One year Taliban in power: Mighty overwhelmed

The Taliban have been in power in Afghanistan for a year – and experts say they are now more firmly established than few governments before. Your style of government remains unpredictable – but the neighboring countries are interested in something else.

For two decades, Western troops and the Afghan military they supported had tried to crush the Taliban. They didn’t succeed. On the contrary: a year ago, the Islamists took power again in Afghanistan – and that’s likely to remain the case for the time being, high-profile observers believe.

Thomas Ruttig says that having withstood the attacks from the West gives the Taliban legitimacy to rule the Hindu Kush again. He is an analyst at the independent think tank Afghanistan Analysts Network and has been monitoring developments in the country for decades. The Taliban are now stronger than ever: “They are the most powerful Afghan government in 40 years,” believes the analyst.

The political power of the Taliban is not only based on military successes. “There is a large part of the Afghan population who are also close to the values ​​of the Taliban,” says Ruttig. Many in the country would have rejected the Western occupation. After the withdrawal of NATO troops, the majority of people in Afghanistan are experiencing the most peaceful phase in decades.

curbing corruption

The new regime can also point to its first political successes. “The Taliban have managed to curb corruption to a relatively large extent,” says Ruttig. This would have increased government revenue again. The comparatively peaceful overall situation in the country also ensures that the situation in agriculture is slowly improving and trade is picking up speed again. However, all this is happening to a manageable extent – a large part of the population is still threatened by hunger and poverty.

Meanwhile, the first foreign investors are also carefully exploring their options. China, Russia and Pakistan in particular are showing increased interest in the country’s raw material deposits. Pakistan already imports plenty of Afghan coal.

China, on the other hand, has identified Afghanistan as an important part of its New Silk Road project, believes Michael Kugelman, Afghanistan expert at the independent research institute Wilson Center in Washington. With this massive infrastructure project, China is trying to establish new trade routes between Asia, Europe and Africa. The regime in Kabul is very interested in working more closely with China, says Kugelman. “Basically, the Taliban are convinced representatives of a liberal market economy,” adds Thomas Ruttig. However, even the regional investors were still acting in a wait-and-see manner. Because the policy of the Taliban is still hardly predictable.

dysfunctional management

The experts see the reason for this in the fact that the Taliban movement itself is not a unified group, but consists of numerous regional factions. As a result, political commitments by the central government in Kabul often proved unreliable in other parts of the country. “The best example is the promise of amnesty for members of the former state apparatus,” says Ruttig. Many Taliban in the provinces would not have adhered to this and instead settled old scores. Such behavior would hardly be sanctioned: “The most important thing for the Taliban is to preserve the internal unity of their movement.”

In addition to reliability, the regime also lacks administrative skills. “The Taliban are essentially a resistance group, so they have very little administrative experience,” says Kugelman. The supply of the population with the essentials is still not guaranteed. Traffic routes, energy and water supply in the country are sometimes in a catastrophic condition. So far, no convincing solutions have been found. The Taliban lack qualified personnel. Many experts who worked in the agencies of the previous government have resigned for fear of reprisals.

However, the Taliban are more flexible today than they were during their first reign around the turn of the millennium. “There are a lot of young people who are well educated,” Ruttig observed. They gradually occupied key positions in the administration. The financial administration, for example, is already working quite well.

Hardly threatened from the outside

The experts agree that the headline-grabbing attacks by the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Afghanistan pose no serious threat to the Taliban. On the one hand, the attacks are mostly not aimed at the rulers, but at religious minorities in the country, and on the other hand, the IS does not enjoy any support among the Afghan population.

The National Resistance Force (NRF) fighters in the Panjshir Valley, around 150 kilometers northeast of Kabul, are the only remaining military threat to the Taliban. The valley’s population has always rejected Taliban rule. Around 3,000 fighters are said to be still hiding in the mountains there. The Taliban had already deployed massive troops to the valley last year in order to break down the resistance by force. Thousands of people have since fled the Panjshir Valley. Analyst Michael Kugelman believes that the NRF still exists. However, it lacked the means to become a serious threat to the Taliban.

At the moment there is simply no political alternative to the Taliban. “Even the West has never succeeded in establishing a halfway viable government in Afghanistan,” says Thomas Ruttig. That’s why the Taliban regime will probably last for a while.