The Taliban’s total victory has important implications for Afghanistan’s neighbors and the region at large, with countries competing to influence as they prepare for potential instability, refugee flows, and the threat of a terrorist refuge.
The big picture: It is largely a strategic victory for Pakistan, which has helped the Taliban and housed its leaders, and a defeat for India, which invested heavily in an Afghan state that has now collapsed.
- For China, it is both a source of concern and opportunity, and the Taliban have already made it clear that it depends on close relations with Beijing.
“On the one hand, it is a strategic victory for Pakistan to have a pro-Islamabad government in Afghanistan for the first time in more than 20 years, and that is no small feat, ”says Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center.
- But the Taliban capture of Kabul also raises security concerns for Islamabad and has sent tens of thousands of Afghans to the border.
- Pakistan will clearly have influence with the Taliban, but now it could also have less leverage, Kugelman notes, “Now that the Taliban have complete control and no longer wage this war, it does not need to depend so much on Pakistan.”
India, meanwhile, he had been the Afghan government’s closest friend in the region, investing in aid projects, close diplomatic relations and even building the parliament building in Kabul.
- Now New Delhi has been forced to deal with the Taliban. The first known meeting between the parties took place just last week.
- “India came to realize late that engaging with the Taliban is a necessary evil, so to speak,” Kugelman says. He says New Delhi will not be in a hurry to recognize a Taliban government and could continue to support groups that still resist militants.
Iran and the Taliban they were bitter enemies in the 1990s, but they have since established ties, and the Taliban’s insistence on protecting Afghanistan’s Shiite minority is at least partially designed for Tehran’s consumption.
- Like Pakistan, Iran is already hosting more than a million Afghan refugees and is trying to prevent another influx. Land borders on all sides of Afghanistan have been closed to refugees since Kabul fell.
The humble departure of the United States from Afghanistan provided a propaganda coup for China.
- A Foreign Ministry spokesman blamed another U.S. military intervention, justified on grounds of “democracy” and “human rights,” had ended in “turbulence, division and destruction.”
- Beijing will have little doubt about the Taliban’s human rights trajectory, and a Taliban spokesman said Thursday that with the assistance of the West, the new government would trust China to “invest and rebuild our country.”
- China has kept its embassy open in a signal that it is ready to deal with the incoming government, but is unlikely to make large-scale investments soon. His main concern in Afghanistan is security, and in particular that Islamist groups rooted in China may be inspired by the Taliban.
The threat that Afghanistan will once again become a center international terrorism is much more acute for the countries of the region than for the United States, at least in the short term. ISIS has a particularly large weight.
- “Many of the regional actors can coexist with a Taliban government as long as they have security guarantees, because for most regional actors (excluding India but Iran, China, Russia and the Central Asian states ), ISIS is a bigger concern than the Taliban, ”Kugelman says.