At a recent Track-2 meeting for Afghan and regional delegates, a senior Taliban official was more than confident that the militant group was well on its way to global acceptance. The “Emirate” had “almost completed” the official recognition process from the international community, the official said, citing the number of countries that now operate diplomatic missions in Kabul, the number of bilateral visits Taliban delegations have made and received, the number of multilateral meetings the Taliban have been invited to in Russia and China, as well as the most recent one in Uzbekistan, where as many as 30 countries including India sent senior envoys to meet around a table with a large Taliban delegation to discuss “Afghanistan: Security and Economic Development” in Tashkent in July.
Conditions and result
The statement by the Taliban official is a sign of the confidence that the Taliban feels that their takeover of Kabul by force one year ago is a “done deal” for the world. It is also a sign of all the wrong lessons the Taliban have taken from the reactions of the international community. Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri’s killing in a recent U.S. drone strike on a home in Kabul’s posh Sherpur area is proof that the Taliban, including the Haqqanis who reportedly hosted Zawahiri, feel little pressure to keep their end of the Faustian bargain the world made with them in August 2021. Part of that bargain was the Doha agreement signed between the United States and the Taliban on February 29, 2020, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council, and premised on four conditions: Taliban guarantees that they would prevent the use of Afghan soil by international terrorist groups against the security of the U.S. and its allies; the U.S. and Coalition forces would provide a “timeline” for the withdrawal of forces; a political settlement for Afghanistan would arise from Taliban talks with the Afghan (Ghani) government, and that the Taliban would announce a ceasefire. It is fairly clear that only one of those conditions was met, i.e., the U.S. and others withdrew all foreign troops from Afghanistan by August 31, 2021.
