Jean-Yves Berthault: "The return to power of the Taliban is a strategic success for Pakistan"
Former French Ambassador to Kabul, Jean-Yves Berthault is the author of “Déjeuners avec les Talibans” (2021).
© Editions Saint-Simon
Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
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Diplomat, Jean-Yves Berthault is one of the “orientalists” of the Quai d'Orsay.
He began his career in Kabul in 1979, before returning there to direct the French diplomatic mission from 1998 to 2001. In his book
Déjeuners avec les talibans
: réévations d'un diplomate
(Ed. Saint-Simon), he reviews his exchanges with the Taliban, but also on the role played by the Pakistani neighbor in particular in the upheavals that Afghanistan has been experiencing for 40 years.
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RFI: French Ambassador in Kabul between 1998 and 2001, you worked with the first Taliban regime and you saw closely how this regime gradually put itself under the ban of the international community by practicing an Islamist rigor from another age . Are the Taliban, who have just taken back power in Afghanistan, the same as those who ruled the country 25 years ago?
Jean-Yves Berthault:
We know that a large part of the Taliban who have just seized power in Kabul were already in office 25 years ago.
On the doctrinal level either, this Islamist movement has not changed since it intends to govern the country based on the most fundamentalist interpretation of religion.
But "the Koran, nothing but the Koran" may be a little short this time to manage the Afghan society which, for its part, has changed profoundly in the space of two and a half decades.
Especially in Kabul and the big cities of the country where we have seen in recent days young women daring to defy the prohibitions and demonstrate in the street.
Afghan women demonstrate in defense of their rights, September 02, 2021, in Herat, Afghanistan.
AFP - -
These demonstrations were repressed ...
The Taliban deployed there dispersed the demonstrators by firing in the air. The fact remains that these women represent the new middle class that has emerged in recent years and with which the new Afghan authorities will have trouble. Afghan women, who are now 20, were born after the fall of the first Taliban government. Most of them went to school and grew up under a democratic regime. It is true that it was a very imperfect democracy, with above all a glaring disparity between the countryside and the cities, but nevertheless public freedoms, freedom of the press, relative equality between men and women were better guaranteed than before. . This is what makes me write, in my book, that today it is not a question of whether the Taliban have changed,but how they will cope with this Afghan society which is no longer quite the same.
You have also been stationed in neighboring Pakistan. What role did this country play in the resurgence and return to power of the Taliban?
Pakistan played a fundamental role in the resurgence of the Taliban
via
its military and powerful Inter-Service Intelligence Agency, or ISI. The latter's cooperation with the Taliban dates back to 1994, the year of the emergence of this Islamist movement under the leadership of preacher Mullah Omar. Pakistan's financial, but also strategic and logistical support was essential in the takeover of power in Kabul by the Taliban in 1996. At the time, Islamabad was one of the few capitals to recognize this fundamentalist regime. In fact, obsessed with its fratricidal rivalries with its Indian neighbor on its eastern flank, Pakistan has been working, since the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan in the 1970s, for the establishment in its western neighbor of a weak power. so as not to be surrounded by enemies.This is why after supporting the Mujahedin factions during the period of the Soviet invasion between 1979 and 1989, Pakistan favored the rise to power of the Taliban movement, whose decisions and operations it tightly controlled.
Will this proximity survive the banishment of the Taliban by the international community, which accused them of having welcomed on their territory Osama bin Laden, the leading thinker of the terrorist attack that struck in 2001 the twin towers of the World Trade Center?
The answer is yes, despite appearances. In 2001, the Taliban were ousted from power by international troops and Pakistan joined the Americans in the war on terrorism. However, he does not cut ties with his Afghan allies. Islamabad hosts part of the fugitive Taliban leadership and treats wounded combatants in its hospitals. Taliban leaders find on the other side of the border a sanctuary which serves as their political, cultural and ideological base, with the possibility of drawing on the
madrassas.
Pakistani new fighters ready to go and fight against the "ungodly governments" of Kabul.
This Pakistani support for the cause of Afghan fundamentalists largely explains why the largest coalition ever formed in the world has failed in 20 years of fighting to overcome the Taliban phenomenon.
Pakistani tribal areas served as sanctuaries for fleeing Taliban fighters after 2001 (Map: RFI)
We are talking about a Pakistani "double game"!
Pakistan is worried about the boomerang effect of this double game. This is why its government has tried to influence with all its weight the first decisions of the new masters of Afghanistan, in particular that concerning the appointment of the transitional government. . The presence in Kabul, at the beginning of September, of Faiz Hameed, the all-powerful head of the ISI, is undoubtedly not unrelated to the relegation of the highly respected mullah Baradar to the post of number two in the executive, while all the world expected him to be appointed prime minister. He had led the Doha negotiations leading to the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan. Mullah Baradar, who spent many years in prison in Karachi for having expressed his inclinations for rapprochement with the Afghan government,does not exactly nurture an overflowing friendship with his host country, which had become his jailer. His mistrust of the Pakistani political class is common knowledge. The other boomerang effect that Pakistan fears is the resurgence of terrorist attacks on its territory. Islamabad would like to be able to count on its new Afghan ally to calm the ardor of the local Taliban. Pakistan has played with fire. The Pakistani army has long practiced a schizophrenic strategy by supporting the Afghan Taliban at arm's length, even as it waged a merciless fight against the Pakistani Taliban, united under the banner of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The Afghan Taliban and the TTP are twin organizations,but will Kabul want to call its “alter ego” to order under the diktat of the Pakistani military establishment? Nothing is less sure.
