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Abstract

The Taliban 2.0 have made overtures to states across different regions to seek international recognition. In a departure from their past isolationist foreign policy practices, I argue the Taliban have expediently, yet uncharacteristically, pursued these initiatives in a spirit of “pragmatism.” The modus vivendi they have reached with Iran demonstrates the Taliban’s unprecedented prioritization of pragmatism over ideology. I draw upon Machiavellian pragmatism in International Relations theory to examine the shift in the Taliban’s political posture through the lens of Iran–Afghanistan relations in three crucial episodes: the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the post-9/11 Afghanistan, and the resurgence of the Taliban since August 2021.

Keywords

The Taliban pragmatism foreign policy Iran Machiavelli

Introduction

Outlasting a superpower through two decades of grinding war, the Taliban are back in Kabul. While they have given up little of their extremist ideology, the Taliban 2.0¹ have adopted a strategy of integrating military and non-military instruments of power to seize control of Afghanistan, re-establish an Islamic Emirate, and obtain international recognition. What particularly distinguishes the Taliban of 2021-onwards from the Taliban of the 1980s–1990s is how strenuously, albeit uncharacteristically, they have strived to keep the country connected to external states across different regions.

In a rare interview in August 2021, Taliban leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar, laid out his vision for Afghanistan, one in which the rights of women and religious minorities would be observed in accordance with the Sharia law, and “where terror groups will not be given safe haven to carry out attacks abroad” (Engel and Smith, 2021). Since then, the Taliban’s efforts to publicly denounce terrorism and support for terrorists and terrorist networks—a security issue because of which the Taliban faced financial sanctions and extreme isolation in the 1990s (Cristol, 2019: 60)—have continued. In its latest attempt to present a less violent image, the Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, condemned and disavowed a terrorist attack on three clerics at the Imam Reza Shrine in the northeastern city of Mashhad, Iran (Al Hashem, 2022). Earlier in March 2022, Amir Khan Muttaqi, acting foreign minister under the Taliban regime, had also given China assurances that the Taliban would “take resolute and effective measures” to eradicate terrorists in Afghanistan (Tiezzi, 2022). And more recently, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy chief of the Taliban and the acting Afghan Interior Minister who is still on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) most-wanted list, appeared on CNN and said “the Taliban regime in Afghanistan does not look at the United States as enemies and wants to have good ties with it but that they have reservations over Washington’s intentions based on its conduct” (Amanpour, 2022).

Yet the Taliban’s promises for a less radical leadership in Afghanistan have been met with skepticism. The Taliban’s claims that they had severed ties with terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda were demolished when the United Nations (2022) warned of al-Qaeda’s “increased freedom of action” under the Taliban as a threat to regional and international security in April 2022, and the US drone strike killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in his mansion in a part of Kabul where Western diplomats live in August 2022 (Kugelman, 2022).

Despite such developments, the Taliban’s attempts at taking the unprecedented step of engaging with other states seems to have come to fruition. The Taliban have indeed achieved some of its political objectives by prioritizing pragmatism over ideology in its foreign relations. More than 34 countries have shown some level of political and/or commercial engagement with Taliban authorities until mid-March 2022 making eventual recognition a fait accompli (Zelin, 2022). While representatives from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the European Union held humanitarian talks with the Taliban in Oslo in January 2022 (AlJazeera, 2022), Turkey invited the Taliban delegation to a diplomacy forum in Antalya in March 2022 (Reuters, 2022), Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi paid an unannounced visit to Kabul praising “the tangible results of the Taliban government in actively responding to the concerns of the international community” on 24 March 2022 (Tiezzi, 2022), and India, whose foreign ministry officials visited Kabul in June 2022, has mulled reopening its embassy in Kabul (Subramanian, 2022).

China and India—the two booming economies that have been competing to increase their economic and geopolitical footprint across the broader Middle East for the past few years (Solhdoost, 2021: 72)—are particularly keen to step up engagement with a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The Afghan theater, according to Vivek Katju (2021), former Indian Ambassador to Kabul, is where India should confront both Pakistan and China.

The Taliban’s outreach to regional players began more than a decade ago when the United States and the Afghan High Peace Council² helped those Taliban leaders participating in peace talks open up an office in the region. The Afghan government suggested Turkey or Saudi Arabia—the two countries which had close working relationships with Kabul—yet, the Taliban preferred to be based in Qatar as they saw Doha as a neutral mediator (BBC, 2013). Thus, from 2010 to February 2020 when the United States reached an agreement with the Taliban to fully withdraw from Afghanistan, Qatar was the site where direct and formal talks between the actual belligerents to the Afghan conflict continued to be held (Knowles and Hauptman, 2021).

