Why Afghanistan Headed War It's Neighbors

Introduction

Afghanistan is a country that is almost synonymous with instability violence and warfare for almost all of the past half a century of History the country has been consumed by a Perpetual state of conflict both within and beyond that has sucked in all of the world's superpowers at one time or another as the chaos within Afghanistan has always found a way to spread well beyond Afghanistan's own borders after a Soviet invasion throughout the 1980s a civil war throughout the 1990s and an American Invasion throughout the 2000s and 2010s the next chapter of the continuous wars in Afghanistan began over the summer of 2021 as the United States began finalizing its long-awaited withdrawal from the country within a span of only 3 months and against pretty much the entire world's expectations the Taliban managed to rapidly overwhelm the us-backed and created Afghan Republic and reestablished their so-called Islamic Emir of Afghanistan once again in the process by the end of the year just like the Soviets before them America's attempt at nation building a country and their own image in Afghanistan had also failed spectacularly but just because the Taliban has found itself back in power in the country again doesn't mean that the Decades of war and conflict in Afghanistan have ended rather than the end of the book chronicling the wars in Afghanistan that began in the late 1970s the Taliban reconquest of the country in 2021 has merely begun a new chapter in this overall story and this new chapter of Afghanistan's present and future.
In the 2020s and Beyond is probably going to be even worse than everything that's come before because the Afghanistan of today in 2024 and later is a much larger threat to Global Security, than it has ever been before and allow me to explain why.

What is current situation now in Afghanistan?

After the Taliban regained their power in the summer of 2021 after waging an Insurgency for the past two decades they have worked overtime to consolidate their position in the country but it hasn't been very easy for them almost immediately after taking power the United States and other outside entities sever nearly all of their foreign aid to the country which amounted to about $8 billion a year and represented roughly 40% of Afghanistan's entire GDP just getting obliterated at once on top of that huge issue the vast majority of Afghanistan's roughly 9 billion dollar worth of Foreign Exchange reserves that had been built up throughout the past 20 years were held in New York City and the US government immediately froze access to all of these assets once the Taliban took back control of the country Afghanistan was further locked out from the Western Financial and banking transaction system while virtually every Taliban leader themselves were already under strict pre-existing US Financial sanctions as well the result is that after the Taliban retook control over the country in mid-2021 the already impoverished and struggling economy absolutely NOS dived even further just take a look at this graph showing Afghanistan's GDP and current prices from 2008 to 2022.

Afghanistan's GDP graph 2006 to 2022

During the period of the US backed Afghan Republic up until around 2012 the economy grew pretty consistently as tens of billions of dollars of foreign aid came gushing into the country to help it develop and then it stagnated for a bit until 2021.
When the Taliban took back over and the economy crashed by more than 20% in a single year undoing the entire past decade of economic progress in the country overnight it's now believed that more than 90% of Afghanistan's population lives beneath a poverty line which is likely the highest percentage of any country in the world and more than half of the country's population remains highly dependent on foreign humanitarian Aid simply for basic necessities the United States provided tens of billions of dollars’ worth of funding to the Afghan Republic for 20 years but with all of that over now that the Taliban is back in charge the Taliban needs to find a new source of outside Capital to Kickstart their economy again but that's very difficult for the Taliban to do because well they're the Taliban.

CURRENT SITUATION OF WOMEN AND GIRLS

Current situation of women

After seizing power, the Taliban has rapidly and ruthlessly suppressed the rights of women and girls within the country just like they did back in the 1990s. Afghan women must now wear full body coverings and be escorted by a male Guardian anytime they want to leave their homes and be in public which effectively condemns Untold numbers of women who lack a male guardian or the funds to afford a full body cover to virtually indefinite house arrest.

Girls have been banned from receiving any education

Girls have been banned from receiving any education past Middle School women have been expelled from workplaces across the country and just last month in May of 2024 the Taliban confirmed that they were reintroducing the practice of stoning women to death convicted of committing adultery so long as these Draconian and gender discriminatory policies remain in place under the Taliban the Western imposed Financial sanctions on them will likely remain in force and their ability to gain International recognition will be challenging as today date in mid-2024 not a single outside country has ever formerly recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan even though they've been the deao government there for 3 years already the Taliban’s lack of international recognition the devastating sanctions imposed on them. By the outside world and their own terrible Geographic boundaries to trade as a landlocked in super mountainous country have all combined to the Afghan economy today, but that doesn't mean that the Taliban hasn't found other ways of making money.

Now there are only question are arriving your mind that how the hell they are live in this place and how their economy is doing?

