. Herawi,[11] with the participation of Tarakay, Karmal, Mir Akbar Khaibar, Taher Badakhshi, Karim Misaq, Muhammad Seddiq Ruhi, Ali Muhammad Zahma and Ghobar. This meeting, he writes, resulted in the establishment of a provisional committee (komita-ye sarparast) for the Front. At this time, there was also contact with the social democrats led by historian Mir Muhammad Seddiq Farhang and Hadi Mahmudi’s Maoist group, he notes.[12]
Ultimately, the Front fell victim to “the differences between Karmal and Ghubar about political and organisational matters,” according to Iskandarov. Ghobar wanted to continue to act within the framework of the new constitution and the constitutional monarchy, and feared a party that would base itself on openly “communist ideology” (as Karmal seemed to prefer) would soon face “terror” from the government’s side, he wrote. This position seemed to have been shared by the social democrats, who dropped out of discussions, while the Maoists remained.[13]
When the Front failed, a narrower, more revolutionary-minded group, including Tarakay, Karmal, Khaibar, Badakhshi and the Maoists, came together to establish the PDPA, but the latter two soon dropped out – the Maoists left the group during the congress and Badakhshi, who prioritised the ‘national [ethnic] question’, above the PDPA’s class question, as being the main fault line in Afghanistan also left and went on to establish his own organisation, Settam-e Melli ([Against]National Oppression), in 1968.[14]
The PDPA’s unity proved to be fragile, and in 1967, only two years after it came into existence, the party split into two main factions – Khalq (The People) and Parcham (The Banner) – named after the party’s short-lived newspapers.[15] Analysts attribute the split to either ethnic factors, suggesting that Khalq was dominated by Pashtuns, while the Parchamis were mainly Tajiks or Farsi/Dari speakers; or to tactical or personal differences between the leaders of both factions. In reality, it was a combination of all three, with the ‘ethnic’ factor being more of a social one. Notably, many Parcham leaders (such as Karmal and later Najibullah) were Pashtuns, too.[16] But they belonged to a more urban milieu, some even with links to the regime, both the monarchy and later to Daud’s republic (1973-78). The teacher-dominated Khalq, in contrast, was based in a more rural milieu.[17]
PDPA members, including Babrak Karmal, Mir Akbar Khaibar and Suleiman Layeq, stood before a banner bearing the names of both PDPA factions, Parcham and Khaq. Source: Afghanwrites via Wikimedia Commons
Both Parcham and Khalq separately infiltrated the military and built clandestine networks. Initially, Parcham proved to be more successful, with officers linked to it playing key roles in Afghanistan’s first military coup, led by Sardar (Prince) Muhammad Daud, who belonged to the monarchy and served as prime minister from 1953 to 1963. During his decade-long premiership, Daud initiated vast modernisation programmes, but his political ambitions were disrupted by the 1963 constitution, which excluded members of the royal family from holding political positions. By 1973, the monarchy had manoeuvred itself into a legitimacy crisis because of its inadequate response to the drought of 1969–72, the country’s first large-scale environmental crisis. The Daud-led coup succeeded without much resistance from the armed forces or the public.
Daud, however, sidelined his erstwhile Parchami allies in 1975 and 1976,[18] and the PDPA set out to remove him from power through their surviving networks in the military. In 1977, prompted by the Soviet Union and with mediation by the Iraqi and Indian communist parties and leaders of the leftist, mainly Pashtun, National Awami Party (NAP) in Pakistan,[19] Parcham and Khalq formally reunited (although their military networks remained separate).
These military networks played a decisive role when, on 17 April 1978, Mir Akbar Khaibar, Parcham’s main ideologue and a military officer himself, was assassinated.[20] The question of who Khaibar’s assassins were is hotly debated to this day. Some claim it was Daud’s intelligence services, while others point to Amin himself, who, they argue, hit two birds with one stone: getting rid of an influential, popular rival and taking over both factions’ PDPA military apparatus.[21]
The party was able to mobilise large crowds for his funeral procession, which turned into powerful protests. Daud’s regime cracked down, arresting almost the entire PDPA leadership. Only one leader, the leader of Khalq’s military wing, Hafizullah Amin, would initially escape. This gave Amin time, according to the Party’s account, to trigger the 7 Saur 1357 (27 April 1978) coup d’état, with support from a group of young PDPA-aligned military officers, some of them trained in the Soviet Union, who had also been involved in Daud’s 1973 coup.[22]
Frontpage of Kabul Now newspaper after the 1978 Saur Revolution. Source: Thomas Ruttig’s archive
Although the 1978 military coup was not triggered, or accompanied, by a popular uprising, the PDPA dubbed it the ‘Saur Revolution’, so named after the month in the Persian solar calendar in which it occurred. On 27 April, troops based at Kabul International Airport started an assault on the city, including an air raid on the Presidential palace (Arg), seizing control of state institutions and communication infrastructure. Daoud was executed the next day along with most of his family. Two days after the coup, the ruling Revolutionary Military Council handed power over to Tarakay and the PDPA, who established a civilian government. Tarakay called the coup a shortcut to “the people of Afghanistan’s destiny,” circumventing the ‘national-democratic’ stage and going directly to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ under the leadership of its party to which the PDPA claimed to be.
This was echoed in the lyrics of the national anthem written by Suleiman Layeq, who had himself had several tenures in the PDPA leadership, even though he had been repeatedly sidelined. Verse 2 of the anthem, which was in use in use from 1978 to 1992, reads:
The military takeover initially succeeded without much resistance from the armed forces and with little bloodshed. In fact, there had been some public outpouring of support, at least in Kabul. (The PDPA, on occasion, had proven capable of mobilising public rallies, for example, at the annual 1 May Labour Day.)
Encouraged by this, the PDPA established a one-party state, imitating the countries of the Soviet bloc, dropping its rhetorical commitment to a ‘broad front of all progressive forces.’ It embarked on a radical reforms programme to abolish feudalism, including land reform, the cancellation of debt, equal rights for women and coeducation. It began to use Marxist terminology more openly and replaced the country’s tricolour flag with the red flag of its party. At Kabul International Airport, a signboard greeted visitors with the slogan: “Welcome to the country of the second model revolution” (only preceded by Lenin’s 1917 October Revolution in Russia), proclaiming the PDPA government nothing less than the model for revolutionary change in the Third World.
All this was deemed as ‘anti-Islamic’ in parts of the still overly religiously conservative population, leading to – apparently – at first spontaneous local uprisings, when revolutionary cadres suppressed resistance against the practical implementation of reform measures with violent means. Cadres, often teachers, were killed by rebels, and schools burned down. It is difficult to gauge who started the violence, but it quickly escalated and the regime carried out mass repressions.
A new outbreak of factionalism fuelled the PDPA leadership’s paranoia. The Khalqis accused the Parchamis of plotting against them in the summer of 1978. By November that year, their most important leaders had either been imprisoned or sent abroad as ambassadors (most of whom quickly abandoned their positions to go into exile). Some were arrested and put in Kabul’s Pul-e Charkhi prison, and some were sentenced to death. The PDPA officially declared five political groups as enemies: Parchamis, the Islamists, the Maoists and Settamis, the Pashtun ethno-nationalists of the Afghan Mellat party and independent intellectuals. Many people who belonged to those categories – or were perceived to do so – were arrested, killed or ‘disappeared’, sometimes with their whole families. Torture and massacres of civilians in rebel areas were widespread. All the former elites – mullahs, landlords, and intellectuals – became targets. Even school children were killed and arrested when they participated in, or even watched, street protests.
Photographs of some of the 5,000 victims forcibly disappeared by the PDPA government placed close to Pul-e Charkhi prison in Kabul where many mass graves have been discovered. Photo: Maina Abbasi, December 2016
Some PDPA cadres seemed to have been inspired by the Khmer Rouge (or Stalin) playbook, trying to physically ‘eliminate’ the ‘oppressor class.’ An elder from Uruzgan province related to the author in 2008 how local PDPA cadres invited local tribal elders to a jirga to discuss matters, arrested and tied them up with ropes, and flew them out by helicopter, never to return (read more about in this AAN report by AAN guest author, Patricia Gossman).
Splits also emerged among the Khalqis, driven by Hafizullah Amin, who had not been among the PDPA founders but had cultivated a close relationship with Tarakay after returning from studies in the US. After the April coup, he became deputy party leader and deputy prime minister. In mid-September 1979, Amin sidelined Tarakay and took over as the head of the party and the state. He had Tarakay assassinated three weeks later, on 8 October. Whether this was about political differences or pure ambition for power is unclear. Initially, Amin accused Tarakay of being responsible for the mass arrests and murders, but the repression only increased under Amin’s rule and the resistance spread and coalesced into various factions of the mujahedin. The Islamists were able to secure more and more funding and arms from the West, Arab countries, Pakistan, Iran and China, while the secular factions were sidelined. Whole army units and garrisons mutinied and joined the rebels.
