The return of the Taliban
The big question
As the Taliban takes back control of Afghanistan, how will this impact its people, the region and international relations?
After 20 years at war, the Taliban swiftly regained control of Afghanistan this month.
The militant group seized power of the country's capital cities just two weeks before the USA was set to complete its troop withdrawal.
They completed their rapid advance by capturing Kabul, the capital city of more than 4 million people, on 15 August.
ABC News have developed an explainer video on the unfolding situation in Afghanistan. Video: Facebook / ABC News
How the Taliban plan to govern Afghanistan remains unclear.
There are fears that women will lose their rights to education, freedom and independence under the Taliban rule, that marginalised groups will also have rights stripped away, and those who have previously spoken publicly against the Taliban will be punished. There are also fears that the region will once again become a training ground for terrorist groups.
In these uncertain and rapidly evolving circumstances, Contact asked a range of UQ experts: As the Taliban takes back control of Afghanistan, how will this impact the region and international relations?
Dr Andrew Phillips
Associate Professor
School of Political Science and International Studies
The Taliban’s re-conquest of Afghanistan is unequivocally bad news, both for the people of Afghanistan, and for international security more generally.
For Afghans, the Taliban’s victory promises a return to the dark days that marred the country from 1996–2001, when the Taliban last held power.
In its first incarnation, the Taliban ruled with an iron fist, banishing women from public life, violently persecuting the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, demolishing antiquities and sheltering Al-Qaeda.
Notwithstanding the smooth assurances of its spokesmen, there is no evidence that time has tempered the Taliban’s extremism.
As they consolidate their grip on power and the world’s attention turns elsewhere, a return to the Taliban’s signature brutality and tyranny is certain.
Internationally, the Taliban’s return portends increased instability in an already war-torn region.
The Taliban Blitzkrieg freed hundreds of extremists from Afghan jails. This includes not only members of Al-Qaeda, but also fighters from the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant organisation hellbent on overthrowing the government of neighbouring nuclear-armed Pakistan.
India, meanwhile, will be ruing the swift collapse of an Afghan government New Delhi has long cultivated, and the inspiration the Taliban’s victory has provided to jihadist terrorists throughout South Asia.
Finally, the Afghan government’s collapse threatens humanitarian catastrophe. For the past two decades, Afghanistan has been heavily dependent on foreign assistance. The Taliban’s victory will see a wholesale withdrawal of Western aid, spelling disaster for Afghanistan’s economy.
Coupled with the atrocious crimes that will inevitably mark Taliban rule, this will see a new surge of refugees, and with it, yet more misery for the long-suffering Afghan people.
Dr Eve Massingham
Senior Research Fellow
School of Law
The stories of the fear and devastation of Afghan women – who had successfully fought many battles for an education, and won many freedoms previously denied to them – are a particularly harrowing reality of the Taliban taking back control of Afghanistan.
There are so many different humanitarian principles and international laws that are in peril.
One of the recent projects of international law has been discussion around the obligation found in Article 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions to ‘respect and ensure respect’ for international humanitarian law (also known as the laws of war).
While international agreement on what it means to ‘ensure respect’ has clearly not been reached, there is some clarity that this obligation must mean something.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has found that obligation requires that States use the capacity and the influence they have to bring about respect for international humanitarian law.
These laws are not aspirational laws.
They are a mere statement of universally agreed basic protections – including to be protected from violence to life, torture and outrages upon personal dignity.
In this sense, they are not enough. But they are a starting point.
And although most of us can agree the project of international law owes the women of Afghanistan much more, surely, at the very least, States must do what they can, where they can, and live up to the first clause of international humanitarian law – to ensure respect for these laws.
Associate Professor Marianne Hanson
Associate Professor of International Relations
School of Political Science and International Studies
The tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan should not have come as a surprise.
For years, US and allied forces engaged in a war which was essentially unwinnable.
Unwinnable, that is, as long as the US continued with policies that were never going to result in a robust and functioning state which provided good governance for the Afghan people.
The 2001 intervention by the US was done for the purpose of preventing further terrorist acts: the Taliban government was harbouring Al-Qaeda, and invading Afghanistan was seen as a legitimate action, supported in the name of self-defence.
US President Joe Biden reiterated this anti-terrorism focus last week, saying that the Afghanistan mission was never about nation-building.
In truth however, it is not possible to separate the two: getting rid of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in order to prevent further terrorism actually required the building of a sustainable state, a government free from corruption and favouritism towards ethnic groups, and a country with viable economic prospects.
Unless effective nation-building happened, where ordinary Afghans felt involved and felt a loyalty to their government, the political and military landscape was never going to be conducive to a Taliban-free Afghanistan.
In reality, the US did try nation-building. But it did it only partially. As one observer noted, many Afghans initially supported the US presence, but believed that its focus should have been:
‘about 10 per cent military and 90 per cent focussed on grassroots political and sustainable economic development, especially empowering civil society. Instead… the overall focus was 90 per cent military, and much of the development work consisted of top-down projects of dubious merit through corrupt elites.’
One journalist present when the Taliban fell in 2001 concluded that America tried nation-building, but ‘never really committed to it.’
Some gains were made. Women’s rights improved dramatically, for instance. But overall, the government propped up by the US was not seen as legitimate or effective by many locals, least of all by its armed forces.
This surely is a lesson we must learn. If the ‘international community’ really wants to advance the lives of people crushed by a brutal extremist regime – and in turn want to keep anti-Western terrorism at bay – then the old military top-down approach will not work.
What is needed is much more insight into what really builds a strong state and supports local people.
Dr Sebastian Kaempf
Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies
School of Political Science and International Studies
The Taliban’s rapid conquest of Kabul has catapulted them back into power after nearly 20 years, taking the world by surprise, but it has been clear for a much longer time that this could happen.
Ultimately, the position of the US government under President Biden and many of its key allies has been to take – what is called in foreign-policy terms – a realist position, based on the realisation that despite the length of the international occupation and the staggering costs (both in terms of finances and lives lost), despite implementing and trying a whole range of different strategic approaches, it has failed to build a state that can stand up on its own and that is ultimately seen as legitimate in the eyes of many Afghans.
The wider international implications are not just the damage this has caused for US – and more widely, Western – prestige, but also raises questions over the viability of Western military interventions when they are tied to decade-long efforts of nation-building and post-conflict reconstruction.
Here, the tragic images of the hastened evacuation coming to us from Kabul have driven home the validity of the Taliban proverb of ‘you have the watches, we have the time’.
There are also immediate concerns about human rights violations within a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and the potential triggering of a broad-scale refugee crisis.
It also constitutes a major geopolitical change in the region: Pakistan, which had been the key Taliban supporter from well before 9/11, will see its position consolidated.
And China has recently received Taliban delegations, an indication of China – in concert with its close ally Pakistan – potentially moving towards recognising the new power-brokers in Kabul.
This is a major change that will have consequences for the years to come.
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