Four foreign nationals and three Afghans were also injured in the attack on Friday when gunmen opened fire, ministry spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani said.
Four people have been arrested, he said.
The Taliban government “strongly condemns this crime, expresses its deep feelings to the families of the victims and assures that all the criminals will be found and punished”, Qani said in a statement.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the late evening attack.
Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs later confirmed that the three individuals killed on Friday were Spanish citizens. At least one Spanish national was also among those injured.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a post on social media that he was “overwhelmed by the news of the murder of Spanish tourists in Afghanistan”, offering his condolences to the families and friends of the victims.
Sanchez also said he was following the situation closely and pledged consular support.
The mountainous region of Bamyan is Afghanistan’s top tourist destination, home to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the remains of two giant Buddha statues that the Taliban blew up during their previous rule of Afghanistan in 2001.
Since taking over the country again in 2021 after the withdrawal of United States-led forces, the Taliban have promised to restore security and encourage a small but growing number of tourists trickling into the country.
Friday’s attack was the deadliest since the Taliban took over three years ago.
ISIL (ISIS) claimed an attack that injured Chinese citizens at a hotel popular with Chinese businessmen in the Afghan capital, Kabul, in 2022.
The European Union condemned the attack in Bamyan in a brief statement on Friday.
“Our thoughts are with the families and loved ones of the victims who lost their lives and those injured in the attack,” it said.
His soldier son toured Afghanistan with fighters in his crosshairs, but US traveller Oscar Wells has a different objective – sightseeing promoted by the Taliban’s fledgling tourism sector.
Marvelling at the 15th century Blue Mosque in northern Mazar-i-Sharif, 65-year-old Wells is among a small but rising number of travellers visiting Afghanistan since the war’s end.
Decades of conflict made tourism in Afghanistan extremely rare, and while most violence has now abated, visitors are still confronted with extreme poverty, dilapidated cultural sites and scant hospitality infrastructure.
They holiday under the austere control of the Taliban authorities, and without consular support, with most embassies evacuated following the fall of the Western-backed government in 2021.
They must register with officials on arrival in each province, comply with a strict dress code and submit to searches at checkpoints.
ISIL (ISIS) attacks also pose a potential threat in the country.
The number of foreign tourists visiting Afghanistan rose 120 percent year on year in 2023, reaching nearly 5,200, according to official figures.
The Taliban government has yet to be officially recognised by any country, in part because of its heavy restrictions on women, but it has welcomed foreign tourism.
“Afghanistan’s enemies don’t present the country in a good light,” said Information and Culture Minister Khairullah Khairkhwa.
“But if these people come and see what it’s really like,” he added, “they will definitely share a good image of it.”
Wells, on a trip with travel company Untamed Borders, which also offers tours of Syria and Somalia, describes his visit as a way to connect with Afghanistan’s people.
He describes a “sense of guilt for the departure” of United States troops.
“I really felt we had a horrible exit, it created such a vacuum and disaster,” he said. “It’s good to help these people and keep relations.”
For solo traveller Stefanie Meier, a 53-year-old US citizen who spent a month travelling from Kabul to Kandahar via Bamiyan and Herat in the west, it was a “bittersweet experience”.
“I have been able to meet people I never thought I would meet, who told me about their life,” she said, adding that she did not face any issues as a woman on her own.
She did experience “disbelief that people have to live like this”, she added. “The poverty, there are no jobs, women not being able to go to school, no future for them.”
Spring has arrived in Afghanistan, and Afghan children have returned to their schools to begin a new academic year. Girls beyond the 6th grade across much of the country, however, are still unable to pursue an education and remain unsure what the future holds for them.
Two years ago, on a spring day like today, the hopes and dreams of Afghan schoolgirls were crushed by the Taliban’s interim government.
On March 21, 2022, the Taliban promised to reopen all schools in Afghanistan, seemingly ending the temporary ban it had placed on girls attending secondary school since its return to power seven months earlier.
Two days later, while many girls were enthusiastically preparing to return to school, the authorities reversed the decision and restricted girls over the age of 12 from attending state-run schools. In an apparent attempt to soften the blow, the Ministry of Education said the closure would be temporary and schools would be reopened once it put in place policies that would ensure compliance with “principles of Islamic law and Afghan culture”.
Six months later, with no plan in place to reopen secondary schools to girls in the foreseeable future, the government issued a new edict and banned girls and young women in Afghanistan from higher education.
This move prompted countless analysts and experts around the world, including myself, to invite Taliban leaders to rethink their decision. We pointed out that “depriving Afghan women of an education would benefit no one” and these anti-education edicts actually stand against the very foundations of Islam.
Regrettably, the Taliban did not listen. This March, exactly two years after the supposedly temporary ban on girls attending secondary schools and universities, another academic year in Afghanistan began without the presence of women and girls.
The hopes and dreams of teenage girls, who believed the ban on their education was indeed “temporary” and they would return to their classrooms once the conditions were “right”, have likely begun to fade away.
As we enter the last week of Ramadan, it is a good moment to reflect on the importance of not reneging on a promise. Those leaders who claim to execute the Divine Will have the responsibility of fulfilling the promise made to millions of innocent Afghan schoolgirls who find themselves oppressed and deprived of their God-given right to an education.
The Taliban’s stance on this issue defies both worldly and religious logic.
Afghanistan, a post-conflict nation that has just emerged from the jaws of multiple protracted armed conflicts spanning four decades, needs all hands on deck to work towards getting the country out of the economic abyss that it finds itself in.
The Taliban takeover of Kabul in 2021 and the ensuing uncertainty precipitated the exodus of a vast number of Afghan professionals, leading to a brain drain at a very precarious time. The last thing that the nation needed was its new leaders to handicap it further and jettison any prospects of recovery by excluding half the population from participating in education, and thus the recovery efforts.
The exclusion of girls from education also contradicts the Taliban’s aim to build a gender-segregated society.
How can women have dedicated healthcare when no female healthcare workers are trained in the country? According to the World Health Organization, 24 women died each day in Afghanistan from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes in 2020 – one of the highest rates in the entire world.
While this statistic was a significant improvement from the situation in 2001 when the Taliban was last in power, experts fear that the situation is likely to get worse, and the Taliban’s diktats on curtailing women’s education in schools and universities are not helping either.