In the context of the ongoing Cold War, which had reached a peak in the 1970s with the US defeat in Vietnam, the success or at least progress of liberation movements and leftist coups in Africa, the Middle East and Central America (the Soviet Union even tried to embrace the ‘anti-imperialist’ Islamic revolution in Iran), Afghanistan’s internal conflicts, which were basically about modernisation, were internationalised. For more than four decades now, Afghans have endured repeated cycles of internal conflict and war.
The Soviet invasion
Over the Christmas period in 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, apparently to rescue the troubled PDPA government. It was ‘rescued’ (for another 13 years) and was significantly altered in the process. The Soviets overthrew and killed Amin on 27 December. They installed the Parcham faction in his place as part of an alliance with some former Khalqi officers that Amin had sidelined, with Karmal as head of party and state.
The Soviet Union, although initially wary of the notoriously divided PDPA, had nevertheless become its key backer. It usually only recognised one communist party per country, and bilateral party relations remained low-key. Several analysts have suggested that while Moscow was ready to live with the Daud regime despite some bilateral hiccups, the PDPA presented the Soviets with a fait accompli when it took power in the 1978 coup. Moscow did not want to see its allies fail. Additionally, then-party leader Leonid Brezhnev had apparently developed personal sympathies for Tarakay. When Amin had him killed, the Soviets’ patience with Amin, who had also proven himself a turbulent ally – with rumours that he was about to make a deal with the militant Islamist opposition and Pakistan, his possible CIA links and his outreach to the US embassy in Kabul – ran out.
Nur Muhammad Tarakay meets with Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in 1978. Source: Janet Geissmann via Pintrest
The Soviet leadership believed Parcham to be closer to their own interests, less radical and possibly – with Moscow’s support – capable of ensuring that instability could be contained at the USSR’s southern border. As it turned out, Soviet troops did not leave after a short time, as had apparently been the initial plan, rather they remained and were increasingly actively drawn into counter-insurgency operations, contributing to the further escalation of fighting and further internationalisation of Afghanistan’s internal woes, with Western, Arab, Pakistani, Iranian and Chinese support for the insurgents, and drawing in thousands of foreign jihadists who established a worldwide movement active to this day.
Initially, in the last days of 1979 and the first ones of 1980, there were jubilant scenes – reminiscent of what we have recently been able to observe in Syria – when the new government opened prison doors and thousands of incarcerated enemies, real or imagined, of the previously ruling Khalq faction were set free (the government-controlled media of the time reported that 15,000 people had been released).[23]
After the Soviet invasion, the Parchamis reciprocated internal purges of the party that the Khalqis had carried out. They even executed Tarakay and Amin’s alleged killers, whom they claimed had been sentenced to death by a military court. (In fact, Amin was shot dead by Soviet special forces.)[24]In contrast, most Parchami leaders had survived jail under the Khalqis. This perpetuated the split between the two factions.
Soviet support and troops, initially moving in for only a short mission, were unable to quell the resistance and became increasingly involved in their own version of ‘mission creep’, taking over more and more fighting and governance functions. The intelligence state, with sham trials and executions, became more systemic. Both Soviet and Afghan government forces carried out indiscriminate bombings in the countryside, resulting in mass casualties and forced displacement of five million Afghans to Iran and Pakistan. Soviet troops stayed for ten years. The mujahedin did not shy away from using the most egregious forms of violence against civilians who sided with the regime.
Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Najibullah: withdrawal
By the mid-1980s, the Soviet leadership – particularly under Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-91) – realised they were fighting an unwinnable war. The country’s involvement in Afghanistan had impacted the ailing Soviet economy and stood in the way of disarmament and its détente with the West. Then-Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, called the Soviet war in Afghanistan a “festering wound.”
Gorbachev replaced Karmal with Najibullah as Afghanistan’s head of state and party, and in 1985 and 1986, compelled him to introduce his own versions of perestroika and glasnost.[25] The overarching aim was to put the Kabul regime on its own feet economically and militarily, withdraw Soviet troops and cut costs at home. Attempts were made to end the war through negotiations with the mujahedin under the title of siasat-e ashti-ye melli (policy of national reconciliation). Among other measures, in 1990, Najibullah renamed the PDPA Hezb-e Watan (Homeland Party), dropped most of the party’s leftist symbols and politics and established a half-baked multi-party system and (still heavily manipulated) elections (see AAN’s backgrounder). According to Najibullah, it had been “a historic mistake” to come under “a specific ideology.” In its new programme, Hezb-e Watancommitted itself to a “democracy based on a multi-party system.” However, almost all the PDPA leadership was transferred to the new party.
It proved to be too little too late. Aside from splinter groups that had emerged, the mujahedin spurned the talks, preferring not to talk about sharing power with the PDPA but instead opting for an all-out victory.
Najibullah‘s government held out against the mujahedin for another three years after the last Soviet troops withdrew in February 1989. Its downfall came only in 1992 when Yeltsin cut the Soviet Union’s funding and various pro-PDPA militia leaders switched sides to the emerging winners. A Parcham sub-faction toppled Najibullah (himself a Parchami) and handed power over to the mujahedin, who would enter Kabul and take the reins without a fight.
These were not the last words on the PDPA, though. At various times thereafter, there were attempts to revive it by reuniting the diverse parties and factions founded by former members of the disintegrated PDPA/Watan Party in the country or in exile. None of them succeeded, leading to further splits between former Parchamis and Khalqis, between Tarakists and Aminists (who say he was a real patriot because he opposed the Soviets – after all, he was killed by them), between Karmalists and Najibists, the former saying that ‘national reconciliation’ was a betrayal of the ‘revolution’ and the latter insisting that it was the only way to peace. At times, there were at least 25 registered parties – and even more unregistered ones – that went back to PDPA’s origins. The name PDPA itself was never used again, although there was an attempt in the early 2000s to establish a party with a name close to the original one, which was prevented by the Ministry of Justice’s party registration office, saying the ban dating back to the mujahedin times was still valid.
To this day, even though all parties are banned in Afghanistan itself, various groups with roots in or affinity with the PDPA remain active among the diaspora.[26]
The ‘Sovietisation’ of Afghanistan
There is an ongoing, albeit diminishing, debate surrounding the alleged ‘Sovietisation’ of Afghanistan and who the driving force behind it was: the Soviets or the PDPA?
A particular point of view here is the reluctance on the part of the Soviets to engage with the divided PDPA prior to 1978. Sources indicate there were varying approaches among the Soviet intelligence services (KGB, GPU), the party, and various ministries. It is also possible that certain officials acted on their initiative in the Afghan hinterlands that did not seem to be a political priority in Moscow – or that the CPSU or certain Soviet intelligence services used them tactically to maintain a degree of ‘plausible deniability.’
During the Cold War, however, many Western authors broadly agreed that the USSR – after its military invasion in late 1979 – intended to ‘sovietise’ the Afghan regime and incorporate it into its worldwide system. One of them, Anthony Arnold, even considered that “by the close of 1979, the PDPA no longer ruled Afghanistan; the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] did.”[27] Indeed, the Soviet party leadership had established a powerful Afghan task force on the level of its Polit Bureau in October 1979, and had dramatically increased its number of military and civilian advisors.
Artemy Kalinovsky, Professor of Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies and author of a number of books on Soviet engagement in Afghanistan, argued that Soviet advisors tried to caution Afghan party leaders against their revolutionary fervour. This Soviet exercise in nation-building “had little to do with the desire to spread communism [but was rather] … motivated by a desire to stop the deteriorating situation” in Afghanistan and prevent it from aligning itself with the US, he said. It was, he noted, “composed of ‘off the shelf’ components, not a master plan … founded on [Soviet/Marxist] ideas but improvised in practice.”[28]
Clearly, there were ideologues among the Soviets who dreamt of a worldwide victory of socialism. In their view, Afghanistan would be part of this. Others were sceptical about Afghanistan marching toward socialism under the PDPA. They often quoted Lenin, who had warned against exporting it to a southern neighbour. Initially, therefore, there was little Soviet enthusiasm about the PDPA, but after the party’s takeover, the Soviets thought they had to live with the situation. The mood swung when Amin came to power, and the leadership in Moscow made the fateful decision to intervene directly. When mission creep, caused by the lack of Afghan capacity or by corruption, had them take on more and more responsibility, all they knew was how to look at Afghanistan through a lens of ‘Soviet’ Central Asia. Methods employed there, such as coeducation or the unveiling of women, were copied in Afghanistan. (Although the PDPA, taking a page from the Soviet book, had started this before the invasion.)
At the same time, the PDPA had built its own party based on the Soviet model, a hierarchically led mass membership party that, when in power, took over and even largely replaced the structures of the state, including the armed forces. (By 1983, 60 per cent or more of all PDPA members served in the army and police.) When in trouble with the resistance, the PDPA realised it was fully dependent on Soviet support, financially and militarily – and was, therefore, interested in presenting itself as a good student of Marxism-Leninism.[29] When the Soviets stepped in, a ‘Soviet’ framework was already in place and they were left with little choice but to follow its logic.
