Andrew Watkins and Dr Ashley Jackson.

Q64 The Chair: Welcome to the second session today for the International Relations and Defence Select Committee’s inquiry into the UK and Afghanistan.

It is my pleasure to welcome to this session our witnesses: Dr Ashley Jackson, Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups, Overseas Development Institute, and Andrew Watkins, Senior Analyst on Afghanistan, International Crisis Group. Welcome to you.

At this stage, I always make the point that the session is transcribed, broadcast and on the record. I remind Members that when they ask questions they should declare any relevant interest. If there is any time remaining at the end of the session after we have asked our preliminary run of questions, I will invite Members to ask supplementary questions. I will as usual ask the first question, which is always broad in its range, and then I will turn to my colleagues for more detailed questions.

The first question is: has the Taliban changed since 2001? If so, in what ways?

Dr Ashley Jackson: Thank you for having me. This is an incredibly broad question, so I will try to answer it as concisely as I possibly can. I will talk about three broad ways in which it has changed. One is the composition—its personnel, its human resources. More than half of the population of Afghanistan was born after the Taliban took power, so we have an incredibly young population. That is of course reflected in the insurgency as well as in the rest of society. You see a lot of older clerics and former fighters across the table from the Afghan government in Doha, but that is not what I see when I have interviewed Taliban on the ground. They are young. They have grown up in a country and in a context that is markedly different to the one which the old school Taliban came to power in and they have different ideas about the way the country should be run. This is not to say that they are more progressive and more liberal, but they are fundamentally a different group of people.

Their networks, ethnicity, tribal alignments and geographic strongholds have also changed. You increasingly see Tajik and Uzbek Taliban contingents. Of course it is a majority Pashtun movement, but certainly it has broadened its outreach and its appeal in many ways. The older-school Taliban that we see more on the news and have known since 1990s have themselves been changed. They have been exiled, they have also travelled, they have developed links, they have been educated in various ways, and their own outlooks have changed, I think, from the young mujaheddin movement in the 1990s that swept to power. They are now elder statesmen—such as they are—and they have a longer-term vision for the Taliban, a more worldly vision of what they want their political movement to be.

Linked to that is the second factor that I will talk about: ideology. To have an ideology—again, it is not, I would stress, more or less conservative than in the past, but simply different—the Taliban has had to adapt to fighting a very different war than the one it was fighting in the 1990s. That was about purifying Afghanistan after a horrendous civil war in which there was theft, chaos and rape and all sorts of horrors that are very different from the war since 2001. It swept to power again with this sort of purification agenda.

That has kind of changed. The Taliban is now fighting against a foreign occupation and is very much grounded in restoring Islam as keepers of the faith and pushing back and rooting out western immorality and all these kinds of things. But it has also co-opted some of those western devices, such as social media; it is making videos, when once it strung up TVs from telephone poles. It has had to adapt to the changing times, much as it might not like to, or at least some of them might not like to.

Finally, I will talk about the Taliban’s organisation and capacity. When it rose to power in the 1990s, it took the entire country almost within a matter of months. So a bunch of people who had been educated in rural areas, if at all, who probably had not travelled very much and certainly had not held positions in government were now in charge of a country that had been devastated by years of war. If you talk to the Taliban, certainly the individuals involved during the period who I have interviewed, or you read their memoirs, they admit this. They were completely ill-prepared, and they will tell you this.

The Taliban has had the better part of the past decade, since it came together as a movement and gained significant footholds, to think about what kind of government it wants to form. It has set up throughout the country a massive shadow government that is not as capacitated as the Afghanistan government, the legitimate government, but it is very clever. It has sharia courts operating at the doorstep of Kabul, it has co-opted the schools and health clinics funded by the international community and run by the government. It has found ways to estate build through parasitic and coercive means, but it has been quite successful, and that has allowed it to experiment and build its own capacities. It is much more equipped and it has positioned itself as a government in waiting.

I will leave it there and turn it over to my co-panellist.

Andrew Watkins: Thank you very much. It is an honour to be here and speak with you all today. I appreciate Dr Jackson’s comments, which lead into some of my own thoughts. I agree very much with what she said.

The question whether the Taliban has changed, and if so in what ways, often has us leading down a road hoping to seek the answer to a later question, which is whether the Taliban attitudes that particularly concern us changed. Dr Jackson noted that we should be careful about using terms such as liberal, progressive, or socially conservative, and I want to answer in this vein, hopefully to illuminate the concerns we may have. How does the Taliban feel about the communities where it operates and that it may even have influence or control over? What are its relationships with these communities, and what does that mean for social norms and social freedoms?

