Afghanistan - Foreign Relations

Starting in 1996, the Taliban controlled the seat of government in Afghanistan for five years. During that period the Taliban received recognition from only three states (United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia). Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a member of the Taliban's Cultural Commission, told US magazine Newsweek in August 2021 it was seeking global recognition of what it is calling an Islamic Emirate.  Thus far only a few countries are willing to engage with the Taliban. The question for the international community is how much they should engage with the group.

While organizations like the World Bank suspended aid to the country as they wait to see what the Taliban does, international aid and humanitarian organizations want to continue working in the country.

The Taliban can help or complicate the work of the states that are optimistic about dialogue with Afghanistan's new bosses. If the Taliban restores the ruthless system it established between 1996 and 2001 and puts pressure on different identities, ethnic and religious groups living in Afghanistan, especially Afghan women, for Western countries including Turkey, forging a dialogue with Afghanistan will become quite difficult.

However, if the Taliban government can establish a system that will protect the rights and freedoms and take care of women's rights in particular, with such a relatively “moderate” system, it will be easier for Turkey and the Western states to do business. In addition, it will be able to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a place where militant groups flourish and develop again - which is the foremost concern of the US and other Western countries.

Although the Taliban began talking to Russia and China about possible economic cooperation projects, it remained to be seen how that will materialise. It would also need humanitarian agencies to provide urgent aid to Afghans displaced by the war. More than 5 million Afghans are estimated to be internally displaced. The UN says nearly 400,000 people have been displaced this year alone as a result of ongoing violence. But with aid agencies, including the UN, pulling their staff out of the country, things will be difficult for people dependent on foreign aid. In order to unlock international funding, the international community’s recognition of a Taliban government will be key, as the group was still blacklisted by the UN.

The Taliban shrugged off the idea of reliance on foreign aid, saying its fighters survived on bread and water while fighting the war. The question remains: Can it convince millions of Afghan civilians to live without the foreign help they have relied on for years? It was also an opportunity for foreign donors and aid agencies to persuade the Taliban to accept their terms in return for aid.

But Jonah Blank, a lecturer at the National University of Singapore said: “Money is not really as powerful a tool as some outsiders might think.” Blank told Al Jazeera’s ‘Counting the Cost’ show “As long as it [Taliban] has enough funding to fulfil its basic ‘duties’ (as it sees them) then I think it’s not really going to care whether an extra billion or two here or there comes into the treasury”.

As international community is watching closely the development of Afghanistan situation, to what extent the Afghan Taliban will honor its promise to make its governance inclusive and to respect women's rights is a question in focus, which is key for relevant parties to consider whether to recognize the Taliban government and restart investing in the country.

In addition to women's rights and internal governance policies, neighboring countries of Afghanistan and world's major powers are urging the Taliban to be inclusive and moderate, and cut off ties with all kinds of terrorism, separatism and extremism. The Taliban encouraged women to return to work and have allowed girls to return to school, handing out Islamic headscarves at the door.

Responding to concerns and worries among Afghan people and the international community, the Taliban has promised that it will respect women's rights, forgive those who fought against them and ensure that Afghanistan does not become a safe haven for terrorists, according to a Taliban spokesperson at a press conference on 17 August 2021. Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban's longtime spokesperson promised it would "honor women's rights within the norms of Islamic law," without elaborating.

Afghanistan would become a “pariah state” if the Taliban takes control by force, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said 29 July 2021, as a top-level delegation from the armed group visited China to assure officials of their international obligations. “An Afghanistan that does not respect the rights of its people, an Afghanistan that commits atrocities against its own people would become a pariah state,” Blinken told reporters in India during his first official visit.

Blinken warned the Taliban it would have to change if it wanted global acceptance. “The Taliban says that it seeks international recognition, that it wants international support for Afghanistan. Presumably, it wants its leaders to be able to travel freely in the world, sanctions lifted, etc,” he said. “The taking over of the country by force and abusing the rights of its people is not the path to achieve those objectives.”

Iranians are not the only ones in the Middle East talking this way about what is happening in Afghanistan as the Islamist militant Taliban group take over. In Iraq in particular, locals were asking whether the US could still be trusted. The US invaded Iraq in 2003, two years after they entered Afghanistan and, for better and worse, have been in the country ever since. Will they still help ensure that the extremist group known as the "Islamic State" does not re-emerge? Will the US continue to play a mediating role in Iraqi politics? After all, the US recently pledged to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq.

