The fighting season

The Afghan Taliban have formally announced that their “spring offensive” is to begin on April 24. They have threatened attacks across the entire country and this will be the first time in a decade that the Afghan National Army (ANA) will face the Taliban without the support of Nato troops, and much is riding on the outcome of this fight. The Nato mission formally ended in December 2014, but there is a residual force of foreign troops tasked with training and supporting local forces. The ANA is known to have a high rate of both desertion and defection, with trained soldiers changing sides. It is in many instances indifferently equipped and lacks air assets from remotely piloted drones to strike capability. By contrast, the Taliban remain well entrenched, are able to run parallel administrations in areas where they are dominant, they are well funded and trained and their morale is high.

The spring offensive has a name — Azm, meaning determination. The principal targets are going to be the interior ministry, any foreign assets, the intelligence services and fixed military bases. It remains to be seen just how much of this is bravado, but in the past the Afghan Taliban have been as good as their word. The highly worrying thing in the current scenario is that they are not the only players — the Islamic State (IS) announced its arrival with a suicide bombing in Jalalabad last weekend that killed 33 and injured at least 150.

There has been little mention of late of talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban, and such talks as there have been in the past never evolved to anything other than scoping exercises on both sides. The Taliban, whatever their iteration and wherever they are, be it Afghanistan or Pakistan, have a single-point agenda — the overthrow of the democratically-elected governments in both countries and the establishment of a ‘caliphate’. Twenty years on, they continue to fight and as the Taliban are fond of saying — “You may have the watches, but we have the time.” They are not joking.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 24^th,  2015.

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