The Taliban insurgency was the insurgency phase of the Afghanistan War which followed the overthrow of the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan regime by the United States and its Northern Alliance allies in 2001. The Taliban movement waged a nationwide anti-government insurgency, funded by the annual opium harvest and by private Saudi donors, reinforced by other militant Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and by Pashtun recruits from both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and armed by Russia and China, and the insurgency reached high points in 2015 and 2021 as the US-led ISAF and Resolute Support Mission coalitions began to withdraw their international troops from the country in each respective year. By early July 2021, the Taliban were either in control or in battle for control of 70% of Afghanistan, with the rapid withdrawal of foreign troops and the collapse of the demoralized Afghan National Army after several "tactical withdrawals" emboldening the insurgents and raising fears that the Taliban might once again seize power. On 15 August, the Taliban captured Kabul, ending the war and re-establishing the Islamic Emirate.
Background[]
In December 2001, an interim government led by Hamid Karzai, a moderate Pashtun, took power and drafted a new constitution that was agreed upon in January 2004. Karzai won the subsequent presidential election but his government failed to win control over the whole country and became increasingly ineffectual and corrupt. Neither Mullah Mohammed Omar nor Osama bin Laden were captured in the invasion of Afghanistan, and the Taliban regrouped and started a new campaign in 2003, funded with money from the annual opium harvest, the raw material of heroin. After January 2006, NATO troops arrived to help US forces but the Taliban continued to expand its control over most of the country outside Kabul and the north. al-Qaeda and other militant Islamic groups consolidated in the mountainous border regions of Pakistan, from where they mounted terrorist attacks against regional and international targets. The Obama administration announced plans to strengthen US forces in the region in 2009.
History[]
Start of the insurgency[]
The state of insurgency was first proclaimed by the Taliban Supreme Court's chief justice in May 2003, with Omar creating five operational zones and appointing commanders such as Mullah Dadullah to oversee them. Mobile training camps were established along the Pakistani border to train recruits from the tribal area madrassas in Pakistan in guerrilla warfare, and, throughout the summer of 2003, the frequency of Taliban attacks increased. In late 2004, Mullah Omar himself announced the start of an insurgency to "regain the sovereignty of (his) country" from "America and its puppets". In 2006, a wave of IED and suicide bombing attacks occurred in Afghanistan, and, that year, at least 669 Afghan civilians were killed in at least 350 armed attacks. After 2008, however, the ISAF coalition forces began to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan in a bid to gradually turn over control of the security situation to the Afghan National Army, and the United States evacuated the bulk of its forces by 2014, leaving behind only a handful of advisers to assist the ANA in fighting off Taliban offensives.
Insurgent offensives of 2015 and 2021[]
In 2015, the newly emboldened Taliban launched a major offensive against the fledgling Afghan government, increasing its suicide attacks and overrunning Kunduz and Sangin. With the support of American air power, the Afghan military was able to recapture much of its lost territory, and, in 2016, the Afghan government reached an agreement with the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin insurgent group, by which its leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar would be allowed to return to Afghanistan after decades in exile in Iran in exchange for peace. In 2019, he Trump administration initiated peace talks with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar in a bid to end the decades-long Afghanistan conflict. On 29 February 2020, the United States and the Taliban came to an agreement whereby the USA would gradually withdraw all 13,000 of the Resolute Support Mission (the ISAF's successor) and its own troops from the country in exchange for the Taliban continuing with the peace process. On 1 May 2021, President Joe Biden, who had pledged to end America's "forever war" in Afghanistan, initiated the withdrawal of US troops from the country. The vacuum caused by the withdrawal of American ground and aerial support from the Afghan government was soon filled by major Taliban advances in the north of the country, with over 1,000 Afghan soldiers choosing to flee across the border and into Tajikistan rather than fight against the resurgent militant group. Ultimately, the Taliban was able to overwhelm the collapsing Afghan National Army and pick off the provincial capitals with increasing speed, and the Taliban captured Kabul on 15 August 2021, ending their insurgency and re-establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Foreign support[]
Pakistan[]
From the Taliban's inception, the Pakistani government and military played a major role in supporting the militant group. From 1994 to 1999, 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis trained and fought in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban; in 1998, the US State Department estimated that 20% to 40% of Taliban militants were Pakistani nationals, and, by 2001, of the 45,000+ Taliban fighters resisting the US invasion, 28,000-30,000 were Pakistanis, 14,000-15,000 were Afghans, and 2,000-3,000 were foreign al-Qaeda fighters. Of the circa 30,000 Pakistanis fighting in Afghanistan by 2001, around 8,000 had been recruited in madrassas in tribal Pakistan. In November 2001, in the "Airlift of Evil", the Pakistani military evacuated thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders and fighters and Pakistani ISI intelligence agents and military personnel from the city of Kunduz before it fell to the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban leadership formed the "Quetta Shura" in the Pakistani city of Quetta, from which they coordinated their group's operations in Afghanistan. The ISI had representation on the Quetta shura, and the ISI continued to have an official policy of support for the Taliban, according to a London School of Economics report. By 2010, the Taliban spent $300 million a year on war, and, according to The New York Times, this money came from "poppy, the Pakistanis, and Bin Laden."
