Key Reflections
* The drivers of the Taliban and the Haqqani Network are power and money in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They engage in diversified commercial and criminal activities and are heavily invested in the agricultural industry, mining, pine nuts, and real estate.
* Taliban factions are some of the biggest drug dealing cartels in the world and control heroin and methamphetamine production and supply globally.
* China is interested in Afghanistan’s natural resources including lithium, uranium, and copper. Beijing has sought to enhance its relations with the Taliban.
* The IS-KP attacks in Afghanistan, including against Chinese nationals, bear the hallmarks of the Haqqani Network. ISK-KP serves as a convenient proxy for the Taliban. The situation is very murky.
* Taliban ideology controls Afghanistan and unifies the factions in taking away the rights of women through the misogynistic Ministry of Vice and Virtue. The Taliban exploits the West’s human rights concerns as a distraction from their other nefarious activities.
* The Haqqani Network remains close to al-Qaeda. The Taliban have made Afghanistan a safe haven for terrorist groups and once again transformed South Asia into the most dangerous part of the world.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
LOD: Lynne O’Donnell
SG: Welcome to the NATO DEEP Dive podcast, I’m your host Dr Sajjan Gohel and this is the second episode of our three-part special about Afghanistan and the Taliban with the journalist Lynne O’Donnell.
Building on what was discussed in part one, when Lynne was detained by the Taliban, in this episode, we talk about what life is really like in Afghanistan under the Taliban and who the key decision-makers are.
There’s so many aspects I want to unpack in this because you’ve addressed the fact that the Taliban are virulently, not only misogynistic, but they are also very homophobic, that they have violently threatened people, and in some cases, have used violence, as you’ve outlined, intimidation, coercion. Perhaps the interesting dynamic that is different from this Taliban to the previous entity in the 1990s is that they seem to be very tech savvy, very media savvy, that they want to use the media for as the oxygen of publicity. In the way that they somehow tried to create that perception of getting you to, quote, ‘confess and apologise’ just shows that media optics matter to them. The fact that they actually thought that they could achieve something from that is what surprises me about maybe their limitations in understanding how the media works.
The thing that I wanted to touch upon right now is that you spoke about Abdul Qahar Balkhi, you spoke about being detained by the General Directorate of Intelligence. It’s interesting that the Director General, Abdul Haq Wasiq, is like Balkhi, tied to the Taliban faction known as the Haqqani Network, which seems to be the most powerful group within Afghanistan, in the sense that they control a lot of the key ministries including the interior ministry, which is led by the leader of the Haqqani Network, Sirajuddin Haqqani, how important are they? And what do you think that their agenda is when it comes to Afghanistan? Because they seem to want to have a public image, with some of their people appearing on Twitter and social media, but at the same time, this is also a proscribed terrorist group, which you were mentioning earlier.
LOD: Well, the Taliban as a group is not sanctioned by the UNSC as a terrorist group. Their leaders are sanctioned as terrorists, and that’s the difference. Haqqani is a sanctioned terrorist group as is the TTP, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban. I think that the agenda is power and money. What else is there? Religion has been a very convenient beard for the Taliban for very many years, but we can’t and shouldn’t forget that the Taliban is the biggest drug dealing cartel in the world, and has been for a long time, controls global heroin production and supply, and that also means that it is embedded in organised crime worldwide.
They’ve been moving into the production of methamphetamine for many years. Meth is a lot cheaper to produce, and the return is a lot higher, but there’s very little material and research done on that. They are hugely embedded in the real estate markets of the region: Turkey, Doha, Karachi, Malaysia. A lot of money flows from the Taliban to the rest of the world in very many ways. Siraj is wealthy in his own right. He controls territory in provinces that border Pakistan that produce agricultural products that are traded to China. For instance, he makes millions of dollars a year out of pine nuts. Chinese love pine nuts and the Chinese, I suspect, are repackaging Afghan pine nuts and reselling them to the world as Chinese products.
The control of the minerals and mining sector, a lot of that has been controlled by the Taliban for a very long time and when we see fighting between Taliban groups, I think that’s factions fighting for control of assets. The Chinese also want a big slab of that lithium, uranium, copper, you name it. I am of the belief that the functionalization of the Taliban when it comes to ideology has been exaggerated and exploited very well by the Taliban themselves. We’ve seen in recent weeks a long list of people from the United Nations and NGO organisations that have been worried about the treatment of women and have been particularly galvanised in the last month or so by the ban on university education for women and women being able to work in the charity sector. And they come away from meetings with the Taliban saying, ‘oh, they say that it’s just these people who, who don’t want women to go to school or work, but we want to and things will be clarified and change soon and you’ll see it’ll all be fine.’
