Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his team find themselves rooting for the Taliban’s victory over a rival terrorist group while fearing their affinity for al Qaeda as Afghanistan weathers a humanitarian crisis.
“We want the Taliban to succeed against ISIS-K,” State Department Special Representative Thomas West told reporters Monday. “When it comes to other groups, look, al Qaeda continues to have a presence in Afghanistan that we are very concerned about, and that is an issue of ongoing concern for us in our dialogue with the Taliban.”
Those misgivings have seeded the United States’s hesitance to provide or permit financial aid to Afghanistan in various forms, despite trans-Atlantic anxiety that a devastating winter will fuel a refugee crisis that strains European allies. U.S. officials are trying to provide humanitarian support to Afghan civilians, but the Taliban’s overthrow of the now-defunct Afghan government has made it harder than ever to provide that aid.
“Allies are supporting a robust humanitarian response to the worsening crisis there,” West said, shortly after meeting with representatives from across NATO in Brussels. “And we want to see [women] as part of that response participate in every aspect of humanitarian aid delivery countrywide.”
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State Department officials face cross-pressure from humanitarian activists and international entities that want to assist the Afghan people and counterterrorism officials and analysts who caution against enriching an oppressive militant group.
“I don’t think it’s in America’s interest to help prop up the Taliban regime, at all,” said Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Thomas Joscelyn, a longtime observer of the war in Afghanistan. “If there is some ability to provide aid that isn’t going to be controlled … by the Taliban, then fine. But I think we’ve seen this game multiple times with authoritarian regimes, and I don’t want to pretend it’s going to be easy to get around in the long run.”
ISIS-K formed in northern Afghanistan and proved resilient in the face of both U.S. and Taliban attacks, with their persistence culminating in the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members and scores of civilians during the evacuation at Kabul’s international airport.
A terrorist with an FBI bounty on his head emerged from power-sharing talks in September as the head of Afghan internal security. Taliban leaders have accepted an oath of allegiance from al Qaeda multiple times, dating back to Osama bin Laden’s original pledge, but the group maintains that al Qaeda has no operation in Afghanistan.
“We do not see anyone in Afghanistan who has anything to do with al Qaeda,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in September. “We are committed to the fact that, from Afghanistan, there will not be any danger to any country.”
West, for his part, tapped the brakes on more expansive international assistance to Afghanistan, citing the need to maintain leverage over a nascent authoritarian regime with links to al Qaeda.
“We haven’t seen the specifics of the proposals, [including] how we can ensure that zero money ever reached the Taliban, how we can ensure there would not be leakage to any terrorist organizations, and, frankly, what we would see in return from the Taliban for taking any steps in that direction,” he told reporters.
That paradox of backing Taliban efforts against ISIS while fearing their misuse of humanitarian aid points to the dilemma at the heart of U.S. operations in Afghanistan over the last two decades, according to Joscelyn.
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“They’re talking about rooting for the Taliban against ISIS, [that] means they’re rooting for al Qaeda because al Qaeda is embedded throughout the Taliban,” Joscelyn said. “The U.S. has ended its role in a 20-year war in which nobody knew anything … The fundamental, foundational observation about the war in Afghanistan is that nobody knew anything. We shouldn’t assume that they know anything now.”