There has already been some fantastic research that has come out this summer. Human Rights Watch produced a report entitled, You Have No Right to Complain, which notes that in many ways there is still some continuity with the way the Taliban has treated local communities, dating back several decades to its emirate era. In many communities, social norms and codes are not only still quite strict but strictly enforced. This has rightly raised a great deal of concern. But the report also noted a great degree not only of flexibility on the Taliban’s part but of the imperative to become flexible when it comes to local communities. The Taliban’s responsiveness to local communities has become a huge part of the shadow governance structure and endeavour that Dr Jackson mentioned.

The Taliban has grown and expanded across Afghanistan over the last two decades, well beyond its roots and origins and the way it was able to deploy itself throughout the 1990s, in large part by growing more and more flexible with different local enterprises, communities and stakeholders. This means that even in our most piercing ideological concerns about women’s rights or girls’ education, we now see movement from the Taliban.

We might assume in another movement that is so ideologically focused and fixated that such issues would not be bent on and that we would not see change or evolution, but in Afghan communities where local communal demands have been made for increased access to education or a demand for better quality healthcare, or many other issues including the use of social media and modern technologies, the group in some instances has changed across the entire country and in others has certainly changed and accommodated the wishes of the local communities that it requires sanctuary and support from.

When we talk about the Taliban and whether and how it has changed, we should also remember that at the moment it remains a highly militant organisation. Dr Jackson has noted in her own work on Taliban shadow governance that military imperatives often remain the trump card of the Taliban’s priorities and what it focuses on. As we look at the peace talks unfolding in Qatar with the Afghan government and Taliban representatives, we have to remember that the Taliban leadership on the ground in so many of these communities across Afghanistan has for several years now been discussing and debating notions of peace and what it might mean to reach a negotiated end to the war, but it has also been asking its fighters to continue fighting every day since its talks with the Americans began in late 2018.

The reality for most Taliban fighters, other supporters or those who live in their communities is that they still live under a militarised organisation. From the Taliban’s perspective, demobilising or softening its governance, shifting itself out of the martial law that one justifies during a state of war and into a state of normal governance is not something that the Taliban and its members and its figures themselves believe is a reasonable or even prudent means of moving forward. Whenever members of this group speak about incorporating into Afghan society and into transitioning into a political movement, they talk about doing so after negotiations are complete, not as they have begun in order to demonstrate good faith and good will but after the state of war has ended. Then they say that you will stop seeing them behave towards local populations as if they are in a state of war.

One final point on how the Taliban has changed. We have seen over the last two decades that while the group’s consensus in many ways remains adhered to strict social norms and standards in many communities, in the places where it has changed, as I noted, it has changed as a result of local demands and local pressure. This carries instructive lessons for us in asking how we can influence this group or influence the potential for a political compromise and in remembering that this group has very rarely, if ever, bent or caved into international pressure, diplomatic or otherwise. But in terms of local pressure, this group has certainly shown the ability and the necessity to adapt.

The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. I now turn to Baroness Smith for the next question. As I did in the last session, I will try to alternate between our witnesses so that they each have a chance of going first. After Baroness Smith’s question, I will return to you next, Andrew Watkins.

Q65 Baroness Smith of Newnham: Thank you. In your first response, Dr Jackson, you commented that the question was very broad. I hope the next series of questions will narrow it down a bit. In both witnesses’ opening remarks, they highlighted the extent to which the current Taliban has different characteristics. Dr Jackson talked about the networks, geographical strongholds and different ethnic groupings of the Taliban. To what extent is there a coherent Taliban structure? Can we talk about the Taliban stretching right across Afghanistan, or should we be thinking more about a looser series of structures, almost like a franchise? Are there characteristics that bring the Taliban together as a whole? What are the issues that bring it together, and what are the fault lines?

Andrew Watkins: I would say that the Taliban is a series of highly decentralised networks bound together by personal and community-based ties, and over the last two decades as an insurgency it has increasingly built up its hierarchy and formal structures. My colleague, Dr Jackson, can go into much more detail on this, so I will leave that for her. She has already made the point that the Taliban has grown demographically well beyond its roots, in particular in southern Afghanistan and the Pashtun communities. The movement, which was defined in many ways by the pre-existing dynamics and relationships between those southern Pashtun communities and tribes, has had to evolve to accommodate a nationwide insurgency, not just with other ethnic groups and communities but in terms of geographic dispersion.

As the insurgency has spread across the country, we have seen a dualistic and apparently contradictory approach by the Taliban to managing its own organisation. One is to decentralise, where necessary, to allow—as I mentioned a few moments ago—local commanders or local officials to bend and to flex with the demands of a certain community or with other local stakeholders to give broad free rein to many of its local operators, but also to insist, and if anything to increase, the group’s ideological basis in obedience, unity and cohesion. By doing so, by in practice allowing a great range of freedom in local operating practice but in theory and in political philosophy demanding obedience and unity from its members, it has given the group the flexibility to expand and grow across the country, while also keeping it coherent.

