The Taliban's Ties to Al-Qaeda

President Obama's decision on what to do next in Afghanistan turns on the answer to a basic question: How severe a threat does the Taliban pose to America?

Some commentators believe the answer is: very little. America's real enemy, al-Qaeda, is hiding out next door in Pakistan. The implication is that we can live with the Taliban as long as it doesn't invite bin Laden and company back.

A corollary to this view is that both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are Pashtuns who have historically united to repel foreign invaders from their rugged heartland in the Hindu Kush. From this proposition it follows that, as New York Times columnist Nick Kristof recently argued, sending more western troops to Afghanistan will only provoke a wider nationalist uprising.

There's undoubtedly some truth in that. But it ignores the Afghan Taliban's roots in the madrassas. The Taliban is defined by its puritanical vision of Islam and determination to impose strict sharia law wherever it holds sway, from Afghanistan in the late 1990s to Swat Valley earlier this year.

The problem, from the standpoint of U.S. safety, is that the Taliban's Islamist outlook (as well as the bonds forged in the 1980s struggle against Soviet invaders) engenders strong solidarity with al Qaeda. In a fascinating article in Foreign Affairs, Barbara Elias dissects the Taliban-al Qaeda relationship:

The Taliban cannot surrender bin Laden without also surrendering their existing identity as a vessel for an obdurate and uncompromising version of political Islam. Their legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concession to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

What this suggests, of course, is that a Taliban restoration in Afghanistan could easily lead to al-Qaeda's return. It also means, according to Elias, that the Taliban probably can't be split or co-opted the way Sunni insurgents in Iraq were.

Recall that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar ignored U.S. demands (punctuated by the Clinton administration's ineffectual missile strike in 1998) to expel Osama bin Laden and his Arab co-conspirators. Even on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he refused, saying, "We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims...that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again."

In other words, protecting al-Qaeda was more important to Taliban leaders in 2001 than holding onto power. What has changed? After eight more years of joint struggle against the U.S., how likely is it that a triumphant Taliban would bar anti-American terror groups from setting up training camps in Afghanistan?

Meanwhile, Howard Altman reports on The Daily Beast that al-Qaeda picked its number three man, Mustafa abu al-Yazid, to be its chief in Afghanistan. "And in that role, he has built new and potentially deadly ties to the Taliban - forging alliances that may greatly complicate the Obama administration's decisions about what to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan," Altman writes.

That's exactly right. We need to learn more about the ties and mutual interests that bind the Afghan Taliban and what's left of al Qaeda. But these reports underline the danger to U.S. security of blithely assuming that the Taliban would never again play host to America's sworn enemies. That's not a risk progressives should be prepared to take.

Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute. This item is cross-posted at ProgressiveFix.com.

 

Comments

[fairleft]

Mr. Marshall,

Your argument that the Taliban is impossible to reason with is almost entirely based on the false contention that it refused to agree to try or extradite for trial al Qaeda leaders. See the following:

U.S. rejects Taliban offer to try bin Laden
October 7, 2001 Posted: 11:48 AM EDT
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/07/ret.us.taliban/

Pakistan blocks bin Laden trial
By Patrick Bishop in Paris
Published: 12:01AM BST 04 Oct 2001
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1358464/Pakistan-blocks-bin-Laden-trial.html

[wildedge]

Your argument has a hidden premise - namely that there is only one strategy feasible in Afghanistan because of the Taliban-Al Queda connection.
Nope.
At the height of the Cold War, when everyone thought of Communism as a united monolith opposng the "Free World," Richard Nixon was able to develop separate strategies for the areas of greatest concern, Russia, China, Vietnam, South America. We can debate their individual effectiveness or propriety, but they were targeted at the differing strengths of different opponents.
We also could now affect different strategies in dealing with our four major problems in Afghanistan/ Pakistan - the Karzai druglords, the Taliban, Al Queda, the stability of Pakistan. Rather than trying to solve these problems at once, we could pull them apart. And these would be primarily political strategies, whic would allow development of an exit strategy for our military.
I do know this - if we keep banging our heads against the wall, we'll end up with a lot of bloody heads and the same old wall.
Doesn't work for me.

[wildedge]

Joseph Palermo's post on the danger of 'moderate escalation' is a good example of multiple-strategy thinking here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/the-goldilocks-principle_b_350611.html

[Radicalthinker]

The real driver of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan is Pakistan's fear of India, so the challenge is developing a comprehensive South Asia strategy that moderates the strategic competition between Islamabad and New Delhi.

For clues on how to do that see this excellent litle piece: http://bit.ly/3vYHPk

[shadowgm]

Why is this a new insight? And why is it Obama's fault now?

WE NEGLECTED THE TALIBAN TO CHASE SADDAM.

