In Democracy’s Cradle, Free Afghanistan’s Ali Nazary Talks of War and Resistance

ATHENS — Ali Masaim Nazary cuts a youthful, leonine figure as he speaks softly of hard times in Afghanistan, the battle-scarred country the Taliban took over last August for the second time. The 32-year-old Afghan-American and UCLA graduate has the suave self-assurance of a man who knows his material — and in his case, that’s a lot of material. He is the point man for Ahmad Massoud, the Sandhurst-trained founder of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan and eldest son of the Lion of Panjshir, the anti-Soviet mujahideen fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud.The head of the NRF’s foreign relations, Mr. Nazary was making a pass through the Greek capital after his participation in the Delphi Economic Forum, which took place north of Athens. We chatted on the rooftop of a boutique hotel down the street from the Hellenic Parliament. Under the shade of a lovely potted olive tree and in between sips of a single shot of strong Greek espresso, Mr. Nazary said many things about the state of play in Afghanistan, such as declaring that its current Taliban leader is dead. Underscoring the volatile situation in the country, the day after we spoke the NRF’s spokesman, Sibghatullah Ahmadi, said in a tweet that 16 Taliban were killed in “intense” clashes at Badakhshan province, in fighting that also killed seven NRF guerrillas.Mr. Nazary had much to say about that restive province, about opium in Afghanistan, and much more. Our conversation follows. The Special Representatives and Envoys for Afghanistan, who met at Brussels this month, said the Taliban must fulfill their counterterrorism commitments as well as their commitments to counter drug production and trafficking and welcomed the Taliban’s recent decision to ban opium cultivation. What do you think about that?There’s a false assumption that the Taliban could moderate — this was a narrative that was being pushed by Pakistan before August 15, before the Taliban actually took Kabul and the government collapsed and everyone believed that the Taliban might have changed. But even after August 15, even though the Taliban keep sending signals, they haven’t changed. Women’s rights, education, work for women: These are all important issues, but what the countries in the West miss is the reason why Afghanistan is experiencing so many problems, and that’s because it is in a state of anarchy. The group that has taken over the country is not there to create a functioning system of governance to serve the people, to provide security … they are there to exploit. The Taliban is not a united, cohesive political or military organization. It’s an umbrella name for different types of organizations that have come in, different factions, who have some mutual interests and at the same time conflicting interests. You have global jihadists, crime syndicates, drug kingpins.…But the Taliban chief has just ordered a ban on poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.The reason they’re banning that is because since August 15, the opium poppy cultivation has drastically increased. When the supply of opium has increased, it decreases the price level.So you’re saying it’s just a ruse?Yes. What they’re doing is controlling the price. They have reserves, so it’s in their interests. They don’t have cash, so they need to increase the price of opium, and by banning it they control the supply. It’s a pretty smart move on their part. They’re trying to sell another false narrative that they’re against drugs.The Taliban chief, Hibatullah Akhundzada, issued the decree, but it was read out by a Taliban spokesman. Akhundzada himself has not been seen or heard in quite some time.Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban “emir” or supreme leader, is not alive. He died or was killed exactly two years ago, in March or April 2020. No one has seen or heard him for the past two years. ISI [Pakistan’s intelligence service] has done this before. The previous Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, died in 2013 but they announced that at the end of 2015. So for two or three years he was ruling the Taliban in name only and now the same thing is happening with Hibatullah.The Financial Times recently ran an article about some harsh new Taliban restrictions, and mentioned Hibatullah Akhundzada in the present tense.The reason why ISI isn’t announcing Hibatullah’s death is because the Taliban is a divided group made up of different factions and each one wants that position. Sirajuddin Haqqani wants to become the supreme leader, as does the head of another faction, so there’s competition, and Pakistan cannot make that decision, so they believe that pushing the myth that Hibatullah is alive is much more in their interest than announcing his death. You’ve claimed previously there are 13,000 terrorists, maybe more, who are affiliated with Al Qaeda and present in Afghanistan today. Do you believe there could be terrorist training camps such as the ones many Americans were accustomed to seeing video clips of in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001?Not in Panjshir, but mostly in eastern and southern Afghanistan, and some parts of northern Afghanistan. In the 1990s there weren’t terrorists or foreign fighters in northern Afghanistan, but in the past few years many foreign fighters have migrated even to northern Afghanistan. This was happening even before August 15. There were no counterterrorism operations to go and completely clear those areas. There’s a very strategic valley in the northeast province of Badakhshan, Afghanistan’s largest province that borders China, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. It’s called the Wurduj, and there have been foreign fighters there for the past five and a half months.Where are they coming from?They’re coming in from Pakistan, but they’re Arabs, Central Asians, South Asians. It’s very difficult to say if they’re ISIS or Al Qaeda. At times the groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, but at times they’ve used the ISIS flag as well. What the West doesn’t understand, or what they think is that all these movements have conflicting ideologies but that’s not the case. It’s the same ideology. All of them are global jihadists, it’s only the name and the flag that’s different. The allegiance of the rank-and-file members isn’t to the flag or to the name, it’s to the ideology.On August 16, 17, every terrorist group from Boko Haram to Al-Shabaab to Lashkar-e-Taiba in South Asia congratulated the Taliban. They considered the Taliban to be the leader of their struggle. The Taliban aren’t shy about this. The other day Sirajuddin Haqqani [the Taliban’s interior minister, who is still wanted by the FBI on terror accusations] said “the Prophet Muhammad is with us.” Haqqani is a notorious terrorist, there’s a $10 million bounty on his head, and you have Western