Well after the US hastily and chaotically withdrew from the country in 2021 they left behind an estimated $7.1 billion worth of military equipment that has almost all fallen into the hands of the Taliban .By now by the US Department of defense's own calculations they left behind roughly 600,000 weapons of all different kinds of calibers and an unknown amount of ammunition about 300 fixed wing and rotary Wing aircraft more than 880,000 vehicles of several different models Communications equipment and Advanced higher-end Equipment like night vision goggles and biometric systems even though much of this equipment will be of questionable value without the proper maintenance schedules in spare parts it is still made the Taliban probably the most heavily armed extremist organization in human history .

Afghanistan Poppy cultivations down 95% in 2023

And they've begun smuggling significant volumes of these arms to other extremist organizations around the world as a new major income source with some us equipment left behind in Afghanistan having already been Tracked Down in militants operating in Kashmir into groups like Hamas in the Gaza Strip historically speaking though the the biggest Revenue generator for then was Taliban their absolute dominance over the global opium and heroin business conducting conventional agriculture in Afghanistan like growing grains vegetables or fruits is very challenging because of the country's dry climate and the difficulty experienced in transporting fresh produce from the landlocked mountains to world markets in time before the produce is spoiled the Opium poppy however is a drought resistant plant that grows well in dry climates and once it's harvested it won't spoil on Long Journeys it's easy to store in transport and most importantly it sells for a lot of money based on a 2007 era study from the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army war College a kilogram of dry opium could sell for approximately $125 which meant that a farmer in Afghanistan could make about 17 times more money by growing opium poppies at $4,620 per hectare than by growing wheat at only $266 per hectare and so thousands of Afghan farmers decided to grow opium instead and worked in League with the Taliban who offered them protection and Logistics in exchange for a share in the profits and they were outrageously successful at it by 2021 just before the Taliban returned back to Power more than 90% of the world's heroin Supply was coming from opium produced in Afghanistan while more than 95% of the heroin Supply in the European market was coming from Afghanistan opium was Afghanistan's leading export by a wide margin and it was valued at about 4 billion million dollar a year split between Afghan Farmers Warlords and the Taliban themselves which bankroll the Taliban’s Insurgency and the return to power in 2021 but then all of a sudden

In April of 2022 shortly after taking power and just as the Opium harvesting season in the country was beginning the Taliban banned the planning of opium and theoretically outlawed the opium trade in the process the move was carefully designed to make the Taliban appear more palatable to the outside world by cracking down on the drug trade but without actually cracking down on the drug trade you see the ban on opium growing in 2022 wasn't going to affect the Opium harvest in 2022 the expectation that the next growing and harvesting season would be banned then sent opium prices skyrocketing in local markets and allowed enough time for the Taliban producers and traffickers to stockpile up reserves to sell at the massively inflated prices since that time satellite images have confirmed that Afghanistan's Opium poppy production is down dramatically with encourage dedicated opium poppy production down by more than 95% in some areas of the country
But as the Taliban continues to earn money by trickling out their strategic reserves of opium at much higher prices they've also begun branching out into a new product of choice that'll begin earning them even more money in the near future methamphetamine the plant that produces natural methamphetamine ephedra grows wild in Afghanistan naturally but natural Ephedra is inefficient at producing methamphetamine when compared to chemically produced meth the production of 1 kilo of pure meth can be either manufactured by 200 kg of ephedra plants that need to be harvested by humans who want to be paid or by only 2 kg of industrial-grade chemical ephedrine that can be sourced from bulk smuggling of cold medicine.
The Taliban’s is also clamped down on the growing of ephedra plants just like they did with opium poppies but that doesn't really matter as the Taliban moves further towards the production of chemical meth in Labs that are harder to spot dotted across the country chemically produced meth is also cheaper to produce than heroin is and the Returns on selling it are much higher which is why the Taliban’s ban on growing opium is really just a diversification play as they shift towards the more lucrative meth market near the beginning of this year on the 2nd of January Iran reportedly seized a massive shipment of 171 kg or 377 lb of Afghan produced meth at their border and that's only a harder of things to come as the Taliban attempts to re-anchor Afghanistan as the new center of the global meth business that the outside world will struggle to ever stop without another foreign intervention that nobody wants to do in fact the Taliban’s most infamous drug lord Bashir noorzai the man who so dominated the Taliban’s heroin trade for years that he was nicknamed the Pablo Escobar of the Middle East and who was arrested by the United States in 2005 and sentenced to life in prison for heroin smuggling was recently released by Washington in 2022 and traded back to the Taliban in exchange for an American prisoner who they had also captured noorzai returned to Afghanistan is likely a harbinger of the Taliban’s desire to use his Decades of smuggling expertise again with methamphetamine but noorzai has also been granted the control of several newly established mining companies in the country that seek to exploit Afghanistan's abundant mineral wealth too the US Geological Survey previously conducted a report in Afghanistan that estimated the country had at least $1 trillion doll worth of untapped an economically recoverable minerals and gemstones including large quantities of resources like coal copper, iron, lead gold, chromite ,lithium ,zinc and a whole bunch of other materials but Afghanistan doesn't really have the finances the equipment or the expertise to really exploit any of these resources on their own which is why all of Nori's mining companies have been established as joint ventures with Chinese companies instead.

