South Asia is witnessing new alignments, with divergences between old allies (the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan) and convergences between new partners (India and the Afghan Taliban).
China has been a part of the Afghan maze, but landlocked Afghanistan seemed to have factored either marginally or episodically in its geopolitical quests in the past decades. While the role of certain regional actors in Afghanistan has been far widely debated and analysed, China’s role, particularly the nature and scope of its bilateral interactions and engagements with various Afghan regimes in Kabul, from Zahir Shah to the Taliban, has remained comparatively understudied. This book is a modest effort in that direction.
The edited volume comprises 16 chapters contributed by Afghan, Central Asian, Iranian, Russian, Western, and Indian scholars and analysts. The chapters not only dwell on country perspectives but also key issues of concern to the people of Afghanistan and the wider region. It includes terrorism, transnational crime, drug production and distribution, the governance system and the state of education in Afghanistan. The contributions in the volume paint an unflattering view of the ground reality in Afghanistan, and a connecting thread of pessimism runs through various analyses.
The Taliban's unwritten and ambiguous 'general amnesty' neither implies Tpolitical integration nor national reconciliation. It's about total control, and about who gets to stay and who gets to come back, and on what terms. In the absence of any credible political opposition, and with more and more Afghans being deported or forced to return to the country, including the exiled members of the previous regime, the Taliban's Contact Commission will remain in business in the foreseeable future.
However, reports of violation of 'general amnesty' by the Taliban members, particularly in the case of mid and low ranking former military personnel, have exposed the limitations to the implementation of the amnesty decree across the country.
Looking beyond high optics associated with the return (often the deportation) of members of the former Afghan Republic to the country, the Contact Commission set up by the Taliban regime in 2022 comes across as a strategic move to present itself as a conciliatory and legitimate state entity on one hand and undercut the support base of the fragmented exiled political opposition on the other. This is best manifest in the fact that the Taliban has opened a pathway for exiled political opposition and former civil and military personnel to return to the country but without yielding any political space or making any provision to integrate the returnees into its governing structures.
The commission’s efforts are stymied by violations of the ‘general amnesty’ announced for members of the former regime, lack of employment avenues for the educated non-Taliban workforce, and the ban on higher education for girls and work opportunities for women. In such a scenario, the commission cannot bridge the divide between the regime and the exiled or returnee Afghans, unless the regime itself acts as a bridge connecting diverse ethnicities and identities that make up the Afghan Nation.
Unless the Taliban regime adopts relatively non-intrusive social policies and embraces people-centric approaches to governance, it will remain somewhat a mirror image of its old regressive self from the 1990s.
