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“The most prevalent 

view among Taliban, that 

the Americans will pick the 

winning candidate, is a belief 

shared by many non-Taliban 

Afghans as well. Furthermore, 

Taliban believe that democratic institutions in modern 

Afghanistan are a facade 

because all key decisions 

rest with the ‘occupiers.’ ”

January 30, 2014

The Taliban’s View of the 2014 Elections

Summary

•	 The Afghan Taliban Movement has publicly rejected the legitimacy of the April 2014 elections.

•	 The Taliban’s military leadership hasissued instructionsto officials and commandersto disrupt

the elections but hasleft field commanders with wide discretion on how to go about doing so.

•	 Many in the Taliban follow the electoral contest closely and comment on developmentsin

terms very similar to how they are described by the political and educated classin Kabul.

However, the anti-election sentiment in the Taliban leaves no scope for any faction to cooperate with the process.

•	 The Taliban will likely be able to intensify violence approaching the election, but notsufficiently to derail the overall process.

Introduction

Afghanistan’s 2014 election is widely seen asthe critical test for the viability of the country’s

post-2001 politicalsystem. Stability following the withdrawal of international troops depends as

much on a legitimately-elected and effective presidentialsuccessor to President Hamid Karzai as

it does on battlefield outcomes. The Afghan Taliban Movement remainsthe principal organized

armed opposition to the Kabul government and poses a viable threat. Lack of progressin 2013

toward a negotiated politicalsettlement between the Taliban and the Kabul government dashed

hopesthat the Taliban might participate in the elections and join a post-NATO government.

Instead the Taliban opted to fight to restore its authority in Afghanistan. A political component

of thisstrategy depends on disrupting the election process and delegitimizing its outcome. This

Peace Brief analyzes Taliban attitudes and intentionstoward the 2014 elections and their ability

to disrupt them.

How the Taliban Are Organized

The Taliban Movement is hierarchical, with supreme authority vested in the leader (ameer) Mullah Omar. Although Mullah Omar is cloistered and plays no active role in running the Movement,

several key deputies act in his name. Thisleadership centralizes appointmentsin the Taliban’s

nationwide parallel administration and military command structure. But the Movement is also

a fraternity in which all membersshare status by virtue of having gained knowledge in the

madrasa system or joined the jihad, and use thisstatusto claim authority over the civilian population. The principle ofsubordination to the ameer dictatesthat Taliban acrossthe country must

obey the official line of opposing the elections. But the anti-hierarchical principle of fraternity

Michael Semple

E-mail: m.semple@qub.ac.uk 

PEACEBRIEF165
© USIP 2014 • All rights reserved.

The Taliban’s View of the 2014 Elections

page 2 • PB 165 • January 30, 2014

meansthat local commanders and officials can use a high degree of discretion in choosing how

they will conduct this opposition.

Taliban Rhetoric about the 2014 Elections

The Taliban leadership has clearly rejected the 2014 electionsin Afghanistan, a position articulated in Mullah Omar’s October 2013 Eid statement. Eid statements are issued by the Taliban’s

Cultural Commission. The Octoberstatement denounced the elections as a meaningless“drama”

and accused anyone participating in them of betraying their religion and the national interest.

The statementsuggeststhat elections held under foreign occupation are illegitimate. It claims

that voting isfutile in any case because the United States will pick the person it wantsto run

the country and fix the results accordingly. It citesthe toppling of Egypt’s Morsi government in

July 2013 as evidence that the U.S. instrumentalizes electionsin its attempt to project power.

Significantly, while the published statement calls on the Afghan people to boycott the elections,

it does not issue any threats. The Eid statement can be thought of asstrategic guidance to the

Movement and should be taken more seriously than the sometimes bombastic and unsubstantiated claims also issued by the Cultural Commission. The Taliban at all levels, from leadership

figuresto field commanders, refer to this guidance and say that the Movement is“boycotting”

the elections.

The Taliban Military’s Stance on the Elections

Taliban field commanders confirmed that they had been urged to disrupt electionsso that the

population does not participate. The head of the Taliban military, Qayyum Zakir, has briefed

commanders and provincial officialsthat they must use all available meansto disrupt the election. These instructions have been issued as general guidance rather than specific orders. Field

commanders know that they have to decide how to operationalize this guidance. For example,

commanders must decide whether to attack locations associated with the elections, personnel

associated with the process, or voters and candidates.

Some eastern field commanders expressed dissent about this guidance—not because they

favor the elections, but because their operating ability depends upon maintaining local popular

consent. Attacking civilians associated with the election by intimidating voters would, for

example, undermine that consent.

Afghan media have documented cases of Taliban field commandersin insecure provincessuch

as Ghazni targeting civilians who registered to vote. However the violence wasinadequate to

derail the voter registration campaign in 2013, as 3.4 million new cards were issued nationwide

that year.

There are also rifts between pragmatists and hardliners within the Taliban Movement. A

Taliban veteran from the north described a tussle in his province between those trying to

intensify the conflict and those trying to mitigate the violence. Extremists had started to gather

intelligence on provincial council candidates with a view to planning attacks. But commanders

keen to avoid jeopardizing localsupport were wary of going after popular targets. (In the last

election, these pragmatists even managed to get an operation against the head of the provincial

election commission called off.) What Taliban actually do at the grassroots depends partly on

the outcome ofsuch local tussles between pragmatists and hardliners, with no unambiguous

guidance from the leadership.
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The Taliban’s View of the 2014 Elections

page 3 • PB 165 • January 30, 2014

Political Commentaries from the Taliban Leadership

Despite the robust top-level rejection of the process, commentsfrom many Taliban leaders and

mid-level officialssuggested that they follow the election process with interest and curiosity

through broadcast media and the many online vernacular newsservices. Although some of their

commentary elaborated distinctly Taliban perspectives, much of it waslocated within a wider

Afghan national discourse.