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—the only three countries that had recognized the Taliban during their rule from 1996 to 2001 (O’driscoll, 2021)—have initiated different levels of engagement with the Taliban 2.0. While the UAE has signed a pact with the Taliban to manage the airports in Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar (Faiez, 2022), Saudi Arabia initially closed its embassy after the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021 (Mathews, 2021). Yet, given their close religious affinity with the Taliban and the fear of Afghanistan moving into Iran’s sphere of influence, the Saudis are likely to take up a more active role in Afghanistan (Fontenrose, 2021).

However, Pakistan, the Taliban’s biggest patron in the 1980s–1990s, has experienced increasing difficulties in re-establishing its ties with the Taliban after their victorious march into Kabul in August 2021. Security concerns about the increasing presence of anti-Pakistan militants and separatist groups hiding on Afghan soil and the specter of New Delhi–friendly Kabul have caused deterioration in relations between the two neighbors (Gannon, 2022).

Among all states with which the Taliban have initiated diplomatic relations, Iran is the odd one out. Tehran and the Taliban movement were arch-enemies when Afghanistan was a proxy theater between the United States and the former Soviet Union on one hand, and Shia Iran and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia on the other hand in the 1980s–1990s. The politics of language in Afghanistan is also a subtext that has taken a backseat to the ideological enmity between the Taliban and Iran until today. Being the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, the Pashtun-speaking Taliban have long-held aversion to those ethnic groups who speak Dari, an Afghan dialect of Farsi, the official language of Iran (Alexe, 2002; Prusher, 2002). Therefore, scrutinizing Iran–Afghanistan relations, particularly the current rapprochement between the two countries, can clearly explicate the pragmatic shift in the Taliban’s political posture following their retaking of Kabul in August 2021.

I develop my critical analysis by drawing upon Machiavellian pragmatism as an International Relations theoretical approach. I examine the Taliban’s relationship with Iran in three crucial episodes: the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the post-9/11 Afghanistan, and the resurgence of the Taliban since August 2021.

Pragmatism, a political tradition from antiquity to modern days

The concept of pragmatism has been found in historical accounts of politics. Among those is Sun Tzu’s seminal work, The Art of War, in which he focuses on pragmatic approaches to war in the 6th century BCE in China (cited in Leece, 2017: 21). A century later, Thucydides (2004), the ancient Greek historian, wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War in which he elaborated how Spartans exercised pragmatic strategizing to bring about the eventual termination of the war in the 5th century BCE (pp. 438–443). The essence of pragmatism in military strategizing was later recaptured by Niccolò Machiavelli in his writings on both military strategies, and diplomacy and political practice. As Machiavelli discusses different forms of government in his writing, scholars of modern political thought consider him “the first great state-and-nation builder of the modern world” in the broadly Weberian sense of possessing a monopoly of coercive authority over a specific territorial boundary (Skinner, 1978: 45; Walling, 1999: 111).

As a theorist of the state, Machiavelli has explored an independent grand strategy that addresses specific political issues with little to no reliance on external benevolence (Kane, 2006: 9). The concepts Machiavelli has written about have entered the lexicon of state foreign relations and have become part of the terms associated with realism as a theory in International Relations. According to E. H. Carr (1946), Machiavelli’s reliance on causation, his emphasis on creating theory through practice, and his efforts to divorce politics from morality have made the Florentine the “first important political realist” (p. 63). Nonetheless, scholars such as Strauss (1969) and Mansfield (1979) suggest that the Florentine’s discussions of statecraft should not be simply treated as “collections of political maxims”; rather, the most sophisticated understanding of Machiavelli’s political thoughts could be achieved by reading between the lines.

By addressing the politico-military interface pragmatically, Machiavelli presents most of his ideas about politics of power and state external relations in two of his notable works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. As he positions himself as a political innovator, the Florentine promotes the idea of independent states free from external servitude in his initial discussions. While rejecting the abstract and the ideal, Machiavelli draws about historical examples to make compelling arguments about ruthless tactics in statecraft, rational decision-making, decisiveness, and institutional efficiency. To break with medieval modes of thought, Machiavelli excludes non-political issues such as conventional morality and religion from his political theorizing. Based on Machiavelli’s pragmatic, and often brutal, approach to leadership, a prudent statesman should conduct leadership on an analysis of the needs of the ever-changing political situations.

