The need to act against jihadist groups inspired by the Taliban

The March 22, 2024, terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall, 20 km west of the Kremlin in Moscow, is neither new nor surprising in the context of a protracted global war on terrorism and fails. Unfortunately, “3/22” has almost been forgotten to be added to the growing list of other dates commemorating terrorist attacks, including “9/11” (New York), “11/26” (Mumbai), on “7/7” (London), “11/3” (Madrid), “12/10” (Bali), “21/9” (Nairobi) and “23/7” (Sharm El Sheikh), for n just name a few.

After the tragedy of September 11 and other major terrorist attacks that followed, United Nations member states began to anticipate an increase in global terrorist activity resulting from the mutually reinforcing symbiotic relationships between different terrorist and criminal networks in permissive environments like Afghanistan. This prompted them to unanimously adopt the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy on September 8, 2006. As a single global instrument, “the strategy is intended to strengthen national, regional and international efforts to combat terrorism.”

However, despite this non-binding global consensus, UN member states have done little to work together to implement this strategy, allowing the instrumentalization of terrorism as a covert state policy against domestic and foreign adversaries. . No UN member state is as notoriously implicated in its relentless instrumentalization of terrorism and extremism to achieve its foreign policy and geostrategic goals as Pakistan, under the firm leadership of its military and intelligence services . The latter’s decades-long efforts to feed, harbor, train, equip and deploy Taliban militants to undermine international stabilization efforts in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021 have been sufficiently documented, studied and publicly reported.

Indeed, this long-standing Pakistani policy finally bore fruit on August 15, 2021, when the Taliban illegally and forcibly overthrew Afghanistan’s young democracy, calling it a victory of their years of jihad. Having shared battlefield space with the Taliban for the past ten years and having observed their rival’s steady progress toward victory over NATO forces (given the latter’s premature withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021), ISKP, al-Qaeda and other global jihadist groups have drawn inspiration from the Taliban’s unprecedented strategic gains in the country.

Now resurgent, Al-Qaeda and ISKP have once again begun carrying out terrorist attacks throughout the region. While al-Qaeda has enabled the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to hit strategic targets in Pakistan, the ISKP has carried out spectacular terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and more recently in Moscow. ISKP members arrested in Russia confessed to having lived and received training in Tajikistan, on the immediate border of Afghanistan. This is a growing terrorist threat that the rest of the world should not take lightly.

But no country, regardless of its influence and resources, can effectively counter and defeat terrorism unless key UN member states act together, in line with the main objectives of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy . If we fail to do this, we guarantee that no one will be spared from Taliban-inspired terrorist attacks. The 3/22 tragedy is just another wake-up call for concerted global action against terrorism before another terrorist attack in another country claims even more lives and innocent lives.