Superpower’s Entry

China has been eyeing up Afghanistan ever since the US withdrew from the country China is highly interested in incorporating Afghanistan into its belt and Road initiative as the country sits precisely in between China and Europe and China is also of course interested in breaking into Afghanistan's huge and untapped mineral wealth while the Taliban wants any International recognition they can get and any outside investment they can get and China is a potential partner nearby who doesn't really ask too many questions about the way the Taliban treats their own people moreover China is also very interested in a calm Afghanistan under the control of a single strong and friendly power because of Afghanistan's border with China's own restive Shen Yun Province home to the indigenous Muslim uyghurs people who, have often resisted Chinese Authority and where more than a million Uyghurs are currently estimated to have been rounded up by Chinese authorities and placed into internment camps China absolutely doesn't want a flow of weapons and extremists traveling from Afghanistan into Shen Yun and so the more stable and secure Afghanistan becomes the better for China .
Unfortunately for Beijing though Afghanistan is still hardly anything but stable or secure in the 3 years since the Taliban sees power they have worked extremely hard to consolidate all of their gains in the country but just like the last time the Taliban was in power back in the late 1990s the fighting between Afghans themselves never really ended and there is another rival faction within the country that seeks to overthrow the Taliban and replace them with their own government you might be familiar with them already Isis but the exact flavor of Isis operating within Afghanistan is different from the Isis that used to operate in Iraq and Syria back in the 2010 that you might be most familiar with the Isis faction in Afghanistan calls themselves the Islamic State Core Province or Isis k for short they are the Regional Central Asian branch of the greater Isis movement and as such they're ideologically fully committed to the cause of global Jihad and carving out a worldwide caliphate that will Encompass all of the world's Muslims beneath one flag and one leader Isis K takes the K part of its name khorasan in reference to the historical region of khorasan in Central Asia then Encompass swaths of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan a region that Isis K believes will be its own Province to govern and Rule within the greater worldwide Islamic State once it's been established Isis K therefore wants to utilize the resources of Afghanistan and all of the weapons left behind by the Americans and the Soviets before them to wage a campaign of massive Conquest across the territory of Coran that will necessitate conquering Tajikistan and invading and conquering large parts of Uzbekistan ,Turkmenistan and Iran as well the biggest thing standing in their way however is the Alban who are pragmatic enough to understand that waging a campaign of Conquest this large in scale would almost certainly bring in another massive outside military intervention again that would topple them from Power again and destroy all of the gains and progress they've made since 2021 the Taliban largely accomplished all of their objectives once they returned to power in Afghanistan and now they're more interested in holding and consolidating their position in Afghanistan rather than embarking on a global Jihad and conquest of Greater Coran and for that reason Isis K believes that the Taliban are unfit to rule and have been waging an Insurgency against the Taliban ever since forcing the Taliban to quickly adapt from being insurgents themselves to carrying out counterinsurgency operations against Isis K numerically speaking Isis K is at a significant disadvantage for now with the US estimating that the Taliban continues to have approximately 80,000 Fighters among their ranks and Isis K controlling a smaller force of only around 6,000 Fighters but if there's anything we've learned about Afghanistan and from history is to always be prepared for the unexpected after the collapse of ISIS’s original base of operations in Iraq and Syria in the late 2010s and his leadership went deeply into hiding to avoid assassination many of their Fighters and officers fled to Afghanistan and bolstered the ranks of the local Isis K Branch there bringing with them their expertise from the wars they fought in the Middle East now in order to achieve their ultimate goal of Conquering the entire khorasan region Isis K knows that they have to begin by overthrowing the Taliban from Power first and seizing control over Afghanistan themselves and in order to do that they need to increase the size of their fighting force first and the way that they've decided to attract more fighters to their cause is by carrying out huge propagandistic Terror attacks that are intended to go viral in the Sunni Jihadi World online and serve as a kind of advertisement or marketing for their brand attracting ideologically motivated fighters to come and join them in Afghanistan from all around the world just like the original iteration of Isis did in Iraq and Syria and Isis K's attacks have been increasingly being focused.

How ISIS work in Afghanistan? And what is the motive behind to do this .