It is worth noting that originally the group was structured in many ways around the personal charisma of the figure of Mullah Omar, but after Mullah Omar’s death—or, some could argue, years before—the group has been evolving over the last two decades to being led, in reality, by its highest circles of leadership, its founding members, which Dr Jackson mentioned.

What we now see is something more of a leadership by shura or a council system. To use an analogy that should not be overextended, we can think more of a politburo rather than a Soviet premier now managing most of the affairs of this organisation, top leadership circles, which has benefited the group in several ways.

First, in a state of war this group’s leadership is now much more stable when it comes under target from international forces and Afghan forces. The succession crisis that we saw after the death of Mullah Omar was revealed. This group’s reliance on a council consultative system of leadership is now much more stable, but there is also increased buy-in from the various elements and interests within the Taliban. As it has expanded and experienced quite a few growing pains as an insurgency, this council-based leadership system has increased buy-in from all those different wings. Again, it is not just different ethnic communities but whole geographic regions.

Finally, before I hand it over to Dr Jackson I would note that no one monitors fault lines within the Taliban more closely than the Taliban’s leadership itself. As it has experienced the trials and tribulations of acting as an insurgent movement under duress and under attack from NATO and the US superpower, it has ensured that its focus on unity and cohesion is spread even throughout younger ranks. We now have an ironic position, moving into peace talks where many of the group’s founding leadership will privately acknowledge the failings of the emirate and understand that political compromises should be made in Doha at the peace table. But the group’s propaganda and messaging and emphasis on unity of leadership and of discipline and obedience to an emir has a younger generation that in many ways has embraced the model which the elder leadership acknowledge quietly may need to evolve and in fact has evolved.

Dr Ashley Jackson: Andrew spoke very eloquently of a lot of the key dynamics. I fully endorse and let his comments stand, but maybe I will just seek to build upon on them in a couple of areas. It is important to consider the history when we consider how fragmented or centralised the Taliban is. I say that, because it has been a very politicised question and the answers that have often been provided have spoken to Western protocol objectives. The idea that the Taliban is fragmented has driven policy solutions, which Erica talked about in the first session, from militias to very flawed, very expensive reintegration programmes that have not worked. It is important to put that on the table and be very critical of any assessment of this that gives a clear answer one way or another.

I think we can say that, after almost two decades, the Taliban’s ability to adapt in its structures, its alliances, its resilience, its ability to kind of shapeshift to be fit for purpose is unique among insurgencies and has been consistently underestimated. That has been part of the problem for the coalition fighting against it. Andrew talked about the process of organisational development, this shift from personality-centric networks, which, by the way, characterise the Afghan political landscape. On the government side that is really what you have, but the Taliban has sought to move away from that and towards building institutions, not that that is a perfect process. It is a continual process and one that is mediated by military demands on the ground. As Andrew said, it is the trump card. That is what dictates everything.

The question about fault lines, fragmentation and centralisation is difficult and perhaps not even a productive question to talk about in the abstract. I always find it much more useful to apply it to the political problems that we are talking about, because what good is Taliban centralisation or fragmentation if it is not for a specific outcome, hopefully one that we would like to see? We know that it is centralised enough to mount co-ordinated offensives in fairly large swathes of the country; we see them in attacks on medium-size cities in Afghanistan, and in ground offences on specific targets. We know this and we have seen it for a number of years now. It is showing some degree of restraint with regard to attacking cities since the US deal and attacking major strategic locales, but that does not mean that it cannot.

The Taliban is also co-ordinated enough to mount ceasefires for at least three days without much oversight or much of a monitoring mechanism to keep it in check. That speaks volumes to me, more so than its ability to co-ordinate offensive attacks. It is co-ordinated enough to do things like collect taxes right through many government-controlled locales, including major roads on the edges and peripheries of government-controlled cities. Certainly in many areas it is co-ordinated enough to have a national education policy, which is more or less implemented, and for people on the ground who I have done research with and interviewed to be able at least to repeat it back to me.

Is it more or less cohesive that the national government right now? That is an important question to ask. My answer would be yes. Is it more or less cohesive than the government-aligned negotiating team, if we can phrase it like that, that it is sitting across from in Doha? Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. Could this change? Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. As Andrew points out, the Taliban itself monitors internal fault lines and fragmentation. It has, unlike a lot of insurgencies, been able to avoid major splits. Even when Mullah Omar died, these big catastrophic events, it has managed to pretty much keep everyone inside the tent. Will it be able to do so in the future? We do not know, but it is certainly something it is paying attention to. On the scale of insurgencies, again it has perhaps more control than most other insurgencies that we deal with in the geopolitical landscape these days.

Is it united enough to hold up its end of the peace deal? That is a broader question. It is probably one you will ask in a different forum, but I would say it is far too soon to say. I have made these bold statements about its coherence, but that does not mean that things could not change. I will leave it there.