It really doesn't take a progressive genius to figure out this was wrong, but no one - none of the experts, none of the pundits, no one in Congress, no one at the Pentagon saw fit to enlighten the Decider as to the realities of the war we'd begun.

As Napoleon once said, if you set out to take Vienna ... TAKE VIENNA. We should never have broken off our main goal of pursuing the Taliban in Afghanistan. We pushed them across the border into Pakistan (and now they have a second home, this one with nuclear weapons).

That we've sort of muddled through Iraq by throwing money/troops at it is not an intelligent strategy. It's like raising your kids by giving them everything they want, instead of paying attention.

[nematsadat]

Dear Mr. Marshall, I thank you for sharing your insightful, pithy, and strategic analysis about the situation in fghanistan. As an native of Afghanistan, I am insulted when I hear or read commentary made my uninformed pundits on western engagement in the region. In light of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and important decisions looming on Afghansitan, I would like to share with you and your readers my thoughts on "Why Afghanistan is the new post-Cold War Berlin." You can view by clicking:
http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2009/10/30/why-afghanistan-is-the-new-post-cold-war-berlin.aspx

Many thanks again,

Nemat

[HANNIBAL1066]

The linked article is utterly unconvincing.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us conservatively 3 trillion dollars, according to Dr. Stiglitz. How much more money does the American taxpayer have to pay for a war without end (the Cold War was 44 years long) pursuing objectives as fuzzy as a Rorschach inkblot (good government, stability)? I was intimately involved for four years in Bosnia with rebuilding a country under cold peace conditions and I can tell you that the inkblot's milestones will forever be changing and moving.

How many more American lives have to be lost and shattered fighting a war that has non-terrorism related objectives?

Hunting terrorists is a job for our intelligence services and our law enforcement agencies. They are far more effective and cost-efficient than sending hundreds of thousands of troops thousands of miles away who are not even remotely close to finding the right cave.

[nematsadat]

The sad reality is that the US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq was supported by US Congress and a large fraction of the American population. Now that Americans are poorer or more are unemployed, many who previously supported the intervention simply want to pull-out without anticipating the unintended consequences of creating disaster and leaving it for Islmamic extremists to fill the vacuum. To answer your question, terrorism is not fought by intelligence and law enforcment. In a landscape like Afghanistan where you have limited information and an absence of a rule of law, you need to build institutions and civilian capacity first. The outcome must not be terrorism must be to launch an initiative of civlian peace-building so that Afghans and the people of the greater region can live in peace and cooperate in a framework of global security.

[Gasparilla]

Exactly. I'm not one who downgrades the threat, but the idea that we will eliminate all of them militarily is a joke. We had the strongest military in the history of the world on 9-11 and the thing that would have prevented it was paying attention to the warnings. Bush didn't, not that he paid attention to much of anything. He did have no problem with a CIA agent being outed by his staff.

[kkrimmer]

The Taliban and al-Qaida are brothers. If you don't contain/destroy both now then you'll have to later.

Islam is going through a radical phase, how to live in a modern world while maintaining core values. Thomas Friedman commented about this a few years ago, and likened it to the Dark Ages for Christianity.

In my opinion it's their war and let them work it out, but with the message, if you mess with us, you're toast.

[Gasparilla]

How many nations should we invade to destroy them? Because they are not just in Afghanistan, nor is their support limited to there.

[HANNIBAL1066]

Al Qaeda is currently in Pakistan with the ability to plot terrorist attacks. Whether they are located in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, or Europe makes no difference. The Afghan government is incapable of ruling the country efficiently due to its corruption and links to drug lords. The police are corrupt. The army is ineffective. To build a functioning government in Afghanistan under war-time conditions could take a decade or more. Counter-insurgency is an option for failure.

What the good writer has forgotten is that the war against al Qaeda is first and foremost an intelligence war. A robust intelligence effort, multi-national and American in scope, is the first line of defense. The second line of defense are our domestic law enforcement agencies and their counter-terrorism capabilities.

Lastly, how many of our brave American military have to die in a war that is not winnable and in the long run will cost us every single domestic program we want to enact? Eisenhower said the military-industrial complex would consume our resources without satiation. Afghanistan will be proof.

[FearlessFreep]

For me, the question is "Are the Taliban likely to cause more American deaths if the US stays in Afghanistan or if the US leaves?" I'd have to say the former.

[scottpot]

There are more Taliban and Al-Qaida in Western Europe than Afghanistan, shouldn't we occupy ?

[Ishmael1]

If you want a true picture of the Taliban, read Ahmed Rashid's book. If you want to find points of convergence between the Taliban and al Qaeda, look at the functional similarities between the Pushtun Wali and the Wahabbist sect of Saudi Arabia, ideologica­l/theologi­cal bases in tribal societies and the intermarriage between the Pushtun and Saudi Wahabbist fighters starting in the 1980's.