From the religious perspective, too, the Taliban leaders must realise that they are accountable before Allah SWT for thrusting ignorance upon a generation of girls just so they can claim a perceived localised victory of tradition.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in their previous avatar from 1996 to 2001, the education of women was banned across the nation as were most of the avenues for their employment.
This time, the Taliban gave public assurances that it would do things differently and avoid earlier pitfalls and mistakes. The people of Afghanistan believed it. They put their trust in the Taliban.
This trust, this “Amanah”, is an asset the Taliban should value and not waste away in pursuit of meaningless political gains.
The group that claims to follow the path of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), the Amin, the trustworthy, should not be seen to break the Amanah of the people.
The Taliban’s refusal to allow Afghan women and girls to receive an education is also a strategic mistake that stands in the way of the government’s efforts to gain international acceptance and find reliable partners that would support Afghanistan’s economic and structural development.
The important geostrategic location of Afghanistan has led to it receiving a lot of political attention from major global and regional powers for much of its history. Oftentimes, this translated into protracted conflict and resulted in security issues overshadowing all global discussions and engagement with Afghanistan.
If it is serious about bringing stability to and building a prosperous future for the country, the Taliban must endeavour expand the global interest in Afghanistan beyond security and divert the agenda of global engagement with the country to issues of development.
Such a change would not only create the conditions for international projects and initiatives that would create employment and alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans living in dire conditions but would also help end the international isolation of Afghanistan and pave the way for its integration into the rest of the world.
By allowing another academic year to pass without resolving the issue, the Interim Government in Kabul is demonstrating a worrying lack of capacity to work out what should have been a straightforward mechanism to create the conditions under which girls would be allowed back to school.
Thus, it is signalling to the international community, including the Muslim World, that it cannot be trusted and is practically putting a block on any development-focused engagement that could put an end to its ongoing isolation.
Any further procrastination on the issue will no doubt reflect negatively locally, regionally, and globally on the Taliban and on their efforts to demonstrate the applicability of political Islam to today’s development challenges.
It is high time for the Taliban to undo this egregious mistake and prove to its own people and the rest of the world that it is a trustworthy leader, and a responsible caretaker of the future mothers and daughters of its nation.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
New Delhi, India – It is almost 5:40 in the evening. A hair salon in New Delhi’s bustling New Friends Colony neighbourhood is alive with the sound of buzzing clippers and chattering customers. The air is thick with the scent of hair spray and aftershave.
Zaki Marzai, 29, stands behind a barber’s brown chair, his hands moving with precision as he snips a customer’s hair.
Wooden shelves on the walls bear colourful bottles of shampoo and styling products. The mirrors reflect Marzai, his eyes focused on the hair before him. His customer looks satisfied.
Marzai, though, would rather be elsewhere – with a rifle in his hand, not a razor.
Three years ago, Marzai was a soldier in the elite special force of Afghanistan’s army, fighting the Taliban in a war that started with the United States and NATO forces invading the country in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Western-backed Afghan government had sided with the US in the 20-year war. Marzai joined the army in 2015 as a sergeant and was on track to become a commissioned officer.
Everything changed on June 20, 2018.
Zaki Marzai, 29, in his room in Bhogal, New Delhi [Luqmaan Zeerak/Al Jazeera]
‘Sitting ducks’
At about 2am that day, Marzai was stationed outside a camp in Ghazni province of Afghanistan when a barrage of bullets hit him and his fellow soldiers.
Before Marzai and his comrades could realise what happened, 25 soldiers had died on the spot and six others had been injured. Bullets had pierced through Marzai’s chin and right leg.
“The attack was so intense we couldn’t do anything. The bullets were coming from all four sides. We were sitting ducks. The Taliban wiped out the entire camp,” he recalls. According to the United States Institute of Peace, an estimated 70,000 Afghan military and police personnel lost their lives in two decades of war in Afghanistan.
It was eight hours before any backup arrived to rescue the wounded. Marzai, who had lost a lot of blood, was first taken to a nearby hospital in Ghazni and soon transferred to a hospital in Kabul for further treatment on his jaw.
After nearly a year of treatment, his jaw was still deformed, so the Afghan government sent him to India for better care. He left behind his parents, a sister and seven brothers.
In 2019, Marzai arrived at a medical facility in Gurgaon, a city adjoining New Delhi. Later, he was also taken to two other public sector hospitals in the Indian capital.
By August 2021, Marzai hoped to return to Afghanistan, his face finally fixed. But the Afghanistan he knew was about to be broken.
Bullets had pierced through Marzai’s chin during the Taliban attack [Luqmaan Zeerak/Al Jazeera]
‘I cried all night’
As the Taliban grabbed control of province after province in Afghanistan in early August, Marzai was following the news on his phone, watching YouTube, tracking Twitter and waiting for Facebook updates.
Then, on August 15, the Taliban stormed into Kabul and took power, forcing the US and NATO forces to flee the country in a chaotic exit. Marzai tried to reach his family and soldier colleagues on the phone, but couldn’t get through because mobile networks were down.
He was stunned: Marzai had expected a fight, not a meek surrender from the country’s politicians, whom he accuses of looting Afghanistan and then escaping.
“I cried all night when the Taliban took over the country,” says Marzai. “I was heartbroken. I was looking forward to returning to my family and rejoining the army, but now I am stuck here [in India].”
Marzai is from Ghazni, an Afghan province dominated by the Shia Hazara community, which has been persecuted by the mainly Sunni Taliban for a long time.
And he is a former soldier for a government that the Taliban viewed as the enemy. Since August 2021, despite a general amnesty announced by the Taliban after its takeover, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported that at least 200 former Afghan soldiers and government officials have been killed extrajudicially by the new authority.
Marzai is not the only Afghan soldier in India, unable to return home.
Zaki Marzai displaying his picture when he was hospitalised after the Taliban attack [Luqmaan Zeerak/Al Jazeera]
‘We couldn’t return’
Khalil Shamas, a 27-year-old former lieutenant who now works as a waiter at a New Delhi restaurant, arrived in India in 2020 for training at the elite Indian Military Academy (IMA) in Dehradun, the hilly capital of India’s northern state of Uttarakhand. By the time he and his colleagues completed the course, the Afghan army had ceased to exist on the ground.
He says there were about 200 Afghan soldiers training at the IMA. A few returned to Afghanistan. Many others migrated to Iran, Canada, the US and Europe.