Many scholars of International Relations have argued for Machiavelli’s contemporary relevance, particularly because of the practical and realistic advice the Florentine offers to the ruler seeking to maintain his state. For example, Machiavelli’s pragmatic approach to political thought and action, according to Heinrich V. Treitschke (cited in Kelly, 2018: 305) and Martin Wight (1978: 30), is considered the earliest modern discourse of Realpolitik. In Treitschke’s terms, realpolitik is in principle formulated by reference to an existing situation (cited in Metz, 1982: 271). However, such general principles have never been systematically put together to introduce a theory of pragmatism (Metz, 1982: 271).

Basically, Machiavellian pragmatism centers on the idea that a ruler should follow a calculating policy of undertaking any activity, whether or not that activity could be considered ethically or morally bad, to achieve the desired result that benefits the state. In Machiavelli’s (2008) words,

A prince, and particularly a new prince, must understand that he is unable to respect all those qualities for which men are considered good. For to maintain his rule, he is frequently obliged to behave in opposition to good faith, to charity, to humanity, and to religion. Thus he needs a flexible mind, altering as the winds of Fortune and changes in affairs require. As I said before he [the prince] does not deviate from the good, when that is possible; but he knows how to do evil when necessary. (p. 283)

It is in the light of Machiavelli’s writings on expedient pragmatism that the Taliban’s radical shift from a government of the sword to the one that, despite conducting domestic politics with an iron fist, acts according to the logic of the situation in its external relations can be explained. In this research, I argue that the Taliban have embarked on the most expedient route to their interests; they compromise their ideological values in their foreign relations in the interim as this serves to maximize their realization in the long run. In other words, the Taliban’s unorthodox approach to foster international connections—even with those states with which they have fundamental ideological differences—is aimed at gaining legitimacy to cement their control over Afghanistan.

However, the Taliban’s unprecedented political adaptation does not mean that they have become “unprincipled.” As Vali Nasr explains, the Taliban “at its core—its ideology, the way it sees Islam, the way that it sees the imposition of religious law on society—has not fundamentally changed as a movement” even though they have presented a different image in their public relations (Kirby, 2021). Furthermore, the Taliban’s current posture does not mean that they will not change course in future. As a matter of expediency, the Taliban’s peaceful coexistence with Iran may be actually stepped over in favor of other pragmatic decisions. I examine the puzzling transformation of the Taliban’s behavior by looking back at their emergence as a fundamentalist militant movement in the 1980s and their subsequent rise to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s until 2001, their survival in the aftermath of 9/11, and their reemergence in Afghanistan in August 2021 that is marked by their political and strategic metamorphosis into a pragmatic actor.

The cold war and the emergence of the Jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s

The religious indoctrination of the Taliban has its roots in a revivalist Islamic movement known as Deobandism in India. Founded in the latter half of the 19th century, the Deobandi school of Islam was centered on the idea that religious schools equip Muslim children to preserve Islam and Islamic civilization from external challenges, particularly colonial forces (Singh, 2012: 19). Prominent Afghan and Pakistani Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, the former head of the Afghan Taliban, and Hakimullah Mehsud, the former head of the Pakistani Taliban, had been both trained in Deobandi schools (Puri, 2009: 21). It was indeed the ideological heritage of Deobandism that had shaped the Taliban’s fundamentalist views before they were exposed to the Saudi Wahhabism in the 1980s. Nonetheless, the strict religious orthodoxy of Deobandism, which denounced Shiites as apostates, opened the way for extreme radicalization of this movement by Wahhabi clerics in the wake of the Saudi involvement in the US–Soviet confrontation in Afghanistan.

One of the most consequential proxy wars of the Cold War period broke out in Afghanistan in late 1979. Suffering at the hands of communist opponents in the Vietnam War (1955–1975), the United States was obsessed with the idea of taking revenge on the Soviets for what they had done to the United States in Vietnam with their generous arms support to the North Vietnamese (Cogan, 2011; McCrisken, 2003: 27). The abduction and murder of Adolph Dubs, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, under the newly installed communist government in Kabul in February 1979 gave Carter’s administration “reason of state” to develop a covert policy to support anticommunist forces in Afghanistan (Prados, 2002: 467). According to Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, the United States actually seized “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War” (Kalb and Kalb, 2012: 41).

