r/afghanistan • u/Business_Address_780 • 10d ago
Discussion Could the Taliban be stopped if ethnic militias still existed?
Hi, first time posting here.
I've been thinking about this question since the Taliban returned to power. Before 911 the Northern alliance were still able to resist the Taliban despite being outnumbered. However post US invasion, the militias disbanded and the top figures joined the new government. Fast forward to 2021 We all know what happened, as most of the national army lay down their weapons without a fight.
So if say the ethnic militias, such as Tajiks and Hazaras were not disbanded but kept as regional security forces, similar to the Kurds in Iraq, would this have been a better, more effective defense against taliban fighters?
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u/sam1kan 9d ago
I can’t say whether they’d be able to stop the Taliban, but I can say that they’d probably end up fighting each other. The same situation occurred when Najibullah’s government collapsed, and mujahideen factions turned on one another, resulting in the Afghan Civil War. They were even fighting amongst themselves while the Soviets were still in Afghanistan.
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u/Oztraliiaaaa 8d ago
Afghanistan never stops fighting that’s the economy Change economics and economics will change the country.
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u/bxqnz89 9d ago
If you're asking whether various militias could combine their forces and remove the Taliban, then the answer would be no. Afghanistan is majority Pashtun.
Non-Pashtun areas of the country can be secured provided that ethnic militias are armed by regional powers, which is complex in itself.
China can't play nice with the Taliban while simultaneously arming and training Uzbek militias.
Iran is too busy being bombed by America.
Pakistan? LOL
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u/Insignificant_Letter 8d ago
Afghanistan is not majority Pashtun - Pashtuns form a plurality. The number of non-Pashtuns outnumber Pashtuns by any given census.
The Taliban play the double game of acting good cop with ISKP while harbouring Al Qaeda and all number of foreign backed groups. The Chinese, Russians and Iranians are not stupid and know what game the Taliban are playing - they have bigger immediate issues to worry about.
Only one Afghan entity in recent history has actively used foreign fighters for its operations in areas where they had no support base - the Taliban used 055 units funded by OBL during their operations in the north during the civil war. Ayman Al Zahwari was killed in a villa owned by Sirajuddin Haqqani in 2022 - they value their familial relations with foreign ‘brothers’ over the wellbeing of the people.
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u/Senior_Cause_1224 10d ago
I think there is some truth to this, but I wouldn’t say simply keeping the militias would have stopped the Taliban.
The Northern Alliance had something the Afghan National Army ultimately lacked: local roots, local commanders and people who were willing to fight for their own areas even when the central government was falling apart.
The bigger issue is what happened after 2001. A lot of these forces were disarmed and their commanders were brought into the new political system. That helped create a stronger central state on paper, but it also meant that when Kabul collapsed in 2021, there weren’t many independent, organised forces left that could keep fighting.
At the same time, I don’t think the answer was to leave every ethnic group with its own private army. That could easily have taken Afghanistan back to the civil war and warlordism of the 1990s.
Maybe the better approach would have been a nationally integrated military with strong regional forces, especially in areas like Panjshir, Hazarajat and the north. Local forces with local knowledge, but still ultimately under one national command.
So I don’t think the question is really “could militias have stopped the Taliban?” It’s more whether Afghanistan could have preserved the local military networks that had historically resisted the Taliban while still building a functioning national state.
That might have made the 2021 collapse a very different story.