Afghanistan’s Taliban have racked up a series of diplomatic victories in recent weeks, with the United Arab Emirates’ acceptance of their ambassador exposing a global rift over how to deal with the hardline regime.
The wealthy Gulf state has joined a small but growing number of regional powers building ties with the Taliban despite western efforts to isolate the Islamist group in the three years since it toppled Afghanistan’s Nato-backed government. Kazakhstan last month accepted a Taliban-appointed charge d’affaires, while Uzbekistan’s prime minister visited Kabul in the highest-level foreign visit to the country since the Taliban takeover.
“The Taliban are hungry for international engagement and hungry for recognition,” said Hasan Alhasan, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain. The UAE’s decision to engage “carries a lot of weight” with the Taliban, he added.
The US and other western countries have enforced sanctions and sought to punish the Taliban over their crackdown on women’s rights and amid fears they are sheltering extremists.
But Middle Eastern and Asian powers increasingly see engagement as a practical necessity, analysts said. Although no country has formally recognised the Taliban government, the Islamist group says it has diplomats in about a dozen countries including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Others, including India, have also built limited ties with the regime in Kabul.
Afghanistan’s neighbours “are mobilising to make sure that instability does not spread across the region”, said Kabir Taneja, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. “Fortunately or unfortunately, the only entity in helping with that is the Taliban.
“The Taliban may not be the most astute diplomats, but they have been able to take advantage of the global situation,” he added.
A UAE official said the decision to accept a Taliban ambassador would help build “bridges to help the people of Afghanistan”.
This included providing aid and “supporting efforts that work towards regional de-escalation and stability”, the official added.
The growing regional acceptance is providing the Taliban with trade and investment opportunities at a time when the country of 40mn faces an economic and humanitarian crisis. Companies from nearby countries have secured deals to build infrastructure in Afghanistan, which is strategically placed between central and south Asian trade routes.
The Taliban have issued dozens of contracts for exploitation of the country’s estimated $1tn of untapped mineral wealth, which includes reserves of copper and lithium. Some have gone to investors from Iran, Turkey and China, which also pledged to include Afghanistan in its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.
An Abu Dhabi company won contracts to manage Afghan airports in 2022, beating a Qatari-Turkish consortium, and there are now regular flights between Kabul and the UAE. “I hear regional officials say things like, ‘The world is changing, the Americans aren’t the boss of everything any more,’” said Graeme Smith, a senior consultant at Crisis Group. “Afghanistan is emblematic of that for these middle powers.”
The Taliban have sought to dispel international misgivings about their rule, saying they are open to engagement and investment. “Our policy is to have good relations with all,” Suhail Shaheen, the head of the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, told the Financial Times.
Shortly after taking power, the Taliban vowed to break with the practices that made their first rule in the 1990s notorious, including a ban on girls’ education and hosting extremists such as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, whose role in plotting the September 11 attacks from the country prompted the Nato invasion in 2001.
But the Taliban have again barred girls from school, and bin Laden’s successor Ayman al-Zawahiri lived in central Kabul until his death in a US drone strike in 2022. The Taliban last month ratified a law that banned women from showing their faces and speaking in public.
For most North American and European governments, this has largely scuppered hopes of meaningful engagement. Germany, which has no diplomatic relations with the Taliban, last week deported 28 convicted Afghan criminals back to the country for the first time.
Some in the region argue that isolation and sanctions are exacerbating a humanitarian crisis that only worsens the plight of Afghanistan’s women and gives the Taliban little incentive to change.
“The American approach to Afghanistan is, ‘Keep it out of the news, it has been a 20-year embarrassment’ . . . in the UK, the discussion is similar,” one diplomat said. “It’s much easier to sit back and condemn them for being misogynist.”
That is harder for countries in the region, which are more vulnerable to violence spilling over their borders. The UN has estimated that hundreds of al-Qaeda members are in Afghanistan alongside other militants such as the Uyghur Turkistan Islamic party and Isis-K, the Afghanistan-based offshoot of the Middle Eastern terror group.
For the UAE, security “prompts them to view engagement with the Taliban as necessary”, said Giorgio Cafiero, chief executive of Washington-based risk consultancy Gulf State Analytics. “[This] is simply about Abu Dhabi being pragmatic and making the most of the situation in Afghanistan.”
Yet some analysts warned that trusting the Taliban could prove a costly mistake.
Pakistan was one of the earliest advocates for global engagement with Taliban-run Kabul but suffered a dramatic surge in militant violence by groups including the Taliban’s Pakistani offshoot, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
The Taliban’s unwillingness — or inability — to stop them led to a sharp deterioration in relations, with Pakistan even launching air strikes on TTP targets in Afghanistan.
The diplomat said the limited foreign presence inside Afghanistan meant many countries were still struggling to ascertain the extent of the threat posed by Taliban rule, but the risks remained high. “Obviously the lesson from history is 9/11.”
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