To counter the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul and to lure the Soviets into a Vietnam-like quagmire, the United States forged an alliance with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt to create and support an anticommunist guerilla army, known as Mujahedeen, in Afghanistan (Gates, 1996: 142; Scott, 1996: 44). Yet, for conservative Arab allies of the United States, particularly Saudi Arabia, it was the dramatic confluence of two important issues: the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Shia Iran and the conquest and occupation of a Muslim territory by the “godless” communists that was the main source of concern (Kepel, 2002: 138; Roshandel and Chadha, 2006: 14). The Shia groups in Afghanistan actually embraced the revolutionary views of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini on establishing an Islamic state as an alternative to communism and liberal capitalism for Muslims (Crews and Tarzi, 2008: 93). Therefore, by funding the Mujahedeen, Saudi Arabia was pursuing two goals: one to push the communists out of Afghanistan and the other to create a wall of Wahhabi radicalism to counter the revolutionary Shia Iran (Hoodbhoy, 2005: 15; Kepel, 2002: 137).

The radical reforms implemented by the communist government in Kabul—which outraged the Islamist movements in Afghanistan—and the US-led coalition support of Mujahedeen soon led to general uprisings in Afghanistan. On 27 December 1979, the Soviets, based on the Brezhnev Doctrine,³ invaded Afghanistan to prevent the fall of the communist government in Kabul (Kepel, 2002: 138).

The most important component of the US-led coalition’s support for Mujahedeen (those who engage in jihad against the enemies of God) in Afghanistan was the Saudi radical ideology of Wahhabism. According to the austere and unforgiving Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, Wahhabi Muslims should fight and kill other Muslims of non-Wahhabi sections of Islam if they refuse to follow the monotheistic practices of Wahhabism, and the leader of the Muslim world must remove the infidels from Dar Al-Islam (Land of Islam) in defense of a Muslim nation (Pourhamzavi, 2015: 15). However, as a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, the second superpower at the time, was not an option, Saudi Arabia joined the US-led proxy war against the Soviet Union and contributed directly to the radicalization of anticommunist Islamist groups in Afghanistan.

Although each and every one of the Mujahedeen, a heterogeneous group, in Afghanistan claimed to be Muslims of one kind or another, Saudi Arabia focused on promoting the fundamentalist ideology of Wahhabism in the Cold War contest between the United States and USSR. Proselytizing Wahhabism through training Mujahedeen in religious institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan was indeed part of the foreign policy Saudi Arabia had adopted in the 1960s and 1970s (Commins, 2006: 4). While Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency recruited and trained fighters for the Afghan jihad, Saudi Arabia created and funded jihad headquarters in Peshawar, a Pakistan city near the Afghan border, and the United States began providing weapons and further financial assistance (Commins, 2006: 176).

The fund-raising campaign that gained substantial support from royal family members and other influential Saudis was led by Prince Salman, the chair of an ad hoc support committee, who later ascended to the throne in 2015 (Burleigh and Akbar, 2015). Salman closely collaborated with the Wahhabi clerical establishment in Saudi Arabia and managed to collect $20–$25 million every month to support jihadists in Afghanistan (Riedel, 2015; Weinberg, 2015).

However, the Saudi Afghanistan policy was not limited to bankrolling Mujahedeen. Then-Prince Salman also helped to recruit fighters for different groups, including Ittehad al-Islami (Islamic Union), one of the most pro-Wahhabi factions, that was led by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (Bronson, 2006: 174). This faction of Afghan Mujahedeen was closely tied with foreign fighters, particularly Arab jihadists, and its leader received Saudi King Faisal’s international prize for “distinguished services to Islam” in 1984 (Kepel, 2002: 395). In addition, the Saudi government sent Osama bin Laden, a wealthy member of a prominent Saudi family, to Pakistan to assist with funding, training, and recruiting jihadists in the anti-Iran and anticommunist Afghan cause (Goldstein, 2010: 271).

Bin Laden’s arrival in Afghanistan, where he met Abdullah Yusuf Azzam,⁴ his influential Wahhabi mentor, rapidly promoted the idea of Jihadism.⁵ The Soviet Red Army, facing huge losses at the hands of Mujahedeen, withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Despite disagreements began to surface among the jihadists, two major factions of Mujahedeen continued to survive, turning their ire against another superpower: the United States of America. Bin Laden forged alliances with other Afghan groups who perceived the world in light of Wahhabi doctrine and armed violence and created al-Qaeda. This progeny of the Afghan jihad soon became a formidable terrorist organization which aimed⁶ to remove non-Muslims from other Muslim territories as a priority (Fisk, 2018). The Taliban, on the contrary, had no taste for international politics and were more concerned about imposing a rigorous moral code on their own society.