Well beyond the borders of Afghanistan too in April and May of 2022 Isis K began firing Rockets into towns and Villages and neighbouring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan from their bases in Afghanistan marking the first attacks .They carried out beyond their home country and they would not be the last in September of 2022 they bombed the Russian Embassy in the Afghan Capital Kabul and then in January of 2024 They carried out another major bombing in the Iranian city of kerman that killed at least 103 people and injured 284 others which made it the deadliest terror attack to have ever happened in the Islamic Republic of Iran's entire history then only months later in March Isis K carried out another major external attack against Russia at the crocus City Hall in a suburb of Moscow while it was hosting a concert that killed another 145 people and wounded 551 others making it the deadliest terror attack to have struck Russia in 20 years Isis K uses these kinds of big bold attacks outside of Afghanistan.
As essentially advertisements to potential jihadis around the world to come and pick up the fight that the Taliban has abandoned while they also keep carrying them out to undermine the Taliban’s authority and legitimacy the more than Isis K keeps carrying out massive attacks Beyond Afghanistan in places like Iran and Russia and likely more to come the more it shows to the world that the Taliban is not actually in control of terrorism spilling out from Beyond Afghanistan's borders and the less motivated outside countries will be to recognize the Taliban’s government and lift sanctions and trade restrictions which weakens the Taliban and serves Isis K's aims of hoping to eventually topple them Isis K also appears to feed off of the resentment within Afghanistan of the country's ethnic Taj minority Community Afghanistan is a highly ethnically diverse country with the pons making up the majority at around 52% of the overall population and the treks making up another 26% or so of the population it is estimated that
There are between 8 in 15 million Tajiks present in Afghanistan which is more than living even the Tajikistan nation state next door the Taliban is dominated by the majority Pashtuns community in Afghanistan and the Taliban is often seen as an extension of Pashtun interests over Afghanistan's other ethnic communities like the Tajiks as a result Isis K meanwhile recruits from all of Afghanistan's ethnic communities but appears to heavily recruit from Afghanistan's often marginalized Tajik minority as evidenced by the fact that all of the Isis K attackers involved in the Iran and Russia attacks in 2024 were tajiks and probably owing to the fact that unlike the pushtun’s dominated Taliban Isis K wants to actually unite all of the Tajik lands beneath their own flag to Encompass the millions of Tajiks that are currently separated and spread across the borders of Tajikistan.
Afghanistan and Uzbekistan Isis K will almost certainly continue carrying out major attacks against people they perceive to be their enemies beyond the borders of Afghanistan and they will attempt to use those attacks to continue undermining the Taliban’s legitimacy and power and to serve as their own marketing recruitment tool they will continue these attacks grow their Fighters and bind their time until they are either stopped by someone militarily or until they feel like they have the sufficient numbers and odds to challenge the Taliban in an all-out fight for control of Afghanistan's future and if they're successful then we'll end up having an Isis Le regime in power in Afghanistan that'll begin preparing for Wars of Conquest across the region into Iran and Central Asia this all places the Taliban in a difficult and uncomfortable position on the one hand the Taliban desires International recognition legitimacy and the lifting of financial sanctions over all other objectives right now and one way they can try and do that is by presenting themselves to the International Community as the lesser of two evils after all would the outside world prefer a Taliban whose brutality is limited to being within Afghanistan or Isis K whose brutality would extend well beyond Afghanistan's borders by presenting Isis K is the only realistic opposition to them within Afghanistan the Taliban hopes to appear as the more reasonable partner to cooperate with and since the Taliban staunchly rejects any foreign troops entering onto Afghanistan's soil ever again they also hope to appear to be the only ones capable of containing Isis K's attacks from spreading Beyond Afghanistan which would require the International Community to support them in doing that and to an extent it's been a working strategy China accepted the Taliban’s appointed ambassador to their country in January of 2024 which effectively extended Beijing’s deao recognition of the Taliban’s government in the country while Russia has suggested that they were about to remove the Taliban from their list of designated terrorist organizations and likely plan to cooperate with them further to try and contain the threat of Isis K but the Taliban has also had to tread a very thin line between suppressing Isis K and appeasing International pressures to do something about them if the Taliban pushes too hard against Isis K they might encourage members of other Terror organizations in the country that are currently friendly to the Taliban regime like Al-Qaeda to defect and join with Isis K which could end up bolstering their ranks and threaten their government.
But on the other hand if they don't press hard enough against Isis K and the group keeps carrying out massive attacks outside of Afghanistan they risk jeopardizing any hope they have of gaining International recognition and getting some of their sanctions lifted or even worse if Isis K were to carry out a big enough attack somewhere they risk another major foreign military intervention again that could come and topple them from Power again and undo all of the progress they've made since 2021 at trying to consolidate themselves in Afghanistan it is an incredibly dangerous balance they have to try and maintain and if they misstep too far in either direction it could end up costing them everything and the dangers presented with Isis K's Ambitions are far from the only potential conflict looming on the horizon for Afghanistan because there are also the external Ambitions of the Taliban itself.

Why Pakistan has shoes interest into Taliban matter ?

