An Anti-Taliban Front Is Already Forming. Can It Last?

REPORT

An Anti-Taliban Front
Is Already Forming.
Can It Last?
The group faces a more powerful Taliban than ever, but public discontent could
fuel the resistance.

By Robbie Gramer, a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy, and Jack
Detsch, Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter.

Ahmad Massoud (center), son of late Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, arrives to
attend and address a gathering at the tomb of his late father in Panjshir province,
Afghanistan, on July 5. AHMAD SAHEL ARMAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
AUGUST 20, 2021, 6:06 PM

In October 2001, U.S. defense intelligence planners were tasked with assessing
whether a coalition of anti-Taliban rebel groups known as the “Northern
Alliance” could topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

“Taliban strength in the Kabul Central Corps is approximately 130 tanks, 85
armored personnel carriers, 85 pieces of artillery and approximately 7,000
soldiers,” U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officials wrote in a memo that has
since been declassified. “Northern Alliance forces, under the command of
General Fahim Khan, number about 10,000 troops, with approximately 40
tanks and a roughly equal number of APCs [armored personnel carriers] and a
few artillery pieces.”

Just one month later, with U.S. backing, Taliban fighters fled the Afghan capital
of Kabul and Northern Alliance forces entered the city, greeted by throngs of
joyful residents celebrating the toppling of the brutal Taliban regime.

Now, two decades on, Kabul’s past has become its future. Thanks to the
collective failure of 20 years of U.S. war and nation-building, culminating in a
botched withdrawal, the Taliban appear to have significantly more political
control, manpower, and military might than they had in 2001. They also have
huge arsenals of U.S. military equipment abandoned by the Afghan army.

“I think it’s a different game than 1996,” said Mick Mulroy, a former CIA and
Defense Department official, referring to the year the Taliban took power in
Afghanistan. “Militarily, they have billions of dollars of our own provided
weapons and equipment. They have the momentum. From their perspective,
they just pushed out the number one superpower in the world.”

And yet, despite the lightning Taliban offensive and collapse of the Afghan
government, a resistance group is already starting to form in the Panjshir
province of northeast Afghanistan, once a stronghold of the Northern Alliance.
Panjshir is the one province in Afghanistan that did not fall to the Taliban in
their sweeping offensive as U.S. and NATO coalition troops carried out their
withdrawal this summer.

The newly dubbed National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, led by the son of
assassinated Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who took
his father’s name, issued a rallying cry in the opinion pages of the Washington
Post earlier this week to petition for U.S. aid.

“I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps,
with mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban,”
he wrote. “We have stores of ammunition and arms that we have patiently
collected since my father’s time, because we knew this day might come.”

Some experts also point out there is an entire generation of Afghans who have
never lived under Taliban rule and grew up with the freedoms and economic
prosperity their parents’ generation lacked. They may be more inclined to stand
up to the extremist militant group’s new era of rule.

One overriding question that could determine the fate of an anti-Taliban
military alliance is the formation of the new government. The Taliban have
sought to portray themselves on the world stage as more moderate than their
previous guise, though many experts and Western officials doubt their claims. If
they organize a viable power-sharing deal to govern with other Afghan power
brokers—including former Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah
Abdullah, a coalition partner in the toppled Ghani government—it could reduce
wider support for armed resistance against the Taliban. But if the Taliban
tightens their grip on power and expand their violent reprisals against former
Afghan government officials, some experts believe a successor to the Northern
Alliance will gain support.

Any internecine violence could exacerbate an already dire humanitarian crisis
and leave Afghanistan’s civilian population caught in the crossfire.

Even to the nascent group’s leaders, it is unclear whether they will have enough
manpower and support to form a viable resistance to the Taliban, unless the
United States steps in to provide more weapons and assistance. “We know that
our military forces and logistics will not be sufficient,” Massoud wrote. “They
will be rapidly depleted unless our friends in the West can find a way to supply
us without delay.”

Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh declared himself the “legitimate
caretaker president” after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country when the
Taliban marched toward Kabul. Saleh’s whereabouts remain unknown, but his
allies are hopeful Saleh can organize a viable resistance movement out of
Panjshir to challenge the Taliban’s rule.

“I cannot say that the Taliban have won the war,” Afghanistan’s ambassador to
Tajikistan, Zahir Aghbar, told Reuters. “No, it was just Dr. Ashraf Ghani who
gave up power after treacherous talks with the Taliban. … And only Panjshir
resists, led by Vice President Amrullah Saleh,” he said. “Panjshir stands strong
against anyone who wants to enslave people.”