How do Taliban fighters look at their Pakistani godfathers?
I have never met an Afghan who loves Pakistan. The endless civil war in their country has driven many Afghans to seek refuge in Pakistan. They were not always treated well, they were arrested, marginalized, but what they particularly regret is having become pawns in the hands of the Pakistani military establishment. It must be repeated that the Taliban movement is not a Pakistani creation. The Taliban emerged in Kandahar province in the early 1990s as a grassroots movement against the crime, violence and corruption practiced by the warlords who divided the country after the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989. United around the personality of Mullah Omar, the majority of the Taliban were students of religion,from the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pakistanis have taken this new train in motion, supporting the Taliban's plan to conquer Afghanistan. The Pakistani generals and their formidable intelligence service then seized on this cause, aware of the advantage they could draw from it to advance their own geopolitical interests. But the Taliban turned out to be rabid nationalists, animated, moreover, by a Pashtun irredentism. Just like their predecessors who reigned over Afghanistan, they nurture the dream of a reunited Pashtunistan, crossed today by the Durand line, inherited from British colonization. Islamabad wants this line to be recognized as an international border, but even the Taliban,during their five years of governance between 1996 and 2001, did not give them satisfaction. It would appear that the emir of the movement at the time, Mullah Omar, had been summoned to the ISI office in Pakistan where he was asked to recognize the inviolability of the Durand Line. "
While our kings, our presidents did not do it, I, a simple mullah, who am I to make such a decision?
», He was satisfied to answer, while his country was in a situation of great dependence on the Pakistani ally.
His response is indicative of the Taliban's spirit of independence.
Mullah Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, surrounded by his troops, in 1996. AFP PHOTO / BBC TV / BBC NEWSNIGHT / FILES
The fact remains that the American rout in Afghanistan, followed by the return of the Taliban, is seen as the victory of Pakistani strategy. Islamabad has been trumpeting it loud and clear for a month.
Certainly, the return to power of the Taliban in Kabul is a geopolitical and strategic success for Pakistan. This new situation represents an upheaval in regional balances in South Asia, which does not fail to cause concern in other capitals of the region, in particular in New Delhi. That said, unlike the 1990s, this time there are other actors present in Kabul, for example Qatar, which hosted the negotiations between the Taliban and the Americans. As, moreover, Qatar is a privileged interlocutor of the West, it can be a useful ally of the Taliban to convey messages. As for the Pakistani godfather, nothing is immutable. One can think that, with the help of Afghan nationalism, the Durand line will remain a lasting bone of contention between the two countries. In the past,relations between Pakistan and their Taliban foals have not always been good, they have fluctuated. I am not sure that the laurels that the Pakistani military establishment thinks they have reaped remain on their heads forever.
“Lunches with the Taliban”, by Jean-Yves Berthault (Éditions Saint-Simon, 2021).
© Editions Saint-Simon
War without peace in Afghanistan
Lunches with the Taliban
, by Jean-Yves Berthault, is a fascinating book on decades of war without peace in contemporary Afghanistan.
Its author is a former French diplomat, who was stationed in Kabul during crucial periods in that country's history.
In 1979, a few months before the entry of the Russian tanks, the young Jean-Yves Berthault was appointed to Afghanistan for his first posting.
Then, between 1998 and 2001, he headed the French embassy in Kabul, while the Taliban already reigned supreme in an Afghanistan disoriented by decades of civil war.
The only Western diplomat stationed in Kabul during the first years of Taliban rule, the diplomat was a privileged witness to the descent of this country into the infernos of Islamist rigorism. In his book, he recounts the decline and fall of the Taliban state, while drawing up, with a consummate sense of humor, portraits of Islamist leaders met in the ministries or during lunches at the embassy, without forgetting to recall that History is tragic under all skies.
The book also reviews the discreet approach taken by the author, in parallel with his role as ambassador, in order to bring to the negotiating table all the stakeholders in the Afghan file: from the deposed king to the tribal warlords, in through the Taliban and their opponents with a modernist sensibility. The objective of the initiative was to establish an elective democracy, rooted in the customary Afghan tradition. The partial realization of this project after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the changes in Afghan society and the opening of a new chapter in the history of the country with the return to power of the Islamist movement, are some of the subjects at the heart of this book.It will be read as both a precious personal testimony and a breathtaking account of the “great game” in contemporary global geopolitics.
Lunches with the Taliban,
by Jean-Yves Berthault, Éditions Saint-Simon, 189 pages, 19.95 euros.
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