The most prevalent view among Taliban, that the Americans will pick the winning candidate,

is a beliefshared by many non-Taliban Afghans as well.1 Furthermore, Taliban believe that

democratic institutionsin modern Afghanistan are a facade because all key decisionsrest with

the“occupiers.”

One former deputy minister of the Taliban-era government argued that, irrespective of the

process, the elections could not produce a legitimate outcome because the leading candidates

lacked the qualitiesrequired of an Afghan leader. A formersenior minister gave a Shariat-based

defense of the institution of elections but lamented that the presence of foreign troopsrobbed

the process of legitimacy.

A mid-level official provided an alternative, perhaps more profound, version of the argument

that voting changes nothing. The country, he argued, is effectively divided into zones under

Taliban influence and zones under government influence. In the former, the Taliban will prevail

in ensuring that there is no election. But in the latter, the government will ensure there is an

election. This election will therefore produce a president who inherits a divided country, and the

conflict will continue irrespective of the electoral outcome.

Some Taliban in both leadership and field commander levels have expressed hope that the

next president would be more serious about reconciliation and create an opportunity for an

intra-Afghan settlement. However, the atmosphere in leadership circlesisso hostile to the electionsthat no individual or faction dares eitherspeak out against the electoral guidance or initiate

a course of action counter to it. Taliban sympathetic to the election at most are just waiting to

respond to a post-election opportunity.

Recent Taliban Efforts to Calibrate Their Violence

Given the Taliban’s public rejection of elections, the question is whether the Taliban military can

disrupt them. There are recent examples of the Taliban struggling to calibrate violence to match

either the propaganda orstrategic intent of the leadership. In November 2013, the Afghan

government convened a consultative jirga to consider the Bilateral Security Agreement with the

United States. The Taliban issued threatsto the event and to all individual participants. In the end,

however, they only managed to launch one abortive suicide attack, and the event proceeded.

On a more strategic level the Taliban military tried to respond to the transition process by

escalating the conflict nationwide to demonstrate that the“occupiers”were retreating due to

military defeat. Taliban commanders were ordered to remain in their areas of operation rather

than spend the winter in Pakistan, which had become the established pattern. The outcome

was patchy. In the two key contested provincesin the south, the number of Taliban operations

slightly increased in Helmand in December but fell in Kandahar. In the contested provinces of the

east, Taliban were more active in the Kunar province in December, but attacksfell in the Laghman and Nangarhar provinces. Even where Taliban did fight into the early winter period,such

asin Kunar, the upturn in activity was modest, with December attacks accounting for barely 10

percent of the annual total.
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The Taliban’s View of the 2014 Elections

page 4 • PB 165 • January 30, 2014

Implications of the Taliban’s Rejection of the Election

A similar outcome can reasonably be expected from the Taliban military’s effortsto disrupt elections. Groupsin the provinces will carry out more attacksthan they would have otherwise, but the

increase in violence will be less dramatic and widespread than hoped for by Taliban hardliners or

predicted by their propagandists.

It isrealistic to expect a 25 percent increase in overall incidentsrelative to what might otherwise have happened. A proportion of these additional incidents, but by no means all, will affect

election-related targets. The elections will thus be one theme in the ongoing Taliban campaign

against the political order, and not the focus of a centrally organised and distinct campaign.

The Taliban’slimited ability to operate in the main population centers, the willingness ofsome

field commandersto refrain from targeting the population, and the Movement’sinability to

operationalize centralized plans mean that the scale of violence will probably not be sufficient to

derail the elections.

On the other hand, the Taliban’s ability to conduct electoral disruptions will increase asthe

year progresses. Theirslow start up from winter and the occurrence of the poppy harvest make it

difficult to increase tempo in April. Thissuggeststhat any delay of the election past the established

April 5 date risks exposing it to more attacks.

Targeting the elections will be an opportunity forsome within the insurgency to establish their

hard-line credentialsthrough high profile operationssuch assuicide attacks on Kabul or provincial

centers, as well aslocalized examples of violent intimidation. 

The overall effect of the incremental increase in operations, backed up by propaganda and

armed intimidation, will be to reduce voting in Taliban-influenced rural areas of the south,southeast, east and more broadly in Pashtun areas. However, this Taliban factor will be only one among

several factors affecting electoral turnout.

The mostsignificant impact of Taliban pressure probably will be on electoral fraud rather than

on voter turnout. The anticipated Taliban campaign will help create a category ofstations which

are difficult to monitor and inaccessible to voters and polling agents. Effortsto conduct mass

fraud, either by the administration or local power brokers, are likely to focus on these stations.

Likewise, worries about a depressed turnout in Taliban-affected areas can be used by apologists of

“proxy voting”to legitimize this massfraud and motivate the electoral authoritiesin the districtsto

facilitate it.

Notes

1.	 See for example, Noah Coburn and Anna Larson, Justifying the Means, USIP Special Report 326,

March 2013.

About this Brief

This Peace Brief was prepared in the 

course of a larger USIP-sponsored 

study on the rhetoric, ideology 

and politics of the Taliban armed 

campaign. The findings are based 

upon Taliban public statements, 

interviews with past and present 

Taliban members and the Taliban 

Movement’s actions. Interviews were 

conducted by the author, Michael 

Semple, or reported to him by a 

researcher, during November 2013 

to January 2014. Semple is a visiting 

professor at the Institute for the 

Study of Conflict Transformation and 

Social Justice (ISCTSJ) at Queen’s 

University Belfast.