Russia has evidence of the US cooperation with ISIS in Afghanistan. Zamir Kabulov, the Russian president’s special representative for Afghanistan and director of the Second Asia Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said about it at the online discussion at the Valdai Discussion Club on July 20
He also said that if there is no progress in the inter-Afghan negotiations, the Taliban might well seize power in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, there is not a single instance of the Taliban crossing Afghanistan’s borders with Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. In Afghanistan itself, the movement is not yet in a position to capture major provincial capitals.
“The Taliban are not yet in a position to capture major administrative centres of provinces [Afghanistan]. Although I don’t rule out that later in the very near future [the Taliban] may take control of two or three administrative centres, but they don’t have enough strength to take over, and more importantly, to hold the major provinces of the country for a long time”, – he said.
As reported earlier, another inter-Afghan meeting in Doha between a delegation from Kabul and Taliban representatives came to nothing. The two sides only adopted a brief statement of intent to continue peace talks. There was no mention of reducing the intensity of fighting or concluding a truce.
It should be noted that since June last year, the US media, and after them some of the European media, have been trying to support The New York Times’ propaganda throw-up “about Russian secret services’ collaboration with the Taliban”. Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov called the publication a lie and an “absolute false,” while the Russian Foreign Ministry described it as containing deliberately false information. Later, the insinuation was repeatedly denied by Pentagon officials and President Donald Trump.
However, the thesis was thrown into the media space again and again. As a result, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was forced to specifically state that “there was in fact no basis for this information”. In January of 2021, the Taliban themselves refuted the Democrats’ fabrications. In April, however, Joe Biden’s administration shook the old thesis out of the box again: if the White House is to be believed, the US intelligence community is more or less certain “that Russian intelligence officials sought to push the Taliban into attacks on US contingent and coalition personnel in 2019 and possibly earlier, including financial compensation.”