David Loyn

Taliban rule of Afghanistan becomes madder by the day. The only thing they reliably do is find new ways of making life impossible for women. They recently jailed the senior government advisor, Dr Farouq Azam, for more than a month after he made the subversive suggestion that women medical professionals should be sent to assist with earthquake relief. But while the Taliban attempt to portray a united front against the outside world, there is mounting evidence of division at the top of the movement. Taliban rule of Afghanistan becomes madder by the day.

Since America’s disastrous scuttle from Kabul in August 2021, there had been rising concern that Afghanistan would once again become a crucible of international terrorism. The claim by the Islamic State group to have carried out the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow appears to have justified that fear.  An Islamic prophecy says that when the Mahdi, the messiah, returns to herald the end of the world, he will come bearing black flags in the land of Khorasan The four gunmen – who are said to have walked casually as they fired into the crowds, leaving more than 130 people dead – were citizens of Tajikistan, which borders Afghanistan to the north.

The SAS blocked UK visas for Afghan special forces soldiers, perhaps fearing that they would be able to produce evidence incriminating the SAS in the shooting of unarmed civilians. That was the striking implication of a BBC Panorama investigation this week – with the Ministry of Defence confirming that it is undertaking a review of 2,000 cases where Afghan applications were blocked by the SAS. Under the ‘ARAP’ scheme, introduced after the fall of Afghanistan in August 2021, Afghans employed by the British government had a near-automatic right to resettle in the UK. This was because they were among the people most likely to face retribution from the Taliban after the fall of Kabul.

It has now been almost two years since the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan. In recent weeks, a number of international assessments have been published looking at the state of the country under their leadership.  One UN report looked at the potential for terrorism in a country where ‘terrorist groups enjoy greater freedom… than at any time in recent history.’ Links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda are said to be ‘strong and symbiotic’, with al-Qaeda ‘rebuilding operational capability’ from its base in Afghanistan.

Fighting has continued against the Taliban in Afghanistan while the world has not been watching. The commander of the main opposition force, Ahmad Massoud, began with 643 fighters after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, and now claims to have a force of 5,000 across six provinces in a belt in the northeast of the country. In a rare meeting in Tajikistan, where he commands remotely from across the northern border of Afghanistan, the 34-year-old resistance leader told me that western countries are making a mistake by trying to engage with the Taliban. Massoud inherited the mantle of resistance leader from his father, the legendary guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was killed in an al Qaeda terrorist attack two days before 9/11.

Sherpur District, to the north of central Kabul, where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed, lies at the western end of a huge former military base where British forces were besieged in the winter of 1879, during the second Anglo-Afghan war. The parade ground, still a wide open area until 2001, was quickly built over by warlords allied to the U.S. when the Taliban were pushed out of power after the attacks of 9/11. I went there with a military commander who was transformed overnight into a building contractor as the plots were parcelled out and garish concrete villas rose out of the dust. Built by one set of warlords after 9/11, those Sherpur villas were seized by other warlords last August when the Taliban took power again.

The office of the Afghan president, the Arg, sits in more than 80 acres of parkland, quadruple the size of the White House estate, and more than twice the size of Buckingham Palace grounds. Since it was built in the late eighteenth century, most of its occupants have died violently in one of the elegant buildings, built inside a large square compound of thick stone walls as a copy of an ancient fortress. But there has rarely been a scene like the one earlier this month, following the visit to Kabul of the head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed. He had come to Kabul to impose Pakistan’s will on the shape of the new Taliban government.