Afghanistan’s Taliban regime has completed five years in office, a period where the dominant marker was consolidation and peace but also the complete sequestration of its women from any role in a modern society.
“This Taliban is very different from Taliban 1.0, which was completely in the grip of Pakistan, terror groups, remember the Kandahar hijack,” said Atul Aneja, strategic affairs commentator and writer who tracks Central Asia and Eurasia closely.
In a conversation on The Gist, he said “They have consolidated and I think they have also focused very strongly on Afghan sovereignty. So therefore that is defining their external relations as well.”
This regime is shrewdly focusing on geo-economics, on connectivity with neighbours through land corridors and with India through the Chah Bahar route in Iran, although that is now virtually closed to India because of US dictates.
“On the security side, the relationship with Pakistan is terrible,” he noted, “and while the Pashtun core is fully consolidated, which is what the Taliban represents, one doesn’t know how some of the minorities are integrated and missed in the new system, which would include the Tajiks.”
There was a grenade attack on a school injuring more than 40 students, also videos are circulating of an insurgent attack in Badakshan province bordering China.
“The Taliban has very powerful enemies. Gen Asim Munir promised President Donald Trump, at that famous lunch, Bagram base. So they have powerful enemies and the minorities are armed minorities, so it’s not a country which is completely settled down.”
For India, some of the traditional thinking about Afghanistan still holds good: that we look at that country through a strategic lens.
So for India, having a foothold and a firm foothold in Afghanistan is vital from a security perspective. Then of course, is the connectivity one, the geographic one, where from Afghanistan we move into Central Asia and then beyond. And the third element I think as it stabilizes is the resources element,” Aneja said.