Russia and China[]
Starting around 2015, a year into the escalation of "Cold War II", the government of Russia began to covertly support the Taliban insurgency as a proxy against the United States. Russia began to supply weapons to the Taliban around that time, and, by 2019, the United States intelligence community first became aware of a "Russian bounty program", in which the Russians paid bounties to Anti-Coalition Militia groups for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. The New York Times first broke this news to the public on 26 June 2020, citing unnamed sources in the intelligence community.
By 2007, it was also reported that the Taliban were also receiving sophisticated Chinese arms, including Chinese-made surface-to-air (SAM) missiles (such as the HN-5 SAM launcher), anti-aircraft guns, landmines, rocket-propelled grenades, and components for roadside bombs. Previously, the Taliban obtained Chinese weapons through the ISI, and southern Afghanistan was once awash with cheap Chinese arms through this arrangement with Pakistan. However, a 2015 Foreign Policy article called Mullah Omar "China's Man in the Taliban" for pragmatically accommodating Chinese concerns for stability in Xinjiang in exchange for Chinese support.
Iran[]
While Iran initially opposed the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban movement and supported Shia militia groups against the Taliban during the 2001 American invasion, by 2010, Iran reportedly paid Taliban fighters $1,000 for each US soldier they killed in Afghanistan. The American and British governments also accused the Iranian government of arming the Taliban rebels, and it was also an open secret that many members of al-Qaeda's underground leadership, such as Saif al-Adel, Muhsin al-Fadhli, and Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, found sanctuary in Iran for several years.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar[]
The Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar were deeply involved in the sponsoring of Wahhabist movements and militant groups around the world for decades, with Saudi Arabia openly funding the construction of fundamentalist mosques and madrassas in countries as far afield as Pakistan and Algeria. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates had been the only three countries in the world to recognize the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan regime of 1996-2001, although Saudi Arabia seemingly turned away from the Taliban following the US invasion (despite having a hand in the 9/11 attacks on 11 September 2001). Taliban sources later reported that Saudi Arabia had resumed funding the Taliban in 2005 and Qatar in 2006, with the Pakistani government supposedly asking them to help them continue funding the Taliban insurgency; Saudi Arabia and Qatar were apparently concerned that the presence of politicians with links to Iran in the Afghan government would lead to the creation of a pro-Iranian regime in Kabul, which the Gulf kingdoms sought to avert by installing a Sunni extremist regime in power. In addition, it was theorized that Saudi Arabia attempted to uphold its legitimacy as an Islamic government by supporting all Sunni Islamic causes around the world, particularly radical ones. As US support for Afghan security forces increased in 2009, Pakistani requests for support to the Gulf monarchies also increased, but, around that time, Saudi Arabia and Qatar's plans began to diverge, with the Qatari government attempting to engineer peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government starting in 2013. Qatar's support for the Arab Spring protests of 2011, its historical support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and its ties to Iran amid the Middle East Cold War led to a deterioration in relations with the Saudis, who, by 2013, decided to smear Qatar as a state sponsor of terrorism, reversing almost ten years of Saudi support for the Taliban. Saudi Arabia also attempted to persuade Pakistan to distance itself from Qatar by scaling back its military support for the Taliban, and the Taliban increasingly cooperated with Iran, which paid $1,000 bounties to its fighters to kill American soldiers.