Taliban tightens screws in Afghanistan
Maxim Petrov's analysis

ANALYTICS  10 May 2022 - 11:42

In recent days, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has taken decisions requiring women to wear burqas in public places. This was done at a time when Shia Hazara communities in the country are under assault and terrorist attacks. These events reminded me of the days when the Taliban first came to power in Afghanistan. Then, in the 1990s, some 3 million Hazaras fled to neighbouring Shiite Iran because of their persecution. Despite current promises by the Sunni Islamist Taliban to pursue softer policies than in those years, it looks very much like the country is returning to the old bad days.

According to AFP, "Afghanistan's supreme leader and head of the Taliban on Saturday [7 May] ordered the country's women to wear burqas in public, one of the toughest edicts imposed on women's lives since the Islamists seized power". The edict states that "those women who are young or not too old must cover their faces, except their eyes, according to the precepts of Shariah (Islamic law) in order to avoid provocation when meeting men who are not mahrams (adult close male relatives).

There are also reports that the Taliban are trying to force women to stay at home and not work. Such measures can be extremely painful in a country where the socio-economic situation has deteriorated sharply over the past year. A large part of the population is facing starvation. In the past, Afghanistan received humanitarian aid from dozens of countries and international organizations, amounting to about 40 per cent of its GDP. The Taliban regime will not be able to receive such volumes of support. In the current circumstances, for families with working women, the attempt to deprive them of work could mean growth of poverty.

Contrary to popular perception, the Taliban, who have seized power by force, do not and have never had the support of the majority of the Afghan population. It relies on the Pashtun Sunni peasantry, which makes up less than one-third of the country's population, while the Taliban are led by wealthy Pashtun families. Other ethnic groups, such as Tajiks, Uzbeks, Shia Hazaras, and various social groups (a large part of the population of Kabul and some other major cities), have no desire to live under such conservative rules. To them, the Taliban are outsiders.

The government is probably trying to tighten the screws by imposing harsh rules to show all the discontented who is boss. However, it is impossible to rule only with the help of cruel disciplinary measures and violence. It is necessary to develop the country’s economy, and it is impossible or extremely difficult without cooperation with other powers. And in this scenario, the Taliban are not doing too well either.

There are three countries with which the Taliban have or might have a good relationship. Israeli political analyst Seth Frantzman argues in his article for the Jerusalem Post that the Taliban's return to power was orchestrated by Qatar, a country that supports Sunni Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood around the world, especially in the Middle East.
"The Taliban were welcomed into Qatar, which helped them in their negotiations with the United States. America's goal after the Obama administration was to leave Afghanistan peacefully, without giving the impression that the US was leaving the country. But this resulted in the Western-backed government of Afghanistan collapsing within weeks and the Taliban taking Kabul," Frantzman says.

There is also no doubt that the victory of the Taliban was extremely beneficial for Pakistan, a country friendly to them and Qatar. For Pakistan, the Taliban are an important armed ally in the strategic confrontation with neighbouring India. The formation of a secular government in Kabul, friendly to India, would be a disaster for the Pakistanis - their country would be caught in a geopolitical trap. The regime of Ashraf Ghani overthrown by the Taliban, although not pro-Indian, maintained good ties with India - the latter was one of the main sponsors of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. Today, Pakistan, having managed to bring its allies to power in Afghanistan, can breathe a sigh of relief, except for the fact that what happened led to a sharp reduction in humanitarian aid to the Afghan population.

Frantzman presumes that a Taliban victory is good news for China and Iran, because after the US withdrawal from the region, these countries, which were in an unfriendly relationship with America, "can help empower the Taliban and make energy and other deals with them". However, even if he is strategically right, things are complicated in practice.

Afghanistan has immense natural wealth, not coincidentally referred to as the "lithium Saudi Arabia". Lithium is an important strategic raw material used in modern technology, especially in a variety of "green technologies", and economists predict that its value could increase tenfold in the coming decades. In addition, the country has large reserves of copper, iron and other minerals. It would seem that for the mighty "factory of the world", which is China, Afghanistan is the ideal place for investment and development. According to Russian expert on China Alexander Gabuyev, China is very cautious about investing in the country and one should not expect any major breakthroughs in the coming years. Several years ago, during the rule of the previous (pro-American) regime, Chinese companies tried to develop copper ore deposits, but they failed. The reason was not even political instability, but the lack of the necessary infrastructure - power plants, roads, etc.

The Taliban-Iran relationship looks even more complicated. In the recent past, the Iranians supported the Taliban guerrilla armies by providing them with weapons. The reason was that they were seeking the withdrawal from Afghanistan of their main military and political enemy, the United States. In 2017, the governor of Afghanistan's Farah province reported that training centres for Taliban combat practice had been established in Iran. In 2016, Foreign Policy magazine published a report citing two unnamed Western officials as saying that Tehran "supplies Taliban forces along the border with money and small amounts of relatively low-grade weapons, such as machine guns, ammunition and grenade launchers".

Iran's need for water has become another major reason for Iranian support for the Taliban. According to Mike Martin, a former British Army officer who had worked in Afghanistan in the past, "Iran has over the years established ties with numerous militant groups in Helmand province... Control of Helmand means control of canals and dams, actually built in the 1950s and 1970s, They, in turn, allow control of the Helmand River, which directs its waters to the Iranian region of Sistan, home to about a million people."

It would seem that the goal of Iranian policy has been achieved: the U.S. has been ousted, and all that remains is to deepen and develop relations with the Taliban. But that was not the case.

In April, Iran closed its consulates in Afghanistan after protests in which outraged Afghans threw rocks at the Iranian mission in the Afghan city of Herat. That happened after videos of Iran's mistreatment of Afghan refugees appeared online. In turn, attacks on Shiite Hazaras in Afghanistan are unlikely to go unnoticed in Iran. If these attacks become the norm, this state of affairs will lead to the new displacement of hundreds of thousands of Afghan Shiite migrants to Iran, which will not please the government of this country at all.

Overall, the Taliban regime is currently experiencing serious difficulties, both domestically and internationally. Thus, in an attempt to solve the existing problems, the government has begun to tighten the screws.

Caliber.Az