In June 2013, the Taliban, waging a war in Afghanistan against the government of then President Hamid Karzai in Kabul and the United States and NATO military presence in the country, opened their first international office in Doha, Qatar. This outpost became a significant moment for a more robust, planned, and designed outreach by the Taliban to the world, in their attempts to end Afghanistan’s near two-decade long conflict and to bring the Taliban back into prominence in Kabul, the seat of power they lost to the US-led invasion after 9/11.
“Even if we don’t say that the US is defeated in Afghanistan, it is an open secret now that they’re defeated,” said Anas Haqqani of the Taliban’s Haqqani Network, after being released from prison in 2019 in exchange for two Western professors taken hostage by the Taliban in 2016.