Q66 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Thank you very much for those illuminating answers to the previous questions. What is your assessment of the Taliban’s connections to other groups such as al-Qaeda, IS Khorasan, the Haqqani network? There are probably more. This is perhaps a key question: to what extent is the Taliban, if it forms in some way or another part of the governance of Afghanistan, either willing or able to prevent the terrorist attacks within Afghanistan or outside it being mounted by those other organisations?

Dr Ashley Jackson: Again, I will try to keep this brief. As Erica pointed out, the Haqqani network is, in many ways, a part of the Taliban. The Taliban is a network of networks, knitted together from diverse constituencies and one big constituency, which of course is somewhat autonomous. It has its own, shall I say, machinery on the Pakistani side of the border and its involvement in many other enterprises beyond the Taliban insurgency. It is an outlier, but at the top of the Taliban is an emir and beneath him two deputies. One of those seats is filled by the leader of the Haqqani network, so it is very involved in Taliban decision-making, and certainly in its areas of control inside Afghanistan it implements more or less Taliban policies and reports through to that military chain of command.

In thinking about it managing what we would consider terrorist groups or groups that might pose a threat to either regional or European/US security, again I would start by pointing out that a lot of the information that we have—even for someone like me, who pores over this information and tries to vet it—is deeply flawed and questionable. Even monitoring reports about al-Qaeda activity in Afghanistan, very few people have reliable information. We have a profoundly patchy understanding of the Taliban’s relationships with these groups. I would argue that there is an urgent need to rectify geopolitical information and security analysis. That would be at the top of my list, certainly.

The Taliban’s attitude since the signing of the US deal has been, “Let’s manage them”. Of course we have relationships with them. The Taliban would not say this, but of course there are these relationships, which by the way go back decades, not only to the Pakistani Taliban or various Uzbek movements or others, such as al-Qaeda. The Taliban has kept those lines of communication open. The Taliban strategy, I think, is to keep its enemies or anyone who would pose a threat to its legitimacy or authority close so that it can manage them. The argument has been that that is better, particularly in the current situation, than casting them out unregulated or selling them out, lest disaffected Talibs join splinter movements. You are giving them legitimacy if you have a disagreement with them somehow.

The Taliban insists very gently to the US and others, “We can contain and manage them. We are the proof that you can’t kill them away. After 20 years, drone strikes won’t get rid of this problem, so let’s try to figure things out”. Recently it has tried to enact rules on the operations of some of these groups inside Afghanistan, so it has made efforts, which I will not go into too much detail about, to step up at least the perception that it is trying to corral these groups and that it is able to kind of monitor them.

But, again, we do not know enough, and we do not know enough about how regional players, who often fund and support non-state armed groups in Afghanistan, will react to the peace deal. Will it try to empower some of these groups, whether it is the remnants of al-Qaeda or some of the other groups I mentioned? That will be critical to watch, but I will leave it there and hand it over to Andrew.

Andrew Watkins: Thank you. Ashley is correct, and I am glad that she spent the time to make the point that there is so little that we know, even among national intelligence gathering services and the work of the UN and other international institutions. This has to guide our understanding: the admission that we understand that we know very little about these relationships.

We have learned in interviews and in field research speaking to figures associated with the Taliban that one impression that we have is true: members of the Taliban, certain constituencies within the Taliban, look with sympathy, if not with affiliation, on many other extremist groups that operate in south and central Asia more broadly and that take sanctuary within Afghanistan.

When you speak to Taliban figures about some of these other smaller groups, perhaps not al-Qaeda but others that Ashley mentioned, such as central Asia-rooted groups from Uzbek or Tajik areas or of course Chinese Uighurs, the Taliban speak about them as dissidents, as freedom fighters—“True Muslims who were outcast by oppressive Governments who were even worse than the Afghanistan Government who we laboured to overthrow”. So you have a sense of solidarity and community among some of these members, which delves down into personalised ties and a broader sense of sympathy.

It is important to remember that al-Qaeda as an organisation predates the Taliban in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda has been present in small numbers and is made up of foreign fighters, but some of those foreign members were present in Afghanistan before the Taliban congealed and coalesced into an organised movement. The standing and the reputation among certain members of the Taliban is decades old, longer than international intervention in Afghanistan. There are relationships that are ill-defined and which we understand very poorly, but which are of course cause for concern.

One thing that we need to clarify is the difference, the bifurcation, within the world of Islamically derived extremism and terrorism, the difference between the al-Qaeda umbrella of organisations and the Islamic State and its many different satellites or adherence. What the Taliban do not have is any pathos or sympathy for the Islamic State, its branch in Afghanistan or its other affiliates that have cropped up in the region. The Taliban has been pitted against the Islamic State and has spent a countless—I say “countless” due to paucity of information—number of resources and its own fighters.

