In Afghanistan, peace is fragile and truce is ephemeral. The only thing firm and perpetual is volatility. On 12 May 2020, in eastern Nangarhar province, a suicide bomber attacked a funeral procession of a local pro-government militia commander, Shaikh Akram, and killed and wounded about 50 grievers. On the same day, a three-member suicide squad attacked a maternity hospital, the Dasht-e Barchi Hospital, in Kabul killing more than a dozen of newborn children, their mothers and nurses. The maternity hospital was adjacent to the Shia Hazara settlement in Kabul. Attacking the soft belly of society without qualms discharges certain messages. The foremost is that the militants can stoop as low as possible to instill fear and infuse disquiet.
The fierce post-9/11 campaign against the Taliban compelled several bloodhounds to forsake the militia and satiate their thirst by forming another group, called the Daesh, which has been making its present felt since 2014. Whereas the Taliban sought support from the eastern border of Afghanistan, the Daesh sought support from the western border of Afghanistan. In February this year, in Doha (Qatar), the US-Taliban peace agreement kept the Daesh, the Afghanistan chapter, excluded. Marginalization is the main grievance. That is, peace is a distant reality unless the Daesh is consulted.
The Taliban is not a concept of administrating the country within the modern contexts of democracy and human rights
Generally, Afghanistan is a hodgepodge of heterogeneous militant groups vying with one another for power and resources. The post-9/11 effort of the US and its allies to introduce responsible democracy under an Afghan egalitarian constitution are the steps still alien to the local warlord culture.
The Taliban is not a monolithic organization. It is a bunch of benighted gangsters assembled together to watch their stakes in the system to control certain even desolate areas and hog even exiguous financial resources – a competition exuding madness. The Taliban is not a concept of administrating the country within the modern contexts of democracy and human rights. In the name of Islam, they carry out bestial acts. Women are the worst sufferers. Another sitting duck is the Hazara Shia community. Ignorance rules over everything.
The leeway the Taliban has provided to the Kabul regime is that they are holding back from attacking cities and are selectively attacking the Afghan security forces, and not innocent unarmed people. The Daesh, however, stands excluded. Impervious to human suffering, the Daesh is all out to crossing all boundaries to either get the US-Taliban agreement dissolved or get itself included in the agreement.
Dr Tehmina Aslam Ranjha is an Assistant Professor at School of Intergrated Social Sciences at University of Lahore and Research Fellow at UoL Center for Security, Strategy and Policy Research. Currently, she is SDPI’s grantee for a mega project on Countering Violent Extremism. She appears on BBC Urdu as an expert on National Security and Counter-Terrorism.She tweets at @TA_Ranjha