Now Is not the Time to Stoke an Insurgency in Afghanistan

Lately I’ve noticed growing chatter in foreign policy circles about supporting the National Resistance Front, which is the leading anti-Taliban movement in Afghanistan. The NRF is an armed group based in the Panjshir valley, about a 90-minute drive northeast of Kabul. The head of the NRF is Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Mujahideen commander and anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated two days before 9/11.

The Panjshir Valley is first of all a beautiful place where the Panjshir River carves its way through rugged mountains. The entrance at the southwest end of the valley is a geological choke-point that makes the valley difficult to invade. Hence, neither the Soviets nor the Taliban ever wrested control of the territory.

That’s why the Panjshir is now home to the National Resistance Front, which has also been able to grab some territory in other portions of northeast Afghanistan.

Details on the size and strength of the NRF are scant. There are other anti-Taliban militias in Afghanistan led by former warlords and there are former Afghan forces eager to take on the Taliban. There have been multiple clashes this year, but nothing that has threatened the Taliban’s grip on power.

It is completely understandable that there are those, including former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton, who advocate supporting the NRF and any other anti-Taliban forces. The question is, what kind of support and to what end?

No reasonable person wants to see the Taliban stay in power. It is a brutal regime that surprised no one when it dismissed pledges to be more moderate and treat Afghans, particularly women, better than it did during its first reign from 1996-2001. It has been as draconian, if not more so in many ways, than it was the first time it ruled the country.

Furthermore, the Taliban has not honored the intent of the 2020 Doha agreement it signed with the Trump administration. That agreement was fuzzy and flawed to begin with and it allowed each party to read what it wanted in the text.

U.S. negotiators intended for the agreement to trade a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan for the Taliban’s commitment to cut ties with terrorist groups and ensure that terrorists never use Afghan soil again to recruit, train, plan, and facilitate attacks against the United States, its allies, or its interests.

The problem is, the Taliban was not in compliance with the agreement in February 2020 when the deal was signed, and it was not in compliance when the Biden administration followed through with the agreement and withdrew U.S. forces.

While the Taliban and the Afghan faction of ISIS are enemies and the Taliban has actively fought ISIS, the Taliban and al-Qaeda maintain close ties. That was evident when a U.S. drone strike killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri as he stood on the balcony of a posh house in a Kabul neighborhood. Making things worse, the house was owned by an aide to Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, a designated terrorist himself. It is absurd at best for the Taliban to claim they were unaware that the leader of al-Qaeda was hanging out in the center of Kabul, about a mile from the former U.S. embassy and less than a mile from where I lived in the city.

While I don’t share the view of the terrorism hawks that Afghanistan poses a clear and present terrorism threat to the United States, and I believe that there are more potent terrorist groups in other locations in the Middle East and Africa, I do believe that terrorist groups will gradually exploit a permissive environment in Afghanistan. I still think the notion of another 9/11 planned and led out of Afghanistan is extremely unlikely.

Still, the fact that think tankers and former military and government officials are calling for the Biden administration to provide support to the NRF is not a surprise. Fortunately, the administration doesn’t appear to be rushing into anything, because arming opposition groups in Afghanistan right now has a lot of downsides, and not a lot of upsides.

While the United States had success in arming the Mujahideen to grind down the Soviet Union in the 1980s, that resulted in a decade of brutal conflict that razed the country and drove millions to flee Afghanistan. Not long after the Soviet withdrawal, the country devolved into civil war, and the Taliban emerged victorious in 1996.

After 9/11, it took a matter of weeks for Afghan militias backed by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces to topple the Taliban. I think that has some in the foreign policy world believing that can and should be replicated.

Yes, the 2001 campaign quickly knocked out the Taliban. By early December, the movement was done and looking for a political accommodation with the United States and the new regime in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the United States ignored the entreaties and chose to further punish the Taliban for sheltering al-Qaeda. That laid the groundwork for the Taliban insurgency that started to foment when the Bush Administration chose to take out Saddam Hussein, who was a paper tiger at the time.

We all know what happened next. The Taliban, with Pakistan’s support, rebuilt and waged a brutal insurgency against the weak and corrupt Afghan regime stood up by the west. U.S. and international efforts to build an Afghan military were slow, ill-conceived, and ultimately unsuccessful.

Anyone who thinks today that arming a small resistance movement in Afghanistan is going to have a positive outcome needs to remember that in 2010-2011, the United States and its allies deployed some 140,000 troops with state-of-the-art weapons and equipment, along with more than 200,000 Afghan forces. The Taliban bent but did not break.

Just as the U.S.-backed Mujahideen did to the Soviets in the 1980s, the Taliban ground down the international community’s will.  

Today, the Taliban controls far more of Afghanistan than it did in 2001. It has more adherents, more weapons (including some pretty good stuff that the United States gave to the Afghan security forces), and a level of overmatch it never did before. Any notion of a repeat of the 2001 campaign is a pipe dream.

The only positive thing to come out of the U.S. withdrawal and Taliban takeover is the end of major violence that killed and injured Afghan civilians for 20 years. Fewer Afghans are victims of conflict today. Unfortunately, the country now faces an epic humanitarian crisis with half the population needing assistance.

Stoking conflict by arming opposition groups and letting them loose will only increase human suffering.

Instead, the United States should play a longer and quieter game by establishing relations with the NRF and providing materiel that the NRF can use to fortify its territory in the Panjshir Valley and fend off Taliban incursions. The international community should provide winter supplies and political support to the NRF for now.

The Taliban has done little to win support from the Afghan public. The economy is non-existent, people are starving, and a lot of people are angry about the crackdown on freedoms. That said, there are many who are happy to see the international community gone and “Afghan values” restored — the failure to understand the Afghan people and landscape was one of the failures of the U.S. campaign.

Still, the Taliban’s inability to provide necessities and an economy will turn people. That will benefit the NRF and other resistance movements. There may come a time when arming them to the teeth and supporting an uprising against the Taliban will make sense. Now is not the time.

Even if the war in Ukraine were not taking place, this would not be the time to engineer regime change (again) in Afghanistan. But for now, the United States should ensure the survival of the Afghan opposition and support likeminded people who do not want extremists running Afghanistan or terrorists using its soil

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