Apart from those members of Mujahedeen that joined al-Qaeda or the Taliban, there were other jihadists who were groomed by Saudi Arabia to create a second front against Shiite Iran’s influence in the region.⁷ Capitalizing on Deobandi militantism, Saudi Arabia funded Islamic extremist movements such as Sipah-e Sahaba-e Pakistan, the Lashkar-e Jhangvi, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Harkat al-Ansar whose members went off to assassinate Shiites in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Indian soldiers in Indian Kashmir in the 1980s–1990s (Hussain, 2007: 51; Kepel, 2002: 224).⁸

Establishing the first Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban 1996–2001

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in April 1988, the formation of a coalition government mandated by the United Nations was rejected by Pakistan. Islamabad, instead, insisted on installing a fundamentalist-dominated Pakistani satellite regime in Kabul (Cordovez and Harrison, 1995: 247). Pakistan used the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, an influential Islamist group which was the strongest coalition partner in the Benazir Bhutto government in 1994, to support the Taliban’s efforts to take over the strategic province of kandahar, and then Herat and Kabul (Crews and Tarzi, 2008: 101).

Apart from the military and political support, Pakistan played a key role in propping up the most radical elements among the Taliban. Darul Uloom Haqqania, also known as the University of Jihad, was the cradle of the senior members of the Taliban—including Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban, and Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansoor, another former Taliban leader—that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 (Hussain, 2007: 77). Maulana Samiul Haq, the director of Darul Uloom, was a member of Pakistan’s Parliament and the leader of an alliance of six Islamic parties in the North West Frontier Province and was known as “The Father of the Taliban” (Ali, 2007). The methods and content of instruction in Darul Uloom propagated an intolerant, ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam based on hardline Deobandism and Saudi Wahhabism (Hashemi, 2016: 136).

The Afghan Taliban blended Deobandi views with Saudi Wahhabism when they established their first Islamic Emirate and turned Afghanistan into a pariah state in 1996. The Taliban’s hybridization of Deobandism and Wahhabism resulted in taking Islamic beliefs “to an extreme which the original Deobandis would never have recognized” (Fisk, 2014).

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi billionaire who founded al-Qaeda, was a prominent figure who provided major financial assistance to the Taliban both for their takeover of Afghanistan and their continued rule from 1996 to 2001. For example, Bin Laden provided the United States $3 million to help with the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in 1996 (Peters, 2009). Such investments in the Taliban’s regime in Afghanistan made bin Laden’s al-Qaeda a close ally of the newly established Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan. By strengthening their ideological alliance with the Taliban government, al-Qaeda transformed Afghanistan into a support system that provided a safe haven, training camps, and ideological indoctrination for international Islamist militants and their global warfare (Crews and Tarzi, 2008: 113).

Yet, the Taliban’s adherence to the Saudi-funded religious schools and their resort to brutal policies and fanatical practices such as banning music, arts, and literature did not resonate among many, including prominent religious leaders in Afghanistan and abroad. For example, Taliban’s destruction of the much-revered 6th-century monumental Buddha statues in the Bamiyan valley of central Afghanistan in 2001 received international condemnation as prominent Muslim scholars termed it an un-Islamic act of vandalism (Naim, 2001).

Apart from a number of domestic policies such as banning women from education and restricting their public appearances, public executions, stonings, and amputations of limbs, the foreign relations of the Islamic Emirate was also highly influenced by the Taliban’s puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam ideological principles. In line with Saudi policy of building a “Sunni wall” around Iran (Nasr, 2002: 85–114), the Taliban began engaging in anti-Shiite sectarian violence. On 8 August 1998, the Taliban, assisted by members of the Saudi-funded extremist groups: Sipah-e Sahaba-e Pakistan and the Lashkar-e Jhangvi, slaughtered thousands of Persian-speaking Hazara Shiites in the multi-ethnic northern Afghan city of Mazar-i Sharif (Takim, 2016: 494). Soon Tehran realized that some Iranian nationals, including some diplomats, were also taken hostage by militants in Mazar-i Sharif. Iran’s Supreme Leader—who believed the Taliban were a puppet of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States—issued a stern warning to the Taliban, called them “worthless and lowly people,” and asked for an immediate release of Iranians (Nada, 2021).

However, it was shortly announced that 10 Iranian diplomats and 1 Iranian journalist were also among those who were summarily executed during the Taliban’s attack on Mazar-i Sharif. Despite the Taliban’s denying responsibility for the death of the Iranians in Mazar-i Sharif, Tehran held the Taliban fully and the government of Pakistan partly responsible for the incident, demanded the UN Security Council’s action against the Taliban, and send over 200,000 Iranian troops along the Afghan border preparing for a possible revenge attack on the Taliban (Gannon, 1998; Jehl, 1998).

