Tajikistan, Taliban tone down the hostile rhetoric

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BNE Intellinews, 9 January 2025

For the Berlin-based outlet, Bruce Pannier – Central Asia specialist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – analyses the (tacitly improving) Taleban-Tajik relationship. He writes that Tajik President Emomali Rahmon “viewed the Taleban as a threat” from the 1990s onwards, and that Tajikistan “was the only Central Asian state that rejected contact with the militant group” when it returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021. “The animosity was reciprocated by the Taleban. … However, it is increasingly difficult for Tajikistan to remain an outlier in its policies toward the Taliban. It is not only Tajikistan’s Central Asian neighbours, but also Russia, China and Iran that are allowing Taliban representatives to occupy Afghan embassies in their countries. … The Rahmon government’s reluctance to engage with the Taliban could cost Tajikistan significant import and export opportunities as well as potentially lucrative transit fees on goods flowing between China and Afghanistan.”

One topic that jointly worries both Tajikistan and the Taleban is ISKP. Consequently, “the first official Tajik authorities sent to Afghanistan was former Tajik security officer Samariddin Chuyanzoda on May 14, 2022, one week after ISKP militants launched rockets from Afghanistan into Tajikistan. (…) In March 2023, a Taleban delegation visited the Afghan consulate in Tajikistan’s remote, eastern city of Khorog after the building sustained damage in an avalanche earlier in the year. The Afghan embassy [in the capital Dushanbe] was still staffed by representatives of deposed Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, but it quickly became apparent that the Taliban delegation in Khorog was inspecting the consulate building prior to occupying it. The Tajik government never commented publicly on the visit or the decision to allow Taliban representatives to staff the consulate.”

At the start of September 2023, at least five border bazaars along  the Afghan frontier in Tajikistan’s eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) reopened for the first time since August 2021. Recently, the most important Sherkhan Bandar border crossing war reopened. “The cash-strapped Tajik government [is] anxious to continue electricity exports to its southern neighbour.”

But it is also “widely suspected that Rahmon’s [government] is helping the mainly ethnic Tajik National Resistance Front (NRF) of former Afghan government soldiers who are still fighting the Taliban. … The Taliban at the same time still harbour Jamaat Ansarullah, despite requests from Tajik authorities to hand over the militants. … The Taliban did help arrange for Tajik government officials and Ansarullah to meet in November 2023 for talks, but nothing came of it and the Taliban are clear they will not hand over the militants.”

Pannier concludes:

The common security and economic interests of the Tajik and Taliban governments are driving them to cooperate, but there is still great distrust between them. … On the one hand, the tentative efforts made at cooperation have at least cooled heated verbal exchanges, while, on the other hand, the two sides are far from achieving friendly ties and their fragile cooperation could easily fall apart.”