Many in the PDPA, at the same time, tacitly derided the Soviets, who took over more of the decision-making than they probably expected. They tried to manipulate them for opportunistic reasons, power or pure survival – or even undermined them actively, secretly cooperating with the mujahedin.
Despite the omnipresence of Soviet advisors – many of them ill-prepared to work in Afghanistan or to understand Afghans,[30] Afghan leaders were able to maintain space for independent manoeuvring and decision-making. The room for this was provided by the notoriously segmented Afghan structures, factionalism and political power games as well as the institutional and personal rivalries among the different groups of Soviet advisors. In effect, decision-making on the ground and, subsequently, political responsibility were shared between Afghans and Soviets. There was no Soviet domination.
What emerged was a classic case of a dialectical relationship in the Marxist sense, in which two mutually dependent actors impacted each other and created (often undesired) effects. In the end, it became clear, however, that Afghans were more dependent on the Soviets than the Soviets were on the Afghans. History later repeated itself with other actors.
The Soviet attempt to turn Afghanistan into another ‘Central Asian Republic’ lasted until 1986, when “the failure of their project drove them to prepare the ground for withdrawal and to push for the ‘policy of national reconciliation,’” as French author Gilles Dorronsoro wrote.[31]
In summary, the PDPA can be described as a wannabe communist party that from its establishment – not very openly, but clearly enough – declared its aim of being part of the Soviet-led ‘socialist world system.’ Before 1978, however, it was ideologically kept at arm’s length by the USSR and its allies. After the 1978 coup, however, once it became a ruling party, its overtures forced the USSR, bound to Brezhnev’s doctrine that revolutionary change must be ‘irreversible’, to support its regime.
The 1979 intervention had two contrary effects on the relationship between the PDPA and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU): the PDPA followed a strategy of further expanding its copycat Soviet model to present itself as an indispensable ally while the Soviets, realising the social and political situation in Afghanistan was not ripe for socialist development, cautioned the PDPA in its ‘revolutionary’ development and, under Gorbachev, concentrated on withdrawal, ready to sacrifice their erstwhile ally.
Feminism and the PDPA
Despite the party’s contribution to plunging Afghanistan into four decades of war and destruction, as well as its responsibility for undoubted systematic human rights violations and war crimes, many of its members and sympathisers were driven by a genuine yearning for reform and modernisation. Sulaiman Layeq – who came from a leading religious family – said in a BBC Persian interview that it was the poverty he experienced in the tribal society of his childhood and the injustices during his school years that made him join the party. Soraya Parlika, a staunch feminist and communist PDPA member, hailed from an upper-class family. She was for many years the head of the PDPA-affiliated Democratic Women’s Organisation of Afghanistan (DWOA), which she said she established together with five other women as an independent organisation in June 1965, only six months after the founding of the PDPA. Parlika told the author: “My mother, mainly, often said that not all Afghans lived as comfortably as we did. That motivated me to engage politically.” She did so, despite her prominence after the fall of the PDPA, and stayed in Afghanistan, organising clandestine schools under the Taleban and continuing to do so after 2001.
Women in particular had considerably more rights, at least in urban areas and when not opposing the regime. The DWOA, before the PDPA took over, supported female victims of domestic violence, tried to mediate with families and helped women take their grievances to court. It organised literacy courses and tried to encourage women to seek employment and send their children to school. It mobilised women to take part in the 1965 parliamentary election, which Parlika was actively involved in, going to the countryside to teach women how to read and write. In 1968, she participated in demonstrations against a draft law proposed by conservative Islamic members to ban girls and women from travelling abroad to receive an education without a mahram. After a month of protests, including an occupation of the parliament, the bill was dropped.
During its period in power, the PDPA government – thanks in large part to the DWOA and Parlika’s work – extended maternity leave to 90 days, with an additional 180 days of unpaid leave. Women were legally allowed to retire at the age of 55. When Parlika passed away in December 2020, the Ministry of Justice’s website still showed the 1979 PDPA maternity leave law as still being in force. Parlika’s advocacy also resulted in the establishment of nursery schools and kindergartens in the workplace (see AAN’s obituary for Parlika).
Women marching in support of the PDPA. Source: nee1o via Instagram
These were big achievements, even though for women in the countryside and in mujahedin-controlled areas, these rights remained theoretical – resembling the situation post-2001. Nevertheless, these accomplishments left an indelible mark on the lives of Afghan women and continue to be valued to this day.
Conclusion
The PDPA, along with its predecessor Hezb-e Watan, existed for less than three decades. Few other indigenous political forces, however, have influenced Afghanistan’s modern history as significantly. One notable exception is King Amanullah, whose reforms, although officially halted in 1929, had lasting and sustainable impacts. The other influential forces—the mujahedin and the Taleban—emerged in part as a reaction to the PDPA’s modernist reform programme, which was inspired by the Soviet Union. Their ideological roots can also be traced back to Amanullah’s opponents (see, for example, AAN’s report about the Khost Rebellion of 1924).
The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan not only dealt a final blow to any support the PDPA once had among segments of Afghan society but also led to its demise as a recognisable political force. The debate surrounding the events that unfolded after the PDPA was established 60 years ago continues not only among Afghans but also in academia as people continue to explore the underlying causes of these events and the role the Soviets had in influencing them.
Whether the PDPA’s founding in 1965 and its takeover of power in 1978 were initiated by the Soviet Union with full-fledged support from the CPSU is questionable, at least from this author’s perspective. What is certain is that the PDPA soon ran into resistance, and violence escalated on all sides. Even for those who have been engaged with Afghanistan and its people, it is still difficult to explain where the staggering level of violence – mass killings, institutionalised torture and widespread repression – that emerged on all sides in the conflict originated from.
Many of those involved in the PDPA in key positions, including Layeq and Parlika, never publicly spoke out against the atrocities committed by their party while it was in power. Some former PDPA officials even insisted, officially, that after their time in power, things took an even nastier turn under the mujahedin and the Taleban, particularly when it came to women’s rights. Many regularly quote late-President Najibullah’s warnings against the ascent of Islamists. One former PDPA Central Committee member told the author: “I am proud of my past because I was always in the service of the people.”
Indeed, there is a growing number of non-PDPA Afghans who praise, in hindsight, some aspects of the PDPA government. A sympathiser of the late Ahmad Shah Massud once told the author: “There were only two real leaders in Afghanistan’s history: Sardar Daud and Najib,” alluding to their perceived ability to ‘effect change’. A member of the leftist armed opposition to the PDPA regime told the author that he later ‘regretted’ having taken up arms against it, witnessing the reactionary politics that followed after its overthrow.
Sixty years on, the book on the PDPA and its legacy is still being written. As it currently stands, it is important to reflect on the momentous events that have brought us to this day in Afghanistan’s history, to acknowledge the atrocities that were perpetrated in the name of the Afghan people and the immense suffering they have endured and continue to endure. It is, however, important to take stock of the country’s achievements over the past six decades in the face of enormous challenges, and to consider the Afghan people’s quest for a better future. The PDPA may be gone for good but current developments in Afghanistan indicate that the struggle between the forces of modernism and those who oppose it is far from over.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
References
↑1
Most sources name only those seven who were elected full members of the party’s Central Committee: Nur Muhammad Tarakay, Babrak Karmal, Tahir Badakhshi, Ghulam Dastagir Panjshiri, Shahrullah Shahpar, Sultan Ali Keshtmand and Dr Saleh Muhammad Zeray as well as the four alternate members — Dr Shah Wali, Karim Misaq, Dr Abdul Zaher Ufoq and Abdul Wahab Safi. A full list of all 27 founding members is given in Sayed Mohammad Baqer Mesbahzadeh’s book Aghaz wa Farjam-e Jombeshha-ye Siasi dar Afghanistan (The Beginning and End of Political Movements in Afghanistan, Kabul 1384-2005). In addition to the eleven already mentioned, they include: Nur Ahmad Nur, Dr Muhammad Zahir Dzadran, [Muhammad] Akram [or Alam] Kargar, Suleiman Layeq, Sayed Abdul Hakim Shar’i Jawzjani, Adam Khan Dzadzai, Mullah Muhammad Isa Kargar, Engineer Khaliar, Wakil Abdullah Dzadzai, Abdul Qayum Qayum, Atta Mohammad Sherzai, Ghulam Mohiuddin Zarmalwal, Hadi Karim, Abdul Hakim Hilal, Mohammad Hassan Baraq Shafe’i and Sayed Nurullah Kalali.
↑2
According to Soviet/Russian writer and former general, Alexander Antonovich Lyakhovsky, the PDPA founding congress took place “with the direct assistance of the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] CPSU”, see Alexander Lyakhovsky, Tragediya I Doblest Afgana (Afghans’ Tragedy and Valor), Moscow 1995. Many others also have emphasised a Soviet role in this event. It is possible that some people in the Soviet embassy in Kabul were aware of, or even actively supported, attempts to first establish the United Front and later the PDPA. Tarakay, according to Lyachovsky, officially visited Moscow for the first time in December 1965, meeting only mid-ranking officials in the CPSU Central Committee. However, according to the late-Soviet/Russian Afghanistan specialist, Vladimir Plastun, who was an advisor to Najibullah in the late 1980s, Tarakay had in fact reached out earlier, when visiting Moscow as early as in 1962, in his capacity as a writer (which he was). According to Plastun, he also met a Central Committee official. After his visit, an interview with him appeared in a Ukrainian literary magazine, which Plastun was later unable to locate (information from conversations with the author).
