The Haqqani network is the new global terrorist threat

With close ties to al Qaeda, the network’s influence and network are likely to grow within Afghanistan and beyond.

The Haqqani network has evolved over the past half-century from a relatively small, tribal-based jihadist group into one of South Asia’s most significant U.S.- and U.N.-designated terrorist syndicates.

As Afghanistan’s new Taliban government pushes for credibility abroad, the Haqqani network is the most powerful faction with which it must reckon.

The Haqqani network could theoretically reform itself to gain international acceptance, but let’s not ignore reality: Paying lip service to Western conditions or red lines won’t change an entity this resourceful and ruthless.

The only way for the U.S. and its allies to deal with the newly empowered Haqqani network is through shrewd statecraft and multilateral engagement.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the network’s founder, has led the terrorist group since 2015, while also serving as the Afghan Taliban’s second-in-command.

In recent weeks, he was installed atop the powerful Interior Ministry, with de facto control of the nation’s domestic security and intelligence operations, while filling key military and civilian positions including control of passports and identity cards.

Mr. Haqqani’s appointment all but ensures that his group’s influence and terror network will grow, both within and beyond the region.

For U.S. decision makers, understanding the Haqqani network’s canny political adaptation to Western policies is an essential first step toward preventing a worst-case scenario: an al Qaeda-backed terrorist resurgence amid a region of nuclear-armed states.

To grasp the magnitude of the threat posed by the Haqqani network, one must understand the strategy that brought it to power at the expense of America and its allies—a strategy that resembled that of the Islamic State and that explicitly married governance and jihadist terror.

Through 20 years of Western counterterrorism, counterinsurgency and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, the Haqqani network has proved remarkably adaptive. Instead of trying to construct alternative, parallel government institutions as the Taliban did in southern Afghanistan, the Haqqanis pursued a more opportunistic method: infiltrating the Afghan nation-state itself.

Michael K. Nagata, a retired U.S. Army general who commanded American special-operations forces in the Middle East and South Asia, recently observed, “decades before ISIS employed a policy of subversion, concealment, and co-option of the West’s institutions and models in Iraq, the Haqqani network started expanding its power and reach in similar ways but with methods that were far more sophisticated, durable, and effective than even ISIS at its zenith.”

Counterterrorism experts Vahid Brown and Don Rassler pointed out a full decade ago that “the Haqqani network has been more important to the development and sustainment of al Qa’ida and the global jihad than any other single actor or group.” Now that the leader of that network has risen to official power within Afghanistan, it is time for the U.S. to confront the implications of the deep links between the two groups.

Although the Haqqani network remains a semiautonomous entity of the Afghan Taliban, Mr. Haqqani has for years cultivated his role as shadow shogun of the movement, designing and executing policy in strategic areas. Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada sustains authority in large part because of Mr. Haqqani’s de facto support.

Many Western scholars and analysts assumed that the recent ascent of the Taliban in northern, western and central Afghanistan was simply a failure of Western military intervention to establish a right to democracy in modern Muslim states.

But, as former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and retired U.S. Marine Corps general Joseph Dunford said, “U.S. officials must consider if Islamist militant ascendancy was, equally, a consequence of mass political subversion, indicating a much larger story: as U.S. counterterrorism practices evolved, so too did the terrorists’ responses.”

Since 2008, Mr. Haqqani’s al Qaeda-backed rise in northern Afghanistan has stood as proof of what Haqqani cognoscenti have long asserted: The violent network isn’t simply an extremist element that the more moderate Taliban seeks to control, but is rather an essential element that wields terrorism at the very core of the Taliban’s modern governance.

As Jeff Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War has argued, the Haqqani network increased its presence in a region that the Taliban struggled to capture in the mid-1990s by assassinating local power brokers seen as rivals. It also used relationships with foreign fighters that they specifically cultivated, including al Qaeda.

In southeastern Afghanistan, the Haqqani network expanded by infiltrating Western-backed military and political structures. U.S. intelligence officials say the network placed itself in an ideal position to seize money meant for legitimate institutions, avoid blacklists, confiscate Western security resources and request the release of detainees.

Many Afghan “officials” were neither subjected to U.S. scrutiny, nor held accountable for using the U.S.’s local governance and development programs as a violent destabilizing force.

The Haqqani network’s infiltration methods were a logical response to Western state-building strategy, and explain how the organization was able to advance its interests in latently incremental but ultimately decisive ways.

Having gained power by exploiting fear and discontent, as well as by systematically subverting the neoliberal institutions of the modern nation state, the Haqqani network chiseled away at democracy, all in the name of thwarting the enemies of the people.

It is hard to fathom anything less in America’s strategic interest than seeing Sirajuddin Haqqani and his network provide their al Qaeda partners with new layers of immunity against Western conditions—especially as the U.S. aims to tie aid for the people of Afghanistan to the new government’s adoption of specific humanitarian and counterterrorism policies.

This is particularly true as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and, in recent years, China, Russia, and Iran, have delivered tacit support to the terrorist syndicate.

Mr. Haqqani marches in lockstep with his al Qaeda base. General John R. Allen, who commanded U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013, said, “it seems impossible to imagine the U.S. and our liberal democratic allies recognizing the Islamic Emirate so long as Haqqani ‘officials’ and their allies are part of the emerging Afghan system of government.”

Ms. Skorka served as a strategic adviser to the commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan from 2011-14 and is a senior fellow at Oxford’s Changing Character of War Centre.

Source: WSJ