Contradictory UN report

The report notes how Al-Qaeda congratulated the Taliban, implying a connection between the groups

A new UN report claims that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has the potential to allow Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to “enjoy greater freedom there than at any time in recent history”. Yet, the same report offers no strong evidence to support this claim. In fact, most of the evidence is speculatory. The report notes how Al-Qaeda congratulated the Taliban on taking over Afghanistan to imply a connection between the groups before contradicting itself by saying that Al-Qaeda has been quiet since then. It tries to tie this “strategic silence” with the Taliban regime’s efforts to gain international recognition.

The report also contradicts its primary ‘safe have’ claim by noting that “Member States have not reported significant new movements of foreign terrorist fighters to Afghanistan.” We would have assumed that a place considered ‘free for terrorists’ would see a massive uptick in the presence of foreign fighters. Also, while claiming that the Taliban have not taken significant measures to “limit the activities of foreign terrorist fighters”, the report conveniently ignores the fact that the West has frozen all of Afghanistan’s finances, leaving the Taliban unable to pay security forces that would normally have been deployed to further anti-terrorist operations.

The report does admit the Taliban’s role in combatting Daesh, but tries to downplay the Taliban’s contribution to the fight as being self-interest because Daesh is the group’s “primary kinetic threat”. Other sections of the report speculate that terrorist groups, including TTP, that targeted Chinese interests in Pakistan and elsewhere have been “relocated” away from the Chinese border “as part of the Taliban’s efforts to both protect and restrain the group”. This claim again ignores Taliban efforts to woo China, even though there is also no situation where poking the dragon ends well for the Taliban. Meanwhile, it also implies that the Taliban is double-dealing with Pakistan, which goes against every accusation that certain “member states” made against Pakistan in the past.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2022.

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