↑3
There was also a brief period of political activity between 1947 and 1952, which saw the emergence of opposition groups, a proliferation of media, and even somewhat pluralistic elections before Afghanistan reverted to a more autocratic form of government (for more details, see this AAN report).
↑4
In his book Polititschekie Partii i Dwizhenie Afganistana wo wtoroi polowine XX veka (Political Parties and Movements of Afghanistan in the Second Half of the 20th Century), Dushanbe, 2004, which this author was able to consult in Tajikistan.
↑5
See also this declassified US Department of State Air Gram about “The Afghan Left” available in the George Washington University archives.
↑6
Neither did he remember whether later party chief Najibullah was among them. He was then 17 years old and had just started studying at Kabul University in 1964.
↑7
This is the correct Pashto transliteration. In most non-Afghan literature, his name is spelled Taraki.
↑8
Khalq’s 1966 party programme, from a German translation in: Karl-Heinrich Rudersdorf, Afghanistan – eine Sowjetrepublik?, Reinbek 1980, pp 142-149.
↑9
Quoted from a German translation in: Wolfram Brönner, ‘Afghanistan: Revolution und Konterrevolution’, Frankfurt 1980, pp 165-172.
↑10
Interestingly, in 1971, Jonathan Neale observed a PDPA-inspired student protest in Lashkargah under the slogan ‘death to the khans!’, see the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism.
↑11
Iskandarov did not provide Herawi’s first name.
↑12
According to this author’s information, Ghobar continued to participate in preparations for the PDPA establishment but dropped out later, some say for ideological reasons – he did not want a Soviet-style party. Others cite the fact that he was staying in Germany in 1965 when the PDPA was founded. Plastun told this author that some ‘Maoists’ also attended the congress but withdrew before the PDPA was founded.
↑13
It was not clear whether Ghobar’s and Farhang’s circles were separate or one; both had cooperated with reformist Watan newspaper and its attempt (which led to its ban) to establish a ‘Watan Party’ during the Wesh Zalmian period. In 1990, the Farhang family protested Najibullah’s choice of Hezb-e Watan for the rebranded PDPA.
↑14
This was the group’s main political slogan, not its official name, but the phrase took hold as its public moniker.
↑15
Khalq was the PDPA’s original newspaper, but it was banned after only six issues were published between April and May 1966 as it appeared too closely associated with a political party that had not yet been legalised. Parcham was published between March 1968 and July 1969 (or even 1970, according to some sources).
↑16
Karmal’s ethnicity, as a Pashtun, is a matter of debate, with some sources speculating that his family were Dari-speaking Kabulis who had originally emigrated to Afghanistan from Kashmir, which was once an Afghan possession (see, for example, Hassan Kakar’s book ‘The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982’, on the University of California E-book collection website). Karmal himself was never keen to dwell on his own ethnic background.
↑17
Karmal and Khaibar were personally acquainted with Sardar Daud. In Karmal’s case, this went back to the period of the Wesh Zalmiyan. An association that Daud, for a while, attempted to coopt into his own political vehicle against other factions/branches within the monarchy. Karmal’s father was still a general in Daud’s republic. His unofficial partner (he was married to Mahbuba Karmal) and later education minister, Anahita Ratebzad, even had roots in Amanullah’s family. This probably made them more reluctant to plan to overthrow him. More on the Khalq-Parcham tactical differences and related issues in this interesting 2023 International Research Centre DDR (IF DDR) interview with Matin Baraki, as an early PDPA activist and now a professor in Germany.
↑18
Two cabinet ministers from the Khalq faction, Zeray and Panjshiri, lost their positions. Daud’s decision to weaken the Parchami faction may have been influenced by his desire to form a closer alliance with the Shah of Iran and the United States. Additionally, this decision could have been motivated by increasing suspicions regarding the activities of radical militant groups, particularly due to the growing infiltration of army ranks by PDPA (mainly Khalqi) cells. This situation was further complicated after several Islamist organizations attempted an uprising in the summer of 1975, which ultimately failed.
↑19
The National Awami Party, or NAP (National People’s Party), not to be confused with the Awami National Party (ANP), was a leftwing political party in Pakistan founded in Dakha (present-day Bangladesh) in 1957.
↑20
According to Lyachovsky, a coup was planned for August 1978. Layeq claimed in an interview with ToloNews on 24 April 2018 that a coup had never been discussed or planned within the party, and that this was a personal decision by Amin. Layeq, however, was a Parchami and the faction seemed to have preferred peaceful means, while – again, according to Lyachovsky – the Khalqis generally favoured a coup and went ahead without Parcham.
↑21
Another source told the author that, in a third version, he had later heard Hezb-e Islami claim the killing. Names were even named. Chris Sands also references this in Night Letters, Hurst & Co 2019, p 444, citing a speech given by Hezb-e Islami’s leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to commemorate the eighteenth anniversary of the Muslim Youth’s establishment on April 2, 1987 (available on YouTube).
↑22
Russian author, Nikita Andreevich Mendkovich, of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan (CISA), quotes a Soviet advisor who worked at the Afghan defence ministry in 1978 in a 2010 article: “PDPA functionaries later admitted that they had deliberately concealed information about the planned coup from their Soviet allies, citing the fact that ‘Moscow could have dissuaded them from this action due to the absence of a revolutionary situation in the country.’” He also provides details on how the military officers who implemented the coup had made their decision during a meeting at Kabul Zoo.
Several other Khalqi leaders received long-term prison sentences and were only released by President Najibullah in the second half of the 1980s. Some of them were reinstated to government posts or appointed to roles in the newly established National Fatherland Front – an attempt to broaden the regime’s basis and to appeal to the Khalq membership, which still made up the majority of PDPA members in both the army and the police.
↑25
Despite often being named ‘Muhammad Najibullah’ or ‘Najibullah Ahmadzai’ – the latter version signifying his tribal affiliation – he himself used ‘Najib’ or ‘Najibullah’, or ‘Dr Najib’ or ‘Dr Najibullah’. The author was present in Kabul during part of his rule in 1988-89, and this fact was also confirmed to him by Najibullah’s own family. The story of the change from Karmal to Najibullah was told to the author by the late Suleiman Layeq, a prominent PDPA activist (and, in fact, Hezb-e Watan’s last leader – see AAN’s obituary for Layeq).
↑26
Amin’s supporters, for example, still gather in the diaspora and maintain the ‘Hafizullah Amin Ideological and Cultural Foundation, as The Diplomat reported in 2019, referencing a video of an event to commemorate Amin, which is no longer available online.
↑27
Anthony Arnold, ‘Afghanistan’s Two-Party Communism: Parcham and Khal, California: Stanford University, 1983 p 99.
↑28
Artemy Kalinovsky, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind: Soviet Advisors, Counter-Insurgency and Nation-Building in Afghanistan, Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2010, Working Paper No. 60, January 2010.
↑29
In a 1985 speech on the occasion of the PDPA’s 20th anniversary, Karmal went as far as calling the PDPA “the new [Leninist] typus party of the proletariat and all working people of the country” the aim of which was to build “the Afghan society on the basis of socialism.”
↑30
Kalinovsky, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’.
↑31
Gilles Dorronsoro, ‘Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present’, New York: Columbia University Press in association with the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales, Paris, 2005, p 173.
Between Reform and Repression: The 60th anniversary of the PDPA
A hundred years ago, tribes led by local mullahs in the area around the town of Khost in southeastern Afghanistan rose up against King Amanullah and his modernisation programme. These events became known as the ‘Khost’ or ‘Mangal’ Rebellion, named after the region where it erupted and the Pashtun tribe that was first to revolt. At one point, the rebels proclaimed their own amir. Twice, they came close to threatening Afghanistan’s capital. Amanullah’s government mobilised lashkars – traditional irregular groups of armed men – among other Pashtun tribes and ethnic groups. By the end of 1924, Amanullah’s forces were finally able to suppress the rebellion: its mullah leaders were publicly executed in May 1925, while the rebel pretender to the throne managed to flee. On its centenary, this themed report brings together two reports on the Khost Rebellion. The first, by AAN’s Thomas Ruttig, looks at the events of the revolt and the interpretations given to it by historians. The second, by guest author German historian David X Noack, focuses on the role of Britain and Germany during the revolt, based on newly tapped archival sources.
Illustration: Payne, W. H. Letts’s bird’s eye view of the approaches to India. [London: Letts, Son & Co. 19–?], 1900, Map. Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/item/2006636637/You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
The 1920s represent a momentous period in the history of Afghanistan. For long decades, the country had been shut to both major internal socio-economic developments and the outside world. This had come as a consequence of the competition between the Russian and British empires, as well as an internal status quo enforced by Afghan monarchs dependent on subsidies from and peaceful relations with the colonial powers. The scenario was suddenly altered by the ascent to power of a group of more dynamic policymakers centred around the figure of Amir Amanullah, from whose reign (1919-29) this period came to be known as the Amani era.
