As the US and its allies try to negotiate a peace settlement with the Taliban before all combat troops leave Afghanistan in 2014, a new obstacle has arisen: Insurgent splinter groups opposed to the deal are emerging, complicating US hopes of leaving behind a stable country.
These splinter groups have demonstrated their strength recently, with two brazen shootings — one of a high-ranking Taliban leader and the other of a senior member of the Afghan government’s High Peace Council.
That new violence has added to the difficulty of striking a deal with the Taliban as the clock continues to wind down with only two-and-a-half years to go before the planned withdrawal. Failure to figure out all these new players in Afghanistan’s varied ethnic and political groups threatens to plunge the country into more civil strife.
“I am very pessimistic,” Moeed Yusuf of the US Institute of Peace in Washington said.
He warns that Afghanistan seems poised to repeat the devastation of the early 1990s after the Soviet withdrawal. At that time, rival rebel factions previously united against the Soviets turned their guns on each other, killing tens of thousands of civilians and paving the way for the Taliban takeover.
As more decisionmakers emerge on the scene, it is becoming more difficult to secure a peace deal that can withstand the test of time, Yusuf said.
“Whatever peace you come up with, I believe it is not sustainable, and I believe we are probably going to see a repeat of the 1990s, where you go for a few years and then it all starts to fall apart,” he said.
The US began the clandestine talks with the Taliban last year, aided by Germany and secretly held in Qatar. A senior US diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the goal for Marc Grossman, Washington’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, was straightforward: Get an Afghan peace deal.
That goal has run into a series of problems.
The Taliban broke off talks earlier this year, saying the US reneged on a promise to release Afghan prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. To get the Taliban back to the table, the US last weekend said it was mulling a proposal to transfer some Guantanamo Bay inmates to a prison in Afghanistan, but Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahed said that the group wants the prisoners freed unconditionally before resuming talks.
In the last six months, the Taliban has had increasingly violent clashes with a militant Islamist group called Hezb-e-Islami, led by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. That fighting escalated to all-out war in some parts of Afghanistan.
Hekmatyar is a former US ally who is now on Washington’s wanted list. The Taliban worry that Hekmatyar’s group, which is close to the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and has held parallel talks with the US, will make its own peace deal.
The fissures in the Taliban movement have been further widened by the emergence of the splinter groups opposed to the peace talks.
Here is a look at some of those groups:
The Jihadi Shura of Mujahedeen for Unity and Understanding. This previously unheard-of group has lashed out at Taliban talks with the US, urged more war and criticized battlefield skirmishes between the Taliban and other insurgent groups.
The Dadullah Front. This group is believed to get most of its strength in the Taliban strongholds of southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces. According to Taliban members familiar with the organization, it is led by Daddi Allah, the brother of Mullah Dadullah, a one-legged Taliban commander who was killed by US forces in 2007. His death ended a spree of beheadings and kidnappings.
The Feday-e-Mahaz, or “Suicide Brigade.” This group is led by Omar Kitab, who had been aligned with Mullah Dadullah before his death. Kitab was also close to the Taliban military shura until earlier this year, when he broke away following the announcement of talks with the US.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese