New Delhi, Aug 20: After a swift victory for the Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is likely to become the new President of Afghanistan, while his deputy Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai in the Doha office is expected to hold a key position in the new government. Stanikzai, who was the deputy foreign minister in the previous Taliban regime, is unlike his peers, who is considered highly educated, as he has passed out from the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun. She was trained in the Officers Academy in the 1970s under the Indo-Afghan Defense Cooperation Programme. In contrast, most other Taliban leaders have studied from madrassas in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Born in 1963 in Baraki Barak District of Logar Province, Afghanistan, Stanikzai is ethnically a Pashtun. In the 1980s, he left the Afghan army and joined ‘jihad’ against the Soviet army. He fought alongside Nabi Mohammadi’s Harkat-i Inquilab-e Islami and Abd ul Rasool Sayaf’s Ittehad-e-Islami as commander of his South-Western Front. The Harkat is the Mujahideen faction, which is considered the closest to the Taliban in terms of both worldview and personnel, and has included Mullah Omar in its ranks. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, Stanikzai served as deputy minister of foreign affairs and later as the rebel regime’s deputy minister of public health.
According to analyst Kate Clarke, the English-speaking ‘soldier’ remained the face of the Taliban for the West, but was never trusted by his senior, then Foreign Minister lawyer Ahmed Muttawakil Abdul Ghaffar, who later broke away from the Taliban when The US launched attacks on Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden. Another interesting thing about Stanikzai is that her daughter is studying in the same America whose civilization, manners and capitalism have always been hostile to the Taliban.
After the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, he, like all Taliban leaders, first went to Pakistan and then to Qatar. Qatar’s government has agreed to financially support the former Taliban leader and his family. Two years ago, Tolo’s former news reporter shared a photo of Abbas Stanikzai’s daughter, who was studying in the US. In 2015, she took charge of the Taliban’s political office in Doha. It will be called the double mentality and hypocrisy of the Taliban that Abbas Stanikzai’s daughter is studying abroad, while they do not allow girls to go to school in Afghanistan.
Stanikzai is also remembered by Kandahar as an officer deemed sufficiently ‘presentable’, often tasked with interacting with foreign visitors and occasionally giving media interviews in English. When Mullah Omar, the founder of the Taliban, ruled Afghanistan, he was assigned this type of responsibility. As a Taliban ambassador, Stanikzai visited US President Bill Clinton in 1996 to persuade the Clinton administration to give diplomatic recognition to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. This was the time when Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recognized the terror organization’s rule.
Although Stanikzai and others were banned from international travel under UN guidelines, arrangements were reportedly made to allow them to travel to Qatar. According to Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, Stanikzai has represented the Taliban in “several rounds of peace talks with the US and the Afghan government”.
In 2016, he went to Beijing and met with the Chinese leadership to establish direct links between the Taliban and China. After the US-Taliban agreement, he was traveling to Moscow, Uzbekistan, China and other places. The buzz is that Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai may again get responsibility in the Taliban’s foreign ministry and be made foreign minister.
(This article is taken in an arrangement with indianarrative.com)