This period was marked by increased government attempts at radically transforming the country and by the reactions against its project. In more recent times, Amanullah has been identified with the struggle for both national independence (by Afghan governments and rebels of all leanings) and modernisation (by reformist-minded Afghans from liberals to leftists).
However, if some features of the Amani era have, in due time, turned into widely-referenced symbols in Afghan politics, the relevance of this decade’s events to an understanding of the more recent vicissitudes experienced by Afghanistan has never been appreciated enough. This may be due to the fact that it is separated from the political upheavals and conflicts that have shaken the country since the mid-1970s by forty years of comparative stability – largely coinciding with Zaher Shah’s reign (1933-1973). Those forty years have often been portrayed as a ‘golden age’ of peace and prosperity under the cloak of a timeless ‘tradition’ by those, Afghans and foreigners, keen to point to a widely acceptable model to which the country could return. Under the pacified surface, however, the tensions and fault lines that first emerged during the Amani decade never disappeared completely.
During the past five, more recent, decades of turmoil, references to the Amani era have usually been limited to assessing contemporary forces at play in Afghanistan’s political arena and then identifying them with the two ‘camps’ that first emerged in the 1920s – secular reformists vs religious fundamentalists. However, besides the clash between secular and religious leaderships and the competition between state law and sharia, there are other relevant aspects from that era which deserve attention.
During Amanullah’s reign and in its aftermath, issues came to the fore which were to prove central for any subsequent Afghan government. These included: the challenges of developing and funding an efficient state machinery and acquiring a monopoly on violence; the need for foreign economic support and the quest for political independence; the risk that centralisation turns into the imposition of political hegemony by one group over others and that local elites, in turn, defend their power and prerogatives in the name of resisting state oppression. Moreover, Afghanistan’s international relations, which were boosted by Amanullah after he wrested control of the country’s foreign affairs from the British in 1919, started then to become an important arena for the Afghan government to manoeuvre politically and seek economic opportunities. In these years, Afghanistan’s diplomatic relations became a sensitive, multi-polar international matter, calling for the attention and involvement of a greater number of nations across the world.
These issues, recurring nowadays under different circumstances, make it all the more important to look back at all the episodes of that decade, not just the most known and debated. As part of its attempts to understand today’s Afghanistan, AAN has always been keen to return to past events and assess their lasting significance. Likewise, we are happy now to present these two contributions, brought together in a themed report, on a lesser known but pivotal episode of Afghan history on the occasion of its centenary: the Khost rebellion of 1924, which was the first major challenge faced by the reformist project of an Afghan government.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
Before the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel and Israel’s continuing war in Gaza, the relationship of the Islamic Emirate towards Hamas could be described as cordial, but not actively supportive. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig (with input from Roxanna Shapour) wanted to look at whether this standpoint has changed since those attacks. By combing through official statements and Afghan media reporting, he has explored the dynamics at play and the context. His report starts with one of the key events of this year, the assassination, likely by Israel, of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in neighbouring Iran, on 31 July 2024 when he came to Tehran to see the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian.Acting Deputy Prime Minister, Abdul Ghani Baradar, and Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, meet Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on the sidelines of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s funeral. Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, 23 May 2024
The Emirate on the assassination of Haniyeh
Kabul was among the few capitals to issue an official statement regarding the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The statement was released in the name of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), rather than from a specific entity or official, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or IEA spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid. This may suggest that the supreme leader, Amir al-Mu’minin Hibatullah Akhundzada, likely approved it. Various Emirate-controlled media outlets, including the English-language government newspaper The Kabul Times, published the 267-word official statement on 1 August 2024 which expressed the government’s profound sorrow at his ‘martyrdom’.
Martyr Ismail Haniyeh was a distinguished, wise, and resolute Palestinian leader who made significant sacrifices in his successful struggle and Jihad, fulfilling his commitment in this manner. For a Muslim and a fighter, martyrdom represents a tremendous victory; he has succeeded and left behind a legacy of resistance, selflessness, patience, perseverance, struggle, and practical sacrifice for his followers.
The IEA statement is full of catchphrases central to the Taleban’s Islamist ideology, such as ‘mujahed’, ‘jihad’ and “martyrdom”: The “martyrdom of this great figure,” it said, was a “significant loss to the Islamic Ummah and the Jihadist cause” and “defending Hamas and the sacred land of Palestine” was “both an Islamic and humanitarian duty.”
The IEA strongly condemned the “atrocities, bombings, and genocide perpetrated by the Zionist regime against Palestinian Muslims as egregious crimes against humanity.” It makes no mention of the atrocities committed by Hamas during its 7 October 2023 attack on Israel. It also glosses over the presence of Christian Palestinians (now few in number in Gaza, but more, proportionally, in the West Bank, Israel and the diaspora), referring to the Palestinian people as Muslim only.[1] It called for action, although notably made no promises as to what Afghanistan could do:
We reiterate our call to influential parties, particularly within the Islamic and Arab world, to intensify their efforts to thwart the Zionist invasion and its associated atrocities. The ongoing crimes of the Zionist regime will undoubtedly lead to further instability in the region and its countries, with the resulting disturbances and adverse outcomes falling squarely on the shoulders of the invading Zionists and their supporters.
The statement did not explicitly call for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Whether this – and its avoidance of using the term ‘Israel’ in most statements indicates a tacit denial of Israel’s right to exist is difficult to answer.[2]
The Emirate’s response to Haniyeh’s assassination and several analyses by various media and median platforms that did not sound fully convincing or even biased led the author to want to delve deeper into its relationship with Hamas and its stance on Palestine/Israel in general. The analysis begins with the Emirate’s response to the 7 October attacks before looking back at relationship with Hamas before then. It then scrutinises how that relationship has developed.
The Emirate on Hamas/Palestine/Israel until October 2023 attacks
Until October 2023, little information was available regarding the relationship between the IEA and Hamas, even in specialised media outlets. However, shortly after Hamas attacked Israel, Afghan-born journalist Akram Dawi, working for the Voice of America (VoA), highlighted the “conspicuous silence of the senior Emirate official on the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza” in an analytical article (see here). He noted that neither the Supreme Leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, nor acting Prime Minister, Mullah Muhammad Hassan, nor his three deputies had commented on the event, which he said was “in sharp contrast to the daily sharp comments from neighbouring Iran.” Dawi referenced (without direct quotes or cited sources) a statement posted on the social media platform X by the IEA’s chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahed, on 14 October, condemning “Israel’s siege of Gaza” and calling “on the international community to address the crisis.”
The IEA’s position on the issue, quoted in the Dawi article, was most pointedly summed up by acting Interior Minister Serajuddin Haqqani: “We do not interfere in others’ internal affairs, but we have faith-based sympathy with Muslims.” In short, the Emirate’s official messages were largely in line with “expressions of solidarity and support for the Palestinians” made by other Muslim countries, as Michael Kugelman of the US think tank Wilson Center told Dawi.
On key aspects, however, the statement clearly differs from the stated positions of other countries in the region, as pointed out by Shujauddin Amini, an author for the US-based Afghan news website Hasht-e Subh: “The Taliban did not call Hamas a liberation movement like the Turkish authorities, nor did they call Israel a usurper and infanticidal regime like the Islamic Republic of Iran. They also did not support the position of Saudi Arabia and Egypt in talking about the necessity of creating two countries in the pre-1967 borders.”
Sporadic contacts, no official relations
The Emirate does have official diplomatic relations with Hamas; their interactions, however, have mostly been limited to sporadic contacts and exchanges of greetings.
In August 2021, after the Emirate was re-established for the second time, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh called its deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani, also known as Baradar, to congratulate him on the “end of the US occupation,” as reported by the Turkish news agency Anadolu, citing the Hamas website. Haniyeh said the end of the United States occupation in Afghanistan was “a prelude to the demise of all occupation forces, foremost of which is the Israeli occupation of Palestine.” Baradar, for his part, thanked Haniyeh for his call and expressed his hope for a Palestinian “victory and empowerment as a result of their resistance.” He also conveyed his wishes for the “oppressed” Palestinian people to defeat their occupiers with God’s help and through their resistance. The Emirate also asserted that it was only able to defeat the USA “with God’s help,” see for example this speech by acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi. He called on all countries to support the Palestinian cause.
A few weeks later, in early October 2021, Haniyeh called the Emirate again, as Anadolu reported. This time, he spoke to Muttaqi. He again praised the Taleban’s victory over the US, but also urged Muttaqi to keep the topic of Palestine present in his speeches, “especially Jerusalem and the ongoing [Israeli] violations there.” Haniyeh also expressed his hope that the Emirate “could have a role in supporting their brothers in Palestine to liberate Jerusalem,” according to the report. Anadolu reported that Haniyah “expressed his pride in the struggle of the Palestinian people and their steadfastness in Jerusalem,” but there was no indication of any promise of concrete support. This pointed to a cautious approach on the part of the Emirate to steer clear of a conflict far away from home and on the heels of their own victory in Afghanistan.
