ISAF WITHDRAWAL AND AN UPSURGE OF RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM IN AFGHANISTAN

Abstract

An upsurge of religious extremism and terrorism in Afghanistan that followed the 2014 withdrawal of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed the pessimistic forecasts for the country’s future: a far greater number of terrorist attacks and their victims among non-combatants across the country was the most obvious repercussion. The civil war continued unabated, while the negative additional factors—the Taliban that had grown much stronger, as well as the activation of ISIS militants, who had come from Iraq and Syria to continue fighting—contributed to its further exacerbation. All sorts of extremist religious groups in Afghanistan consolidated their positions and even created an unwelcome possibility of their transit to the Central Asian countries. The authors have clearly demonstrated that there is a direct interdependence between the presence of ISAF under U.S. command and the degree of violence of the Taliban, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—Khorasan Chapter, and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan operating in Afghanistan. They have also analyzed the impact of the statement made by the U.S. regarding the signed agreement with the Taliban that envisaged the removal of U.S. troops from the country in the next fourteen months and the release of Taliban prisoners. Since the Government of Afghanistan had been left in the cold, many doubted that the agreement would be fully realized any time soon. An analysis of the events that followed demonstrated that the Taliban would not stick to its part of the agreement, while the White House treated the document as an election promise (formally) fulfilled. There are enough extremist organizations (i.e., ISIS) that operate in the provinces and, free from obligations and in pursuit of their own aims, might interfere in the attempts to fulfill the agreement in its optimistic version. An assessment of certain processes suggests that the threats coming from ISIS are somewhat overestimated. The studies are based on the following methods: comparative analysis of relevant literature, statistical analysis of the dynamics of time series to identify the developing trends of terrorist activities of religious extremists in Afghanistan.