Kamran Bokhari

The #Rasoul faction based in western #Afghanistan - not a traditional area of #Taliban activity - might be a model for #Kabul's attempt to weaken the #Taliban from within. But to what extent this dynamic can be duplicated in other parts is unclear.

The #Rasoul group is a local phenomenon that likely joined the #Taliban at some point and is now asserting its independence after realizing that it is better off doing so.

The mechanism for splitting the insurgency is based on the reality that the #Taliban has long ceased to be a singular national entity and instead is a diffuse movement consisting of autonomous local/regional militias - many of whom are not ideologically motivated.

Rather they revolve around local/regional warlords & organized crime bosses who are loosely threaded into the nat'l #Taliban command structure. This has happened bcuz the apex leadership has been in hiding since 2001 trading away direct op ctrl in exchange for physical security.

The same thing happened with al-Qaeda, which led to the emergence of #ISIS as an independent movement. What this means is that at one level the parts are more powerful than the whole. In fact the whole is a whole because of the compliance of the parts.

The various field commanders are small-time warlords without the #Taliban brand, which is a powerful tool in the hands of the apex leadership. Conversely, the field commanders also know that without them the apex leadership cannot be a national level force.

The more the #Taliban expand beyond their core turf in the south the more pronounced this dynamic becomes. The #Haqqanis represent the earliest and most significant case of this phenomenon.

The #Taliban began in the south specifically in #Kandahar. Their ability to expand to the east so quickly was because Jalaluddin #Haqqani the patriarch of the #Haqqanis decided to pledge allegiance to #MullahOmar.

Without the #Haqqanis who have been a force on both sides of the #Afghanistan-#Pakistan border since the '80s the #Taliban would not have become the force that they did in the late 90s.

The #Haqqanis while remaining loyal to the #Taliban have always used their unique share of the #Taliban stock to their advanatge, especially since the resurgence of the Taliban in the early 2000s, which once again was catalyzed by the Haqqanis and their #Pakistani backers.

There is a reason why Sirajuddin #Haqqani became #2 after #MullahOmar's death. The #Haqqanis themselves are also not a monolith. They are loyal to the #Taliban, very close with #Pakistan and do business with al-#Qaeda.

.@NDSAfghanistan maybe trying to take advantage of this, especially now that #ISIS seems to have siphoned off the more radical elements within the #Haqqanis.

The only way for the #Afghan state to absorb #Taliban within its structure is through peeling off elements from the insurgency because otherwise a more coherent insurgency seeks to replace the state as opposed to being subsumed by it.

The key will be whether the @Afghan state can hold out that long because this is a really slow process. Even if it succeeds there is the risk that an already deeply divided state will become even more fractious through this approach.

Ultimately, there is no way around the fact that since the collapse of the #Marxist regime in 1992 #Afghanistan has not had anything but a weak state.

Hence why the anti-Soviet #Islamist alliance quickly descended into a factional war once #Najibullah's government fell. Emerging from that fighting the #Taliban were able to impose order on most of the country until 9/11 but that was a unique period given a variety of factors.