To avoid a military attack by Iran, the Taliban’s representative presented multiple requests to the United Nations to establish a mediation process between Kabul and Tehran (Crossette, 1998). As widespread support in Iran for a revenge attack on the Taliban portended an imminent war, the UN Special Envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, met with both the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, and Iran’s President Khatami to deescalate the crisis (Gannon, 1998). Brahimi managed to arrange the safe return of Iranian hostages from Afghanistan, and upon Iran withdrawing its military from the border, the tension was diffused. Yet, Iran’s Supreme Leader—claiming he had prevented the outbreak of an all-out war between Iran and Afghanistan—lashed out at the Taliban once again and called them “savage mercenaries” who commit crimes against humanity on US and Pakistani army’s payroll (Khamenei, 1998).

It should be also noted that a day before the Taliban captured Mazar-i Sharif on 8 August 1998, two terrorist attacks were carried out next to the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing 224 people and injuring over 4500 others (McKinley, 1998). Arguing that some evidence existed that linked bin Laden with the US Embassy attacks in Africa, President Clinton ordered a missile attack on bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan on 20 August 1998 (Elias, 2005). The coincidental attacks on US and Iranian diplomatic missions made the Taliban and al-Qaeda common enemies of Washington and Tehran.

September 11 and the US–Iran Détente

The US decision to respond to 9/11 terrorist attacks by trying to destroy al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan vouchsafed Iran an unprecedented opportunity to wreak vengeance on the Taliban. Moreover, as Afghanistan under the Taliban posed major non-traditional security challenges such as Islamic fundamentalist and transnational terrorism, drugs trafficking, and refugee crises to Iran (Solhdoost and Pargoo, 2022: 147), toppling the Taliban would fulfill major political, economic, and strategic goals for Tehran. For example, the establishment of a stable government in place of Iran’s radical Sunni enemy in Kabul would facilitate the return of around 4 million registered and undocumented Afghan refugees who had been a burden on the Iranian economy for more than two decades (Zammit, 2015: 14). For these reasons, Iran—unlike most members of the Six-plus-Two⁹—was in favor of the American-led war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Pollack, 2005: 345).

Therefore, to discuss their common interests and common cause—which was to remove their mutual enemies, the Taliban and al-Qaeda—representatives from Iran and the United States met under the UN flag in Geneva (Blake, 2020). While the United States was considering a range of options—including using nuclear weapons against Afghanistan (Aderet, 2015) and buying off some of the Taliban commanders (Holguin, 2002)—Iran, according to Ryan Crocker (2012), then the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, shared information on how to order conventional attacks on the Taliban positions, how to prepare for the Taliban’s response, and how to use the Northern Alliance¹⁰ against the Taliban with their US counterparts in these pre-attack meetings.

As mutual security concerns trumped political enmity, cooperation between Iran and the United States continued. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force commander, General Qassem Soleimani,¹¹ used Iran’s infrastructure in Tajikistan to assist the CIA with establishing bases in Panjshir and Bagram in Afghanistan (Rubin, 2020). With General Soleimani’s consent, the United States was even allowed to use Iranian airspace to carry out its bombing campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan (Lammon, 2020). Iran’s participation in and its “major contribution” to the UN conference to form Afghanistan’s transitional government in early December 2001 was later praised by James Dobbins (2010a), the Bush administration’s First Special Envoy for Afghanistan.

According to Dobbins, Iran continued the talks with the United States discussing development and security issues and offered to join a US-led program of support to train and equip the new Afghan army after the Taliban were ousted (Congressional Hearing, 2007). Crocker (2012) also acknowledged that it was US–Iran mutual understanding that led to the selection of Hamid Karzai as the head of the interim government in Kabul. Tehran even agreed to keep Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fundamentalist pro-Taliban Mujahedeen leader wanted by the United States, from returning to lead his jihadist Hizb-e Islami¹² (Islamic Party) “so long as the Bush administration did not criticize it for harboring terrorists” (Congressional Hearing, 2007).

However, what appeared to be the first case of a successful US–Iranian détente began to deteriorate after President Bush labeled Iran part of the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address. Tehran initially protested President Bush’s public condemnation of Iran, yet it persistently raised the prospect of broadening a common agenda to achieve a strategic rapprochement between the United States and Iran (Leverett, 2007). Much like its cooperation with the United States on Afghanistan in 2001, Iran offered to provide tactical support to a prospective US-led attack on Iraq so long as the Bush administration gave assurances not to use the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK)¹³ against Iran (Congressional Hearing, 2007).