But I don’t believe that’s the case. I think that logically the side-lining of women from public life is not going to be something that the Taliban generally will oppose. I think that the factional differences are over power and money only.
SG: Power and money tend to be the obsession that the Taliban have, which doesn’t always get enough attention. Because they are, as you mentioned, very entrepreneurial, but mostly with very nefarious practices. You spoke about the fact that the Taliban and the Haqqanis are now dabbling in methamphetamines, that seems to be a very growing narcotic from the region which is getting dispersed across the world. The meth I believe is produced from the ephedra shrub.
LOD: Which grows wild in Afghanistan. So, how do you keep your costs down? You don’t need the inputs that poppy does.
SG: Exactly. And I believe that it’s also weather resistant and it’s a perfect item to grow for nefarious purposes. The aspect of minerals is also very significant because in Badakhshan province, for example, and other northern provinces of Afghanistan, the country has many natural resources, but they haven’t been extracted, they haven’t been fully developed. You mentioned China, China seems very interested in Afghanistan, but at the same time, they’re perhaps encountering some of the same challenges that the West did over the last two decades. How does that relationship between China and the Taliban work, because on paper, it doesn’t actually make any sense whatsoever. Have they been able to meet to some extent and have an arrangement or is this a relationship that is ultimately doomed to fail?
LOD: ‘Doomed to fail,’ I’m not so sure. The Chinese have been very good to the Taliban for a very long time, that relationship goes back decades. And you might remember that in the months before the August 2021 fall of the Republic, the Chinese government red carpeted Taliban leaders in Beijing, they made it very clear whose side they were on. And they’ve also been very vocal in calling for, for instance, the United States to release the foreign reserves of Afghanistan and really I think that they would like to see the United States recognise the Taliban and certainly engage with them more.
But at the same time, on balance, the United States has put $2 billion worth of humanitarian and development aid into Afghanistan since the Taliban took over and I think the Chinese are probably still in five or six figures and certainly not that much. But what the Chinese do want, and have made it very clear that they want, is access to minerals and mining. They’ve had the Mes Aynak copper mine near Kabul tied up for a long time. I think that they probably could, if they wanted to, start working on that now that security is a little bit better.
The Chinese are very risk averse. That attack in December on their hotel in Kabul would have very much put the wind up with them and angered them that the Taliban were not providing them with the security that they expect. I mean, there’s two ways of looking at that, I mean the Taliban have a very good cover in blaming IS-KP for everything that happens security wise, but a lot of those IS-KP attacks bear Haqqani hallmarks for sure. So, it’s not outside the bounds of imagination that the Longan hotel attack in December was carried out by the Haqqanis to convince the Chinese that the Taliban need more weaponry to keep them safe. I don’t rule anything out. But then again, that Mes Aynak copper deposit is supposedly the second biggest high quality copper mine in the world. The Chinese are the biggest users and biggest purchasers of copper and having that in the background provides them with a hedge on price.
So, I never take anything that the Chinese do—I was a correspondent based in China for more than a decade—I never take anything that the Chinese government does or says at face value, and their dealings with the Taliban are pragmatic and mercenary. They want to be able to stretch their Belt and Road infrastructure network through Afghanistan, so they can get the goods that they produce in their eastern seaboard factories to European markets through Central Asia much faster than and cheaper than they could by boat. And they are already, as far as I understand, very well embedded in the in the minerals sector, visiting uranium mines down south for instance, and they have a lot of personnel up north, assaying the gold quality, and they’re buying the coal that is coming out of those northern mines and being shipped cheaply into Pakistan. They’re putting that into ships out of Pakistan to China, as far as I can understand, I don’t know in what quantities.
