But Grand Mufti Ahmed Al-Khalili failed to recognize the Islamist militant group that controlled Afghanistan. In fact, he avoided mentioning them at all.
The mufti’s ideological contortions — accepting the Taliban’s presence in Kabul without explicitly acknowledging its authority — are likely to be repeated across the Arab Gulf. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, and the United Arab Emirates now have to balance the need to develop pragmatic relations with the fundamentalist movement, even as they wage their own battles against Islamic extremism.
“Gulf states are baffled, no doubt,” said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics. “This represents a major setback for governments that have turned Islamists into enemy archetypes, such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, because they inspire and motivate religious activists around the world and show that they cannot trust the United States. to come to your country. help “.
The relations of the Gulf states with the Taliban will have significant implications for the US, which maintains large military bases in the region and will trust these nations as an outpost for Afghanistan once its withdrawal from that country is complete.
The region has changed dramatically since the Taliban held power in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were just three countries that recognized the group. Today, the hereditary monarchies of the Middle East largely view any popular Islamic movement as a threat to national security and its own primacy. This applies to militant groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as well as ideological movements calling for a religious democracy, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
The most notable exception is Qatar, which welcomed Taliban leaders into exile and helped transform the group into a political actor with a seat at the table. This allowed the U.S. a more consistent path of communication with an adversary that previously could not be reached. And Doha took on the role, hoping to raise its profile and make it a more valuable asset for the world powers that could protect it.
Since the Taliban took control, Qatar has made calls from top diplomats around the world and its defense minister visited the U.S. defense secretary at the Pentagon on Thursday. The main public face of the Taliban, Abdul Ghani Baradar, met on Tuesday with the ruler of Qatar, shortly before returning to Afghanistan from Doha, where he has lived since 2018.
Follow the updates live
“Qatar has become a key factor in this global discussion with the Taliban and the Americans have relied on Qatar to deliver them,” Gerges said.
Right now, with the Taliban entrenched in Kabul’s presidential palace, there is fear in the region – and beyond – that Afghanistan may once again be a magnet for religious extremists.
In the 1980s, waves of Saudi citizens traveled there to fight alongside local militants in a U.S.-funded effort to repel the Soviet Union. The Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996 and, under its tutelage, Afghanistan became a conspiracy ground for jihadist attacks in other states, including the kingdom.
Afghanistan also still maintains al-Qaeda. A repeat of the group’s bombings in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s, which achieved both Western and Saudi goals, could derail the economic transformation plan of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“Saudi Arabia expects the Taliban and all Afghan parties to work to protect security, stability, lives and property,” the kingdom’s foreign ministry said on Monday.
The smaller and more vulnerable UAE, which is increasingly becoming regional intermediaries, took a kinder tone, even in the case of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country on Sunday.
Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, called a Taliban spokesman’s recently moderated statements “encouraging.”
“Afghanistan needs good relations with the international community to ensure a prosperous future,” Gargash wrote on Twitter.
Amid heated relations, the UAE’s national security adviser met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday, whose plans secured Afghanistan’s main international airport after the withdrawal. of the United States unraveled with the acquisition of the Taliban. Erdogan’s Islamist-inspired government has seen the Taliban’s messages as positive in the same way, saying it will not rush to recognize the group’s regime and welcome fleeing Afghan officials.
The rapid collapse of the US-backed government is another cause of anxiety in the region.
The “resounding message” sent to American partners in the region is that “the US can never be trusted,” Prince Talal Al Faisal, a Saudi businessman and royal junior, wrote on Twitter.
A drawing by Saudi political cartoonist Abdullah Jaber depicted the American withdrawal from Afghanistan as a plane coming out of a grenade launcher, leaving the country behind to explode.