Until August 31, we will attempt to provide our readers with a daily SITREP on Afghanistan, based on information we believe is credible, along with a brief analysis providing some measure of context.
Explosions Outside Kabul’s Airport
An explosion took place a few minutes ago today, outside Kabul’s airport. Unconfirmed reports speak of three wounded U.S. servicemembers.
On 15 August, the Taliban capped their drive for power in Afghanistan by taking Kabul, the country’s capital, for the first time since they ruled most of the country from 1996 to 2001. With the previous government’s collapse, the group is now the de facto power throughout the country and is in the process of forming a new government and revamped state system. Questions are swirling about how they will govern, such as whether they will attempt to exercise a monopoly on power or give some roles to other political forces and whether they will try to reimpose the harsh social restrictions, including on women, that they enforced in the late 1990s. As yet, there are no firm answers.
La cartographie des actions terroristes en Afghanistan apporte une première explication à la prise rapide de Kaboul le 15 août 2021. Celle-ci montre la très forte augmentation des actions terroristes et de guérillas à partir de 2012, la localisation des attaques et la concurrence entre les talibans et l’État islamique. Des éléments indispensables à maitriser pour comprendre le déroulement de cette guerre. Jeudi 26 août, deux attaques suicides aux abords de l’aéroport ont tué plus de 100 Afghans décidés à quitter le pays, ainsi que treize militaires américains, selon l’AFP. La branche afghane de l’organisation État islamique a revendiqué le double attentat.
The swift fall of the Afghan government and Taliban takeover over the past few weeks poses challenges for the countries to the north. Central Asian governments desire a stable and secure government in Afghanistan that can prevent the spillover of a destabilizing conflict across their borders. In addition, while Afghanistan is less of a lucrative market for trade with Central Asia, with less than $2 billion in trade per year, it is crucial to connecting the region with the 1.5 billion-person combined markets of Pakistan and India.
As the Taliban transforms its military chain of command into a governing structure for Afghanistan, alliances and tribal configurations that kept two rival Taliban factions together in recent years are now being tested.
“Conquering a country is always the easy part. Ruling it, in Afghanistan’s case, is the difficult bit,” says historian William Dalrymple, an expert on Pashtun tribal rivalries. “That’s when the tensions and the fault lines become apparent.”
Refugees from Afghanistan are arriving in their thousands at a US air base in Germany.
The base has become a makeshift refugee camp and an international airport to evacuees – many children have arrived on their own.
Fawad Khan anxiously scrolled down the news on his cellphone, watching the chaos at Kabul airport as thousands of his fellow Afghans try to flee the Taliban-controlled country in the waning days of a massive airlift.
The cooperation and alliance-making have always been the core principle of state’s strategies. The states converge and diverge according to their benefits and rivalry. The cooperation between Pakistan and Turkey goes back to history, and both have stood by each other out of the spirit of brotherhood. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mustafa Kamal Ataturk also shared joint views on the intersection of Islam and promotion of Muslim brotherhood. Today, both the countries have always been at each other’s forefront in times of conflict and crisis, and have supported each other at international level. The relationship between Pakistan and Turkey has increased immensely under the leadership of PM Imran Khan.
US President Joe Biden has made a strategic decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, after twenty years of military presence under the pretext of eliminating terrorism and spreading democracy. Twenty years later, the Taliban has become more powerful and influential and has seized all the joints of the state and major cities easily and in a record period, which leaves many questions about the role that the United States was playing in Afghanistan and its relationship with the Taliban. Paradoxically, the superpower, accompanied by an alliance of powerful armies, could not eliminate an armed group not too numerous.
Since the takeover of Afghanistan, there is a growing concern most importantly about the fragile Afghan economy. It’s a fact that the United States of America has been providing huge economic assistance for Afghanistan for the past 20 years and all this is possibly coming to an end with the Taliban in power. For the past 20 years, the Afghan economy has depended on foreign aid, it is on record that 75% of Afghan’s public expenditure was financed by international aid, and the withdrawal of foreign troops will lead to a drastic drop in funding for their administration. For now, the Taliban has failed to gain international recognition except China. China has so far openly expressed its willingness to trust and cooperate with the Taliban. Will China replace the United States’ financial support in Afghanistan?