But at least 50 of them stayed back in India – unable to get visas to the West, and too scared to return to Afghanistan.
Back in India, the difficulties for Afghan soldiers forced to stay in exile worsened after the Afghanistan embassy in New Delhi, their only source of contact and support, stopped funding their stay after the government in Kabul changed. The soldiers are reticent about sharing details of just how the embassy supported them financially.
“Since 2021, we have not received any help from the embassy. We have been left on our own, to fend for ourselves,” says Marzai.
After exhausting all of his savings and with no help coming, Marzai managed to enrol in a six-month haircutting course and started working in a salon.
He lives in a two-room apartment with a damp odour, with three other Afghan men in the congested Bhogal area of South Delhi. The paint is peeling off the walls, and dirty quilts are strewn about.
Zaki Marzai in his room in Bhogal, New Delhi [Luqmaan Zeerak/Al Jazeera]
Not far from Bhogal, Shamas lives with seven Afghan friends in a small apartment in the city’s Malviya Nagar area. “It is challenging to live in a foreign land without any financial assistance from your government. I had to not only look after myself but also send money back home for my family,” he says.
Shamas’s older brother Dost Ali Shamas was a district governor in his hometown, Ghazi, when Taliban fighters killed him in an ambush in 2018. After the incident, the family moved to Kabul in search of a safer environment.
Since 2022, India has also slowly increased its engagement with the Taliban, a group it shunned when it was in power in the 1990s and when it was fighting US-backed forces between 2001 and 2021. In June 2022, the Indian government reopened its Kabul embassy and deployed a team of “technical experts” to manage its mission.
In November last year, the Afghan embassy in New Delhi, which was led by diplomats appointed by the elected government that the Taliban overthrew, announced that it was shutting down, accusing the Indian government of no longer cooperating with it.
Now, in addition to no longer receiving financial support from the mission, the Afghan soldiers also have nowhere to go for paperwork to authenticate that they were once part of their country’s army.
According to a 2023 report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), India is home to more than 15,000 Afghan refugees. Nearly 1,000 of those are Afghans who took shelter in India after the Taliban came to power in 2021.
The report says nearly 1.6 million Afghans have fled the country since 2021, bringing the total number of Afghans in the neighbouring countries to 8.2 million.
Among them is Esmatullah Asil.
Khalil Shamas, a 27-year-old lieutenant in the former Afghan national army lives in New Delhi, where he works as a waiter in a restaurant [Luqmaan Zeerak/Al Jazeera]
‘My dream came crashing down’
Asil, another former Afghan soldier, begins his day at 7am. Dressed in a black sports T-shirt and trousers, he hurries to work where young boys and girls wait for his instructions.
Asil, 27, is a gym trainer in South Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, home to hundreds of Afghan migrants who have opened restaurants, shops and pharmacies there.
After finishing his master’s degree in social science from Herat University in western Afghanistan, Asil enrolled in the army and was set to become a lieutenant. “It was my dream to join the army and serve my country. But after the Taliban returned, my dream came crashing down,” he says.
While at the IMA, Asil used to visit the academy’s gym, where he learned bodybuilding. It was a skill that came in handy when he then sought work at the Lajpat Nagar gym.
“I told the gym owner to give me a chance and worked there for free for six months. If I hadn’t secured the job, I don’t know how I would have survived here,” he says.
The former Afghan soldiers in India say they are afraid of returning to Afghanistan – they fear they will be targeted for supporting the US-led NATO forces.
Shamas, whose brother was killed by the Taliban, recounts the threats that preceded that assassination.
“My brother received numerous threatening letters from the Taliban demanding to quit his position before they ultimately killed him,” Shamas recalls.
Marzai has his own demons.
He says he still wrestles with nightmares from the “harrowing night” he was ambushed. He instinctively moves his hands and legs in sleep, as if trying to evade the bullets that rained on him years ago.
“I sleep alone in a separate room. My roommates are reluctant to sleep beside me. I don’t know whom I will hit in my sleep because I move unconsciously,” he says.
Khalil Shamas shows his photo from his IMA training in Dehradun, India. Shamas is wearing his Afghan army uniform in the photo [Luqmaan Zeerak/Al Jazeera]
‘Never tastes like home’
In their free time, Asil and Shamas visit each other’s homes, recalling with nostalgia their days of hope and dreams at the IMA, where they first met. Conversations often end up veering towards the state of present-day Afghanistan – and the realisation that they need to distract themselves.
“We usually play cards, listen to songs – Afghani and Bollywood – watch movies on Netflix, and on occasions also cook,” Asil says. “My favourite actor is Shah Rukh Khan, and actress is Deepika Padukone,” he adds, laughing, referring to the Bollywood stars.
They cook their favourite dishes. Asil prefers kebabs and ashak, pocket-sized dumplings filled with chives, and typically served with yoghurt and a mint seasoning. Shamas has a weakness for kabuli pulao.
“We try our best to cook our favourite dishes. But it never tastes like home,” Shamas said.
And the delicacies of home can’t fill the void of missing out on family functions.
Shamas’s niece got married in early March, while Asil’s brother was married five months ago. One of Marzai’s older brothers got married in 2022.
“I desperately wanted to be there as my brother is no more. But, I couldn’t travel. I watched the wedding through a video call,” Shamas says.
Shamas and Asil want to migrate to the US. However, their lack of active service in the Afghan army makes them ineligible to seek asylum, they say.
“Because we were still in training and had not yet joined the army in active duty, the US authorities are not considering us for asylum despite the dangerous conditions we face in Afghanistan,” says Shamas.
According to the International Rescue Committee, up to 300,000 Afghans had been associated with US operations in Afghanistan since 2001. Since the withdrawal of the US, approximately 88,500 Afghans have been resettled in the US, according to the US Department of Homeland Security, while thousands more have applied, seeking asylum.
Asil is trying to move to other countries as well. “Let’s see what God has in store for me. I have no plans to return to Afghanistan. I want to settle in any Western country and later bring my family there as well,” he says.
Marzai is trying to get asylum in Europe or the US. “I am worried about my family. I want to go home but I am afraid of the Taliban. I am hoping that as a serving soldier, I will find a home in the West,” he said.
But for now, they must stay in India. And while the Afghan army they once served no longer exists, they can’t get rid of the habits they picked up over years of training.
