The Taliban will actively try to destabilize things north of the border.
By: Kamran Bokhari
On Dec. 27, the
Islamic State’s franchise in Afghanistan claimed responsibility for an
attack that killed the highest-ranking Taliban security official in
Badakhshan province, located on the border of Tajikistan. It was merely
the latest incident in a series of accelerated attacks by the Islamic
State since the Taliban retook control of the country.
It is especially
concerning for Tajikistan, which is the most vulnerable of Afghanistan’s
neighbors to cross-border instability. It’s little surprise, then, that
in sharp contrast with the more pragmatic approaches of Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan (as well as Russia), Tajikistan has adopted a
confrontational attitude toward the Taliban regime. The governments in
Tashkent and Ashgabat along with the Kremlin have, for example, relied
on the Taliban to keep the Islamic State from spreading into their
respective territories. They figure that the Taliban, which is a
nationalist jihadist group bent on creating an emirate limited to
Afghanistan, is a natural counterweight to the more transnational
ambitions of the Islamic State. Tajikistan shares this concern but,
because of its historical and geopolitical connections, considers the
Taliban a more immediate danger.
Cross-border Tensions
The influence of
Afghanistan’s Pashtun minorities on Pakistan is well documented – and
for good reason. Pakistan shares a 1,640-mile (2,640-kilometer) border
with Afghanistan, and ethnic Pashtuns make up about 42 percent of all
Afghans and 18 percent of all Pakistanis, most of whom live on either
side of the internationally recognized border between the two.
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The situation is
similar with regard to Tajikistan, if only on a somewhat smaller scale.
Ethnic Tajiks form Afghanistan’s second-largest ethnic group (27
percent) and most of them inhabit the country’s northern regions
bordering Tajikistan, where Tajiks account for 84 percent of the
population. The Tajik language is a variant of Dari, which binds
together the various Afghan ethnicities.
The Russian
Empire and, later, the Soviet Union created barriers that prevented the
natural commingling of cultural and linguistic influences in borderlands
such as these, but those began to erode during Moscow’s invasion of
Afghanistan in 1979. Tajikistan was the main launchpad for the
deployment of Soviet forces. Moscow relied on its own ethnic Tajik
citizens who, thanks to their ethnolinguistic connections to
Afghanistan, helped it understand Afghan society and culture. Many
served in the Soviet armed forces, of course, but many others adopted
civilian roles as interpreters, advisers and technical experts to try to
help Moscow improve the standing of the communist regime in Kabul among
the broader Afghan population.
But all the
while, Afghans were also influencing Soviet Tajiks, who found an
opportunity to reconnect with their shared Persianate heritage. The
experience helped them not just enhance their language skills but also
revive their religious and ethno-nationalist identity, which had long
been contained under Russian and Soviet rule. This was taking place at
the same time that Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms
were creating the conditions for Tajikistan and other former Soviet
republics to declare independence. The Tajikistani veterans of the
Soviet war in Afghanistan played a role in the national and religious
revival both in the lead-up to independence and afterward.
When Tajikistan
declared independence in September 1991, Afghan Islamist insurgent
groups were trying to topple the communist regime in Kabul. One of the
most powerful factions was Jamiat-e-Islami, an ethnic Tajik Islamist
group led by former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani and former
military commander and Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. This group
would have a significant impact on Tajikistan’s domestic political scene
and the country’s relations with Afghanistan. Within three weeks of the
collapse of Afghanistan’s communist regime in April 1992, Tajikistan
plunged into a civil war that raged for five years.
Two simultaneous
conflicts thus emerged. In Afghanistan, after the collapse of the
communist regime, opposing factions unable to reach a power-sharing
arrangement began to fight each other in a chaotic intra-Islamist war
from which the Taliban would eventually emerge victorious. In
Tajikistan, protests against the newly independent state dominated by
former Soviet elites quickly descended into a full-scale civil war. The
opposition consisted of democratic and Islamist factions hailing largely
from the highland regions of the center and southeast, while
pro-government factions comprised the lowland areas in the north and
southwestern parts of the country.
Southern
Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan essentially became a contiguous
battlespace. Which makes sense – historically, these two regions were
effectively the same area, as evidenced by the fact that large parts of
territory on both sides of the border are called Badakhshan.
Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province was a stronghold of the
Tajik-dominated Jamiat-e-Islami, which was embroiled in a conflict
between anti-Soviet guerilla factions for control following the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Since the fighting was taking place in Kabul,
Jamiat-e-Islami could participate in the power struggle at home and help
its allies in Tajikistan fight their own government. It offered
sanctuary, weapons, supplies and training to the Tajikistani opposition,
and there is even evidence that Afghan veterans of the war against the
Soviets participated in Tajikistan’s civil war. (It helped that
Jamiat-e-Islami’s senior leaders likewise occupied civil and military
spots in the rump state in Kabul.)
