Epistemic terrorism

In today’s day and age, terrorism is not merely enabled by ideology and technology but also most effectively by an epistemic strategy that sacralises the ideological lineaments of the terrorists’ main creed.

A concrete indication of this trend is the Taliban government’s use of sophisticated strategic communication tools through epistemic proxies like the Al Mirsaad, a web-based publication funded and directed by Taliban regime’s General Directorate of Intelligence’s media wing.

Recently, the Al Mirsaad’s credentials as a Taliban mouthpiece were exposed by a report, “Heretics, Adversaries, & Legitimacy” by the Durand Despatch, an independent digital news organisation that specialises in security and counter-terrorism affairs in Afghanistan and South Asia.

The analysis of the Al Mirsaad’s 137 articles, published between October 2025 and March 2026, identified a pattern of deification of the internationally isolated and delegitimised Taliban regime.

The Taliban’s messaging strategy

It appears that the Taliban regime has started employing sophisticated information operations through mouthpieces such as Al Mirsaad, extending the reach of their strategic messaging to the Western audience, ostensibly to curry favour with the human rights sensitive West, which so far has ostracised the Taliban for their education apartheid against women and imposition of medieval strictures upon minorities.

To this end, the Al Mirsaad has been eulogising the Taliban regime in an attempt to establish its credentials as a sovereign entity that deserves international legitimacy. Russian recognition, and Indian diplomatic warmth have been cited as indicators of increased acceptance of the Taliban regime’s legitimacy and reasonableness, while countries like Pakistan are castigated for their aggression against Afghanistan. Clever communication artifices are employed to present the terror-supporting Taliban regime as a victim of the ISKP’s (Islamic State of Khurasan and Pakistan) terrorism which is propped up by the West and Pakistan.

This allusion is drawn to elicit Russian sympathy and is clearly evident in the shape of maximum number of articles on the theme in the month of July 2025 when the Russians were mulling over the option of recognising Taliban regime.

A narrative of victimhood

The terror apologists typically resort to the gaslighting tactics of concealing the misanthropy of terrorists in a victimhood narrative. The Al Mirsaad apparently practices the same tactics by burying the brutally oppressive and obscurantist image of Taliban in a carapace of mendacity by framing their distorted ideology as a counterpoint to a bigger menace — the sectarian terrorism of ISKP/Daesh.

Of the 137 articles produced by Al Mirshad, couched in language and idiom targeting the Western audience, over 50 per cent frame the ISKP as the main terrorist threat to regional peace and security while only 4 articles mention the TTP as a kindred terrorist entity.

In order to divert attention away from the egregious human rights violations and the blood curdling atrocities against the women, minorities, and hapless Afghan population, the Taliban regime has started a self expiatory epistemic campaign to paint a halo of innocent piety around itself. The strategy is to shift the focus away from their medieval statecraft towards entities like the ISKP to confuse the international community and to accuse neighbours like Pakistan of proxy warfare in Afghanistan.

The reality, however, cannot be obscured in this age of technology enabled transparency. Empirical evidence clearly points towards a steady rise of TTP-sponsored terrorism. Ever since the American departure from Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan has suffered over 3,000 civil and military casualties at the hands of the TTP, which operates from Afghanistan, under the patronage of Taliban regime. According to the Institute of Economics & Peace (IEP), Afghanistan has emerged as a major terror exporting hub due to weak governance, diffusion of terrorist ideologies and the prevalent conflict economy.

A deflection campaign

Meanwhile, the Taliban regime has perfected the art of dissembling and prevarication when it comes to the accusations of supporting terrorism. It poses to the world that it is opposing the ISKP and Al Qaeda, whereas it is a fact that Afghanistan has become a farraginous blend of terror entities under the benign gaze of the Taliban, who regard all these groups as their ideological kinsmen. There is a free lateral movement of terrorists from the Taliban to ISKP, Al Qaeda, ETIM, and IMU and all these terror franchises share the operational and logistical intelligence besides being animated by the same deviant version of ideology that celebrates spread of ideology through violence.

The Al Mirsaad, as a narrative building vehicle of a terror supporting regime shies away from even engaging with the issue of TTP terrorism that lies at the heart of the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict.

Al Mirsaad’s criticism of Pakistan’s retaliation against the TTP bases in Afghanistan is undergirded with the identical legal and moral logic as articulated by the Taliban regime’s spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid, without concentrating on the elephant in the room — the TTP’s brutal terror campaign against Pakistani civilians as well as law enforcement agencies.

Through channels such as Al Mirsaad, the Taliban regime is trying to redeem itself in the eyes of the international community. The Indian rapprochement, though driven largely by Indian anti-Pakistan animus, is also being presented as an opportunity for the Taliban regime to gain international recognition, knowing fully well the difficulties inherent in the undertaking due to the ICC’s arrest warrants for the Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhunzada and the Afghan Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani.

The global consensus against the Taliban’s human rights violations and the support of terrorist entities like Al Qaeda and ISKP is evident in the form of frequent UN censures of the Taliban regime for their blatant disregard of human rights and concomitant support to a large ecosystem of terrorism finding a salubrious environment under the Taliban’s patronage.

Justifying support for terror through epistemes is a bigger crime than the acts of terror themselves. ...