John Chuckman
COMMENT ON THE PRESENCE OF ISIS IN AFGHANISTAN
For a while now, we’ve heard of ISIS forces appearing in parts of Afghanistan. What possible interest or purpose would ISIS have there? Afghanistan’s strict Islamic Taliban, with whom the United States has been at war for 18 years, certainly wouldn’t in theory be regarded as an enemy by any genuine jihadi warrior types, which is what ISIS pretends to be.
The Taliban would not likely welcome any group of outsiders into their country even if the outsiders were not hostile to them. So, there are real reasons for conflicts arising between ISIS and the Taliban. The presence of ISIS just complicates things for the Taliban, something favoring American interests. Any confusion for your enemy is welcome in the new hybrid form of warfare the United States has used in the Middle East.
ISIS – despite all the grotesqueries and disinformation over the years - has always basically served American interests by attacking those America opposes and never attacking American or Israeli or Saudi interests, the “natural” targets of any genuine jihadi types.
Well, the northern and northeastern portions of Afghanistan border on old Soviet Central Asian republics like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. So, we have American-supported Muslim proxy forces assuming some kind of role in the American-occupied Muslim country of Afghanistan next door to former Soviet Muslim republics which today are part of an organization called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), one having many relationships with Russia.
The intention could even be to infiltrate some of the Central Asian Muslim countries with ISIS forces to create instability near Russia. The very large Central Asian country of Kazakhstan, located just above those I’ve mentioned, is right on Russia’s southern border.
There are Russian intelligence reports of ISIS groups being helicoptered by American forces, something we saw more than a few times in Syria with ISIS and al Nusra.
It does appear we are seeing something a little along the lines of what we see in northeastern Syria where thousands of American troops are illegally based. Their purpose is to assist native Kurdish Syrians in efforts to balkanize or disrupt Syria with the creation of a de facto eastern rump state – all done, mind you, in the good name of America staying around to fight ISIS.
Fighting ISIS has been used as a pretext by the United States either for keeping its military in a location, as is very much the case in northeastern Syria, or for bombing Syrian government infrastructure while pretending to bomb ISIS. If nothing else, that may be just the reason for the ISIS presence in Afghanistan, to keep American troops there. ISIS does come in handy.