And so, I don’t think that—there was a headline deal a couple of weeks ago on an oil field, up north near the Uzbekistan border, near Hairatan, where we know that there are oil fields. But they already had that deal with the Republic—the Taliban did publicise the fact that they had cancelled that earlier contract—they’ve just reinstituted the old contract, but whether they get any money out of it or not, is another thing. China needs oil and so holding on to contracting ownership if you like, of oil fields, as well as copper fields, is a way of making sure that it’s there when they need it. And I think that it’s pragmatic. The Taliban need all the friends that they can get. China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Russia, they’ve been there, but the Chinese are the ones who really have the potential and are saying that they will put the money in, and they may well be paying Haqqani and paying other figures in the in the de facto authorities to stay on their side. I mean, they’ve got money. I wouldn’t put it beyond them to just be paying everybody off because like we said, it’s all about money and power.
SG: Every comment you make makes me want to ask you a dozen questions connected to that. One aspect that you mentioned that really stood out was, you spoke about how IS-KP, IS-K, the ISIS affiliate, they have the hallmarks of the Haqqani Network. That is something that I have noticed, both in terms of strategy and in tactics. Yet some people still want to draw a separation. There’s often this perception in some quarters that IS-KP are the enemy of the Taliban. And I think often when people make those remarks, they don’t understand the shades of grey in Afghanistan. They don’t understand how murky these different entities are, because it does look like, to me, Lynne, that the Haqqanis have infiltrated IS-KP, and they use them almost as a proxy in their own agenda to undermine other Taliban factions, but also to get more concessions from other entities, including China.
LOD: Yes, I agree with you. I think that once the Taliban took over, I noticed it almost immediately, everything was blamed on ISIS, IS-K, very conveniently. And I remember I was being interviewed on a radio programme about it, and I said. “What, now the Taliban are in control, they’re not liars anymore? And we believe everything that they say?” I am firmly of the belief that that August 2021 attack at the airport, the Kabul airport, in the middle of the pandemonium around evacuation was a Haqqani attack. I have no doubt about it. I think some of the highest profile attacks that we have seen on Hazara communities, on Sikh and Hindu communities, have been Haqqani and that it is quite possible that they are using IS-K as a proxy. It was also suggested to me a year or so ago that they traded opportunities for claiming responsibility, “Who’s going to get the most out of claiming responsibility for this one?”
We see reports you know, on Bakhtar, which is now the Taliban mouthpiece, or even TOLOnews which is also very pro-Taliban these days in what it reports, “The Taliban say that they’ve killed seven IS-K operatives in ‘blah de blah’ part of the country.” It’s like, how do we know? They might just be some blokes they didn’t like, another Taliban faction, somebody who was in control of a lapis lazuli mine that this faction wanted to take over. There is no truth coming out of Afghanistan about anything. And so, I’m quite with you. It’s very convenient to draw those lines, but the murkiness is the reality. But like you say, I think it’s all of a mesh, it’s all murky, and everybody’s using everyone else. And the rest of us out here, the patsies. The pushback that I get when I try and report this stuff is really just a reflection of how well-absorbed the new line has been, you know, “Taliban kind of good now” I suspect.
SG: Yes, and everybody wants, I guess, a black-and-white narrative because it’s just easier to report on. But for us, yourself, for me, those of us who have been and spent time in Afghanistan, we understand the nuances, which are so important, especially with some of the challenges that lie ahead. One other thing that I wanted to track back on because it’s such an important dynamic is the Taliban misogyny, which has been institutionalised. They closed down the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and the very building that belonged to protect women’s rights has now been repurposed perversely into the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which effectively is the propagation of misogyny. There’s this other perception that there are some Taliban factions that want to keep women’s rights or restore them, there are others that are against it. Again, where do we draw these distinctions? Is that the fact that there are differences within the Taliban over the mistreatment of women, or are they ultimately all singing from the same sheet?
LOD: I think that this is also a complex issue. I don’t think it’s as easily drawn as has been made out…that the whole movement has been taken hostage by a dozen people and Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader’s, pronouncements are just a reflection of one small part of powerful Taliban figures. I don’t think that for a minute. I think that this is the ideology. We saw it in the north. Before I went to that valley that I mentioned before in the highlands that had been taken over by the Taliban for four days and the women had been terrorised with threats of forced marriage, there had been rumours but no confirmation that this was going on in areas that the Taliban were taking over. You’ll remember how they did it: they closed off the border points, and then they started taking districts around provincial capitals. And it wasn’t until the very latest stages that they moved into the provincial capitals, and then they started falling, and that’s when we decided if the capital has fallen, the province has fallen. That domino effect didn’t come until the last couple of weeks. In the meantime, in those districts, what they had been doing was pretty much setting the example of what was to come, but there hadn’t been any confirmation because they were also closing down media organisations as they took over, of what they were doing.