As mentioned previously the Taliban are dominated by the ethnic pushtun Community within Afghanistan but like the Tajiks the Pashton also don't just exist within Afghanistan there were close to 19 million pushtun who are believed to live in Afghanistan but there were over 40 million pushtun who live next door in Pakistan largely concentrated in Northwest Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan
Although there were very large numbers of pushtuns present at Pakistan's other major cities as well like Karachi and Islamabad this situation is the historical result of atreaty that was signed between the British Empire's Colonial authorities inIndia and Afghanistan back in 1893 which established the recognized border between British India and Afghanistan by what became known as the Durand Line named after the then British Diplomat who drew the line up Mortimer Durand historically before this throughout most of the 18th and early 19th centuries all of the pushtun people were United under a single polity that was known as The Durrani Empire but successive military defeats to the Sikh Empire and then the British Empire resulted in more and more historically pushtun lands coming under British colonial control the 1893 Durant treaty thus effectively carved a line between the pushtun people and separated them between Afghanistan and British India and then later between Afghanistan and Pakistan after 1947 when Pakistan gained its independence this has of course always been a highly controversial situation among the Pashtuns themselves
When the British were preparing to partition India between separate Hindu majority and Muslim majority countries after the second world war there was a very large political movement in the pushtun majority areas in the Northwest under British control to be given the choices in the referendum of either becoming an independent state they wanted to call Pushtunistan or being allowed to join themselves with the Pashtun and neighboring Afghanistan instead the colonial British authorities only gave the pushtun in British India the choice in a referendum between joining with India or Pakistan without the option of Independence or joining with Afghanistan after the pushtun areas then joined with Pakistan they became a minority group in a country that was Dem demographically dominated by Punjabi’s which left many Pakistani pushtun infuriated and feeling marginalized Pakistan initially attempted to get ahead of any potential pushtun separatist movements here by establishing what became known as the federally administered tribal areas or FATA a semi-autonomous region in the northwest of Pakistan that gave the Pakistani Pushtun a high degree of local autonomy from the rest of the country however this autonomy in the FATA region proved to present major challenges after the 9/11 attacks in the US invasion of Afghanistan the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan were able to almost seamlessly travel across the border into Pakistan with friendly pushtun on either side of it and after 2002 the Taliban set up a local Pakistani Taliban chapter in the fata region that they called the Tehrik-I-Taliban which is usually just referred to as the Pakistani Taliban instead ever since the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban have insisted that they are completely separate organizations even though the Pakistani Taliban lead has publicly pledged his loyalty to the Afghan Taliban and the fighters of each group have very often been proven to be the same people traveling back and forth across the border the Pakistani Taliban in particular is militantly opposed to the existence of the Pakistani State they openly seek to wage a violent Insurgency across the entire country with the ultimate goal of either overthrowing the Pakistani government itself or carving out an independent state for the tens of millions of pans east of the Duran line or joining their pushtun lands here with the Afghan Taliban or barring any of that at least accomplishing complete autonomy for Pakistan's pushtun and in service of those objectives the Pakistani Taliban has been responsible for many of Pakistan's deadliest Terror attacks that have collectively killed thousands of people in the country.