Whenever Marzai meets a senior ex-officer, he maintains the same routine of discipline and respect he had been trained in, lowering his head and standing at attention while greeting the officer.
Washington, DC – As the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in 2021, millions of Afghans faced the prospect of life once more under Taliban rule.
For thousands among them, the danger was particularly acute: They had worked with the departing Americans and could be subject to Taliban reprisals as a result.
But a long-running US programme offered the possibility of life abroad: Translators, contractors and other Afghan employees with direct ties to the US military were eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV.
Now, less than three years later, advocates fear this narrow immigration pathway — a cornerstone of Washington’s relief efforts — could quietly fall victim to deadlock in the US Congress.
The legislature must pass a set of budget appropriations bills before March 22 in order to avert a government shutdown. But critics fear the package will pass without authorisation for more Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans, leaving them with even fewer options to escape the threats they may face.
On Thursday, a bipartisan group of legislators sent a letter (PDF) to top Senate leaders urging them to include the provision for Special Immigrant Visas in the final version of the appropriations bills.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, one of the letter’s signatories, told Al Jazeera in a statement that Afghans connected to the US military remain “at grave risk, as the Taliban continue to hunt for them”.
“For two decades, the US military mission in Afghanistan relied on trusted Afghan allies who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with American troops,” said Shaheen. “We promised to protect them — just as they did for us.”
US Senator Jeanne Shaheen has pushed for 20,000 additional Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans to be authorised this year [Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Reuters]
Protecting Afghan allies
Shaheen is one of 13 senators pushing for 20,000 more Special Immigrant Visas to be included for Afghans in the 2024 State and Foreign Operations (SFOPS) appropriations bill, part of the budget package that needs to pass this month.
But immigration is a hot-button issue in the US election year, and advocates worry anti-immigrant sentiment could scuttle attempts to increase access.
Revised drafts of the Afghan Allies Protection Act — which sets the parameters for the Special Immigrant Visas — were introduced in both the House and Senate last year. But while the Senate Appropriations Committee authorised the 20,000 additional visas, the Republican-controlled House has not approved more on its end.
Because the visa programme for Afghans — first established in 2009 — was considered temporary, Congress has to regularly extend its mandate and adjust the number of visas available.
Currently, there are just 7,000 special visas left for principal applicants, but advocates say there are more than 140,000 pending applicants, with at least 20,000 nearing the final stages of the process.
The current processing rate is about 1,000 applicants a month, which means the visas are set to run out around August — the month that marks the third anniversary of the US troop withdrawal. Without further legislation, it is unclear what would happen next.
“I’m just mystified by this whole thing,” Kim Staffieri, the executive director of the Association of Wartime Allies (AWA), told Al Jazeera. Her organisation helps Afghans associated with the US military with their visa applications.
“I’ve been doing this for seven, eight years, and have never come to the point of worrying about running out of [SIVs] ever,” she said.
Few options for Afghans
The possibility that the programme could run out of visas has left Afghans like Abdulrahman Safi feeling betrayed.
Safi, 35, worked with both the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Afghanistan, before fleeing on an evacuation flight to the US in 2021.
“We come here with all these promises: ‘We won’t leave you behind,’” Safi told Al Jazeera. “Now it feels like none of that matters.”
Safi is one of the tens of thousands of Afghans who have applied for Special Immigrant Visas. The shortage, however, only compounds existing problems with the programme: Critics say it has been dysfunctional for years.
The spike in applications following the 2021 troop withdrawal, advocates add, has only amplified the mile-high application backlog.
There are relatively few options outside of the Special Immigrant Visas — and they too suffer from long wait times and tight caps on the number of applicants admitted.
Some Afghans who evacuated in 2021 were granted humanitarian parole, a temporary status with no pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. Others have applied for asylum status, although that process is likewise backlogged and can take years, with no guarantee of success.
A victim of partisanship
Support for the special visa programme has historically been bipartisan in the US, due in no small part to widespread advocacy from veterans groups, according to Adam Bates, a supervisory policy counsel at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).
In many ways, he said, the programme has been “compartmentalised away from the broader immigration debate”.
“The Afghan SIV program has been around since 2009. For that entire time period, it has enjoyed widespread bipartisan support,” said Bates. “It had support across presidential administrations, even during the [Donald] Trump administration.”
Bates is among the advocates who worry the programme may be falling victim to partisanship in Congress, heightened by November’s impending general elections. The immigration debate has played a prominent role in campaigns so far.
Joseph Azam, a lawyer and board member for the Afghan-American Foundation, told Al Jazeera he fears other issues are overshadowing the Special Immigrant Visa programme for Afghans.
“For whatever reason — because we’re in election year, there are other things going on in the world, or people are just not paying attention — this programme has gotten to the point of almost withering away,” he said.
“That would be catastrophic for the tens of thousands of Afghans who have been left behind, who are in hiding with their families and were some of the first on the kill list for the Taliban when they took over.”
Azam noted that no legislators have spoken out in opposition to the Afghan programme, but he nevertheless feared that the visas could become a political tool during the election season.
President Joe Biden has been widely criticised for his handling of the chaotic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Azam said the episode could be used as a “cudgel” for his critics in Congress.
“Perhaps there’s a sense that, if they passed [the additional SIVs], it would kind of address some part of the wound,” he said.
Azam added that politicians might be seeking to avoid perceptions that they are lax on immigration. “Immigrant populations — particularly from that part of the world — are very convenient boogeyman during an election year.”
‘A backstab’ to Afghans
Helal Massomi, the Afghan policy adviser for the nonprofit Global Refuge group, is herself an evacuee who fled to safety in the US. She previously held an advisory role in the US-backed Afghan government, helping to lead peace talks before the Taliban takeover.
She worried that Congress’s apparent indifference to the Afghans who worked with the US military could be a canary in the coal mine. If Congress will not act to protect those Afghans, she wondered, will it act to protect any Afghans in vulnerable situations?
“This shows that, with every day that passes, the commitment that was out there for standing by the allies — the Afghan allies — is fading away,” she told Al Jazeera.
Massomi has recently led efforts to pass legislation that would create a pathway to residency for the Afghans evacuated to the US. But those bills have languished in Congress amid Republican opposition.