"What is happening in Afghanistan will deepen the impression among Arab governments that they cannot rely on the US to protect their security as they used to," Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, wrote.

So far though, the main impact of this week's events in Afghanistan on Middle Eastern nations has been psychological. It has boosted morale for any group wanting the Americans out of the region and undermined the confidence of those who perceive them as allies. The Taliban adhere to Sunni Islam and follow the ultra-conservative Deobandi school of the religion. Nevertheless, Islamist groups from around the region, no matter if they were Sunni or Shiite, congratulated the Taliban on their victory.v From out of the Gaza strip, Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni Muslim group that controls that area, sent a message praising the Taliban for a "victory, which was the culmination of its long struggle over the past 20 years."

In Iraq, a Telegram news channel run by PMF military groups — who are mostly Shiite Muslim and pledge allegiance to Iran — made cruel jokes about the US withdrawal. They published a picture of a man falling from a US military plane for instance, recalling the tragic events at Kabul airport earlier this week. But in their digitally altered version, the man falling was Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who they see as their enemy and beholden to the US.

For a time, the situation in Afghanistan remained fluid and the impact of the Taliban's takeover on the Middle East mostly emotional. The Taliban have said they won't be making any official announcements until the end of August. But when the group does form a new government, experts suggest that many changes on the ground should likely be viewed through the prism of the long running conflict between Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia and Shiite-majority Iran.

The Taliban ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, when the US invaded. In the 1990s, neighboring Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were the only countries in the world to offer the Taliban diplomatic recognition. For many years, the Taliban's relationship with Saudi Arabia was all-important. However, the Saudi-Taliban relationship changed after September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda, the Sunni Muslim terrorist group whose leadership had been sheltering in Afghanistan, carried out suicide attacks in the US, resulting in the deaths of over 3,000 people.

As allies of the US, the Saudis were increasingly forced to keep their distance. The UAE broke off diplomatic ties shortly after the September 2001 attacks. Since then, Qatar has slowly stepped into the breach, working as a mediator between the Taliban and other parties in recent years — and from 2013 onwards, became infamous for being the only country in the world to formally host the Taliban's political commission. Iran's relationship with Afghanistan and the Taliban has also changed over the years. "There may be more ideological resonance between the Taliban and the Saudis but in terms of diplomatic relations the relationship with Iran is now much more developed," said Kristian Berg Harpviken, who has written about the Taliban's foreign policy and is director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). "The two almost went to war in 1988, and Iranians haven't forgotten that. But they're very pragmatic."

The Fatemiyoun Brigade represents a potentially worrying aspect of that pragmatism. The force is made up of Shiite Muslim Afghans who sought refuge from Taliban persecution in Iran. They have been trained and equipped by the Iranians and have apparently fought in both Iraq and Syria. There could be as many as 60,000 of them.

In a December 2020 interview, Iranian Foreign Minister Javid Zarif hinted that some of the Fatemiyoun Brigades might already have returned to Afghanistan. "If an opposition [to the Taliban] were to emerge inside Afghanistan, it wouldn't be possible without comprehensive external support," Harpviken told DW. "I do wonder what is happening in Riyadh right now, how they're looking at all this," the Norwegian researcher continued. "The Saudi-Iran rivalry hasn't been very conspicuous on Afghan soil. But the potential is there."

When it comes to official recognition of a Taliban-led Afghanistan, Middle Eastern countries are unlikely to be at the front of the line though, Harpviken added. Pakistan will likely be first and then, as Joe Macaron, a fellow at the non-partisan research outfit Arab Center Washington (ACW), wrote in an op-ed this week, "China, Russia, Turkey and Iran … have indicated that they will pursue formal relations with the Taliban and are ready to recognize a Taliban government in Kabul."

"Many Middle Eastern states won't be wanting to rush into upsetting the US, especially after some of them signed the Abraham Accords," Harpviken explained. There won't be a repeat of 1996, he said, because back then things were very different: Afghanistan was considered a foreign policy backwater. Now, he said, "the costs for a country like Saudi Arabia or the UAE to recognize them [the Taliban government] are clear."