Interestingly the Pakistani State spent decades supporting the Afghan Taliban fight against the United States and NATO and even bankroll their rise back to Power in the country Pakistan's intelligence agency provided funding and intelligence to the Afghan Taliban and granted them sanctuary in Pakistan to support attacks and operations in neighboring Afghanistan with the hope that the Afghan Taliban after they assumed power in Afghanistan would clamp down on the neighboring Pakistani Taliban and end their separatist movement and cooperate with Pakistan in the region against their arch nemesis India but instead after returning back to Power in Afghanistan the Taliban has basically done exactly the opposite of all of that and inflamed tensions with Pakistan instead as the Pakistani Taliban Insurgency in the fata region intensified and attacks in the region continued that killed thousands of people and displaced millions of others Pakistan decided to revoke the area's former autonomous status in 2017 and merge the fata into their new Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province which for the first time since Pakistan's own independence in 1947 effectively symbolized Pakistan's formal incorporation of the pushtun lands east of the Duran line into their country this development enraged both the Pakistani and Afghan’s sides of the Taliban and after the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan in 2021 Pakistan has never been able to convince or pressure them to stop their support for the neighbouring Pakistani Taliban instead weapons and arms drugs cash and even volunteers have all flowed from Taliban ruled Afghanistan into the arms of the Pakistani Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban’s attacks against the Pakistani State have skyrocketed with hundreds killed in the process since 2021 alone.
In 2022 a Pakistani Taliban attack on a Pakistani military Convoy of mostly Punjabi soldiers killed seven of them which then prompted the Pakistani Air Force to begin actually bombing targets across the border in Afghanistan's coast and Kunar provinces they said were targeting Pakistani Taliban training camps there in retaliation the tensions between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban have grown so sharply that ever since Pakistan destroyed the pushtun's autonomous status in the former fata region they have been tirelessly constructing a massive border fence all along the entire 2,670 km long length of the Duran line largely completed by 2022 the Border fence was constructed by Pakistan at a cost of $500 million and consists of two sets of chain link fences 3.6 M high on the Pakistani side and 4 M high on The Afghan side separated by a 2 m space in between filled with dense coils of razor wire behind the fence on the Pakistani side Pakistan has also built nearly a 1000 forts that will be permanently manned by the 80,000 man strong Pakistani Frontier Corps they will be assisted by countless cameras and watchtowers built All Along The Border's length as well as swarms of hundreds of drones that will permanently Patrol the Border by the air the border is marked by only eight official Crossing checkpoints that Pakistan will heavily monitor by building out this massive border fence Pakistan hopes to prevent the spread of militants weapons and drugs from flowing across the border from Afghanistan into the pushtun tribal lands of Pakistan and into the hands of the Pakistani Tal but from Afghanistan and the pushtun's perspective the wall has thrown up a permanent and massive barrier between the two halves of the pushtun community and separated families on either side of it and after the destruction of the Fata’s autonomous status within Pakistan since 2017 it represents to them Pakistan's attempt to solidify the Duran line as the final permanent border incorporating all of the pushtun lands and people to the east of the line within Punjabi dominated Pakistan forever these developments are what led the Afghan Taliban’s acting foreign minister in February of 2024 to declare during a speech verbatim quote we have never recognized the Duran line and will never recognize it today half of Afghanistan is separated and is on the other side of the Duran line Durand is the line which was drawn by the English on the heart of the Afghans the Taliban in Afghanistan thus refused to recognize the Duran line as the formal border with Pakistan and they informally support the Pakistani Taliban’s Ambitions on the other side side of that border to carve out an independent state of pashtunistan.
It's estimated that the Pakistani Taliban have between 7,000 and 10,000 of their own fighters currently and you should expect to see continued attacks and tensions along this border for years more to come and to try and apply more pressure on the Taliban and Afghanistan to reign in the Pakistani Taliban Pakistan in late 2023 began deporting literally hundreds of thousands of undocumented Afghan refugees in the country back across the border into Afghanistan in order to try and overwhelm the Taliban’s meager resources and to try and force them into negotiations on restraining the Pakistani Taliban and then on top of Isis K's conflicts with the Taliban and with Iran Turkmenistan ,Uzbekistan ,Tajikistan and probably everyone else in the world and on top of the Taliban Zone conflict with Pakistan across the Duran line and all of the drugs and weapons that are flowing out of Afghanistan