She has also pushed for more immigration pathways for vulnerable Afghans outside of the US. That includes an expansion of the Priority 2 (P-2) programme, which was set up to offer access to Afghans who worked with US-based organisations but do not qualify for Special Immigrant Visas.
She noted that some of the most vocal critics of Biden’s Afghan policy have remained silent on the issue of approving more SIVs.
“I completely support criticism towards the administration,” she said. “But you can’t do it if you yourself are in inaction.”
The message that inaction sends is chilling, she added. “I think it’s a backstab to the Afghans who stood by the army and the American citizens in Afghanistan.”
As handfuls gather on International Women’s Day, UN rights rapporteur calls for release of detained rights activists.
Small groups of Afghan women have gathered in private spaces to demand that harsh restrictions on their freedoms be lifted, despite recent Taliban crackdowns on protests that have seen activists detained.
The demonstrations were staged in different locations, including the provinces of Takhar and Balkh, as the world celebrated International Women’s Day on Friday, according to the activists from the Purple Saturdays group – an organisation formed to raise awareness and oppose restrictions on women’s freedoms.
In northern Takhar province, seven women held papers obscuring their faces, reading “Rights, Justice, Freedom”.
“Our silence and fear is the biggest weapon of the Taliban,” a demonstrator whose face was covered said in a video.
In Balkh province, several women also held up signs saying “Don’t give the Taliban a chance” in front of a banner reading “Save Afghanistan Women”.
About 20 women gathered at an event organised by the Afghanistan Association of the Blind in northern Mazar-i-Sharif city on Thursday. “It is very painful that a woman has no value in our society today. She cannot use any of her rights,” said one attendee.
On Friday, Richard Bennett, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, called on the Taliban government “to immediately and unconditionally release all those who have been arbitrarily detained for defending human rights, especially the rights of women and girls”.
On #InternationalWomensDay I stand with the women of Afghanistan, call on the #Taliban to respect the human rights of women & girls under international law, and urge the immediate and unconditional release of detained women human rights defenders. 👇https://t.co/0g3kskNSBS
— UN Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett (@SR_Afghanistan) March 8, 2024
Women have protested sporadically against rules handed down by the Taliban authorities, but often in small groups and indoors out of fear of reprisals, after several activists were detained for months.
‘Poverty and isolation’
Since surging back to power in August 2021, Taliban authorities have imposed numerous restrictions on women and girls, ordering women to cover up when leaving home, stopping girls and women from attending high school or university, and banning them from public spaces with laws the UN has labelled “gender apartheid”.
They also barred them from working for the UN or NGOs, and most female government employees were dismissed from their jobs or paid to stay at home.
Taliban authorities have repeatedly dismissed international criticism as propaganda. On Friday, spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the Taliban government was committed to women’s rights within the framework of Islam, according to an interview with Tolo News.
Marking International Women’s Day, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), urged the Taliban government to lift restrictions on women and girls, saying not doing so risked “further pushing the country into deeper poverty and isolation”.
According to UNAMA, more than 12 million Afghan women are in need of humanitarian assistance. The mission raised fears over recent crackdown on non-compliance with the Islamic dress code, which was “pushing women into even greater isolation due to fear of arbitrary arrest”.
Alison Davidian, special representative for UN Women in Afghanistan, said the plight of Afghan women and girls was “a global fight and a battle for women’s rights everywhere”.
The Taliban has set unacceptable conditions for attending a United Nations-sponsored meeting about Afghanistan in the Qatari capital, Doha, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says.
“I received a letter [from the Taliban] with a set of conditions to be present in this meeting that were not acceptable,” Guterres said at a news conference on Monday.
“These conditions denied us the right to talk to other representatives of Afghan society and demanded a treatment that would, to a large extent, be similar to recognition,” the UN chief added.
The two-day meeting which ended on Monday in Doha brought together member states and international envoys to Afghanistan to discuss an array of issues facing the country. But the Taliban didn’t attend because its demands were not met.
The Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021 after United States and NATO forces withdrew following two decades of war.
However, no country recognises it as Afghanistan’s government, and the UN has said that recognition is almost impossible while bans on female education and employment remain in place.
The biggest point of contention between the international community and the Taliban are the bans imposed on women and girls.
Since it retook power, it has ordered women to cover up when leaving home, stopped girls and women from attending high school and university, and banned them from parks, gyms and public baths.
The Taliban insists the bans are a domestic matter and reject criticism as outside interference.
Guterres said it was essential to revoke the restrictions.
In January, Taliban chief spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the UN preoccupation with Afghan women was unwarranted and dismissed its concerns.
“Afghan women wear hijab of their own accord,” he said on X. “They don’t need to be forced. The Vice and Virtue Ministry hasn’t forced anyone [to wear hijab] either.”
Another point of contention is the appointment of a UN special envoy in the country, which the Taliban opposes.
On Monday, Guterres said there needed to be “clear consultations” with the Taliban to have clarification of the envoy’s role and who it could be to “make it attractive” from the Taliban’s point of view.
He said it was in the Taliban’s interests to be part of the consultations.
Many governments, international organisations and aid agencies have cut off or severely scaled back their funding for Afghanistan in response to the Taliban policies, causing a serious blow to the country’s struggling economy.
“One of our main objectives is to overcome this deadlock,” Guterres said, explaining that a roadmap needed to be created in which “the concerns of the international community” and the concerns of the “de facto authorities of Afghanistan” are taken into account.
Lotfullah Najafizada, CEO of Amu TV, an international media outlet, told Al Jazeera the Taliban made a strategic mistake by not attending the talks.
“I think it is very important also for the Taliban to understand where the world stands. At the moment the world has planned to go ahead without the Taliban, which is not something that they expected,” he said.
“I think it is very important for the international community to build consensus and deal with the Taliban with one voice.”
The meeting in Doha also aimed at a more coordinated response to tackle issues in Afghanistan.
Guterres said there had been discussion of a “contact group”, with a “limited number of states able to have a more coordinated approach in the engagement with the de facto authorities”.
He said this could include permanent members of the UN Security Council, neighbouring countries and relevant donors but it would be “up to member states to decide how to create it”.
“I believe it would be a way to have coherence in the way the international community is engaging with the de facto authorities of Afghanistan,” he said.
At an official ceremony held by the Chinese government in Beijing on January 30, a queue of foreign diplomats lined up to present their credentials to President Xi Jinping. Among the 309 diplomats was an unlikely participant.