At times, the Taliban has very clearly, according to conflict monitors, prioritised its fight against the Islamic State in the eastern regions of the country even above fighting against the Afghan government. We have seen fighting seasons when the Taliban pours far more resources into eliminating the Islamic State in Afghanistan, as Dr Jackson noted, in large part due to the perceived threat to the Taliban’s own legitimacy, and this also goes back to the relationship the Taliban has with other groups.

Since the Taliban’s insurgency, but in particular as it has seen success at the negotiating table with the Americans and is now moving into peace talks, al-Qaeda and its various wings have done nothing but propitiate the Taliban and held it up as an embodiment of Islamic governance and an example of jihad to be emulated. This praise, while almost never publicly returned by the Taliban and reciprocated, must have an impact on Taliban fighters who are groomed and are fed a steady diet not only of Islamic education but of propaganda that is grounded in Islamic language. We have these impressions and these relationships. What does that mean for the Taliban if a political settlement is reached? This is very difficult.

We already have some indications from US negotiators and policymakers that there may be a willingness in the Taliban to work very quietly to assuage counterterrorism concerns, but given the little that we understand on the ground about Taliban members and their relationships and sympathies to some of these groups, one thing that I think we can eliminate—and this is due to the Taliban’s focus on its own unity and cohesion—is an open and public denunciation of these groups or the pursuit and targeting of some of these groups. The Taliban will certainly be willing to continue to go after groups that have been a threat, such as the Islamic State, but co-operation with groups that have long sought some form of sanctuary or coexistence with the Taliban will be difficult at best and almost certainly quiet and less public than many would hope.

The Chair: Thank you very much. As ever—it seems to be my recurring statement—time is against us. I regret to say that it is not under our control, because in the virtual world we have only a certain amount of broadcast time.

Q67 Baroness Blackstone: Good morning. What is your assessment of the Taliban’s relationships with Afghanistan’s neighbours as well as other countries, including the Gulf States? To what extent is the Taliban responsive to external pressures of this sort?

Andrew Watkins: It is a vital question. The history of the Taliban as an insurgency is an obvious one. Its sanctuary, its very survival, depended on Pakistan, allowing it to operate from across its borders to regroup, to organise, to coalesce. Of course, much of the movement’s leadership still resides in Pakistan across the border. There are varying testimonies and reports of other forms of Pakistani support, which are difficult to verify, but certainly a cross-border sanctuary is essential to the survival of any insurgent movement, and the same has been true for the Taliban.

The evolution of that relationship with Pakistan and the Taliban is most evident in the way that the Taliban has been able to expand across Afghanistan. Cross-border support does not mean the same thing that it meant 15 or 10 or even five years ago. The Taliban, even senior leadership, now resides very comfortably within districts of Afghanistan that it comfortably controls and feels fairly secure in. When we say that leadership resides in Pakistan, we are talking about circles of some several dozen of the Taliban’s most senior commanders, but when we talk about those who command and lead the fighting of this movement we mean that they reside and operate in Afghanistan and conduct their business there. The influence on a practical level has been greatly has, I will not say reduced, but evolved and has certainly trended in the direction of the Taliban’s self-reliance.

This is a success story, on the Taliban’s part, in the history of modern insurgency—starting from a place of sanctuary in a bordering state and moving in the direction of self-reliance but also to the successful expansion of relationships with other neighbours. When you look at the history of the Taliban during the 1990s as an emirate with Iran, in 1998 the two parties almost went to war over a massacre in northern Afghanistan. Iran held back and showed restraint, but it was incredibly hostile to this rather extreme Sunni Muslim government who had been established. Over the last decade, however, the Taliban has cultivated stronger, closer ties with Iran. They are certainly not those that it enjoys with Pakistan, but just the fact that the Taliban has overcome the hostility that existed between itself and Iran is quite a major accomplishment.

The Taliban’s relationships with Gulf states has been primarily one of funding and not of governmental support, aside from the hosting of its political office in Qatar. Broadly when we talk about Gulf relations with the Taliban, we talk about less official financing, funding and support. This has dropped off over the last decade for reasons that are largely unrelated to Afghanistan, starting from a financial crisis beginning in 2008, but of course leading into the tumult, the crisis and war in Syria, in Yemen and elsewhere. Gulf powers have much less time and resources to devote to Afghanistan than they did several decades ago.

Then you have other regional power brokers, states such as Russia and China. I think we have evidence on the diplomatic front of how the Taliban has reassured major powers in the region. Once its entire policy was to fund and support the northern stakeholders and commanders that would oppose the Taliban. You now see a state like Russia that would do anything to buffer itself against the Taliban and its control of the country engaging in an open relationship with them.

I will turn this question over to Dr Jackson now, as the answer could go on and on, but I hope that is at least a summary of how the group has evolved.

