The March 22nd’s spectacular complex terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall, twelve miles west of Kremlin, in Moscow is hardly new or surprising in the context of the world’s protracted failing war on terrorism. Unfortunately, “22/3” will soon be forgotten only to be added to the growing list of other terrorist-attack memorial dates, including “9/11” (New York), “26/11” (Mumbai), “7/7” (London), “11/3” (Madrid), “12/10” (Bali), “21/9” (Nairobi), and “23/7” (Sharm El Sheikh), to name just a few. But the people of Russia, particularly Moscow residents, will long remember “22/3” as one of the most tragic days in their recent history, which witnessed the indiscriminate killing and wounding of over two hundred innocent civilians, who were going about their daily lives that fateful day.
The tragic sequence of events, involving high-profile deadly terrorist attacks, hasn’t changed much over the last two decades: terrorists with a shared ideology but operating under different labels (e.g. ISIS, al-Qaeda, Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, al-Shabaab, et al) and often with the covert support of different sponsors, including state actors, target the most vulnerable crowds of ordinary people in any selected country’s civilian areas. Terrorists’ indiscriminate brutality, cowardice, and lethality swiftly take scores of lives and limbs. Soon after the chaotic scenes of dying, surviving and being rescued, other civilians rush to nearby hospitals to donate blood in solidarity with the grieving loved ones of victims, while the targeted nation’s leader delivers a message of condolence and a stern promise of hunting down and punishing the perpetrators of terrorist attacks. And world leaders react—momentarily setting aside differences, tensions, and hostilities—to express solidarity, condolence, and usually a renewed call for international cooperation to fight and defeat terrorism.
Over the past two decades, no nation has experienced this tragic sequence of terrorist events as often as suffering Afghans, whose recent history has been punctuated with too many terrorist attacks to keep a count of. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) began documenting civilian casualties, directly resulting from daily terrorist attacks, only in 2009. UNAMA’s civilian casualties’ reports—conservatively recording between 4,000 to 6,000 terrorist-attack casualties a year—are a ghastly reminder of international failure to eliminate the growing threat of terrorism, whose sanctioned and black-listed perpetrators remain free and unpunished under international law. It is this very collective failure that has effectively encouraged and emboldened terrorist groups worldwide to copy from the Taliban’s terror campaign playbook and carry out large-scale terrorist attacks in places of their choice, as we just witnessed in Moscow.
In their oft-cited “defeat of NATO in Afghanistan,” the Taliban proudly claim to have conducted most of the UNAMA-documented terrorist attacks against civilians, leaving only a few to be claimed by their ideological brothers affiliated with other terrorist groups. In just one truck bomb terror attack in Kabul on May 31, 2017, for example, the Taliban instantly killed over 150 civilians and fatally injured more than 400 others, many of whom died days later due to overburdened hospitals filled with too many civilian casualties to treat. In another similar operation, on January 20, 2018, a group of Taliban terrorists attacked the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul, indiscriminately killing over 40 civilians and injuring dozens of others. Much like the chaotic scene of terrorists killing civilians in the Moscow attack, cold-blooded Taliban gunmen went door to door to find hotel guests and shot them point blank, including the foreign crew of an Afghan airline.
And the Taliban’s brutal campaign of countless terrorist attacks on purely civilian areas, facilities and buildings also includes a complex suicide attack on a prominent Kabul high school auditorium during a live play performance on December 12, 2014. The then Taliban spokesman and now deputy minister of information and culture Zabiullah Mujahid immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, justifying it to say that the show was “desecrating Islamic values” and spreading “propaganda against jihad.” Reposted video of that attack on social media bears some similarities to Friday’s attack on the Crocus City Hall, now claimed by Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), an Afghan affiliate of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Having shared battlefield space with the Taliban over the last ten years and having observed their archrival’s steady climb to victory over United States-led NATO forces, given the latter’s premature withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, ISKP militants have been inspired by the Taliban’s unprecedented strategic gains in Afghanistan. Consequently, ISKP fighters have not only battled and targeted Taliban forces, including a recent attack in Kandahar, which killed 22 Taliban personnel, but they have also planned and carried out terrorist attacks in Kerman-Iran and now Moscow. At the same time, other terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have been resurgent, deriving both operational support and moral inspiration from the Taliban. Last February, the United Nations (UN) reported that one of eight al-Qaeda camps in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is “conducting suicide bomber training” to support TTP, “a globally designated terrorist group leading attacks against Pakistani security forces.”