After over two years of negotiations, China recognised Bilal Karimi, a former Taliban spokesman, as an official envoy to Beijing, making Xi’s government the first in the world to do so since the group seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.
China has been making inroads into Afghanistan through investments and projects since the United States withdrew forces from the country in 2021, triggering a collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government and paving the way for the Taliban to return to power.
But as the news of Beijing’s formal acceptance of the Taliban on January 30 spread, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was quick to issue a statement, clarifying that the acceptance of diplomatic credentials did not signal Beijing’s official recognition of Afghanistan’s current rulers.
It was too late.
By then, Beijing’s move had already secured a major diplomatic win for the Taliban which has been struggling for global recognition for its government, say analysts. Since taking power, the group has remained isolated on the international front, mainly owing to allegations of supporting armed groups and for its strict interpretation of Islamic laws to impose restrictions on the rights and freedoms of women. Sanctions by the West on the Taliban have in turn had a crippling impact on the Afghan economy.
But why did China recognise Karimi as the Taliban envoy to Beijing — and what does it mean for the group?
China’s deep interests in Afghanistan
At a time when Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are treated as outcasts by much of the world, China has stepped up engagement with the group.
In 2023, several Chinese companies signed multiple business deals with the Taliban government. The most prominent among them was a 25-year-long, multimillion-dollar oil extraction contract with an estimated investment value of $150m in the first year, and up to $540m over the next three years.
There’s a history to that relationship, said Jiayi Zhou, researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
“The Taliban are not an unknown entity to the Chinese government, which reached out to them when they were a pariah government in the late 1990s and continued to maintain a working relationship with the Taliban as an insurgency group,” she told Al Jazeera.
Beijing’s decades-long pragmatic relationship with the Taliban, Zhou said, is a “natural consequence” of a number of factors, most prominently security.
“As a direct neighbour of Afghanistan, China’s own security depends on the Taliban. It can ill-afford to alienate or antagonise them, and certainly has no interest in doing so over values,” she said,
And Beijing isn’t alone in seeking such a pragmatic relationship with the group.
“Most of Afghanistan’s neighbours hold the same position as China: that the Taliban need to be engaged with, rather than isolated,” she said. “China’s [acceptance of the Taliban ambassador] is very much indicative of a China that has become comfortable being a first mover in the foreign policy domain.”
‘Realism and opportunity’
Many regional countries had taken a critical stance against the Taliban when it was in power in Afghanistan during the 1900s. However, “realism and opportunity” have overtaken as prime motivators in geopolitics since its 2021 takeover, said Gautam Mukhopadhaya, senior visiting fellow at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and former Indian ambassador to Kabul, told Al Jazeera.
“Realism in the sense that for the moment, it looks like the Taliban in the only game in town,” he said. “Despite the unpopularity of the Taliban and its repressive measures, resistance [against them], civic as well as military, is almost crushed… Today, the US has made it clear it has no compelling geopolitical interests, stomach or desire to commit resources to Afghanistan.”
While China is the first country to recognise a Taliban ambassador, several other countries including Russia, Iran, Turkey and India have made efforts to engage with the Taliban, not only on humanitarian projects but also by reopening their diplomatic missions in Kabul.
An International Crisis Group (ICG) report released last month, examining the Taliban’s relationship with its neighbours, observed similar patterns of engagement. “They are convinced that the best way to secure their countries’ interests and moderate the Taliban’s behaviour in the long term is patient deliberation with Kabul, rather than ostracism,” said the report.
“The world will not stop and wait for Western sentiment to shift in favour of the Taliban. We are here on the frontlines,” a regional diplomat is quoted as saying in the ICG report.
What does the Taliban gain?
The West’s antagonism, especially in the form of sanctions, has had severe effects on aid-dependent Afghanistan. There is widespread unemployment and starvation, with an estimated 23.7 million people requiring humanitarian assistance in 2024.
According to data gathered by multiple international agencies, more than 13 million people – nearly 30 percent of the country’s population – are facing extreme food insecurity. That figure is projected to rise to 15.8 million by March.
Similarly, an estimate by the International Labour Organization in 2022 observed a 35 percent drop in Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) since the Taliban takeover, resulting in more than 900,00 job losses since 2021 and causing widespread unemployment.
Faced with these crises, the Taliban needed partners. It now has one, said Mukhopadhyaya. “It can now count on a major power more or less on its side,” the former Indian diplomat said.
“Ideally, the Taliban would’ve wanted strong relations with major global powers such as the US and China, and regional powerhouses like Russia and India for various reasons,” Ibraheem Bahiss, analyst with the International Crisis Group (ICG), told Al Jazeera.
With the US unwilling to play ball, China becomes even more important for the Taliban, he said.
A cautious Taliban
Deeper ties with China could “come with a cost” for the Taliban, warned Bahiss, in the form of “falling into the Chinese grip that other countries have discovered to their chagrin.
“But for now, both sides seem willing to play that game.”
The ICG analyst, however, said the Taliban, despite being starved for recognition, may still be cautious about how much to engage with Beijing.
“The Taliban are still trying to keep their relationship with China somewhat in check because they seem to be aware that the more they gravitate towards Beijing, the more regional powers like Russia and India will hesitate to expand relations with Kabul, thereby prompting the very dilemma of singularity of foreign patrons that the Taliban are so desperate to avoid,” he said.
“China, for obvious reasons, has emerged as a key driver of the region’s outreach and engagement with the Taliban,” Bahiss added.
“All this, however, seems to have created a spiral where the more isolated the Taliban becomes, the more they turn to China to replace the diplomatic weight the US previously provided.”
Taliban chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid says the UN preoccupation with Afghan women is unwarranted.
The United Nations mission in Afghanistan is “deeply concerned” about Taliban authorities arbitrarily arresting and detaining women and girls it accuses of violating dress codes regarding the Islamic headscarf, or hijab.
In a statement on Thursday, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said it had “documented a series of hijab decree enforcement campaigns” taking place since January 1 in Kabul and Daykundi provinces.
These were under orders from the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice and the police, it said, and women had been “warned” and “detained”.
To secure a woman’s release from detention, UNAMA said her male guardian, also called a mahram, was required to sign a letter guaranteeing her future compliance or else face punishment.
The mission said it was looking into claims of ill-treatment of the women and extortion in exchange for their release, and warned that physical violence and detentions were demeaning and dangerous.
