The Afghanistan model will serve as an inspiration to Islamic organizations around the world, and they will try to cultivate the ethos of victory over a foreign superpower, something that will be prolifically used in their propaganda, said Yoram Schweitzer, an Israeli intelligence official who heads the research program t the Israel Institute for National Security Studies.
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Right now, "The Taliban is engaged in a charm offensive," Schweitzer told Israel Hayom on Wednesday, adding, "We need to pay attention to what is happening in rural areas [in Afghanistan] - we hear that the Taliban is behaving there as it has in the past," he said, referring to the brutality for which the group is notorious.
"Right now the Taliban is looking for the international legitimacy it lacked for the past 20 years. They are being courted by the United States, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Russia, China – everyone is chasing them because they want to 'calm the beast', and the Taliban is taking advantage of it."
Schweitzer says that the Taliban "has a country to run. They only now took control of some of it and they're facing a lot of problems."
Afghanistan, he said, "is a country with poor infrastructure, it's in ruins, really; it has no sources of income so it has to have external aid, which is why it's conducting itself the way it is. But the DNA, I guess, remains the same DNA."
He further said that other radical and terrorist groups will certainly look at the hurried US withdrawal from Afghanistan as something to simulate.
"Both the Taliban and al-Qaida have already begun celebrating the victory and cultivating the ethos of victory over the Christian-Crusader foreign power. This will stay with us for a while," he asserted.
"On the Shiite side, we see [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah, who gave a 58-minute speech yesterday [Tuesday] and devoted more than half of it to exploit the victory of the Sunni Taliban, hostile to the Shiites, for his own needs.
"We see the Iraqi militias talking about it, the Houthi militias are drawing encouragement from it, of course – this affects any group that defines itself as Islamist, be it Sunni or Shiite. It makes them feel that a determined Islamist group can defeat a foreign power – a superpower even – and it emboldens them ahead of future campaigns. Of course, it's also a propaganda tool," he said.
The Taliban, however, is not without its rivals.
According to Schweitzer, "The Islamic State – Khorasan Province [ISISK] has been active in Afghanistan since 2015, and it joined forces with ISIS in 2014. It's made out of Taliban and Pakistani Taliban operatives."
ISISK, he explains, "are a bitter and stubborn adversary of the Taliban. They see the Taliban as a ransom organization, an organization that cooperates with Islam's biggest rivals – the United States, the Russians, the Chinese, the Turks, and the Iranians, so they accuse them of heresy and therefore They are working against them.
"They see the Taliban being their rival in the leadership of the Muslim world. There is organizational competition here, not just ideological rivalry," he concluded.
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