Tajikistan’s Afghan Conundrum – Analysis

Bruce Pannier

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(FPRI) — Tajikistan’s policies toward neighboring Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are reaching a pivotal moment. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and his government have always viewed the Taliban as a threat, and that position has not changed since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. However, there is a bigger threat to Tajikistan growing in Afghanistan, and it might take cooperation with the Taliban to neutralize it.

Additionally, the other Central Asian countries and China, Iran, and Russia are engaging with the Taliban government. Tajikistan risks missing out on opportunities that these countries are opening in Afghanistan. Following the lead of these countries presents Tajikistan with a different set of problems. Tajik authorities have been warning the country’s people and the international community about the Taliban threat for nearly 30 years. Tajikistan’s rigid stance against the Taliban government has brought Rahmon’s government support from Tajikistan’s people and other countries. Making peace with the Taliban will be difficult to explain to Tajik citizens. It will also remove one of the greatest incentives for foreign governments to continue decades of generous financial and security support for Rahmon’s government.

Enemies from the Start

President Rahmon is unique among the current leaders of countries bordering Afghanistan. He is the only leader who was in power when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

In the late 1990s, all the Central Asian presidents, except the Turkmen president, viewed the Taliban as a threat and shunned any contact with them. Rahmon’s government and the government of Uzbekistan’s then-President Islam Karimov aided ethnic Tajik and Uzbek groups fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. The potential danger from the Taliban was acutely felt in Tajikistan where there was civil war from 1992 to 1997. The Rahmon government’s battlefield opponent was the United Tajik Opposition, a coalition of groups in which the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) was the backbone. In the early years after the Taliban appeared, most people knew little about the group except that they were Islamic extremists.