Coll: The Taliban poses a threat to the stability of Pakistan and Afghanistan
where constitutional governments find themselves really in a war with the Taliban
over legitimacy and territory.
The concern is not to allow the Taliban to return to power at the point of a gun.
Haass: This is a critical moment for Afghanistan as the era in which the international
community has invested enormously and has held a large presence is essentially coming
to an end. So the real question is how well will the Afghans deal with the continuing
security challenge they're going to face from the Taliban and indirectly from Pakistan,
which continues to provide a sanctuary.
Markey: The biggest concern for the United States and the international community
is that if the Taliban retakes significant control of Afghanistan or assert themselves
inside of Pakistan, they will again provide safe haven to international terrorists like
al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11. Of course, the humanitarian concerns are very real as
well. Wherever the Taliban have governed, women have suffered. Children, especially
girls, haven't been able to go to school. The kind of ruthless governance that they
provide is not satisfactory to any sense of human rights.
When I was in Swat,
which was a place of tourism,
and beauty, suddenly changed into
a place of terrorism. I was just ten when more than 400 schools were destroyed.
Women were flogged. People were killed.
And our beautiful dreams turned into nightmares.
Reid: A Talib can at its most anodyne just mean student, religious student,
There is, of course, famously a much darker side to this movement. They use an
interpretation of Sharia, of Islam, that is very hardline, particularly around moral questions
like women's rights.
Semple: The Afghan Taliban movement originated in 1994 during the period of civil
war and chaos after the collapse of the Communist government. They swept across the country
and during the rest of that decade, the Taliban movement was essentially a governing party
that set up their version of an Islamic state in Afghanistan.
Markey: By 2001, it was clear that the Afghan Taliban had a close relationship
with al Qaeda, and that's why after 9/11 the United States invaded Afghanistan and deposed
the Taliban from Kabul.
We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and
those who harbor them.
Reid: After 9/11 the Taliban made a resurgence in Afghanistan and have gradually
built themselves up to be quite an impressive fighting force again. There are many reasons
why people are part of the Taliban movement. You will see the hardcore religious ideologues
who believe that they're going to restore Afghanistan to a proper Islamic state. You've
got some who just feel like power should be theirs again. You've got some lower-level
guys who are probably just there for the money or because they've had a local grievance in
their village or district and the Taliban are going to help them resolve it. And there
are some who find it appealing; some of the propaganda of the Taliban tends to be around
forms of nationalism, anti-Westernism.
Rashid: The Taliban leaders who fled Afghanistan after 2001, they were given sanctuary
in Pakistan, they were allowed to resuscitate their movement in 2003, they were helped considerably
by the Pakistani intelligence agencies.
Siddique: Pakistan had a policy called the ""strategic depth"" which called for dominating
Afghanistan through a client regime that will not allow India into Afghanistan and will
let Pakistan use Afghan territory in case of a confrontation with India. Pakistan skillfully
channeled resources to nurture these extremely violent Islamist factions among the Pashtuns,
both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. But eventually some of them did turn against Pakistan.
Coll: The Pakistani Taliban were born in 2007, so much more recently than the Afghan
Taliban. They are made up of Pakistani nationals, and their goal is to carry out a revolution
in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, not in Kabul.
Coll: While no one can imagine the Taliban marching back into Kabul right away,
as the United States withdraws and as NATO withdraws it leaves behind Afghan security
forces that have lots of challenges, not just their professional competency in the battlefield,
but also their cohesion politically and whether they have a government that they can be loyal
to, and whether they have enough national support, popular support, whether they're
willing to kind of take the kind of casualties that fighting the Taliban has required. So
these are big questions about the future of Afghanistan.
We have to recognize that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it is not
America's responsibility to make it one. The future of Afghanistan must be decided
by Afghans.
Markey: As U.S. forces depart from the region, the Afghan government and the
other parties to this conflict face certain clear dilemmas. The Afghan state needs to
come to terms with how much of the Afghan insurgency can be brought into the political
process, how much needs to be fought to a standstill, how much needs to be destroyed
in order for the Afghan state to survive.
What the British public, the American public, the public in all our partner countries
Japan, European Union, everywhere else, Canada expects is the same as what the Afghan public
expects, a functioning government, a government dedicated to the well-being of every Afghan.
Markey: For its part, the Pakistani state needs to determine how it's going to
deal with its Pakistani Taliban insurgency. It also needs to determine how it will deal
with the Afghan Taliban, whether it will continue to allow a safe haven to persist on its own
soil. The Taliban insurgents also face a dilemma. They need to determine what kind of political
settlement they would be willing to accept, whether from Islamabad or from Kabul, whether
they could be brought into the future state of Afghanistan or a Pakistani state, and what
their main goals are moving forward. And because it's not a monolith, different members of
the Taliban are likely to choose differently.
Haass: The United States and the rest of the world which has invested so much over
the years in Afghanistan, has really got to decide what it is they're prepared to live
with and what matters most . There's one school of thought that would say, we don't really
care what Afghanistan looks like, so long as the government that runs it, whether it's
some version of the current government, the Taliban, or some combination, so long as they
don't allow their country to be used as a terrorism base. Or the United States and others
have to say, we care about that but not just that. What we also care about is the quality
and nature of life.