In his Washington Post op-ed, Massoud said since the fall of Kabul, the group’s
ranks had swelled, with Afghan army veterans “disgusted by the surrender of
their commanders” and former special forces joining the cause.

“There’s a lot of ex-soldiers and commandos and other people who literally have
skin in the game right now,” said Bill Roggio, a senior fellow with the

Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has been closely tracking
battlefield updates in the Afghanistan conflict for years. “The key for them is to
organize resistance now and immediately try to regroup before the Taliban fully
cements its control.”

Roggio said Panjshir and the neighboring province of Badakhshan have
historically served as the stronghold of anti-Taliban resistance. Badakhshan
borders Tajikistan and the Pakistan-administered region of Gilgit-Baltistan. “If
Saleh can consolidate, hold Panjshir, and retake all or parts of Badakhshan to
get an outside lifeline for their forces, it’s possible they can last. The question is:
Who’s going to support them?”

Some in Congress, like Florida Republican Rep. Mike Waltz, a retired Army
Green Beret who served in Afghanistan, are already calling on the Biden
administration to provide aid to Massoud. It’s not yet clear what the Pentagon
plans to do with the $3.3 billion it had budgeted for the Afghan army, which
collapsed in a matter of weeks in the face of the Taliban offensive.

Asked whether the United States has made contact with either Saleh or
Massoud, the State Department did not respond.

But the military map still looks much more fraught for whatever resistance is
able to emerge. Massoud’s late father was able to carve out between 5 to 10
percent of the country in the 1990s that was mostly untouched by the Taliban
before helping to drive out the militant group alongside U.S. forces in 2001.
This time around, Panjshir remains effectively surrounded by the militant
group.

“The Northern Alliance had a lot of territory across multiple provinces,” said
Asfandyar Mir, a South Asia analyst affiliated with Stanford University. “Right
now, we’re talking about this one district, maybe two districts, in one province.
So, no real resistance.”

In the wake of their lightning offensive into Kabul, the Taliban have amassed a
war chest of U.S. military equipment, including more than 2,000 armored
vehicles and 40 aircraft, according to an intelligence assessment conveyed to
Reuters. By and large, the Taliban have built up more core strength in the
northern provinces where Massoud was once powerful, giving them the ability
to quickly stifle a potential uprising.

“The Taliban have a very strong presence in the north,” said Ibraheem Bahiss,
an expert with the International Crisis Group. “They completely flooded the
capital recently for security reasons. There just isn’t enough equipment to be
replenishing a long-term resistance against a larger enemy like the Taliban.”

But even as the Taliban appear to have consolidated military gains and de facto
political acceptance from foreign powers like China, Pakistan, and Russia,
experts believe they could be at risk of overextending thin lines of credit and
will be consumed by establishing a new government from scratch.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the Biden administration
halted bulk shipments of cash to Afghanistan as the Taliban neared Kabul; most
of the Afghan central bank’s $9 billion in reserves are held outside of the
country. And the Taliban, still on sanctions lists in many Western countries, is
likely to be vulnerable to asset freezes by foreign governments.

“[It] depends on their ability to generate revenue—much of which will come
from products of the poppy cultivation, which they have long controlled,” David
Petraeus, a retired U.S. Army general who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in
Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011, told Foreign Policy in an email. “And if they can
attract outside investment, now … they might guarantee the security that they
previously disrupted. They have trillions of dollars of minerals in the ground.”

Petraeus said the system of government the Taliban is likely to administer,
based on strong central control, will require multibillion dollar budgets that
might be difficult to maintain as foreign-funded aid organizations leave.
Without that money, the fledgling government will struggle to provide services.
“How will the Taliban make up that difference without U.S., Japanese, and
other foreign funding?” Petraeus added. “And what about when militant
members carry out abuses?”

And the newfound problems of incumbency for the Taliban aren’t likely to end
there, experts and former officials said. The Taliban are accustomed to fighting
as an insurgency, but maintaining a standing army will be much more
expensive.

“Given that Afghanistan doesn’t have much of a tax base, how do you fundraise
for something like that?” Mir asked.

Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Twitter: @RobbieGramer
Jack Detsch is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter.
Twitter: @JackDetsch