[Gasparilla]

Once again, this ignores the fact that al-qaeda exists in other countries where we have no military presence. Are we to invade them all? And it ignores the fact that 9-11 happened because the incoming Bush administration deliberately downgraded the terrorism threat because they had to be the anti-Clintons. Bush saw the defanged Saddam Hussein as the threat when he clearly was not. Had anyone paid attention to the info about the flight school students that began surfacing in the summer of 2001, the plot might have been rolled up as others were during the Clinton years.This is the same argument that went on for years about Viet Nam: If we withdraw, the whole world will go Communist one nation at a time, so we have to "take a stand". We withdrew and ultimately the Soviet Union fell because of it's own bloated political and economic system. Are there people that want to kill us and do us harm? Sure, and if a government hosts a Bin Laden type, we tell them that unless they remove that person, we will feel free to target that person. Of course, when Clinton targeted Bin Laden, we got "no war for Monica" from the Republicans.

[randyjet]

I am glad to see a progressive have some common sense. The fact is that the Pakistanis have found out that they could not peacefully co-exist or co-opt the Taliban. Instead they launched an all out assault on the Pakistan government. To think that the same would not happen in Afganistan is belied by the facts and history.

I fully support sending more troops to Afganistan to provide security and to take the war to the Taliban and keep the pressure on them so that they will expend more of their resources. We CAN win that war since we have a lot more than they do.

[Bonobo]

Unfortunately, the current American methodology is extremely inefficient, and the Taliban tactics are quite cheap. And they have a much shorter supply line. Military strategists talk about force multipliers. The Taliban have resource multipliers, to the tune of a couple of magnitudes of advantage. America will beggar itself long before the Taliban, in the existing setup.

[Bonobo]

I agree with Will Marshall that a return of the Taliban to power in Pashtu Afghanistan would likely also be a return of an Al Qaida presence, and any policy decision reliant on separating the two is likely a fool's bet.

However, the presence of Al Qaida in Pashtu Afghanistan might not actually be such a grave threat. At least not as long as there are other failed and weak states in the Islamic world, and, in the words of Matthew Hoh, Al Qaida is likely more of a threat as a conceptual cloud on the Internet.

I believe strategy in Afghanistan should be primarily humanitarian in nature, yielding American security as a side benefit of good government, and the extent of involvement dictated by what level of resources can be sustained over the next 20-30 years. And by extent I mean actual territory. Afghanistan needs beat cops, not drive-by shootings. And I emphasize good government. America cannot continue to own the outcome without some direct control of the process.

[mamacat]

The so-called ineffectual missile strike in 1998 nearly succeeded in killing Osama, according to a recent interview with his eldest son, Omar, who was with his father at the time.

In 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban government offered to hand Osama over to another Muslim country for trial, but not to the USA. This was rejected by the Bush White House, who chose to engage in regime change instead.

The history of our efforts in Afghanistan is one of repeated mistakes, including keeping a large force there once al Qaeda had been allowed to escape by the Bush Administration. Basically, the argument that a failing policy should not be changed because it has already been formulated and implemented goes against common sense.

[buttonz]

Do people here not understand that if we pull out we will probably be attacked again in which there will be more than enough political pressure to return to Afghanistan??

The Taliban hardly functions out its region but we know that they want to take over Afghanistan and tried to take Pakistan. If they did take both countries it would be very likely that they would try to spread through South and Central Asia as many of their members are from those parts.

What is even worse is that Al Qaeda is not the only transnational terror group under the Taliban's umbrella. They have thousands of Arabs, Chechens, Uighurs, and other nationalities who fight with them. A reporter who was kidnapped in Afghanistan and brought to Waziristan where he later escaped described the eclectic mix of foreign fighters who talked of being inspired to overturn their own governments.

Head in sand policy has never worked.

[mamacat]

We can keep al Qaeda hiding in their caves in Pakistan without maintaining a large army of occupation in Afghanistan, and without spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year for a military mission without a goal.

There are only a few thousand al Qaeda hiding in those mountains, and we can contain them a lot more effectively and cheaply, and with a much smaller cost in lives, than we are now.

[linux]

Are you willing to pay higher taxes to pay for an extended occupation?

[Bonobo]

I've already remarked on how the Neo-Domino Theory is overblown, so I'll just point out that those non-Pashtu groups ARE Al Qaeda. And obvious foreigners make pretty piss-poor insurgents, in any case. Too easy to pick out of the population.

And for pity's sake, the Uighurs were only there because the State Department leaned on the Central Asian Stans not to give them asylum because they were sucking up to China to suck up American debt.