Decline of the Afghan Tajiks
1994 would prove a
significant year for both countries. In Afghanistan, the Taliban
emerged on the scene, and in just two years, it would topple the fragile
Jamiat-e-Islami-led government. (Jamiat-e-Islami would then retreat and
band together with various other groups to form the Northern Alliance.)
Meanwhile, in Tajikistan, the government – led by President Emomali
Rahmon, who occupies the office still today – had begun to gain the
upper hand in the war against what had become the United Tajik
Opposition alliance.
With the Rahmon
government in Dushanbe pushing UTO southward, and with the Taliban
driving the Northern Alliance northward, the cross-border battlespace
began to shrink, leading to a realignment in an area where ethnicity
trumped ideology and accelerating negotiations between the government
and the UTO. The Afghan Tajik movement’s priority was to defend itself
against the Taliban, and it could no longer help the UTO. In fact,
Jamiat-e-Islami actually facilitated the peace talks between UTO and the
government in Tajikistan – which helped end the conflict there.
Jamiat-e-Islami,
which was losing territory to the Taliban, was forced to rely on
Dushanbe and Moscow. (It was an ironic turn of events; the group went
from fighting the Russians in the 1980s to being clients of them in the
1990s.) Once again, Tajikistan became the springboard for military
operations in Afghanistan, only this time it was a Russian-backed
Islamist faction fighting a rival and much more hardline Islamist
opponent. Even so, by the early 2000s, it seemed that the Taliban were
well on their way to consolidating power in Afghanistan, particularly
with al-Qaida assassinating Massoud on Sept. 9, 2001.
Two days later,
the 9/11 attacks took place, which would change the cross-border
landscape again. The U.S. operation to remove the Taliban regime shifted
the battlespace well south of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. For
the next two decades, the American intervention, along with the fact
that Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks were in dominant positions in the
Western-backed Islamic Republic of Afghanistan regime, insulated not
just Tajikistan but the broader Central Asian region from the ravages of
the subsequent Taliban insurgency. The Taliban knew that the mainstay
of the opposition to them was ethnic Tajiks in the north.
After all, the
Tajik-majority northern region is where the Taliban faced resistance for
years after taking control in 1996 and was the launchpad of the ground
offensive that toppled the regime in late 2001. The Taliban also
understood the cross-border ethnic Tajik phenomenon and the critical
role Tajikistan played as a strategic rear guard for their enemies. They
knew that it was only a matter of time before the Americans would
withdraw from the country and give them the opportunity to retake Kabul.
But what they did not want was to return to a situation where the
Tajiks and their allies in the north would be a constant threat.
Looking Ahead
For this reason,
the Taliban began expanding their insurgency in the north, taking
advantage of the public dissatisfaction with warlordism, factionalism
and corruption that had emerged among the old Afghan Tajik elite during
the U.S. military presence, especially after the Taliban assassinated
Rabbani in 2011. The broader infighting within the internationally
backed Afghan state after the 2014 elections only helped the Taliban
more. By mid-2016,
five years before they retook the country, the Taliban had already
gained significant ground in 12 of the 22 provinces of Badakhshan, among
other areas in the north. This was an unprecedented development; for
the first time, the Taliban had been able to penetrate the region of
their historic rivals.
And so, when in
the summer of 2021 the Taliban seized Kabul, they did so only after
first taking most of the north. Unlike when they took power in 1996,
this time they eliminated the possibility of major resistance from the
Tajiks. Consequently, they deprived Tajikistan of the buffer that had
long existed between Tajikistan and the Taliban-controlled southern and
eastern parts of Afghanistan. More important, the Taliban are in a
position to leverage the trans-border ethno-linguistic demographics to
undermine the Tajikistani government.
Hence the
hardline stance Dushanbe has adopted toward the Taliban. Rahmon, who has
led the country for almost 30 years, has personally witnessed the
geopolitical ebb and flow between his country and Afghanistan since the
Soviet era. This emerging threat on the southern flank comes at the
worst possible time as the Rahmon government faces growing economic
difficulties and sees the weakening of longtime ally Russia.
The Taliban’s
stance toward Tajikistan is similar to its attitude toward Pakistan. It
may not be seeking to act against either neighbor, but trans-border
dynamics are such that the Taliban cannot secure their regime without
buffer zones. In the case of Pakistan, they don’t have much to worry
about; Islamabad is somewhere between ambivalent and sympathetic toward
the new government in Kabul. However, Tajikistan’s opposition to the
Taliban regime means that they will actively try to undermine security
north of the border. Tajikistan is thus headed for instability, which
has the potential to spread to neighboring Uzbekistan and the wider
region. |