Taliban need more than Pak expertise

We join the world in condemning the terror attack in Kabul that has killed an indeterminate number of ordinary people besides 13 American soldiers. The attack is simultaneously an indictment of terror as instrumentality of politics and a foretaste of the challenges the Taliban confront as they seek to graduate from an insurrection to a State. Governments around the world should continue their evacuation missions, putting the onus on the Taliban to carry out the evacuation in an organised fashion that does not require people to mill around the airport in mobs pleading with airport guards to accept their applications for safe passage outside the country.

Pakistan discovered the hard way, when the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) killed 150 people, including 134 schoolchildren, in an attack on an army school in Peshawar in 2014, that terror is difficult to control, and what it sought to use against India had the potential to harm itself. The Taliban have now been administered that lesson about how amenable terror is to control, once you have legitimised it and allowed it to run rampant. The Taliban and the Islamic State, whose South Asia chapter, called the IS-Khorasan (IS-K), are part of a continuum of faith-based terror. The IS-K reportedly considers the Taliban to be inadequately pure and inadequately ruthless.

Whatever their mutual sentiments and regard, the objective fact is that a terror attack inside Kabul at a time when the Taliban have claimed to be in control of the city is an attack on the authority and capability of the Taliban, as much as it is an attack on the occupation forces and native Afghans, whom the terrorists would dismiss as collateral damage. To govern, the Taliban need more than mastery of terror, more than Pak expertise.