journalists going and meeting him in Kabul. The NRF is not the only group that seeks the removal of the Taliban.There have been a few other groups, but we still haven’t verified if those groups are inside or outside of Afghanistan. We haven’t seen fighting from them. The difference between the National Resistance Front and other movements is that ours is acknowledged by the SIGAR [Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction] and our military forces are made up of the remnants of the former security forces that were trained by NATO and the U.S. We have bases, we have structure. We have regular and irregular forces.Our official position, which our leader Ahmad Massoud announced on March 21, is that we welcome any resistance movement and we are open to cooperation if they share the same vision and objectives, which is to oust the Taliban, free Afghanistan’s citizens regardless of race, religion, or gender, and establish a democratic government. We’re not going to cooperate with a splinter terrorist group that might start fighting against the Taliban that doesn’t share these objectives. We are clear that we are against any group that would inflict civilian casualties. Those aren’t our tactics.How can some of the NRF’s recent successes against the Taliban on the battlefield be corroborated when media access in Afghanistan is increasingly limited — mainly because of the Taliban?With the fighting that happened Friday [April 8] in Andarab, we did provide a video showing the corpses of Taliban fighters. We can’t put out videos of all the fighting, we don’t always have access to corpses after the fighting. These valleys are remote, sometimes it’s very difficult for them to take all the bodies with them when they retreat. This is a problem that we face, but we don’t do reporting on everything. We’ve been fighting for the past week, shown the bodies, but the Taliban still doesn’t acknowledge it. They did acknowledge that one of their commanders was killed about a month ago. The Taliban has restricted the movement of journalists from Kabul, particularly toward the north where the fighting is happening. Why are they restricting the movement of journalists to the north but not to the south? Because there is something they are trying to hide. One thing I don’t understand is the amount of credibility the Western media give the Taliban. When you have the Taliban saying there’s no resistance, and then the New York Times writing there’s no resistance, then why isn’t the Taliban allowing the Times journalist to travel to Panjshir and especially to the side valleys?Do you find that the media’s wait-and-see approach to the Taliban since the takeover has been at all politicized?At times I think there is an effort to ignore Afghanistan and it could be connected to politics in Washington. The withdrawal happened after January 2021, and there was still plenty of time to stop this catastrophe. There could be other reasons. Pakistan has had a history of finding good friends within different media outlets and controlling the narrative. Many correspondents are based in Islamabad and they only go to Kabul maybe once a month. What interest does the Taliban have in turning a blind eye to foreign militants inside Afghanistan, to the point of even giving them passports?Shared ideology. Even Taliban officials have said their jihad isn’t ending in Afghanistan. For them their emirate isn’t confined to Afghanistan’s national boundaries, it goes beyond. In central Asia for example, secular republics aren’t in their interests. If they’re able to strengthen central Asian terrorists, give the equipment and means to infiltrate into their countries, the faster those liberal governments could in their view be toppled. The president of Tajikistan has been very vocal when it comes to this; they are the country in central Asia that shares the longest and most rugged border with Afghanistan. On the Afghan side of the border, the Taliban have handed over security to two terrorist groups. One is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the other is made up of Tajik nationals from Tajikistan. The Taliban has given both groups American-made gear and weapons. The Taliban needs these foreign fighters inside Afghanistan because they’re overstretched. They don’t have enough fighters and can barely feed the ones they have. They know that with the amount of their own fighters they have that they can’t control the whole country. That is why there will be many opportunities for us to start liberating parts of Afghanistan.If the former Afghan government with all the resources it had — including an air force, a military budget of $3.3 billion from America, and humanitarian aid — and it could not even control half of the country, how can the Taliban control what they have today? These terrorist groups are helping the Taliban right now. It’s both ideological and transactional.Is there any reason to believe that jihadist groups operating in Afghanistan today have international terrorism on their agenda?In the jihadist narrative, Afghanistan is where jihad starts. It’s the easternmost Islamic land and they think the savior will be born in this part of the world. And then will start going west, from central Asia toward Jerusalem, from where they want to “liberate” the rest of the world. This is why they are not starting their efforts in the Gulf region or anywhere else, because ideologically jihadist narrative inside radical Islam starts from this region.It’s why the white and black flag is very important. In some narratives it’s the white flag that should be raised in the eastern lands, and in some narratives it’s the black flag. The ISIS flag is black and white.So is the Taliban’s. The background is white, the inscription is in black. For ISIS, it’s the other way around. White and black are the key colors for all these jihadist movements. Another reason why the jihadists are in Afghanistan is that in the past 20 years, the Al Qaeda leadership and ISIS since 2013 or 2014 have realized that the reason they’re unable to continue their efforts in the Islamic world and beyond is because their leadership was always a target, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. The terrain there isn’t suitable for the leadership to base themselves in those regions. It’s easy for Westerners to find and neutralize them there. They need a region where they can hide and create their lair and base of operations. Once jihadists are able to entrench themselves in the Hindu Kush mountains, then the leadership can survive for decades without anyone being able to attack them from the air or land. And continue their operations in the Muslim world and beyond. We understand how strategic the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan are. We defeated the Soviets because of this.

In Democracy’s Cradle, Free Afghanistan’s Ali Nazary Talks of War and Resistance

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