Afghan – Iran Conflict

There's also Afghanistan's potential for conflicts with most of its neighbors because of water as well first to discuss here is the Helmand river an important river that begins in the mountainous Highlands of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan before flowing West into the hamun wetlands that straddle the Iranian- Afghan border the wetlands here and the Helman river that feeds them is an important source of freshwater for Iran's arid Southwestern cyan and Baluchistan Province a sparsely populated Frontier province of Iran’s that is demographically dominated by the minority Baloch people rather than by the Persians who represent the demographic majority across most of the rest of Iran as a result there is a significant separatist movement among the Frontier Baloch people here in Southeastern Iran who also extend into neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan and so if one of their primary Water Supplies such as the Helmand river and the hamun wetlands were cut off it would inevitably increase instability and Baloch separatism and prove to be a headache for the Iranians to deal with.
In the 1960s Afghanistan started to construct dams on the Helmand River at kazaki and grist to produce hydroelectricity and provide irrigation but they also cut the river's water flow further Downstream into Iran that's why in 1973 Imperial Iran and the First Republic of Afghanistan signed the Helman river water treaty that committed Afghanistan to allowing at least 850 billion cubic meters of water from the Helmand River to flow further Downstream into Iran on an annual basis but shortly after the treaty was signed Afghanistan's government was overthrown by the Communist Revolution in 1978 Iran's government was also overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979 and Afghanistan has been locked in a con state of warfare with rotating governments coming in and out of power ever since meaning the 1973 water treaty was never really fully implemented or ratified which has led to both governments today in tehran and Kabul heavily disputing the terms of the 1973 treaty and the nature of water rights in the Helman River after the Taliban took over power in Afghanistan the first time back in the 1990s they decided to close the sluice gates of their Kajaki Dam in 1998 which severely restricted the flow of water in the helmand river further Downstream in into Iran cyan in Baluchistan Province then after a Taliban raid on an Iranian Consulate in the country killed 8 Iranian diplomats in the same year.
Iran actually began preparing for war with the Taliban they massed 200,000 troops on the border and the Iranian supreme National Security Council even voted for war the crisis was only averted when Iran's supreme leader the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei personally overruled the decision and the world was spared from an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan in 1998 just 3 years before the Americans would do it but the risk of conflict between Iran and the Taliban over the helmand river's Water Supplies never really went away after the Taliban came back into power in 2021.
Iran has continued accusing the Taliban regime of restricting their water supplies they feel they are entitled to base on the 1973 Helmand river water treaty in 2022 the Iranian ambassador to Afghanistan even claimed that the Taliban was only allowing 4% of the water in the Helmant River a flow.
Downstream to Iran that the 1973 treaty had promised to Iran only about 27 million cubic met out of the 850 million they were theoretically legally entitled to tensions over the water in the river escalated until a clash occurred at the Afghan Iran Border right where the river enters into Iran in May of 2023 Taliban and Iranian forces at the border open fire on each other resulting in two Iranian border guards and one Taliban fighter getting killed and several others injured and even though the crisis quickly calmed down the Taliban has continued holding back the Helman River's Water Supplies by keeping their sluice Gates on dams like the Kajaki closed which means that the potential of a water War erupting between the Iranians and the Taliban remains ever present and that's not even the only water war that the Taliban in Afghanistan could trigger in the near future either by far the mightiest and longest river that flows through Afghanistan is the Amu Darya one of Central Asia's greatest water sources whose Headwaters begin in the Premier Mountain of Tajikistan and Afghanistan the Amu Darya and its tributaries form Afghanistan's Northeastern political borders with Tajikistan ,Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan before the river continues on through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan before finally emptying into the mostly dried up lake bed of the former Aral sea the Amu Darya has a very long history of overexploitation and macro-engineering projects that have already caused extensive amounts of environmental damage in the region the Soviet Union and Afghanistan made several agreements regarding the amu Darya river throughout the 20th century but interestingly none of these agreements ever actually concerned the issue of waterers sharing rights on the river the Soviet Union itself only regulated waterers sharing agreements on the amu Darya river between its own separate republics in Central Asia without ever concerning Afghanistan so after the Soviet Union's collapse in the early 1990s the newly independent states of Central Asia relied on these old Soviet era treaties to share the river's water without any concern about war torn Afghanistan's control over a large part of the river that they weren't really using during the Soviet era Soviet Engineers diverted a massive amount of the Amu Darya river through Turkmenistan with the Karakum Canal project one of the largest irrigation projects ever accomplished in human history the karakum canal diverts about 13 cubic km of water per year from the amu Darya across nearly 1,400 km of arid Turkmenistan's karakum desert the canal is Turkmenistan's largest source of fresh water and it provides the capital and largest city.
Ashgabat with the majority of its own water supply as well the canal opened up huge new areas of agricultural land in Turkmenistan's desert that the government primarily used to grow cotton while Uzbekistan also began withdrawing massive amounts of water from the river further Downstream as well for huge irrigation projects on their own cotton Farms that they began developing too Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan’s pulling of water from the river transformed them into some of the largest cotton producers in the entire world but it also meant that virtually all of the water in the amu Darya flowing into Turkmenistan in Uzbekistan gets withdrawn from the river before any of it reaches its natural Outlet in the aral sea which is why the aral sea has been dying for decades now and is just a tiny shadow of what it used to look like as a result pretty much all of the water in the amu Darya river is already largely consumed by Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan with little room left over for maneuvering but now that the Taliban is back in control of Afghanistan they're doing something so insanely different with a river that it could literally become an existential crisis for Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan very quickly in early 2022 within months of them seizing power the Taliban began building a brand new Canal from their side of the amu Darya river that they're calling the Qosh TepaCanal once completed the canal will stretch for 285 km from the Afghanistan border with Tajikistan across the Ain north of the country which the Taliban expects will be capable of converting about 550,000 hectares of what is currently unproductive desert in a productive agricultural Farm land the Taliban has publicly stated that they want to divert 10 cubic km of water per year from the amu Darya river through their new qosh tepa Canal once it's finished