Afghanistan
Reports
Vanda Felbab-Brown
Director - Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors
Co-Director - Africa Security Initiative
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
![Afghan Islamic Taliban fighters fire a Soviet-made cannon against former government forces on the front line, 30 km north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, November 5. [The dismissal of the Pakistan's government of Prime Minister Benazir-Bhutto could have important ramifications for Afghanistan's Taleban militia, now locked in war with a northern alliance.]](https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Afghan-Islamic-Taliban-fighters-fire-a-Soviet-made-cannon-against-former-government-forces.jpg?w=617&crop=0%2C28px%2C100%2C347px&ssl=1)
For the past year, you've seen that perhaps no leverage that the US and the West thought it had — aid, sanctions, the freezing of Afghanistan's reserves — has really had an effect on Taliban behavior. The Taliban has essentially done what they had always done. The Afghan people have been in a humanitarian crisis because the Taliban hasn't budged.
[Who is to blame for Afghanistan's current crises is a] tug of war in some ways. The people who are suffering are ordinary Afghans. [Politically, it’s difficult for the US to release foreign financial assets as long as the Taliban remains in charge.] The US can’t really just say, ‘Okay, you know what, we’re going to unfreeze your central bank funds and essentially insert liquidity in the economy,’ because that really looks like you’re essentially letting the Taliban get away with it.
It would be fair to describe the T.T.P. [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan] as the ideological twin of the Afghan Taliban. When the Taliban took over Afghanistan last year, the T.T.P. hailed the Taliban’s ‘victory’ and renewed its oath of allegiance.
Towards the end of 2020, once President Biden was elected and the withdrawal from Afghanistan was imminent, Pakistan pitched a geo-economics-based relationship with the US... The US-Pakistan relationship for the last 14, 15 months has now been characterised by a cold shoulder by the Biden administration to the Khan government... [Khan] was saying he wanted an independent foreign policy, he wanted good relationships with all counties – that is the foreign policy approach both of the civilian government and the military … [But] in the last few months it ended up looking different because of visits to China and Russia, whereas there hasn’t been a relationship really with the White House. [The military] does want a positive relationship with the US and looking like Pakistan is not properly balancing its relationships with the US and with China, is something the military does not like.