There have also been a few meetings between Emirate and Hamas officials. These were likely not the first such encounters and did not represent dedicated bilateral discussions, but were rather meetings as part of broader diplomatic or religious events. For example, in early October 2022, spokesman Mujahid met Hamas representatives, including Haniyeh, during a conference of Islamic scholars in Istanbul and reportedly discussed regional issues, including developments in Jerusalem and the West Bank, according to the US-based website The Long War Journal (LWJ). In April 2023, the IEA envoy to Qatar and Haniyeh met at an Iftar celebration in Doha, according to a report by the Indian think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF).
While the LWJ described such meetings as “an attempt by the Taliban to expand ties with Hamas,” the initiative seems to have come from Hamas, perhaps in an effort to secure (at least verbal) support. Mujahid remained non-committal during his meeting with Haniyeh and referred to Palestine merely as an “issue for the entire Muslim Ummah,” according to a report published by the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI). No concrete agreements or even arrangements were reported after this or similar meetings. In their May 2024 report published by ORF (cited above), Kabir Taneja and Shivam Shekhawat wrote:
The Taliban has not shown any proactive support for Hamas and has almost never mentioned them by name. … The Taliban has not been vociferous on the Gaza war. On the contrary, it has aired its views and made its position clear, but tried not to wade into either being overtly [in the same camp as the] pro-Iran or pro-Arab states.
While not all meetings between the Emirate and Hamas have been public, or written about, what is certain is that there are bound to have been numerous occasions for them to rub shoulders. Former Hamas representative in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, Mustafa Yusuf Al-Lidawi, is quoted by MEMRI as saying:
It is not unreasonable [to assume] that Afghanistan will become a new base of operations for Hamas… whose gains will multiply as a result the Taliban rule there. For Hamas met with the Taliban leadership for years during their joint stay in Qatar, and formed close ties with it that can be characterized as natural and expected. Hamas will also gain credit with its allies, its affiliates, those who benefit from its ties [with other elements] and those who seek to expand the resistance axis. Iran, [for example], has an interest in ensuring its security and the security of its border with Afghanistan, and Hamas can play a significant role in this context and gain considerable achievements that will count in its favor and burnish its reputation.
There is no confirmation that this assertion is correct from any other source, and – according to this author’s reading – the meetings were not particularly substantive at all.
Acting Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar meets with Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Doha, Qatar.
Photo: Globe Eye News via X, undated.
Emirate reactions after 7 October 2023
As elsewhere, interest in the Israel/Palestine conflict increased in Afghanistan after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack and the all-out war Israel launched in response in Gaza and later southern Lebanon. In line with its thus far cautious attitude, the Emirate made no official statement at all about the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 – neither condemning nor approving it. Given the number of casualties on the Palestinian side and Israel’s concrete actions in Gaza and the West Bank, however, they, like others, also toughened their tone in official statements, however, without resorting to threats or considering entering the war.
In its various statements, the IEA and its officials have condemned specific Israeli attacks, which they deem “criminal.” For example, in October 2023, the Foreign Ministry “strongly condemned” (see this post on X) the bombing of a hospital in Gaza “by Zionist forces,” calling it “barbaric and a crime against humanity.”[3] It is probably using the term ‘genocide’ for the first time in this context: “We stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, and with countries and organizations calling for the immediate end of the ongoing genocide and bringing its perpetrators to justice.” Two months later, in December 2023, the foreign ministry condemned the bombing of the same hospital in almost identical terms and voiced concern about a regional conflict “spiraling out of control” and declared its “solidarity” with “the Palestinians.” The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, also weighed in to condemn the United States’ veto of the Gaza ceasefire resolution at the United Nations Security Council on 8 December 2023:
IEA-MoFA deems position of the United States regretable and condemnable vetoing UNSC resolution & international consensus calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, thus openly making the United States complicit in the ongoing atrocities in Gaza (see his thread posted on X).
Acting Foreign Minister Muttaqi, speaking at what was billed as a High-Level Political Consultative Conference on Palestine in Tehran on 23 December 2023, introduced another element into the Emirate’s position, namely the parallels it sees in the West’s behaviour in Gaza and, before 2021, in Afghanistan (see the text of his speech on the IEA Ministry of Foreign Affairs website). He criticised the West’s “double standards” and spoke of a “paradox” that:
[I]n a world where countries are sanctioned under the pretext of the slightest violation of human rights or on political grounds through the instrumentalization of the human rights paradigm … at the same time, the unremitting genocide of a nation by a regime that is breaching all human standards in its war is not even dealt with the slightest objection!” He added that it was “grotesque to see my country, Afghanistan, being sanctioned by instrumentalizing of human rights – when we are taking steps towards security and stability following more than four decades of foreign invasions!
Indeed, Muttaqi questioned whether “the current world order with all these contradictions, founded following World War ll, could still “address the needs of people in the 21st century.”
However, he still did not go beyond condemning “the ongoing atrocities of the Zionist regime in the Gaza Strip and occupied Palestine,” describing “the struggle of the Palestinian nation as legitimate and legal based on the texts of Sharia and international law” and calling again on “the influential Islamic countries” to “play a more effective role in ending the murder of innocent Palestinians by the Zionist regime and holding the Zionist regime accountable.” He called for a “permanent and just” solution to the Palestine issue “that would ensure the Palestinian people have a state established in the historic land of Palestine.”[4] This, again, was neither a demand for a two-state solution nor that the whole land should be for Palestinians, nor that Israel should cease to exist.
Mutaqqi went on to stress that “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan stands ready, within its capabilities, to accompany the Islamic world in this humanitarian and Islamic issue.” Again, this statement does not include any suggestion of action, such as a threat against Israel or of the Emirate being willing to get directly involved.
The following year, on 2 April 2024, the IEA Foreign Ministry issued a statement slamming Israel’s airstrike on the Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus, Syria. It condemned the strike “in the strongest possible terms,” calling it a “blatant violation of diplomatic norms and a provoking attempt towards escalating insecurity in the region.”
Following Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel on 14 April, Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi termed the action as Iran’s “legitimate right to self-defense” and accused Israel of diverting attention from the “genocide” it was committing against the people of the Gaza Strip by violating other countries’ airspace and thereby destabilising the region. He also reiterated the IEA’s call for “all influential world & regional states to expedite their efforts of halting the crimes of the Zionist regime in order to prevent further escalation of the crisis,” (see his post on X).
Similarly, the Eid al-Fitr message of the IEA’s Amir al-Mu’minin, published by Bakhtar News on 6 April, used the same language, albeit in more general terms:
The Islamic Emirate’s foundation lies on the principles of Islam and the well-being of the Muslim community. We share common faith, beliefs, and convictions, binding us together. In times of joy and sorrow, we stand united, supporting each other with equal participation and collaboration, leveraging our abilities to the best of our capabilities.
This is followed by a two-paragraph section titled “Palestine”:
The issue of Palestine is indeed a concern for the entire Islamic Ummah. We stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza against Israeli aggression and occupation. It is incumbent upon the Islamic Ummah to address the plight of the oppressed Palestinians and to collectively condemn any form of injustice or aggression perpetrated by Israeli invaders. We must mobilize our resources and support Palestine in every possible way to alleviate their suffering and work towards a just resolution of the conflict.
It is regrettable that the international community often falls short in effectively addressing the injustices faced by the people of Palestine. Despite claims of upholding human rights, there is a lack of meaningful action to curb the ongoing oppression and to hold perpetrators of these injustices accountable. This is indeed a source of profound sorrow, and it underscores the urgent need for all responsible parties to fulfill their obligations in addressing this grievous situation.
Individual IEA officials have expressed their support for Hamas, albeit on their personal social media accounts. For example, acting Deputy Education Minister, Mawlawi Sebghatullah Wasil, posted a video message on 8 October 2023, praising Hamas for “their recent operations in Gaza” and “ability to maintain the secrecy of their operations, their preparation, their speed of execution and their skill in carrying out their attacks.” (His statement was cited in a 9 October 2023 post on X by Afghan Analyst). Wasil reportedly stressed that Afghan youth and the ulema were in solidarity with Palestine and expressed their sincere support. He further stated, according to Afghan Analyst, that Hamas’ attack had strengthened the belief that the only viable way against oppression was jihad and resistance.
Similarly, acting Deputy Foreign Minister and the Taleban’s former chief negotiator in Doha, Sher Muhammad Abbas Stanikzai, posted a floral pattern and the word ‘Palestine’ laid into the borders of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza on X on 22 October 2023, accompanied by the comment (see here):
The victory march will continue until the Palestinian flag flies in Jerusalem and in all of Palestine. #FreePalaestin [sic]
The Emirate’s acting Deputy Prime Minister, Muhammad Abdul Kabir, had several meetings with various Iranian officials, including Iranian Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, where, according to Tehran-based news outlet Khabar Online, on 2 August 2024, he said:
Afghanistan, together with the Islamic Republic of Iran, supports the oppressed people of Gaza, and perhaps if we had a common border with the occupying regime [Israel], we would have gone to war with the Zionists to defend the oppressed people of Gaza.
