View From A Changed Perspective

"The Taliban became accustomed to fighting as insurgents, relying on a range of asymmetric attacks to target Afghan and .S. forces."

"But it seems clear that the Taliban has not given much thought at all to how the equation changes as a counter-insurgent."

Colin P. Clarke, analyst, Soufan Group, New York security firm 

Sources: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, Uppsala Conflict Data Program

Now that the Taliban in Afghanistan have speedily returned to the administration of the country after its surprise ouster of the West-supported government of the Republic of Afghanistan, now transformed to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, they face the same unforgiving dilemma that they had imposed on foreign troops stationed for twenty years in the country attempting to haul it out of the dark ages where Taliban Stage I had left it.

The country's fragile economy has cratered, it did so as soon as the Taliban retook power, when international aid suddenly dried up. Countries and financial-aid groups that had formerly pledged aid to Afghanistan withheld that aid until such time that they could assess the direction of human rights under another Taliban administration. What they have seen, despite Taliban promises to the contrary has not been reassuring. The hard line Sharia-governing Taliban has reneged on its initial placatory pledges.

Although Western media is not invited to report from inside the country, there are ample reports leaking out to the free world describing education being once again withheld from girls and women. Girls in their early teens are judged ripe for 'marriage'. The Taliban has been entering homes with the intention of ordering young girls into marriage with Talibs. Former government officials, members of the military and workers have been hunted down in a violent reckoning. As have Afghan civilians who worked with and for foreign embassies and troops.

But as much as the Taliban  trample human rights, and despite their constant attacks and killings of Afghan police and military in the past several years and in the months leading up to the American troop withdrawal from the country along with other foreign nationals in August, their mode of Islamist fundamentalism is too tepid and timid for the group that established themselves in rural eastern Afghanistan, Islamic State in Khorasan. ISIS has committed itself to continuing the barbaric atrocities that distinguished its reign in Syria and Iraq.

The Islamic State has now picked up where the Taliban left off, two months ago when it became the ruling group in the country; no need any longer to stage violent suicide attacks on government department buildings, or targeting foreign embassies, or clinics and hospitals, since they now administer the country and plan to establish good relations with their neighbours, extended outward to charitably-funding foreign nations.

The Islamic State-K violent rampages in Afghanistan have raised the level of alert within the international community fearing its success in that country will inevitably lead to once again inspiring 

affiliates abroad to mount new attacks in the West. In Kabul and other cities in the north and the Taliban's southern heartland, Kandahar, suicide bombs have proliferated. w\Within a period of several weeks alone, those attacks have killed 90 people at minimum, wounding hundreds more.

Now it is the Taliban feverishly trying to manage security to the population of the country, and attempting to persuade the international community it is committed to establishing law and order. For an insurgency group that once set off bombs in crowded cities themselves, the Taliban are now hard pressed to prevent those same bombs being exploded by another terrorist group in the geography they now govern. 

The Taliban leadership has refused to cooperate in countering the Islamic State, with the United States. Instead they are utilizing guerrilla tactics in localized conflicts against a terrorist organization using tactics very similar to those the Taliban itself maintained to gain its advantage and finally realizing its goal. Its rival terrorist group marginally more bloodthirsty is obviously just as determined to succeed in its stab at conquest as was the Taliban, the terrorist group that demonstrated it could overcome the support the elected Afghan government was enjoying from a NATO coalition.

Jalalabad has been the target of IS-K for several years, dispatching IS-K fighter cells into the city from their haven in surrounding rural districts. Between September 18 and October 28 Islamic State launched 54 attacks in Afghanistan. Most of those assaults targeted Taliban security forces. Previously the IS-K targets were fairly exclusively the civilian population where minority groups of mostly Shiites were targeted for attack and slaughter.

And then, there is Pakistan. The Islamic State in Khorasan was established in the east of Afghanistan in 2015 by the Pakistani Taliban. Where Salafi Muslims of Sunni Islam live. Although Salafist Muslims are a minority in Afghanistan, the majority Pashtun Taliban have tolerated them although with suspicion, as fellow Sunni Muslims, fundamentalist political Islamists, all. 

"In every society if the economy is bad, people will do what they have to do to get by", commented Faraidoon Momand, a local power broker in Jalalabad where the failing economic situation drives recruitment for Islamic State and Salafi fighters eagerly join Islamic State, planning to replace the Taliban as too weak in Islam to properly govern Afghanistan.

The Islamic State in Afghanistan’s six-year fight against the Taliban is now entering a new phase following America’s withdrawal.  War on the Rocks