The Chair: Thank you. I will be very brutal and ask Dr Jackson to be quite brief in her reflection on this one.

Dr Ashley Jackson: Luckily for all of us, my co-panellist has done a fantastic job. I will just add a few remarks. He made a great point about the Taliban transitioning to living inside Afghanistan and reducing its reliance on Pakistan. It is a complicated and fraught relationship, and one that I will not go into. We would be here for hours if I attempted to do so, but I would highlight that Ambassador Khalilzad had to get Mullah Baradar, his negotiating partner, out of a Pakistani jail in order to negotiate the US-Taliban deal. He was ostensibly put there, to put it diplomatically, at a time when the Taliban was seeking to engage in dialogue with the US and with other countries in the region. That is a key relationship.

You would have seen in the Gulf a jockeying of different players for influence with the Taliban, trying to figure out how to insert themselves into peace talks. The tensions between Qatar, Saudi and the Emirates have played into that in various ways, so the Taliban is also hostage to regional dynamics, which I think is often overlooked.

Two more very quick points. There are others that we do not necessarily talk about who have played a positive role. Indonesia is an interesting one, and various members of the Taliban have travelled to the country or have met with Indonesian officials and Islamic scholars. I think Indonesia thinks that it has a role in moderating and helping the Taliban to see a different side of Islam. That is a more benevolent influence that we see. I do not want to overstate the case, but then we see it from elsewhere. There are unexpected allies. China is another one to flag. It of course has significant economic interests in Afghanistan, but it has tried to figure out a positioning vis-à-vis the Taliban.

I will end by saying that this is an incredibly important question, but the most important part of it is not being addressed in the current political talks. The lack of a regional strategy at this point is deeply, deeply concerning. Back in 2001 and at the Bonn Conference, most of the world and certainly the region aligned, coercively or not, to that strategy. That kind of political will is absolutely what we need to see by the time we get to the point where we are negotiating substantive issues. The fact that it is not really coming together and coalescing in any sort of recognisable form quite yet is deeply concerning, but in the interests of time I will leave it there.

The Chair: Thank you for those very strong cautionary words. In the interests of time I will next, as I did in the last session, ask two of my colleagues to ask their question simultaneously, and I ask Dr Jackson to begin the responses.

Q68 Lord Mendelsohn: Thank you, Chair. Thank you for some very insightful evidence. Turning attention to the inter-Afghan talks, I invite you both to give your assessment of what the Taliban wants to achieve with the talks and what outcome you would consider a success.

Q69 Lord Alton of Liverpool: Can I turn to the question of sincerity and trust? The Taliban has so far refused to recognise and negotiate with the Afghan government. Are there any indications that the current negotiations are a genuine change in the group’s strategy? To what extent can the Taliban be trusted to respect any final agreement?

Dr Ashley Jackson: To begin with, I will answer the Taliban objectives. The Taliban, for all that we debate its motives, has been remarkably on message and consistent, to the degree that I think Western politicians could learn a thing or two about its “on message” ness. For the past 15 years, it has had two core demands: foreign troops out and a “truly Islamic” government established. Up and down the movement, when you ask the fighters I have talked to in Pakistan and Doha what the Taliban want, that is what they say, so there is a coherence within the movement that these are the objectives. It is very close to achieving the first one with the US-Taliban deal.

The inter-Afghan talks are a means to that second objective. That is not without controversy among different Talibs and factions within the Taliban, but there is broad consensus on sitting down with other Afghans. I think they would view the other side of the table as not the government but a coalition of other Afghans, because of course it is not just members of government on that team. Interestingly, beyond that, the Taliban has left it incredibly vague, which is very clever. It leaves it open to any number of positions and it leaves the rest of us wondering what its red lines could be. This is kind of good for negotiations, because had it expressed a number of really hard red lines the talks would be much more difficult than they were already going to be.

There has been a lot of speculation about the form of Taliban government. Again, I would urge caution. Look at what the Taliban say. It says very little about the form of government that it would be open to. When there is speculation, it assumes that there is consensus within the Taliban, and I would call that into the debate. There was not a lot of preparation before these inter-Afghan talks. In fact, talks have been a volatile rollercoaster from one day to the next. People on all sides of this process for the past two years have been living one day at a time to try to keep things moving forward.

There has not been the kind of time that you see in other peace processes, real concerted engagement to try to help the Taliban think through what is feasible and to help the other side of the table think through how to engage with the Taliban and that prep work. There has been some dialogue, but not the kind of big machinery and support that you see in peace processes of this significance. Just to return to the Taliban, it is good that we do not necessarily know what its ideal end state is, but it means that a lot of time will have to be devoted to internal consultation within the movement, that talks will be slow and precarious, and that the Taliban has to think these things through to some degree as it is negotiating them. That again will take time.