and operational which is already a huge amount of water but it'll almost certainly be even more than that in reality the past half a century of war in Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban and their sanctions in 2021 has resulted in a decades long brain drain in the country and a serious shortage of skilled workers Machinery Architects and Engineers rather than digging out a canal like a government in an economically developed country might with proper tools and materials regulations and Engineering expertise the Taliban are really just digging a giant hole across the desert that they'll divert the amu Darya’s water through instead as a result International experts expect that approximately half of the water the Taliban diverts through the canal will be simply lost due to seepage out of the canal and into the ground and also by evaporation that high level of waste and inefficiency suggests that in order to reach their 10 Cub km of water Target the Taliban will have to really withdraw something more like twice that amount from the Amu Darya instead which could end up with the Taliban literally reducing the water flow in the Amu Darya river in half which would absolutely devastate Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan further downstream by practically cutting each of
Their water supplies in half for the sake of a reference point the Soviet era water sharing agreements on the Amu Darya river that led to projects like the karakum canal in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan’s massive cotton growing program and that didn't include Afghanistan in the negotiations only assumed that Afghanistan would ever withdraw about 2.1 cubic kilometers of water from the river per year vastly less than the 10 cubic kilometers or even more than Afghanistan is currently preparing to divert that level of water diversion being made by Afghanistan on the amu Darya river is literally an existential threat for the governments of Turkistan and Uzbekistan to worry about and there's no legal mechanism in place to force the Taliban to negotiate or stop since Afghanistan has never been a party to any treaty on waterers sharing in the river completely landlocked and with the arel sea already practically destroyed and with precious little rainfall Uzbekistan has very few other ways of acquiring any freshwater for its 37 million people in their agriculture other than from the amu Darya River and Turkmenistan is in the same boat Turkmenistan is almost entirely covered by the Aral karakum desert
And even though it borders the Caspian Sea that could be harnessed for freshwater with desalination plants desalination plants are highly technical projects that require outside expertise and they're expensive and time consuming to build and Turkmenistan might not have either the time or the cash to build a few desalination plants on the Caspian Sea after the Taliban starts really diverting their water from the Amu Darya River the Taliban want to build the Qosh Tepa canal because the amu Darya river is just right there running through their country in the north and they want to use it to irrigate new lands here in the north to solidify their control in the area they have always struggled to maintain it Northern Afghanistan where the canal is being constructed is inhabited primarily by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbek rather than the pushtun to the southeast who dominate the Taliban and so it's the north of the country where their biggest internal rival Isis K is more heavily present at by digging the canal and irrigating the land and settling Farmers the Taliban hopes to pacify the North in the process and reduce the influence of Isis K but by doing so they are risking a huge gamble on whether or not Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will do anything about it or not Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will have to carefully weigh their own responses to the crisis between doing nothing and risking an explosion of internal instability within their own countries as their water supplies inevitably crash and water rationing will have to take effect or confronting the Taliban directly and risking a sharp rise in Regional instability in Central Asia that could end up resulting in the modern world's first major water War Afghanistan stands today at a highly uncertain future in the central of Asia with any number of potential Wars and conflicts that could break out around them in the future the Taliban themselves will continue struggling to gain International recognition so long as they ruthlessly repress the rights of women and welcome organizations like Al-Qaeda at home and continue exporting weapons and drugs abroad around the world the Ambitions of Isis K against the Taliban risks throwing Afghanistan back into another civil war while Isis K's external Ambitions risk Wars with Iran Turkmenistan , Uzbekistan into Tajikistan at a minimum whether increasingly bold attacks on outside powers like Russia and potentially maybe China and others risks dragging another major power into another invasion of Afghanistan if the attack is big and destructive enough the Taliban support of the Pakistani Taliban next door and their continued refusal to recognize or accept that Duran line as the international border risks another major conflict escalating between Afghanistan and Pakistan while the Taliban’s water policies on the hell Mound and amu Darya rivers risk sparking water conflicts with Iran Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
As well there are so many different sources of potential conflicts emanating out from Afghanistan today that it might only be a matter of time before one of them inevitably triggers another major international incident that'll Force someone sometime somewhere to decide on intervening back in Afghanistan yet again and then the long cycle of instability chaos and violence that has consumed Afghanistan and made it a black hole on the world map for the past half a century will continue and keep on going into another chapter and I don't think there's anybody alive today who really knows how to actually break the tragic cycle of Afghanistan's forever Wars for good as I said before when it comes to Afghanistan it's always best to expect the unexpected after all hardly anyone in the outside world anticipated the sheer speed at which the Taliban would Thunder back into power over the summer of 2021 as the United States withdrew itself from the country Washington had spent the past two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars tirelessly building up the Republic of Afghanistan and their Armed Forces to keep the Taliban and other extremist forces at Bay after US forces withdrew from the country and the belief in Washington back then at the time was that the Taliban was massively outgunned and outmanned by the Republic's forces but as it turned out the Republic of Afghanistan was only superior to the Taliban on paper in only 3 months after the US forces initiated their withdrawal from the country the Taliban defeated everyone's expectations and managed to Blitz themselves across the entire country easily casting aside the Afghan Republic's armed forces that on paper had nearly five times the Manpower in significantly better weaponry and Technology the Afghan president fled the country in disgrace and by August of 2021 the scene of Us helicopters evacuating American Embassy staff and jets hastily taking off from the Kabul Airport with desperate passengers trying their hardest to cling on evoked some of America's bitterest memories of the chaotic withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975
The speed at which Afghanistan fell back under the Taliban’s control in those 3 months profoundly shocked the United States and the rest of the world but unfortunately due to the inherently violent controversial and very recent nature of discussing how an organization is Infamous as the Taliban actually managed to pull it all off and come back into power over the summer of 2021.

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