And so…they’re just revisiting 1996 to 2001. And as you say, they’re doing it with a much more sophisticated view of how to use media nationally and internationally. But…this is ideology, this is their ideology. There’s no surprises in any of this. And I think that anybody who tries to say that it’s only a few people who are powerful who really want women to stop working, stay home, not get educated, just be pregnancy vessels for the guys, is delusional. This is Taliban ideology, and the Taliban control the country. So of course the whole country is going to fall in. And it’s been very, very cleverly used. You talked about their understanding of how media works before. You know, I was the resident correspondent and bureau chief for news agencies in Afghanistan for a long time. And I used to tell ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), as it was then, the NATO mission all the time…something happens, and within minutes, I’ve got texts and emails from the Taliban saying what it’s about and how many were killed and how it happened and blah, blah. And it takes you days, they are way ahead of the diplomatic missions and the military effort in their use of media. They understood it very, very well from a very long time ago.
Now what they’re doing is using the fact that Western headlines will be about the latest, awful treatment of women, and not about the expansion of methamphetamine exports to whatever country in the world it is. They will tell visiting officials and heads of charities who come to talk about women what they want to hear, because nobody is going in and saying, well, there are two Americans and two Canadians in prison, can we talk about that please? Or can we talk about the way Hazaras are being forced out of their homes in this particular province, or about…whatever other atrocity you want to name, there’s a whole laundry list of them. But they’re very assiduously and cleverly using the Western obsession with what appears to be their obsession with women’s rights to draw a veil, if you like, over everything else that they do. They’re very, very clever. It is a terrible, terrible thing that they are doing to women, but it’s working for them ideologically, and in terms of deflecting everything else that they do.
SG: I find it very upsetting what’s happening, as I think everybody is, about the mistreatment of women because one of the great success stories in Afghanistan, which doesn’t get a lot of attention, was women’s empowerment, where you see women playing prominent roles over the last 20 years in various administrations, in universities, as judges, in the media. Afghan women are an extremely important contributor to Afghan society, to the economy, and now their voices have been completely shut, and they live in this very dark, Orwellian world that the Taliban has created. The thing I noticed, Lynne, when it comes to terrorism, extremism, and I think in many ways it appears, or it’s relevant for Afghanistan I mean, is that if you see the reduction and decrease of women’s rights, you see the increase of radicalisation and extremism. We saw that in Afghanistan in the 1990s, where misogyny became the order of the day, al-Qaeda created and set itself up in Afghanistan. In the last year and a half, the Taliban have returned. We’ve seen that al-Qaeda figures have come back to the country, most notoriously of course was the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who interestingly enough I’m actually writing a book on. Surprise, surprise, he was found in a villa in the centre of Kabul. Do you think—I guess this is a two part question, are you surprised about the relationship that the Taliban have maintained with al-Qaeda even though they promised the world that they wouldn’t harbour them? And are you concerned that Afghanistan could once again become a cesspool for extremists from around the world like it had been in the past?
LOD: I have been writing about the Taliban’s relationship with and to al-Qaeda for many, many years, and [that] was one of the themes of my reporting before the end of the war, I did a paper for NATO on it in 2020. And I warned about allowing the Taliban, which we did, we allowed the Taliban to take over, that this would lead to Afghanistan becoming a safe haven for jihadist organisations that have fought with them and alongside them for 20 years, and that’s what’s happened. So I’m not worried about it happening, like becoming…something like that. It is that. And there are and have been for a long time about two dozen jihadist organisations affiliated with the Afghan Taliban. Sirajuddin Haqqani is very close to, if not one of the leaders of al-Qaeda. His Haqqani group is a close affiliate of al-Qaeda. The placement around the borders of affiliated terrorism, terrorist organisations, and jihadist groups is causing great concern amongst the Central Asian states. The Taliban have transformed South Asia into the most dangerous part of the world in my view.
SG: Well, that’s very chilling to hear. I don’t think it should surprise many people, especially those that watch Afghanistan.
This would be a good place to conclude here the second episode of our discussion, Lynne.
Stay tuned for the third and final part with Lynne O’Donnell where I talk with her about the future security challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan and how they could have global ramifications.
Thank you for listening to this episode of NATO DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP). My producers are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.