Since returning to power in August 2021, Taliban authorities have imposed numerous restrictions on women and girls, with laws the UN has labelled “gender apartheid”.
“Enforcement measures involving physical violence are especially demeaning and dangerous for Afghan women and girls,” said Roza Otunbayeva, UN special envoy and head of the mission.
“Detentions carry an enormous stigma that puts Afghan women at even greater risk,” she said. “They also destroy public trust.”
‘Pushing women into even greater isolation’
The Taliban said last week that female police officers have been taking women into custody for wearing “bad hijab.”
When the Taliban retook power in 2021, they ordered women to cover up when leaving home, stopped girls and women from attending high school or university, and banned them from parks, gyms and public baths.
They also barred them from working for the UN or NGOs, and most female government employees were dismissed from their jobs or paid to stay at home.
The UN mission’s statement said it “fears the current crackdown is pushing women into even greater isolation due to fear of arbitrary arrest, and creating a permissive environment for men to enforce repressive measures at home”.
The Taliban chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the UN preoccupation with Afghan women was unwarranted, and dismissed its concerns.
“Afghan women wear hijab of their own accord,” he said on X. “They don’t need to be forced. The Vice and Virtue Ministry hasn’t forced anyone [to wear hijab] either.”
In May 2022, the Taliban issued a decree calling for women to only show their eyes and recommending they wear the head-to-toe burqa, similar to restrictions during their previous rule of the country between 1996 and 2001.
A spokesman for the Vice and Virtue Ministry, Abdul Ghafar Farooq, earlier on Thursday rejected reports that women and girls were being arrested or beaten for wearing “bad hijab” and called it propaganda from the foreign media.
Islamabad, Pakistan – A recent deadly suicide attack on a military post in northwest Pakistan has raised fears of the return of armed rebellion in the country’s tribal regions that have seen a dramatic rise in armed attacks this year.
A little-known group, Tehreek-e-Jihad Pakistan (TJP), claimed the December 12 bombing in Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan. At least 23 soldiers were killed and another 34 injured in the car bomb attack.
The attacks by the TJP have brought back memories of the series of deadly attacks carried out by armed groups led by the Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, in late 2000.
But why have attacks on security forces increased and how are the Pakistani government and the military planning to handle it?
What explains the surge in the attacks?
The first 11 months of the year witnessed 664 attacks of varying nature and size across the country, an increase of 67 percent from the corresponding duration in 2022, according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), an Islamabad-based research organisation.
But the bulk of the attacks have targeted two provinces – Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the northwest and Balochistan in the southwest.
Almost 93 percent of the total attacks took place in these two provinces, with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the worst affected province, witnessing 416 attacks since November 2022 when the TTP walked out of the ceasefire with the government.
Pakistan Taliban’s ideology is aligned with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which currently rules the war-torn country. However, the groups have different goals and they operate independently.
Family members of the victims of a suicide bombing in Peshawar weep as they take part in a march on February 1 denouncing armed attacks. [Muhammad Sajjad/AP Photo]
In January, at least 100 people, mostly policemen, were killed in the worst attack of the year, when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The attack was claimed by a TTP splinter group, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar.
The genesis for the spike in the violence, analysts say, could be traced back to the unilateral decision by the Pakistan Taliban to end the ceasefire last year. The armed group has asserted that its attacks were in response to the renewed military operations in the region.
Among their main demands include the release of its members and the reversal of the merger of the tribal region with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. A stricter imposition of Islamic laws is also one of the demands.
The Pakistani army has conducted multiple operations to eliminate the group since 2002 but struggled to achieve its goal as fighters have used the porous border to find safe haven in Afghanistan.
Since its founding in 2007, the TTP has targeted both civilians as well as law enforcement personnel, resulting in thousands of deaths. Their deadliest attack came in December 2014, when they targeted the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar, killing more than 130 students.
The TTP also claimed responsibility for shooting Malala Yousafzai in 2012. Yousafzai went on to win the Noble Prize for Peace in 2015 and is currently a globally renowned girls’ education activist.
The most disconcerting aspect of TJP lies in its implementation of suicide attacks.
by Abdul Sayed, a Sweden-based researcher
The group remains banned in Pakistan and has been designated a “terrorist” group by the United States. Formed to unify like-minded groups in the region, the TTP stepped up attacks in response to Pakistani military operations launched to flush out foreign fighters fleeing the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
In response to the APS attack, the Pakistani military launched a large-scale military operation, titled Zarb-e-Azb, against the armed groups. While the Pakistani army claimed it was able to achieve its objective, the military operation was harshly criticised by the local population as well as human rights organisations.
The military was accused of adopting scorched earth tactics and carrying out enforced disappearances of individuals accused of having links with the TTP. Many of those arrested were tried in a military court, which is considered contrary to international law.
Which groups have sought to claim responsibility for the recent attacks?
With the return of the Taliban government in Afghanistan in August 2021, which has had historical links with the Pakistani security establishment, it was believed that managing the TTP would become easier.
A month after the Taliban took over Kabul, it helped facilitate the meeting between the Pakistani military with the TTP for both sides to engage in a ceasefire talk, a decision endorsed and pushed by Imran Khan, Pakistan’s then-prime minister.
Subsequently, over the next few months, a tentative ceasefire led to the release of senior TTP leaders imprisoned by Pakistan. It also facilitated the resettlement of hundreds of TTP fighters and their families back to Pakistan. Some of their leaders had been released as part of peace deals with previous Pakistani governments.
However, low-scale skirmishes between the two sides continued well into 2022, with both sides accusing each other of violating the agreement.
The January 31 suicide blast targeting a mosque inside a police facility was one of the deadliest attacks on Pakistani security forces in recent years. [Muhammad Zubair/AP Photo]
Despite repeated meetings, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the growing distrust between the two sides increased. The removal of Khan as prime minister in April 2022, followed by the retirement of army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa in November 2022, did not help the cause. The TTP announced a unilateral end to the ceasefire days after Bajwa retired.
The emergence of an obscure TJP, believed to be affiliated with the TTP, has further raised concerns among policymakers. TJP has been behind at least seven major attacks this year, including the latest one in Dera Ismail Khan.
The group targeted a Pakistani Air Force airbase in Mianwali city in November and in another attack this year in Zhob city of Balochistan it killed at least 14 army personnel.
