Taliban fighters entered Afghanistan’s Presidential Palace hours after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday, a milestone in the insurgent group’s assumption of control over capital city Kabul. One unit shared pictures of the palace interior — intact, but empty and apparently abandoned by Afghan officials — on an official Telegram account. The Taliban have not just taken some more cities, but are taking back the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul. Perhaps the only positive to be taken out of the situation is that there is none of the bloodshed of the Taliban’s 1996 takeover of Kabul, when former President Najibullah was taken out of the UN compound where he was holed up, strung up from the nearest pole and his corpse dragged through the city behind a truck .
It was also to be noted that the USA succeeded in evacuating its embassy, while other foreign missions also evacuated their staff. Meanwhile, the UN was among those acting as intermediaries between the government and the Taliban so that there could be a peaceful transition. The sheer speed of the Taliban advance throws into sharp relief the importance of the US and other NATO troops to the Kabul government. It has also shown the world the ineffectiveness of the training that the USA is supposed to have given the Afghan National Army. At the same time, there has been widespread panic among those who have worked with foreign forces in such ancillary roles as interpreters, and the refugees who had gone to the capital, now have to find refuge again.
And just as there is chaos and uncertainty on the streets of Kabul, you can be sure that people in the power circles in Islamabad are also running from pillar to post to make sense of the situation and adopt an appropriate policy. That is because Pakistan did not come up with a concrete policy in the days that have just passed even though it could be seen that the entire region’s security calculus was being stood on its head. And the few lines that came from a few ministers actually contradicted each other more than they formed some kind of a narrative. Now there’s not only the matter of what to do about the new Afghan government that the Taliban are no doubt going to head – a matter made infinitely more difficult than it would have been if senior government officials hadn’t already gone on record to say that Pakistan would not support, nor recognise, a forceful takeover of Kabul – the fate of thousands, perhaps even millions, of fresh refugees must also be settled very quickly.
It’s also perhaps more than just symbolic that the same day that the Taliban re-took Kabul local headlines were speaking of a grenade attack on a mini-van in Karachi that killed 12 people of an extended family, mostly women and children, in what the police is calling a terrorist attack. There is a clear positive correlation between the security breakdown in Afghanistan and incidents of terrorism in Pakistan for reasons that everybody already understands too well.
There is no denying the fact that Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which had taken refuge in Afghanistan, as well as the possibility of attacks launched against the Pakistani armed forces. The issues of the wider region, such as legitimate interests of China and the Central Asian republics regarding trade and connectivity, will also have to be addressed by the new Taliban government, leaving all of them with legitimate questions about the future. The Pakistan government has been in a constant state of crisis since at least 1979. The fall of Kabul does not show signs of bringing that crisis to an end.
Shafaqna Pakistan
pakistan.shafaqna.com