Turning quickly to the idea of sincerity, I think there is a misconception. The Taliban has refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Afghan government. Certainly in its public statements, it does everything it can to delegitimise them, calling them a public government, all these kinds of things. But I would not express its decision to sit down with the Afghan government as a fundamental change in strategy. It has for years demanded very insistently to talk to the US first, to come to a deal on troop withdrawal first, before it would even consider anything regarding the Afghan government. That has roughly been the position historically, or at least in recent years. It got that. The US was the one that ultimately changed its position from insisting on the Taliban talking to the Afghan government first to just sitting down with the Taliban first.

It has got what it wanted, but the question of sincerity could be asked again of all sides. The Taliban has been remarkably vague on what it is willing to concede to. It has been remarkably hard-line on a number of issues that we might like to see it compromise on, such as recognising the Afghan government’s legitimacy, talking about the constitution and all these kinds of things. It is trying to maintain adherence to some of the core positions while still engaging in dialogue and still expressing a desire to bring the war to an end and to create a form of government that is not only in its eyes truly Islamic but that represents, as it says, all Afghans, which is modest but a step in the right direction none the less.

In closing, we have to distinguish between a lack of sincerity, competing objectives and internal incoherence. We have certainly seen some of that on the US side with President Trump’s tweet derailing the peace talks last September, but I am sure we will see it on all sides where there is not necessarily rock solid coherence of position and objectives on all sides, as I touched on before.

Andrew Watkins: I defer to Dr Jackson’s comments, which I agree with and that characterise the appropriate answers perfectly. The two questions in my mind are very closely linked. The extent to which the Taliban can be trusted or relied upon to uphold any agreement that it may enter will depend on the degree to which the agreement gives it what it wants and what it is seeking. That is not an entirely helpful answer, because, as Dr Jackson noted, even the Taliban itself may not have universal consensus on exactly what it wants.

But the extent to which the group can be trusted to adhere to a potential political settlement to the war is the extent to which any political actor can be relied upon to adhere to an agreement it enters, whether or not the adherence of that agreement meets its interest. Unfortunately, the way the US has broadcast its public policy position in the future for Afghan, and the reliance of other Western partners to Afghanistan on US architecture in order to support the state as deeply as it currently is with a trajectory of US disengagement, there really is no means of enforcing an agreement which the Taliban do not care for but that it would be obliged to follow or adhere to. There is no practical means of reaching a settlement that does not leave the Taliban somewhat satisfied with the results and the output.

This entire process has been developed from the beginning on the basis of the assumption that the Americans would withdraw or would seek to withdraw as quickly as possible. That effectively means that this process is an arrangement of bringing the Taliban back into power and giving it at least some of what it wants in exchange for it discontinuing its insurgency. That is an uncomfortable truth, but that is the essential structure of the process that has been entered into.

The Chair: I now turn to Baroness Helic for the penultimate question.

Q70 Baroness Helic: Good morning. Thank you to our witnesses for a really good, insightful and detailed analysis of where we are. It comes across that the Taliban is very clear about its core demands. One of those demands is obviously having a purely Islamic state, in Afghanistan as an emirate or whatever shape and form it can take. That does not fit in well with all the progress that has been made over the last almost 20 years on women’s rights and the inclusion of women in social and political life in Afghanistan. What influence, in your view, can the western countries bring to bear to avoid the progress made being lost? In particular, what do you think countries like the United Kingdom can do?

Andrew Watkins: It is an important question. I would like to address the context of the question: the idea that what the Taliban seeks may be inherently contradictory to the gains or the progress that has made in Afghanistan for the last 20 years. In many ways, I think there is a basis for a compromise that does not necessarily undermine achievements or progress made towards women’s rights and freedoms in Afghanistan, which it must be said in a further caveat have only benefited a percentage of the population. The extent to which the freedoms under the Afghan government enable or empower or have improved women’s lives across Afghanistan are limited by the capacity and reach of the Afghan government, which is one of the weakest in the world.

Furthermore, the current Afghan constitution has strictures within it that say that no law of the country will contradict or go against tenets of sharia law, that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is meant, on paper and in theory, to be an Islamic state. This gives, even within the current framework and constitutional order, quite a bit of room to reach common ground with the Taliban, especially given that the Taliban is vague about what it wants.

In terms of what Western governments can do, I would return to my remarks in answer to the first question. Very broadly, how has the Taliban changed? The only evidence we have seen of Taliban change has either been in battlefield adaptation out of necessity or in response and compliance to local community demands.

The question in relation to what Western statements will and will not be acceptable or what we hope to see from a political settlement on Afghanistan is not about the right approach or the principled approach, but whether or not such an approach will reach the Taliban and impact it in any way. The group has demonstrated very clearly over the last two decades that it does not take such statements or such principles, or even the military might of the Western world, and bend to that attempt to leverage and influence. The West can best influence this group by refocusing and considering how local communities might engage with the Taliban and how best to oblige the Taliban to be more responsive to the demands of Afghans themselves.