According to researchers who study different armed groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan, TJP remains an “enigmatic organisation”.
The group, which has carried out several attacks this year, is shrouded in mystery regarding its leadership, members, and locations. The main source of information about the TJP is derived from its media releases. The group claims it was formed to “wage jihad against Pakistan with the aim of transforming the country into an Islamic state”.
Abdul Sayed, a Sweden-based researcher on armed groups in South and Central Asia, said the TTP officially recognised TJP as a fellow armed organisation in July 2023. Pakistani authorities also assert that TJP is linked to TTP.
“However, as of now, there is a lack of concrete evidence to substantiate any clandestine connections between the two groups,” Sayed told Al Jazeera.
The most disconcerting aspect of TJP, he said, lies in its implementation of suicide attacks.
“In the attacks claimed by the TJP, a group of four to seven suicide bombers conduct assaults on security force camps under the cover of darkness. This strategy has propelled the conflict between militants and security forces in Pakistan to an exceptionally destructive level,” Sayed added.
Two of the most violent attacks this year were carried out by the regional affiliate of ISIL (ISIS), the Islamic State in Khorasan Province or ISKP (ISIS-K). In July, it targeted a political rally in Bajaur, a tribal district neighbouring Afghanistan, killing more than 60 people. It was also behind a major blast in Mastung city of Balochistan in September that killed more than 50 people.
While the ISKP chose to target civilians in the few attacks it conducted, the TTP and the TJP have singled out security personnel.
Abdul Basit, a research fellow at S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the tactic of targeting law enforcement personnel worked on multiple levels, as it helped demoralise the forces, as well as help create terror and air of insecurity.
Why has Pakistan been unable to control the increase in violence?
For many counterterrorism analysts and observers of the violence in the region, one of the key failings of the Pakistani government was its inability to formulate a “coherent and cogent” policy towards Afghanistan, which they believe has led to the current situation.
Elaborating on this, Basit said the Pakistani army’s strategy was based on “assumptions and hope” that after the Kabul takeover by the Taliban, it would be able to control the TTP from perpetrating its attacks in Pakistan.
Basit said fundamentally, the combination of having counterproductive Afghan policies as well as the inability to build counterterrorism capacity, the government was unable to prepare itself for the battle it is faced with now.
“Pakistan spent a lot of time seeking peace talks, but … it was not proactive in eliminating the threat. But with ceasefire ending, Pakistan is in firefighting mode,” he said.
“Now, the best they can hope for is damage limitation.”
In counterterrorism, public support is critical but in the areas which have seen long bouts of fight, such as here in Pakistan, the sentiment is hostile towards both the military as well as the rebel fighters
by Abdul Basit, a research fellow at S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore
The peace talks Basit is referring to was endorsed by the Pakistani government under former Prime Minister Khan in late 2021, when the military engaged with the TTP. Those talks were facilitated by the Afghan Taliban. The TTP demanded the reversal of the merger of tribal districts as well as the imposition of its interpretation of Islamic law. But both demands were rejected by the then government.
The Pakistani side urged for the disbanding of the armed group, a demand which was never met.
Khan was a vocal opponent of the US-led drone strikes targeting TTP fighters in Pakistan’s tribal region bordering Afghanistan, as those attacks collaterally caused loss of civilian lives.
Basit, the Singapore-based expert, said the current situation, which sees almost daily skirmishes between Pakistani troops and TTP fighters, does not allow for any large-scale operation, for which he said the government lacks the capacity as well as the public goodwill. The researcher said the resettlement of TTP in Pakistan in early 2022 was seen as a very unpopular decision, resulting in public protests.
“In counterterrorism, public support is critical but in the areas which have seen long bouts of fight, such as here in Pakistan, the sentiment is hostile towards both the military as well as the rebel fighters,” Basit said.
Pakistan in the past has engaged in dialogue with the fighter group on numerous occasions, with at least five major peace agreements between 2007 and 2014, none of which lasted more than a few months.
The Pakistani military launched several operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and tribal areas against the TTP during the same period.
With the government having tried both military operations as well as dialogues, Amina Khan, director of the Centre for Afghanistan, Middle East & Africa (CAMEA) at the Institute of Strategic Studies (ISSI) in Islamabad, concurs with Basit on the point that the government never had clarity on how it wanted to approach its policy against the TTP.
“We do not know whether Pakistan wants to engage with them in a dialogue, or to start a kinetic operation against them,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that there is a lack of agreement among stakeholders in the country on the issue.
What options does Pakistan have now?
Senior Pakistani civilian and military leaderships have conducted multiple high-level meetings with their Afghan counterparts in Islamabad and Kabul this year.
Pakistan has repeatedly alleged that Afghan soil is being used to harbour fighters, who carry out cross-border attacks, a charge the Taliban vehemently denies. After the Dera Ismail Khan attack, Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesperson for the interim government, repeated the defence, saying there is no threat emanating from Afghan soil to any of its neighbours.
“Every incident in Pakistan should not be linked to Afghanistan. This incident [Dera Ismail Khan attack] happened hundreds of kilometres away from our country. There are security forces and intelligence there [in Pakistan], and they should be cautious about their duties,” Mujahid said last week.
In October, Pakistan decided to expel more than 1.5 million Afghans allegedly living without documents raising further tension with the Taliban administration.
Pakistani officials on numerous occasions this year also threatened to conduct cross-border attacks on TTP hideouts in Afghanistan. However, no attacks have been confirmed from either Pakistan or the Taliban government.
Sayed, the Sweden-based scholar, said the Taliban views the increasing attacks by fighters in Pakistan as an internal matter, attributing it to Pakistan’s policies resulting from its involvement in the so-called “war on terror” led by the US.
Basit, the researcher, said “choosing bravado” would be a wrong lesson from the increasing violence in the country, and waging cross-border attacks in Afghanistan would be a bad idea.
He, however, supported the idea of conducting targeted operations within Pakistan.
“You must blunt the sharp edge of the knife, first and foremost, for which you will need to use force. However, priority should be focused on internal issues and to dismantle the network of these fighters in the country. The process must be about containment, downgrading, and then eliminating,” Basit said.
However, Khan, the director at ISSI, said she was firmly of the opinion that the avenues for dialogue must remain open.
“I feel that dialogue is essential, and it must continue,” she said.
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