Afghanistan likely to become haven for future terror attacks abroad

The Taliban is unlikely to honour its pledges to stop Afghanistan being used as a haven for 9/11-style terror attacks, Afghan security officials have warned.

Despite agreeing during peace talks with the US that it would not permit al-Qaeda and Islamic State to operate from Afghan soil, the Taliban retains close operational links with both groups, one senior official told The Telegraph.

He said once Western troops completed their withdrawal this summer, there would be no guarantee that Afghanistan would not become a base once again for Islamist radicals plotting atrocities overseas.

Western governments, he added, were wrong in thinking that there was any real difference between the Taliban and other militant groups deemed more extreme.

“In the West, there is this thinking that these groups operate in silos, but they don’t,” he said.

“The leadership and political ambitions may differ, but the ideology of all these groups is the same. They all want to establish and fund an Islamic state that would be a breeding ground for all other fundamentalists worldwide.”

Officially, the Taliban sees itself as separate from al-Qaeda, and its fighters have clashed in the past with cells from Islamic State, which is trying to establish a foothold in Afghanistan.

However, the official said that several Islamic State terror attacks carried in Kabul had shown all three groups working hand-in-hand.

“With several incidents, we found that while Daesh (Islamic State) took responsibility for it, the logistics were provided by the Haqqani network (a Taliban offshoot affiliated to al-Qaeda) and the funding came from Lashkar-e-Taiba (a Pakistani militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks),” he said.

“To suggest that the Taliban would ever differentiate from these groups is contrary to their DNA. It is physically impossible for them to separate themselves from the other terrorist groups with which they have so much in common.”

The official spoke out amid growing concerns in both Kabul and Western capitals about the future of Afghanistan now that both Nato and US troops are leaving.

Despite continuing with peace negotiations with Afghan government delegates in Qatar, the Taliban has captured large swathes of rural territory from Afghan forces, reimposing curbs on women’s rights and other social freedoms.

The Afghan official said that in the peace talks, which theoretically allow the Taliban to enter democratic politics, there had been little sign of the group being willing to compromise.

“At this moment, we don’t see the Taliban negotiating in earnest. They’ve told us that we, the government, should surrender to them, which is not acceptable. They want an Islamic Emirate in which they choose the emir (ruler), whereas we want the right of every Afghan to choose their leader.”

While he acknowledged that the group had some genuine popular support, mainly in conservative rural areas, he said that amounted to only one sixth of Afghanistan’s 38 million people.

The Taliban’s ambitions, he said, now threatened the future of a new democratically-minded Afghan generation that had grown up since 9/11.

“We don’t want to be known for fundamentalism. We want to be known as a tolerant Islamic society that is part of the international community, not an outcast from where attacks are planned on other countries.”

The extent of the security collapse in Afghanistan was highlighted on Thursday as neighbouring Tajikistan held its largest military drills in history, prompted by Taliban militants sweeping gains just across the border. About 1,000 Afghan troops fled over the frontier to take refuge in Tajikistan in June.

Tajikistan, an impoverished ex-Soviet state, deployed all 230,000 Tajik troops, including police officers, for surprise military drills in the early hours.

Russia, a major power broker in the region, hosted a Taliban delegation earlier this month. Moscow said after the talks with the Taliban that it had received assurances fighting would not spill over across the border.

Meanwhile, the European Union said it was considering a new £50 million package of financial aid to Afghanistan and its neighbours to help limit the flow of refugees from the country.