The suicide bombing at a Kabul wedding puts the spotlight back on an increasingly unsafe Afghanistan. An overview of the negotiations with the Taliban and the scenarios that must be averted.
At least 83 dead and more than 180 wounded, all civilians. Yet another night of celebration cut short in Kabul, yet another wedding turned into a massacre. This, as we write, is the toll of last Saturday's attack, on 17 August, in the Afghan capital, claimed by the Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), the local Islamic State. This is the suicide bombing that has caused the most victims in Afghanistan over the past year, though not the last on an endless list. On Monday 19 August, during celebrations marking the centenary of independence from the British, 6 bombs exploded in Jalalabad, wounding more than 30 people.
Afghans have been forced to live with terror for 18 years. It is one of the defining features of the longest war the United States has ever fought. One wonders whether anyone at the top of the Pentagon had foreseen this disastrous outcome of the invasion ordered by the Bush Junior administration following 11 September 2001, with the participation of a NATO coalition of 40 allied countries. The aim was to destroy the Taliban regime, which had given shelter and support to Osama Bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda accused of having ordered the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. In Afghanistan, however, neither peace nor democracy arrived — quite the contrary. Women were not freed from the veil and from the abuses of a patriarchal mentality, as Western media had suggested at the outset of the conflict.
An Islamic Republic replaced — across a series of elections invariably tainted by fraud — the Taliban Emirate (1996–2001), but Sunni fundamentalist groups managed to reconquer much of the country. Since 2001 there have been around 1,500 terrorist attacks. Some — the most "spectacular" — made headlines; others did not. First the Taliban and al-Qaeda (the Sunni fundamentalist organisation founded by Osama Bin Laden in 1988) carried them out, then from 2015 also IS (the Salafi-Sunni jihadist militant group) which established itself and grew within the Asian country.
Yet, in the near-two decades since 11 September, Afghan civilians have also had to contend with another "terror" — that inflicted by those who were supposed to protect them. The UN reports that in the first half of 2019, NATO forces and the Afghan army (trained by the former) caused more casualties than Taliban insurgents and other militants. It is perhaps for this reason that Mohammed Ghulam, the father of the groom who survived the suicide attack on Saturday 17 August, told Afghan outlet Tolo News: "It's all the government's fault. Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, ed.) has nothing to do with it. The government did it." The man, overcome with despair, lost 14 members of his family.
Today Afghanistan is less safe than ever. The population is exhausted. Many would be willing to accept the Taliban returning to power, if only the war would end. According to analysts, this is a plausible scenario at the conclusion of the ongoing negotiations between the Trump administration and the Islamic fundamentalists who governed the country between 1996 and 2001. The United States president has announced his intention to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible, provided the local government guarantees it will keep "terrorists" — IS-K in particular — under control. This would, however, paint a bleak picture, with no nuance and no glimmer of hope. This view is widely shared, from human rights activists such as Afghan feminist and former parliamentarian Malalai Joya, to certain Republican members of Congress and US military officials.
Claudio Bertolotti, former head of NATO's counter-intelligence section in Afghanistan, confirms these forecasts: "Donald Trump is speaking only to the American electorate, putting at even greater risk a mission that has already failed. Civilians will pay the highest price of this withdrawal, in terms of rights and security. The Taliban now control almost all urban areas and, through their shadow governors, have consolidated their position in rural zones. They offer a minimum of 'social services' and guarantee justice — where no one else does — by their own methods, of course: 'an eye for an eye': if someone has stolen something from you, they cut off his hand."
The days when Italy committed enthusiastically to reforming the Afghan judicial system and, at the Rome Conference of 2007, promoted the National Justice Programme and the Afghan Reconstruction Trust – Justice, seem a distant memory. Bertolotti, now director of the think tank Start Insight, continues: "Things have come to this point because with every change of US administration the strategy has changed. Even Obama first increased troop numbers and then, after a short time — 18 months — reduced them. It is now clear that the United States no longer wants to fight this war. The military instrument has not been effective. No one has managed to build a self-sufficient Afghan army. We are witnessing a political collapse. The upcoming elections will produce a new transitional government, without Ghani as president and Abdullah as head of the executive. The result: a Taliban Islamic Emirate somewhat more open than the one of the 1996–2001 period, sustained by the thriving narcotics economy." Not even the poppy fields and opiate production were converted into a different, legal business, as promised by the propaganda of the early years of the war.
In a context of an extremely weak state and a disintegrating army, the effect of a US-Taliban agreement on the expansion of the Islamic State Khorasan could prove even more threatening: "If the negotiations conclude, IS-K will remain as the sole enemy of the Afghan government, the Taliban and foreign military forces," Bertolotti explains. "It should be noted that 14,000 soldiers will not leave all at once. Around 5,000 special forces and CIA units will remain, as part of the Freedom Sentinel mission — the one that uses drones, to be clear. To these must be added 20,000 support contractors involved in transport, communications, intelligence, infrastructure security, and so on. In theory, under agreements already reached, the US will maintain its bases in Afghanistan until 2024. That said, nothing is certain. Afghans, since the time of the British and Soviet occupations, have never honoured an agreement."
Will the war continue? "Yes," the military analyst replies. "And I fear the ranks of the Islamic State will swell. Twenty years of conflict have brought economic rewards to the old Taliban, but the young men in the lower ranks have yet to collect theirs. IS will do everything it can to absorb them. It is in its modus operandi. The Islamic State is ideologically distinct from al-Qaeda. The latter does not want to shed Muslim blood — that is, it does not want to ignite a war between denominations, between Sunnis and Shias. IS, by contrast, has no such scruples. Nevertheless, various disillusioned Taliban fighters and IS veterans from Syria and Iraq could join a militia that today numbers only 6,000 members against the 60,000 of the Taliban army."
This is why Mr Ghulam is mistaken: the attack at his son's wedding, launched at 10.40pm while 1,700 guests were celebrating, is in all likelihood the work of IS-K. The group, which seeks to establish a Caliphate in South Asia and aims to destabilise the entire region, acts to sow maximum terror even among the Muslim population and to achieve maximum international visibility. But, looking at the broader picture, Ghulam is right: others paved the way for this type of violence. Those responsible must be sought in the various powers that have dominated this country, in the short-sightedness of Western rulers, in the greed and mistakes of the post-11 September era, in the warlords, the Islamic extremists and the corrupt local figures, in the incumbent negotiators who care nothing for civilians. What is needed is an assumption of responsibility by the international community, so that the hundreds of thousands of Afghan victims — like the 3,996 dead and more than 6,000 wounded of that Tuesday morning in September in Manhattan, which changed the history of the West and of the entire world — may have justice and peace. A jolt of global clarity is needed so that the Afghan groom, Mirwais Elmi, who said "I will never be happy again in my life", can dare to hope once more.