Roving Periscope: How the Taliban upstaged Turkey as the new Islamic power!

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/Syria (ISIL/ISIS), founded by Abu Musab Zarqawi in 1999, shut shop by 2015, although its splinter groups still remain. It resurrected Turkey’s dream of reviving the Ottoman Caliphate when Recep Tayyip Erdogan became President in 2014.

He wasted Turkey’s resources far and wide, funding fundamentalists and separatists all across what was the Ottoman Empire until a century ago to resuscitate what European historians called the “Sick Man of Europe”. He interfered in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, among others. He dusted off Turkey’s dormant issues with Greece, Cyprus, etc., and even forayed into nuclear-armed Pakistan to support its “Kashmir cause”. He even found common causes with Iran, Russia, and Malaysia. To sum up, Turkey tried to dislodge Saudi Arabia from Islamic leadership, revive the Ottoman Empire, and reinstall the Caliphate to lead the world’s 1800 billion Muslims.

His ultra-ambitious objectives, however, came to naught on August 30, 2021.

With the US-led western forces completing their pullout from Afghanistan on Monday, the Taliban is back in power in Kabul. Although the IS-Khorasan, a Pakistan-supported splinter group of ISIS, has denounced the Taliban as “American stooges”, the Islamic militia is here to stay for the long haul.

America will no longer have to depend on Pakistan-supported “non-state” actors to do the dirty job as it did against the USSR in the 1980s and 1990s. Washington has not only facilitated a proscribed ‘terrorist outfit’ s return to power, it now supports a state actor in Kabul, directly run by the Islamist militia, to redraw borders in South, Central, and East Asia—including, of course, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the process, the world’s hotspots in the Middle East have also shifted to Central, South, and East Asia. It is a huge relief to the America-supported Arab world!

And, the US has also ‘neutralized’ Turkey whose expansionist aims had scared the Arabs and the Balkan countries alike, once part of the Ottoman Empire. That the Taliban, not Turkey, will now call the shots in the Sunni Ummah became clear when the new rulers of Kabul rejected Ankara’s request to ‘manage’ the Hamid Karzai International Airport.

The Taliban will, for all practical purposes in the near future, be the American proxy in Asia!

But the US is also cautious about the unpredictable Taliban. It left a lot of arms and ammunition worth about $ 280 million, for the Taliban’s use but took care to keep the Islamic militia a landlocked irregular army in a mountainous country, fit only for insurgency and guerrilla warfare for longer periods. The Taliban have no air force or navy. They will have to, almost exclusively, fight battles on terra firma, unaided by air or naval power, and depend on America for cash. They cannot join hands with an atheist China which has already refused to replenish spare parts for the weapons and aircraft supplied to Pakistan!

Before the last American plane took off from Kabul on Monday, the US ensured that scores of aircraft, armored vehicles, and the high-tech rocket defense systems were disabled.

The US Army’s Central Command chief, General Kenneth McKenzie, said a total of 73 aircraft present at the Hamid Karzai International Airport were ‘demilitarized’ by US troops before they wrapped up the two-week evacuation of the Taliban-controlled country.

Already, even when Ashraf Ghani was President, the Afghan National Army (ANA) units were mostly disarmed in a planned manner, which eased the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan so swiftly. Moreover, Ghani had himself sacked at least six anti-Taliban ANA commanders in the weeks before he fled, according to media reports.

This process of selective demilitarization of Afghanistan was completed last week. “The aircraft disabled by the US armed forces – will never fly again, and will never be able to be operated by anyone. Most of them are non-mission capable, to begin with, but certainly, they will never be able to be flown again,” General Kenneth McKenzie said.

“The Pentagon, which built up a force of nearly 6,000 troops to occupy and operate Kabul’s airport when the airlift began on August 14, left behind around 70 MRAP armored tactical vehicles, which can cost up to $1 million apiece that it disabled before leaving, and 27 Humvees.”

“The vehicles which were used by the US forces in Afghanistan – will never be used again by anyone,” General McKenzie said.

The US, however, left behind the C-RAM system, artillery, mortar, and counter rocket that were used to protect the airport from rockets.

“We elected to keep those systems in operation up until the very last minute. It was a complex procedure and time-intensive procedure to break down those systems. So we demilitarize those systems so that they will never be used again.”

But the US will, in all likelihood, keep the Taliban well-supplied on a need-to-arm basis!