After al-Zawahiri, what’s next for America’s Taliban policy?

The killing of al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a safe house in Afghanistan’s capital is a feat for the U.S. counterterrorism community, but it also indelibly paints a disturbing picture of the deep faith that various jihadists continue to place in their Taliban partners.

The discovery of safe houses and sleeper cells run by various countries and groups in Afghanistan’s major cities comes as no surprise. For years, the wider presence of such facilities have been an open secret operated by the neighboring countries, including Pakistan, Iran and even China. In some cases, senior Afghan officials in the previous government leased their own properties to nebulous groups and characters to house their unknown guests. Various jihadists from the Haqqani Network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic State have long leveraged a vast network of sleeper cells in upscale neighborhoods. But al Qaeda’s decision to place its supreme leader within a mile of the presidential palace illustrates the strength of its multilayered alliance with the Taliban. 

While the conventional wisdom in Washington maintains that al Qaeda has become a statistical outlier in Afghanistan’s sprawling jihadist landscape, the group is hardly a bottom feeder in the country. The group’s codependent partnership with the Taliban’s core governing partners is one of mutual confidence. A measure of the vitality of this interwoven partnership is that al Qaeda fighters despise any labeling as “foreign fighters” by their Taliban partners, demonstrating their crucial role in the Taliban’s internal dynamics. 

In eastern Afghanistan, the joint venture has long relied on compartmented cells, effectively forming a lethal triangle consisting of a basket of armed fighters, logisticians and those involved in fundraising, recruitment and propaganda. In eastern Kunar province, al Qaeda’s presence had been so obvious that the local people identified certain districts as al Qaeda districts. In northeastern Afghanistan, the business side of the partnership has been involved in an extensive gold smuggling campaign in which joint Taliban and al Qaeda cells disguise themselves as local businessmen.

During the U.S.-Taliban talks in Doha, al Qaeda leaders and the Taliban hardliners expressed serious concerns to core Taliban leaders about how they were being sold out as part of the bilateral agreement. They rightly judged that unless they are at the table, they will be on the menu.

At al Qaeda’s urging, the Haqqani Taliban, which commanded the Taliban’s war management, pressed to place several of their key members in the boardroom in Doha. While the final agreement’s two classified annexes specified the Taliban’s counterterrorism promises, it also gave the al Qaeda-affiliated Taliban greater visibility into the operational and sequencing details of the five stages of American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Indeed, the counterterrorism commitments appeared only to require the Taliban not to allow al Qaeda and other Salafist jihadists to plan and plot against the United States and not for them to cut ties or expel the jihadi variants from Afghanistan. At the time, the reasoning seemed to have been that were the Taliban pressured to expel jihadist elements from Afghanistan, where might they end up?

Instead, the concentration of jihadists within Afghanistan offered a practical alternative for monitoring and targeting purposes. Since then, the Taliban has only deepened its shared intelligence and operational understanding with different jihadi franchises.

Meanwhile, internally, the Taliban rulers have marched on to solidify their own control across Afghanistan, including burnishing their originalist Islamic credentials, engineering an Islamic identity based on Islamic nationalism and validating themselves as the vanguard for true Islamic leadership. In turn, this process has also increasingly informed the internal calculus of different jihadist groups to creatively reassess their own functions, reorganize and determine their new mission spaces. 

As such, a wide variety of jihadist outfits have since patiently reorganized, including several tactically reorienting to other theaters with a foot in Afghanistan. In this space, what has been missing is a debate about the role of scores of unaffiliated fighters, who are kinetically the most active in the broader region. While the bulk of these unaffiliated fighters (foreign and domestic) have long operated under the Taliban’s patronage, they are not in a monogamous relationship with the Taliban. 

More notably, several cells in this constellation have increasingly become worried about the Taliban’s promise of protection, with many now branching out to establish tactical partnerships with other outfits. The death of al-Zawahiri would only boost their suspicions of the Taliban’s promise, likely resulting in more militant diversification and newer alliances. This disparate consortium involves various Uzbek, Tajik, Uyghur and Pakistani groups and unaffiliated fighters, which includes many now rubbing elbows with al Qaeda and the Islamic State’s regional branch. 

As the Taliban rulers work to exploit this morphing threat to blackmail the regional and non-regional countries to extract recognition or normalization of relationships, al Qaeda’s new leadership would undoubtedly reassess its own ties with the Taliban.

While there are real risks of al Qaeda severing its Taliban ties, the Taliban hardliners could potentially mitigate possible al Qaeda overreaction by making important concessions to reset the partnership. This could include the Taliban deepening its intelligence and operational arrangement with al Qaeda, quietly conducting internal retaliatory killings to avenge the senior sheikh, rearranging al Qaeda camps and tightening key personnel for operational security. For the United States, while these brewing developments buy some time to re-evaluate its Taliban policy, it also offers several opportunities. 

First, Washington should declassify one of the two classified annexes of the Doha agreement to publicly scrutinize whether the Taliban is living up to its counterterrorism promises. 

Second, while Washington has largely regionalized solutions to the Afghan debacle, it should use the time to fix the limits of its over-the-horizon counterterrorism engagement — which, while significant, is insufficient. Despite the current nature of limited militant targeting, the distance limits in the “horizon” and erratic airspace access remain undefined. Local partners and ground support teams are largely missing, and critical intelligence collection, including from within the Taliban circles, is negligible. While some paramilitary elements of the previous Afghan counterterrorism pursuit teams appear to have made their way back into the country, their number and reach are limited.

What’s also been missing is a regional counterterrorism monitoring station (perhaps one based in Termez, Uzbekistan) to provide timely verification from the ground. Meanwhile, as Washington spends over $19 billion to support this engagement, there is a critical need for a redefined U.S. regional counterterrorism strategy to provide clarity about America’s new rules of engagement. 

Third, as jihadists’ threat grows more decentralized, and the Taliban’s civilian bureaucracy becomes more militarized, the United States could also creatively expand and decentralize its targeted activities. Using the Afghan paramilitary support teams, Washington could consider expanding its roster of target package to include known Taliban/Haqqani operatives who have not ceased their enabling roles in the jihadist enterprise. This basket should include the Taliban’s senior- and mid-level intelligence operatives, couriers, financiers, logisticians and recruiters.

Finally, internally, the Taliban is undergoing an identity crisis, with the group split among the ideological variants and businessmen. The Taliban’s cohesion depends on how well they manage power and patronage, a recurring challenge that has long hobbled power dynamics in Afghanistan.

For Washington, a critical blind spot in its Taliban policy has been its negligible engagement with the Taliban’s powerful clerics, particularly in Kandahar. Because ideology is deeply entrenched in the Taliban’s actions, there is a burning need for robust religious diplomacy that creatively (and directly) engages the Taliban’s clerics. While Washington has discouraged backing organized armed opposition against the Taliban, it could instead consider cultivating an institutional counterweight within the Taliban’s governing ranks to shape their future choices and actions. 

Javid Ahmad is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute. Follow him on Twitter @ahmadjavid.