Charles Elias Chartoun/Afghanistan, Islamist Terrorism and the Tormented Geopolitics of South Asia/شارل الياس شرتوني: أفغانستان، الإرهاب الإسلامي والجغرافيا السياسية المعذبة في جنوب آسيا

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شارل الياس شرتوني: أفغانستان، الإرهاب الإسلامي والجغرافيا السياسية المعذبة في جنوب آسيا
Afghanistan, Islamist Terrorism and the Tormented Geopolitics of South Asia
Charles Elias Chartoun/August 27/2021

The agreement between the US and Taliban was swiftly undermined by the Taliban’s deliberate failure to uphold its stipulations and abide by the sequences of the withdrawal course, the immediate resurfacing of the Islamist terrorist movements converging from all over Central Asia, the continuation of the Pakistani double game, and the inability of Taliban to get their act together and operate as a coherent entity, let alone establish their independence towards their undergirding power players.

They were readily outmaneuvered by their Islamist power rivals from within and without, and they are going to have a hard time attesting their statehood credentials, if ever. Therefore, their ability to engage the international community is curtailed at the onset of the political course that was supposed to set the track of normalized statehood. Taliban are unable to extricate themselves from their terrorist legacy, engage the process of statehood, endorse a consensual power sharing with the different ethno-national communities, and convert their political momentum into Nation-State building.

The harshness of factional, ideological and geopolitical power rivalries have undermined the presumed political credentials of the Pashtun islamist movement, and confirmed the inability of Afghanistan to overcome its state of geopolitical prostration, ineptitude to build State institutions and pliability to clashing power politics. This vast political wasteland is demonstrating its inveterate political instability, and the volatility of the overall geopolitical stability in South Asia and the Indian sub-continent.

The terrorist attack at Kabul Airport, has proven at a very early stage, that the two trillions spent by the USA on the reconstruction of a peripheral political wasteland converted into an operational platform for Islamist terrorism, have yielded dismal results in terms of Nation-State building and cumulative societal and cultural transformations. One wonders whether the alleged moderates amongst Taliban are willing to seize the new political circumstances to reengage the international community and attempt at Nation-State building, the answer is quite sobering since their internal rivalries are self defeating, their purported new political elites are quite ambiguous, the cauldrons of ethno-political warfare are set for revival, and the galaxy of Islamist Terrorism is impatient to regain its foothold and set its imprints on the long awaited comeback.

There are no good news, insofar as the normalization of Afghanistan, and hopefully the completion of the withdrawal shall prepare the ground for strategic simulations regarding the future of an expired geopolitical order, its exacerbating pathologies, destabilization effects and eventual substitutes. The juggling imperial projections (China, Russia) are in no better position to take advantage of the rising chaos and its corollary strategic voids; their best bet is to join their Western power rivals to contain the destructive proclivities of overlapping radical Islamist movements and their nihilistic delusions, and put an end to the volatility of a smoldering geopolitical order and its deleterious consequences.