Islamic State -- One Big Reason to Doubt Imminent Peace in Afghanistan

For months it has been reported that a peace deal will soon be reached allowing the U.S. to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. There are many reasons to doubt this, one of which Mujib Mashal explores this morning in "As Taliban Talk Peace, ISIS Is Ready to Play the Spoiler in Afghanistan." 

In the aftermath of an Islamic State suicide bombing at a wedding in Kabul on Saturday which slaughtered 63 people, it is apparent that an end to hostilities will be difficult to bring about because, as witnessed in Syria, jihadists will simply go where the money is, and that is the Islamic State. Mashal argues that Islamic State in Afghanistan is run by Pakistan's military and intelligence services:

The Islamic State is set to grow if an extreme layer of insurgents breaks away from the Taliban to keep fighting, and it is likely to thrive if a hastily managed American military withdrawal leaves chaos behind.

“This is a replacement for the Taliban,” said Abdul Rahim Muslimdost, an Islamist cleric who has been jailed in Pakistan and in the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Muslimdost explained how he helped create the Islamic State chapter in Afghanistan — mostly, he said, from former Pakistani and Afghan Taliban members. He said he had since dissociated himself from it, contending that it had been infiltrated by Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.

That view is shared by some Afghanistan security officials. They have consistently portrayed the Islamic State as the continuation of what they describe as neighboring Pakistan’s policy of “strategic depth,” in which it exerts influence in Afghanistan through militant proxies.

The Taliban, whose leadership operates out of Pakistan, had long been seen as that country’s main source of leverage in Afghanistan. But even though international pressure has led Pakistan to support the peace process with the Taliban, Afghan officials accuse the country’s military establishment of investing in the Islamic State’s local chapter to maintain its influence.

They say there is overlap between the support networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan that enable the Islamic State’s suicide bombings and the ones that helped the Taliban’s most lethal arm, the Haqqani network, carry out urban attacks for years.

“The responsibility of all these attacks — which are carried out with same tactics as the Taliban — goes to the Taliban,” said Massoud Andarabi, Afghanistan’s interior minister, even after the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the wedding bombing on Saturday.

“It is the Taliban who have created the networks that make possible such terrorist attacks in our cities, and now they claim responsibility when they want for an attack and not when they don’t,” Mr. Andarabi said.

The U.S., as to be expected, denies that Islamic State is run by Pakistan.

Two critics of the United States in the region, Russia and Iran, claim that the Islamic State here is being nurtured by the Americans in order to destabilize everything around it.

Makes sense. Afghans think the entire peace overture in Qatar is a Trump reelection stunt. I think they are right.