OPINION:
“When you are up to your butt in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.” We need to remember that when people ask why our armed forces occasionally assist Taliban forces which are fighting ISIS in Afghanistan.
Some months ago, I predicted in these pages that such support would be forthcoming. In the lands where the Muslim religion predominates, there is an old saying that; “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Unlike the Taliban, ISIS in Afghanistan is a threat to America; thus, the enemy of my enemy.
We intervened in Afghanistan in order to rid it of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda operatives who planned and organized the 9-11 attacks on the United States. Until then, the Taliban had ruled Afghanistan for some time. We didn’t like their tyrannical rule and treatment of women, but we had no vital national interest in ousting them.
Mullah Omar — the founder and leader of the Taliban — had foolishly provided sanctuary for al Qaeda because bin Laden had been a key player in ridding Afghanistan of the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Al Qaeda shared many of the extremely radical views of the Taliban, and there was also the Afghan tradition of Pashtunwali, which requires its adherents to provide protection to guests.
Not all the Taliban rank and file agreed with Mullah Omar regarding protection for bin Laden and his crew; but by 1991, he had achieved a status similar to the pope in Vatican City. Omar was both the political and religious leader, and he had achieved the status of infallibility.
The original American intervention was designed to rid Afghanistan of al Qaeda and ensure that they could not launch any further attacks on the American homeland. Removing the Taliban from power was a lesser included mission, and we succeeded at both. The decision to attempt to eliminate the Taliban entirely and turn Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy was mission creep at best, and mission leap at worst. Neither was ever feasible.
Meanwhile, al Qaeda was mutating and splitting. With bin Laden dead and al Qaeda greatly weakened in Afghanistan and Iraq, the terrorist splinter group that we now call ISIS eclipsed the original and remerged creating a potentially existential international threat while the Taliban remain an Afghan insurgent group with no overseas aspirations.
ISIS is a foreign-led group that has now become a fierce competitor for the loyalty of the religiously conservative rural population that has traditionally represented the Taliban power base. Afghans have a solid track record of resisting foreign domination; that is why so many joined the Taliban to expel what they saw as a potential American takeover. Today, it is obvious to all but the most fanatical of the Taliban that the Americans have no aspirations in that direction. Not so the would-be ISIS emirate in Afghanistan.
There are several hard facts we must recognize regarding Afghanistan. First, the national governance will be bifurcated for the immediate future with the government controlling the major population centers and the Taliban in charge of a good part of the rural countryside. Second, both the government and the Taliban have a vested interest in suppressing ISIS. Finally, Afghanistan will not ever be a Western-style democracy. The tribal culture and Muslim traditions are too strong. But Afghanistan can be a democracy where the population has a voice. We can take some credit there.
None of this is meant to be a defense of the Taliban. Its perverted view of Islam is every bit as odious as that of ISIS and al Qaeda. Taliban negotiators may someday agree to become a legitimate political party, but the organization is anti-democratic and will likely return to full scale anti-government military operations as soon as the situation appears to allow it. However, the Taliban will not directly attack the United States and its allies, which ISIS clearly intends to do.
ISIS still lives, and it is spreading its influence in Asia and Africa. American bipartisan strategy has been to deny it sanctuaries in those regions that would allow it to build bases with which to attack us directly. The remote areas of rural Afghanistan are prime ISIS targets. The United States prevailed in the Cold War with an indirect approach of supporting anti-Soviet actors. Some of those allies were themselves repugnant, but the alternative was to bankrupt our nation by trying to act alone. If the Taliban can help drain the ISIS swamp, let them.
• Gary Anderson was a special adviser on counterinsurgency for the deputy secretary of defense and served as a State Department senior governance adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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