However, Iran changed course when Tehran realized that the Bush administration—in the midst of US–Iran cooperation on Afghanistan—had arranged clandestine meetings with members of MEK to pledge US support for their efforts to overthrow the Iranian regime (Dobbins, 2010b: 157). Iran even released Hekmatyar from house arrest and allowed him to go back to Afghanistan (Cocker, 2009). As the Bush administration’s anti-Iran policy, once again, pitted the two states against each other, Iran began to allegedly develop covert ties with the remaining members of the Taliban by 2007 to undermine Washington’s influence in Afghanistan (Solhdoost and Pargoo, 2022: 147). Following more official as well as secret visits to Iran by Taliban delegations in 2015 and 2016 (Nada, 2021), the US Defense Intelligence Agency released a report which assessed that Iran had no intentions to return the Taliban to power in Kabul, yet it aimed to “maintain influence with the group as a hedge in the event that the Taliban gain a role in a future Afghan government” (Gul, 2019).

One way for Iran to maintain influence with both the Afghan government and leaders of political parties, including the Taliban, was to participate in regional initiatives that aimed to reach an agreement on a political settlement in Afghanistan. For example, Iran has actively participated in the Heart of Asia—Istanbul Process (HOA-IP), a joint initiative of Afghanistan and Turkey that was established in 2011 to strengthen regional security, and economic and political cooperation with Afghanistan through “dialogue and confidence-building measures” (Quie, 2014: 290).

The Taliban 2.0: an insurgent-turned-ruling group

The Taliban had sought to present themselves as a more moderate group in recent years in Afghanistan. One particular area in which the Taliban have purported to be deradicalized is their foreign relations. In an atypical departure from their past ideologically informed views of other states, the Taliban have started widening their diplomatic relations with regional powers since the formation of the Afghan National Unity Government in 2014 (Bilal, 2017; Krauss, 2021). The US peace talks with the Taliban in Doha in 2020 put the Taliban’s political maneuver on steroids as it gave the ideologically strident militant group a public venue to demonstrate their apparent image makeover. By signing the Doha accord with the Taliban—which promoted the militant group to the position of a security guarantor in Afghanistan—the United States conferred international legitimacy on the group (Afzal, 2020; Fazl-e-haider, 2021).

As the Doha peace talks provided the opportunity to the Taliban to present itself as a rational actor, the group exercised more caution in its rhetoric and began to expand its diplomatic outreach to other states. To lay out their approach to shape the new future for Afghanistan under their rule, the Taliban, emphasizing on the principles of sovereignty and non-interference, stated “we do not want to have any problem with the international community” in their first news conference in Kabul in August 2021 (AlJazeera, 2021). To indicate a more proactive posture toward establishing relations with other states, Muhammad Naeem Wardak, the spokesperson for the Taliban’s political office in Doha, added, “we want to deal positively with the whole world and all countries. We do not want any problems” (NPR, 2021).

The Taliban’s unheard-of rhetoric, accompanied with proactive foreign policy practices, have resulted in some level of political and/or commercial engagement with dozens of countries, including immediate and non-immediate neighbors such as Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, India, and China. As mentioned above, the de facto rulers of Afghanistan have thus made their eventual recognition a fait accompli.

Discussion and conclusion

This article examined the Taliban’s unconventional foreign policy practices after their takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021. The historical analysis conducted in this research can be used to assert that the Taliban have understood that their survival as a government in the international system depends in large part on diplomacy. Using the concept of Machiavellian pragmatism, I explained how the Taliban—reflecting on their failure of the past and schooling themselves on foreign affairs—have strived to foster diplomatic relations with other states, even previous enemies.

The conflation of an obscurantist brand of Deobandism and Saudi Wahhabism helped the Taliban rise to power in 1996, but paradoxically, brought their revivalist movement to its doom in 2001. Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, US President Bush stated that the United States “would make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them” and demanded that “the Taliban must deliver all al-Qaeda leaders who hide in Afghanistan immediately and permanently close every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan” or face war (Martyn, 2002; Woodward, 2002: 30). Eventually, the Taliban’s refusal to hand over bin Laden and other al-Qaeda members to the United States resulted in the Taliban sharing their fate. In other words, the establishment of a medieval theocracy—which engaged in fanatical practices in Kabul’s foreign policy as well as its internal affairs—converted Afghanistan into an active war zone between the Taliban forces and al-Qaeda jihadists on one hand and the US-led coalition forces on the other hand. Albeit too late to avert their dismal fall in 2001, the Taliban seems to have learned the painful lesson that demonstrating overt ties with al-Qaeda hitches their wagon to a terrorist organization, which is viewed as an enemy by not only the most powerful state in the international system but also some regional powers such as Iran.