Following the tragedy of 9/11 and other major terrorist attacks that followed it, the UN member-states began foreseeing increased global terrorist activity resulting from mutually reinforcing symbiotic relationships across different terrorist and criminal networks in permissive environments such as Afghanistan. This prompted them to unanimously adopt the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy on September 8, 2006. As a unique global instrument, “the Strategy is supposed to enhance national, regional and international efforts to counter terrorism.” More specifically, “the Strategy reaffirms that member-states have the primary responsibility to implement the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and in preventing and countering terrorism and violent extremism conducive to terrorism. It sends a clear message that terrorism is unacceptable in all its forms and manifestations, and that member-states have resolved to take practical steps, individually and collectively, to prevent and combat terrorism.”
Despite this non-binding global consensus, however, the UN member-states have hardly worked together to implement the Strategy, effectively allowing instrumentalization of terrorism as a covert state policy against domestic and foreign adversaries. No UN member-state is as notoriously implicated in its relentless instrumentalization of terrorism and extremism to achieve its foreign policy and geostrategic goals as Pakistan under the firm rule of its military and intelligence establishment. The latter’s creation of the Taliban in 1994 and its decades-long nurturing, sheltering, training, equipping, and deploying Taliban terrorists to undermine international stabilization efforts in Afghanistan between 2001-2021 have been adequately documented, studied, and reported publicly.
Unfortunately, neither Pakistan nor other UN member-states, which tangibly facilitated the return to power of the Taliban in 2021, have ever been held accountable for bringing about an increasingly dangerous situation in Afghanistan where more than twenty regional and transnational terrorist groups have resurged under the Taliban’s rule. They directly and indirectly derive ideological guidance, material support, and operational inspiration from the Taliban, whose key leaders remain sanctioned by the UN and black-listed by major international law enforcement agencies, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In a new message to his followers, who share common jihadi goals with other terrorist groups in the world, Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhunzada speaks of continued resistance in an expanded jihad far beyond Afghanistan’s borders: “We have waged a 20-year battle against you, and we will persist for another 20 years or more, as our mission remains incomplete.” This statement reaffirms the global jihadi ambitions of the Taliban in full ideological and operational alignment with other Islamist terrorist groups across the world.
The permanent members of the UN Security Council and their related allies shouldn’t ignore Taliban leader’s message. If they are serious about ridding the world of the growing threats of terrorism, extremism, and criminality, now firmly centered in Afghanistan under the Taliban, they must revisit the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and fully operationalize it. This much needed endeavor must begin by putting an end to the dangerous post-2021 developments—including the sheltering of regional and transnational terrorist groups, enforcement of gender apartheid, mass radicalization of youth, and drug production and trafficking—in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, which suffering Afghans literally consider as hell on earth!
Afghanistan is strategically located at the “heart of Asia,” on whose stability and prosperity the rest of the world increasingly depends for its own sustainable peace and development. Hence, it must be in the long-term strategic self-interest of many stakeholders in the international community to help all Afghan sides form an inclusive government through a negotiated political settlement. Such a government should enjoy national legitimacy and international recognition, whose current absence constitutes the root-cause of the ever-growing challenges, which confront Afghans with far-reaching implications for regional stability and international peace.
Indeed, a collective failure to deliver on the basic expectations of Afghans guarantees nothing but more terrorist attacks emanating from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, hitting targets from its wider neighborhood to Europe and North America. Those, who doubted this same threat in the 1990s and underestimated its potential of striking the United States on 9/11, only regretted it later to no avail. If major world powers fail to act together and in full solidarity with one another, consistent with the principal goals of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, Taliban-inspired terrorist attacks will eventually spare and leave no one behind. This is a lesson that has been learned many times over since 9/11, which must not be ignored again!