A handful of Iranian sources picked up this quote, but it was not widely reported by other news outlets, including the Afghan media. For the most part, media coverage of Kabir’s visit focused on strengthening Kabul-Tehran relations, Afghan refugees in Iran and counter-narcotics (see, for example, Omid Radio, ToloNews and the Iranian Students’ News Agency, ISNA). AAN was unable to find any IEA or other sources either confirming or denying Kabir’s comments.
While encounters between IEA officials and Hamas have continued since 7 October 2023, there has been no indication that these signify a strengthening of contacts. Both sides’ representatives met again in May 2024 when attending the funeral of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, who had died in a helicopter crash (see India Today). On the IEA side, acting Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs and confidant of the late Taleban founder, Mullah Muhammad Omar, Mullah Baradar, attended. Photos of this event were distributed by deputy Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hafiz Zia Amin (see his post on X). Importantly, it does not appear that the IEA delegation had travelled to Tehran specifically in order “to meet the Emir of Qatar and the head of the Hamas Political Bureau,” as reported by the US think tank Jamestown).
The Emirate’s final encounter with Haniyeh came when acting Deputy Prime Minister, Mawlawi Abdul Kabir attended the inauguration of Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, on 30 July (see al-Emarah). From there, Kabir went to Doha to attend Ismail Haniyeh’s funeral on 4 August, accompanied by Muhammad Na’im Wardak, the charge d’affaires of the Emirate’s embassy in Qatar (see ToloNews). There, he “met with former Hamas chief Khalid Mashal, deputy chief of Hamas Musa Abu Marzooq and Ismail Haniyeh’s son Abdul Salam Ismail Haniyeh, to express condolences,” as Afghan broadcaster Ariana reported.
Possible fake report about Taleban fighters in Palestine
There have been reports of a more active role for the Emirate in supporting Hamas/the Palestinians. They caused a stir, but ultimately proved dubious. On the very day of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, a post on social media caused a stir. An X-account calling itself “Taliban Public Relations Department,” which has since been suspended, claimed that the IEA foreign ministry had contacted Iran, Iraq and Jordan to obtain transit permits for Taleban fighters to travel to Palestine to support Hamas. VOA reported the tweet on 9 October 2023:
This evening, the foreign office contacted his counterparts in #Iran, Iraq and Jordan, asking for permission for our men to cross their sovereign territory on their way to the holy land. We are preparing and hoping for the good news from our neighbors.#Gaza #Israel #Palestinepic.twitter.com/ZuHTMeQc7q — #FreePalestine 🇵🇸 (@TalibanPRD__) October 7, 2023
The author could not find this tweet and the account has been inactive since 14 October 2023. Moreover, an institution under such a name does not exist in the IEA system; rather, there are public relations departments in various ministries. There are, however, several other accounts on X with almost the same name, such as “Taliban Public Relations Department, Commenitary” (sic) under the handle @TalibanPRD1 (see here), which on 12 October 2023, claimed that an Afghan “mujahid” from Khost had been a “martyred” in Palestine (see here ).
The Emirate was quick to deny that it was trying to facilitate getting it fighters to get to Palestine to support Hamas; the same VOA report quoted the head of the IEA political office in Doha, Mohammad Suhail Shaheen, as saying the “information” was “inaccurate” and spokesman Mujahid reiterating that the IEA’s position had not changed.
It appears that, in October 2023, the IEA had blocked any member from trying to get to Palestine: an order instructed the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) to tell its staff to prevent Taleban fighters leaving Afghanistan for ‘jihad’ in Palestine. The order stressed that the “ideological mujahedin” must remain in Afghanistan and that those who disregarded this order would be punished (see a copy of the letter posted by Afghan Analyst on X).
Also in October, acting Interior Minister Serajuddin Haqqani stressed that: “The Taliban, as the IEA, are prohibited from engaging in Jihad outside Afghanistan,” said Afghan Analyst in a 15 October 2023 post on X. He also went on to note that there were discussions on “internal WhatsApp groups … about supporting about assisting individuals with [obtaining] passports for attending Jihad in Palestine.”
“Numerous pro-Taliban accounts,” Afghan Analyst reported more recently, on 20 March 2024, had claimed that a certain “Yasir, also known as Abu Yosuf al-Afghani,” was killed on 18 March during fighting with Israeli forces in Rafa. According to these sources, Yasir had travelled from Afghanistan to Syria in April 2023 and joined the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir ul-Sham there. In January 2024, he allegedly moved to Palestine “with other Arabs” and took part in fighting there (see the post on X). Afghan Analyst, however, casts doubt on the veracity of this claim by pointing out that his death had already been reported months earlier. He quoted a post by Afghan journalist Wais Barakzai highlighting “recent propaganda efforts by pro-Taliban accounts, which involve misinformation and disinformation.” In his post, Barakzai identified the individual shown in photos posted by various social media accounts and that he was a person “from Syria and was killed several months ago, was also introduced as a Taliban” (see his post on X.
“The authenticity of this claim [is] not known,” said Director of Research at The Khorasan Diary, Riccardo Valle, which focuses on the “greater ‘Khorasan’ region” (broadly speaking, a region that encompasses West and Central Asia) (see his post on X). Valle stressed that the “only source of information has been Afghan Taliban and TTP accounts, it could be a PR move. However, infiltrations [of individual Afghans into Gaza] can be possible.”
It remains unclear whether the episode happened as reported, or even at all. Presumably, Israeli sources would have reported such an incident prominently if there was any truth to it. An internet search yielded no results except a MEMRI report, which also referred only to the posts on X.
The ‘Yasir, also known as Abu Yosuf al-Afghani’ post could be the work of activists involved in – probably mostly private – psychological warfare operations by the Emirate’s opponents. They know that something like this would be picked up and quickly circulated, often without fact-checking, by those who believe the Emirate capable of anything. High-ranking politicians such as the Chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, Republican Michael McCaul, certainly proved the point when he told VoA that he had seen ‘“indications that the Taliban want to come to ‘liberate Jerusalem,’ in their words, to ‘fight the Zionists.’”
Public sentiments in Afghanistan
It is difficult to glean real public sentiments regarding Palestine from Afghan media reports. It can, however, be assumed that Afghans feel a great deal of sympathy for Palestinians not only as fellow Muslims but also as people who have suffered decades of conflict and occupation. That the GDI appear to have put in place procedures to stop Afghans trying to go to Palestine suggests sentiments were strong enough to make some men at least talk about travelling to fight. The younger generation, regardless of their support for the Emirate or lack of, is likely very sympathetic to Palestinians, which could mirror public sentiments in neighbouring Pakistan. “Pakistani society almost universally feels solidarity with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. But that doesn’t rub off on Hamas. Very few people here show solidarity with them,” head of the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Pakistan, Birgit Lamm, told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle:
In early August, the Emirate held a public rally to mourn Haniyeh’s death at Kabul’s Eidgah Mosque, where the IEA and Palestinian, but not Hamas flags, were displayed (see Afghan Analyst’s post on X). The rally attracted “hundreds” of participants who carried “banners denouncing the injustices perpetrated by the Israeli occupation and the repression faced by Palestine and Gaza,” according to reports in the pro-Emirate media (see, for example, this Hurriyat Radio post on X).
There were also earlier pro-Palestinian street demonstrations, for example, in Kabul one week after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s military response (see ToloNews).
It is difficult to determine how much of this was organised by the state and how much was a genuine expression of solidarity by the Afghan public. The Emirate certainly does not permit any public expression of opinion that diverges from their views.[5]
The Emirate does, however, allow rallies supportive of it, or its stances. For example, see a pro-IEA women’s gathering on 11 September 2021 in a Kabul university (see this New York Times report) or street protests in Khost against Pakistani cross-border attacks that killed Afghan civilians in April 2022 (see VoA).
Some IEA officials are more strident on social media than they would be in official statements. The Ministry of Higher Education’s Director of Publications, Information and Public Relations, Hafiz Ruhullah Rohani, for example wrote: “We, God willing, will come to the aid of our oppressed Palestinian brothers from the land of the graveyard of empires. It just takes some time,” in a post on his personal X account in early August (see quote and screenshot here):
Some “prominent Taliban propagandists,” ie not officials, have started a “Boycott Israeli Products” campaign on X, Afghan Analysts reported on 3 July (see this post on X). It is unclear if Israeli goods are even on the Afghan market, or whether such utterances represent online bravado or could translate into concrete action or even an indication that the IEA’s official, previously reserved position might be about to change.
Conclusion
Following Hamas leader Haniyeh’s assassination, various media and news platforms – both Afghan and international – discussed the relationship between the Taleban/Islamic Emirate and Hamas. Much of the analysis seemed to the author at least partially superficial, while some sounded biased, insinuating a much closer – and sinister – relationship then was the case in reality.
