In a leafy lane in Delhi’s Diplomatic Enclave, Afghanistan’s embassy is grappling with an issue confronting Afghan diplomats in capitals across the planet triggered by the hasty, unseemly exit of former President Ashraf Ghani and therefore the rapid takeover by the Taliban – which authority does it now serve?
The embassy in India – a bit like Afghanistan’s embassies across the planet – has chosen to take care of that it continues to represent the sooner Afghanistan Republic, using the arguable logic that while Mr Ghani and a number of other of his ministers may have fled, he and his government didn’t resign, keeping alive, so to talk , the authority of the erstwhile Republic.
At the Delhi embassy, the red-and-green flag of the sooner Afghan Republic has not been replaced by the austere black-and-white pennant of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate. The portrait of former President Ghani continues to hold from the walls
It would be wrong, a politician who spoke on condition of anonymity told me, to offer legitimacy to a regime that has seized power by force. The Taliban, he said, doesn’t represent all of Afghanistan. The Islamic Emirate may have de facto control of Afghanistan, but not de jure, the official added, a stance he claims is analogous thereto of all Afghanistan embassies spread across the world , who, he says, are in regular touch with one another . This strategy, he says, is being steered by former ministers, most of whom are in exile.
The embassies are emboldened by the reluctance of much of the planet community, including India, in recognising the Taliban interim government.
The official said the Taliban had reached bent them on one occasion, a couple of weeks ago, but the embassy told them their allegiance remains with the erstwhile Republic until their (the Taliban) government receives wider global recognition. Until then, the embassy is working during a kind of jurisdictional twilight zone, mainly providing consular services to the sizeable Afghan diaspora in India.
Practical problems, loom though – mainly of funds. the traditional remittances from Kabul have ceased. The official told me they need cut costs and trimmed staff strength, mainly by shedding a number of its Indian employees. “We have funds to last us a couple of months,” he said. What after that? The official said that diplomats and bureaucrats like him are hopeful that the bottom reality in Afghanistan will change, with the emergence of a united resistance to the Taliban.
uring the previous Taliban regime, which ruled Afghanistan from1996-2001, an outsized swathe of the country’s north remained under the control of a coalition of anti-Taliban commanders referred to as the “Northern Alliance”. Countries like India recognised the Alliance as Afghanistan’s government in exile, providing legitimacy and funds to the Afghan embassy in Delhi. This time, however, every pocket of anti-Taliban resistance has collapsed, including the holdout Panjshir Valley region north of Kabul. The whereabouts of the resistance’s main leaders, Ahmad Massoud, son of the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, and former vice chairman Amrullah Saleh, remain unclear.
But the official was hopeful. “The Taliban aren’t strong,” he said, “we were weak. If we unite, things are going to be different.”
