India’s worries over Taliban in Afghanistan fuels talk of revived ‘Northern Alliance’ with Iran, Russia
- The anti-Taliban military front comprising several ethnic minority groups operated from 1996 to 2001 and was supported by Russia, Iran and India
- But distrust towards the government in Kabul and the Taliban’s tight border controls could impact any efforts for a coordinated resistance effort, analysts say
The alliance was supported by Russia, Iran and India after its inception in 1996 and remained a pocket of resistance in northern Afghanistan until it disbanded in 2001, when a more inclusive Hamid Karzai government, which had representatives from minority groups such as the Pashtuns, came to power in Kabul.
Indian external affairs minister S. Jaishankar’s visit to Iran and Russia last week fuelled such speculations, although analysts have observed that New Delhi was for now clearly focused on a diplomatic solution.
On Wednesday, Jaishankar and the foreign ministers of seven other nations, including China and Russia, met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Tajikistan, where he stressed that confronting extremism and terrorism should be a key purpose of the grouping, which is seen as a counterweight to the US-led Nato military alliance.
Senior officials from the SCO countries, as well as the EU and US, met on Friday in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, for a discussion on regional connectivity that pivoted to focus on the impact of instability in Afghanistan.
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Alexey Kupriyanov, a senior research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of Moscow’s Russian Academy of Sciences, said the revival of the Northern Alliance was “theoretically possible”.