Dr Ashley Jackson: I am very glad that you asked this question. There are two things. First, I would be very critical of Western narratives of Afghan women’s progress. As Andrew has pointed out, the Afghan constitution is often written about as upholding women’s rights. No, it is a jumble of contradictions which the international community endorsed and agreed to. That is the system that Afghans have decided upon, but to present it as anything other than that is deeply problematic.

Secondly, the narrative of women’s progress has unfortunately been one of the greatest lies of this war. It is not that there have not been advances for Afghan women—I would argue that there have been many important ones—but time and time again, from the number of maternal deaths in childbirth to the number of girls’ schools built, the advances have been inflated, fabricated and revealed to be false. The investments made for Afghan women have been driven by donor political prerogatives, flawed ideas, and lack of consultation with Afghan women as to what they need or want or what will work for them. Again, I would be very critical of the idea that Afghan women have made great strides.

If the West, the UK and others, want to continue to try to uphold their stated, but so often undelivered, promises to Afghan women, there are many simple things that they can do, regardless of what happens in peace talks. They can do them right now. You could invest in girls’ education. I do not mean investing in the ARTF,[1] which funds government schools. In Taliban areas, we know that it will accept community-based education where women from the community teach in a discrete setting, usually someone’s home, and that will work. Why there is no massive British investment in these kinds of modalities to ensure that every girl under the age of puberty learns to read and have some level of numeracy, I have no clue, particularly given the UK government’s statements about how important Afghan women’s rights are.

Secondly, the number of maternal deaths remains shocking. After so much investment, why you cannot even keep mothers alive long enough to deliver their babies is beyond me. There is a need to invest in community midwives, which again the Taliban sometimes demands because there is a shortage of them, and in maternal health, again beyond what is put into government trust funds, and to invest in things that, after 20 years of too many failures, we know work and not in things that we know do not work.

If there is any strong recommendation to make on women’s rights, I would urge that we take this seriously and look at what the evidence says, as well as the base things such education and healthcare, which all Afghan women need. I know that we are very short for time, so I will leave it there.

The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. We do have time for our last question.

Q71 Lord Purvis of Tweed: My question is about ISIS-K.

Andrew, you gave a very good outline of some of the dynamic that is in Afghanistan. We only have time for me to ask a couple of specific questions and for you to give specific answers needed, if you do not mind, rather than any analysis. What you said before was very helpful. What is your estimate of the size of ISIS-K? I have seen online that there are quite varied assessments about its source of income and its size, which is anything from 3,000 to 10,000 fighters.

Secondly, I recall a couple of years ago a former UK Secretary of State for Defence saying that there were ongoing links between ISIS-K and individuals in cells within the UK. Is that the case still or has that been broken?

Andrew Watkins: I will answer the question asking for an estimate on ISIS-K’s numbers by avoiding the question. Instead I would like to pivot, simply because there is no great way to derive better estimates than those that already exist from experts who focus on this group exclusively. Instead, I want to make a vital point about this group and the demographics of its membership, a point that was raised earlier this year in reporting conducted by the US Institute of Peace, among others, on the membership of the Islamic State in Afghanistan. It was long believed—and in part this was true—to be a group that originated in Pakistan extremist groups and their families and communities fleeing across the border from Pakistan in 2014 and 2015 during military movements to wipe out extremism in border regions. In large part, the Islamic State, which has never really succeeded in becoming an organic insurgent movement across Afghanistan, certainly nothing resembling the Taliban’s success, was a foreign-seeded organisation that has global aims and attempts to solicit and reach out to any global networks possible.

However, with regard to the Islamic State’s global ideology, one thing that it is important to note and which this current research has shown is that, although the group in Afghanistan and globally has suffered a series of military defeats and no longer controls territory within Afghanistan, and although many of its fighters have if not been captured by the government or relinquished the fight then have fled into the proverbial hills and moved into the country’s most remote regions, is that we are seeing and we need to understand that there are educated, urban youth who will continue to be drawn into this ideology.

Kabul, as a capital city, has expanded over the last two decades. It is now a city that ranges in some estimates from 5 million to nearly 7 million people. It is impossible to keep track of the security environment in that context. I am not clear about the current threat and the extent of the networks that this organisation has in the UK, but one thing I do know is that despite all its military defeats in Afghanistan it has attracted both membership and the capability to carry out incredibly violent, brutal attacks in Kabul, regardless of what happens in any peace negotiation.

The Chair: Thank you. With great regret, I am afraid that we are now out of our broadcast time, save for me to give our great thanks to our witnesses today, Andrew Watkins, Dr Ashley Jackson, and indeed all four witnesses. You have given us a tremendous amount of challenging and in-depth information, and goodbye for now.