The historical analysis of the Taliban’s evolution shows that the 11 September terrorist attacks and its aftermath, indeed, forced the Taliban to face the fact that their interests and al-Qaeda’s interests were not always the same, and if they officially continued to shelter and protect al-Qaeda, they would remain at the mercy of the US-led War on Terror. More specifically, this analysis suggests that the Taliban understood well that their overt connection to the terror group led to two decades of war and military occupation in Afghanistan and would inevitably continue if they do not officially declare, or at least pretend, that they have separated their path from al-Qaeda’s. Certainly, they both evolved from the Mujahedeen that received training, money, and arms from the same patron states: the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan in the 1980s–1990s, and they almost both subscribed to the same radical fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. Nevertheless, the Taliban learned it the hard way that a violent non-state actor such as al-Qaeda—despite having shared ideological and political aims in certain areas—is likely to demonstrate a fundamental divergence of attitude toward adversarial actors in the international fora.

In addition, this article suggests that the Taliban’s uncharacteristic appreciation of diplomatic relations shows that they have realized that they should differentiate between running a popular militaristic movement—which exalts fundamentalist religious views within and across its borders—and administering a functioning state—whose foreign policy behavior is largely determined in relation with other states in the international system. It could be concluded that it is based on the learned lessons that the resurgent Taliban have pragmatically attempted to utilize some bureaucratic and managerial skills in its foreign relations despite upholding their puritanical morality when formulating public policy. Theoretically speaking, the Taliban’s 2021 triumphant return to power, their decisive decision to dissolve the US-backed political establishment in Kabul, and their declaration of independence following the US-led coalition pull-out from Afghanistan bring them into the scope of the Discourses on Livy.

As argued in this research, the expedient pragmatism—or the survival strategy—the Taliban have exercised since August 2021 indicates that they have reconsidered their policy choices with regard to at least two major issues: first, their relationship with al-Qaeda, and second, their interactions with other states, particularly their powerful neighbor, Iran. With no fear of losing the anti-Machiavellian freedoms and virtues of the liberal tradition, the Taliban have converted themselves to the Florentine’s approach to foreign policy. The Taliban 2.0, contrary to the Taliban of the 1980s–1990s, have begun their relationship to the external world in much the same way as a newly founded Machiavellian republic that—despite its continued brutal authoritarian behavior in domestic politics—adopts a pragmatic approach in its foreign relations.

It should be, however, noted that the unprecedented pragmatism in Taliban’s foreign relations suggests a normative instability that ensures that Taliban’s foreign policy behavior retains fluidity in their basic motivations and executions. In other words, the Taliban’s expedient pragmatism might justify foreign policy reorientations that may not be necessarily favorable to Iran, which has been cautiously optimistic with the prospects of a modus vivendi with Afghanistan under the resurgent Taliban. The unreliability of the new image the Taliban are trying to show is particularly worrisome if the dominant political echelon of the group—which consists of hardliners that were instrumental to the Taliban’s movement in the 1980s–1990s—wins over pragmatists and causes a relapse into the fundamentalist radical practices. Nonetheless, given Afghanistan factors into Iran’s relation with China and India, two of the greatest regional trading partners of Iran (Solhdoost, 2021: 68; Solhdoost and Pargoo, 2022: 147), Tehran has continued to maintain a sanguine stance toward the Taliban 2.0.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mohsen Solhdoost

Notes

Author biography

Mohsen Solhdoost is a Lecturer in International Relations. He is currently teaching International Relations courses at the University of Queensland and the Australian Catholic University. His main program of research includes foreign policy analysis and diplomacy. In his work, he focuses on complex security issues such as states’ interactions with non-state actors and examines issues around identity politics. His research has been published in leading journals such as Global Policy Journal (GPJ), and prominent think-tanks such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. He was a recipient of Rotary World Peace Fellowship and holds a PhD from the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland.

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The Taliban and Their Machiavellian Moment

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Pragmatism, a political tradition from antiquity to modern days

The cold war and the emergence of the Jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s

Establishing the first Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban 1996–2001

September 11 and the US–Iran Détente

The Taliban 2.0: an insurgent-turned-ruling group

Discussion and conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References