One could certainly argue, though, as MEMRI does, that the (sparse) Hamas-Emirate relations are inspired “by the shared position of jihadism” and by their experiences of “occupation.” When, in 2017, AAN guest authors, Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten looked into how Taleban ideology had developed since the fall of the first Emirate, Hamas was one of the movements they compared it to, along with Ahrar al-Sham in Syria and al-Nahda in Tunisia, similar in how their “Islamic Nationalism … was focused on the goal of ‘national liberation’.” Hamas has never been active in Afghanistan and the Taleban have shown little interest in becoming actively engaged in Gaza or the wider Middle East conflict, or indeed any country outside Afghanistan. Both groups are focussed on their own country, not interested in others’ affairs, except as it affects them. In an interview with al-Jazeera in August 2022, an IEA spokesman did not even seem to rule out diplomatic relations with Israel in principle since they have no [immediate] problems with Israel (quoted by MEMRI TV).
Given the geographical distance between Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, intensive interaction between the two is unlikely. Historically, many volunteers from Arab countries, including some Palestinians, participated in the mujahidin’s fight against the Soviet occupation, a segment of which later became the Taleban. But no particularly close relationships emerged from this. Signs that this might be changing are hard to find beyond some individual online statements.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, there are some 40,000 Palestinian Christians living in the West Bank, 850 in the Gaza Strip, and 4,000 in Jerusalem (quoted by Anadolu Agency). The US Department of State’s ‘2023 Report on International Religious Freedom: Israel, West Bank and Gaza also provides a figure of 138,000 living inside Israel. Even greater numbers live in the Palestinian diaspora.
↑2
We were only able to find one exception, in an Islamic Emirate statement posted on X by spokesman Mujahid dated 13 October 2024, where the terms ‘Israel’ and ‘Israelis’ were used. States and individuals especially hostile to Israel typically do not name it, using such phrases as ‘Zionist entity’, instead.
↑3
The statement referred to an attack on the al-Ahli hospital, formerly the al-Mamadani. The cause of the explosion is actually contested, with some sources including Israel, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Canada saying they believe it was a result of a failed rocket launched from within Gaza by either the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) or Hamas (see, for example, The Guardian and Al-Jazeera). Other sources, such as Goldsmith University’s Forensic Architecture, assert that the blast was the result of “a munition fired from the direction of Israel” (see here). Several other organisations have since examined satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts, but so far have been unable to determine who was to blame for the attack on the hospital with certainly (see, for example, The New York Time’s ‘A Close Look at Some Key Evidence in the Gaza Hospital Blast’). The hospital was established by theAnglican Church’s Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1882 and is currently operated by the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem (for more information on the hospital and its history see Barnett, Carlton Carter, Anglo-American Missionary Medicine in Gaza, 1882-1981, Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2021 available on the Wayback Machine here).
↑4
Muttaqi was not explicit about the geographic boundaries when he referred to “the historic land of Palestine.”
↑5
Shortly after taking power, on 19 September 2021, the IEA published an 11-point code of conduct for the media (see Reporter without Borders and UNAMA’s November 2024 report ‘Media Freedom in Afghanistan’), which stipulates that all reports “must be in an Islamic format and in accordance with Afghanistan’s tradition” and align with the “national interests.” The code includes the vaguely worded warning: “If there is any illegal action, it will be addressed” (see ToloNews). What precisely constitutes a contradiction of Islam and Afghan tradition, however, is left open to interpretation by the rulers. The Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Law, issued on 21 August 2024, tasks the virtue and vice ministry’s muhtasiban (enforcers) “to ensure that those working for the press and news organisations” comply with these stipulations (see AAN’s basic translation). In September 2024, the IEA imposed additional restrictions on the media. According to a report by the Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC), they included prohibiting criticism of the IEA’s laws and policies, as well as banning the broadcast of live political shows. Media bosses were informed of the new guidelines in a meeting on 21 September, where they were told that the Emirate must first approve topics for political shows. Furthermore, they were told, that they could only interview guests from an approved list, which includes 64 individuals designated by the IEA (see the list of 64 individuals who have been approved by the IEA to be interviewed by the media in this Zamzam News tweet).
Birds of a Feather, in Ideology: What is the relationship between the Islamic Emirate and Hamas?
Taken too far, incoming US president’s pragmatic disengagement policy in Afghanistan could badly backfire.
Since Donald Trump’s re-election as United States president, there has been growing discussion about what his incoming administration’s policies towards Afghanistan might look like.
Many anticipate a tougher stance against the Taliban, but a closer look at Trump’s track record and statements on the issue indicates he is unlikely to make any drastic changes to the pragmatist and staunchly anti-intervention policies he pursued during his first term in power.
During his first term as president, Trump made his stance against protracted foreign engagements and especially the decades-long US presence in Afghanistan clear. He was the architect of the 2020 Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban, which paved the way for the US withdrawal from the country and ultimately allowed the Taliban’s return to power.
The Doha Agreement was a major turning point in America’s Afghanistan strategy. Dissatisfied with the progress of his administration’s South Asia policy, frustrated by a perceived lack of accountability among military advisers and eager to prove to his voting base that he could indeed end one of America’s longest and most costly wars, Trump began to look for a fast way out of Afghanistan. And after all the traditional strategies failed to produce a workable exit plan, he entered into direct negotiations with the Taliban to end the conflict.
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After his re-election, Trump is likely to stick to this business-minded approach to foreign policy, which remains popular with his base, and favour pragmatic deals over costly confrontations and military entanglements in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Taliban itself seems to believe the Trump presidency could be beneficial for its future prospects. For example, the Afghan government hopes the future Trump administration “will take realistic steps toward concrete progress in relations between the two countries and both nations will be able to open a new chapter of relations”, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi said in a post on X in November soon after Trump’s victory in the US election.
The Taliban’s optimism for future relations stems from its positive interactions with the first Trump administration. After all, the first Trump administration negotiated directly with the Taliban, started the process of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan and prepared the ground for its return to Kabul.
However, although he has been more open to a pragmatic collaboration with the Taliban than President Joe Biden and firmly against any direct military confrontation, Trump is unlikely to let the Taliban do as it likes with the country or give it everything it needs without extracting a price. If the Taliban fails to make progress in fulfilling the commitments it made as part of the Doha Agreement, for example, Trump would likely curtail US assistance or condition it on tangible progress in specific areas.
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Trump has consistently argued for cutting back foreign aid as part of an “America First” approach, and he can also reduce US assistance to Afghanistan significantly without offering a reason or condition. He also would not hesitate to impose severe economic sanctions on the Taliban government if he concludes that it is harming American interests in one way or another.
US humanitarian aid amounting to about $40m a week since the Taliban takeover is an important lifeline to Afghanistan’s impoverished population. Any limitation or reduction in US aid would have significant consequences for its wellbeing and that of the fragile Afghan economy. Such a decision would deepen Afghanistan’s economic crisis and further erode progress in education, healthcare and food security.
Since Trump’s last term as president, global attention has moved away from Afghanistan. After the US withdrawal and with the beginning of globally consequential hot conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, the country became somewhat peripheral to Washington’s foreign policy agenda. As an “America First” president who will have to spend considerable time dealing with crises in the Middle East and Europe, Trump is highly unlikely to treat Afghanistan as anything other than a problem he already solved.
However, Trump’s isolationist tendencies in foreign policy coupled with the aid cuts and economic sanctions he may impose on the Taliban could easily result in the collapse of the Afghan economy and once again turn Afghanistan into an urgent problem for the US and its allies.
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Afghanistan’s economic collapse could trigger a new migration crisis, significant regional instability and create fertile ground for extremist groups, such as the ISIL (ISIS) affiliate in Khorasan Province, to flourish.
While Trump’s noninterventionist stance appeals to an American audience wary of foreign intervention, the ripple effects of a weakened and further impoverished Afghanistan could present longer-term security challenges.
Such a scenario would also have severe consequences for the Afghan people – worsening economic hardship and causing a potential collapse of health services, renewed conflict and further isolation from the rest of the world.
Once Trump is back in the White House and trying to deliver on his “America First” agenda, Afghanistan is unlikely to be a priority in his mind. Nonetheless, the choices he makes regarding Afghanistan will have important consequences not only for the long-suffering Afghan people but also the entirety of the international community.
In short, in his second term, Trump will need to find the right balance between pragmatic disengagement and responsibilities of global leadership to be successful in his Afghanistan policy and ensure that his efforts to end one conflict do not create a worse one down the line.
Amin is a writer and analyst currently serving as a fellow at the Oxford Global Society think tank in Oxford, United Kingdom and the Brenthurst Foundation.
In Afghanistan, Trump will have to play a balancing game
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
Illustration: Payne, W. H. Letts’s bird’s eye view of the approaches to India. [London: Letts, Son & Co. 19–?], 1900, Map. Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/item/2006636637/You can preview the report online and download it by clicking 
Acting Deputy Prime Minister, Abdul Ghani Baradar, and Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, meet Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on the sidelines of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s funeral. Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, 23 May 2024
