America’s nearly two-decade war in Afghanistan may finally be drawing to a close.
After six days of negotiations in Qatar last week, the United States and the Taliban, the country’s Islamic insurgent group, have reportedly agreed on the outline of a long-sought deal which would allow US and foreign troops to leave the country, perhaps within 18 months.
If true, this would officially kickstart the end to Washington’s involvement in Afghanistan, and likely hand much of the country back to the Taliban — a group which has outlasted the efforts of three US presidents to destroy it.
On Monday, the Trump administration’s envoy for the peace talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the New York Times that “[w]e have a draft of the framework that has to be fleshed out before it becomes an agreement.”
That framework as it stands now looks like this: The Taliban, which controlled Afghanistan and harbored al-Qaeda prior to the September 11 attacks, would promise never to allow a terrorist organization to operate in the country again. In return, at least some US troops would leave the country after the Taliban agrees to a ceasefire and engages in talks with the Afghan government.
That’s a potential problem: The Taliban has for years refused to engage with Kabul, but also hinted that it might do so only after foreign troops leave the country.
Asked about Khalilzad’s comments to the Times and other similar reports, a State Department spokesperson told me that “[w]hile discussions were positive, the talks concluded without an agreement.”
“Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” the spokesperson added.
Still, some experts I spoke with called the tentative outline a “breakthrough” and “tremendously good news” — and it is, to a certain extent. It’s the first, and possibly best, chance for the US to establish a semblance of peace between the US-backed government in Kabul and the Taliban so American troops can come home.
But major concerns remain, experts tell me. Namely, it’s unclear that the Taliban would actually adhere to such an agreement. Most signs indicate the insurgents are winning the war; the Taliban has taken much of the country’s territory back from Afghan control, and has recently pulled off attacks that kill hundreds of Afghans and even American service members. That’s led some to say the diplomatic effort is really a cover so the US can withdraw its forces — a priority for President Donald Trump — while avoiding embarrassment.
What both champions and critics of the US-Taliban talks told me, though, is that there’s still a long way to go before a final deal is within reach. “There’s at least five or six moving pieces here,” Jason Campbell, who led the Pentagon’s Afghanistan peace talk efforts from June 2016 to September 2018 and now at the RAND Corporation, told me. “If one goes wrong, you’re back to square one.”
Why a US-Taliban deal in Afghanistan is so hard to strike
To understand why US-Taliban talks aren’t easy, you need to understand the recent history.
The Taliban took control of Afghanistan in the early 1990s, and by 1998 controlled around 90 percent of the country. The group imposed its strict interpretation of Islamic law on the country: men had to grow long beards, women were forced to cover themselves completely, and people were prohibited from watching movies or listening to music. Punishments for various crimes sometimes included public executions or amputations.
After September 11, 2001, the US started paying closer attention to the group. US officials suspected the Taliban of harboring Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated the 9/11 attack, and his terrorist group, al-Qaeda. Less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the US invaded Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power.
The Taliban quickly lost control of Afghanistan and retreated into neighboring Pakistan, where it has since regrouped. Now, over 17 years later, the Taliban is the most formidable insurgency fighting the United States and the Afghan government — and it doesn’t look like its more than 60,000 fighters are going anywhere any time soon.
That’s because the Taliban is actually winning the war against the Afghan military, which is backed by roughly 14,000 American troops in the country. Two charts from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the US military’s Afghanistan war watchdog, make this clear.
The first chart shows that the Taliban and other insurgent groups now control more populated areas than they did in August 2016. The second shows that insurgent groups control even more districts in Afghanistan than they did in January 2016, and their influence is growing.
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, April 2018 report
This has made it hard for the US to reach some kind of peace deal with the Taliban despite nine years of trying (the Trump administration tried again in earnest as recently as last August.) Basically, the Taliban doesn’t seem to want to make concessions because it currently has the upper hand in the war.
That’s given the US less power to compel the insurgents to speak with the Afghan government, which the Taliban derides as an American puppet with little control outside the capital. The Trump administration says the only way for the war truly to end requires the Taliban and the government in Kabul to negotiate a peace deal.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, for his part, has repeatedly expressed a desire for Taliban talks. He reiterated that stance in a Monday address after receiving a briefing from Khalilzad on last week’s negotiations. But Ghani doesn’t want to rush discussions, he noted, saying that a bad deal could lead to bloodshed in the future and make life worse for the people of Afghanistan — particularly the women and minorities who suffered greatly under Taliban rule.
It would still be a major sign of progress if the Taliban ultimately agreed to meet with the Afghan government. The problem is that the most difficult part — ironing out the specifics of an Afghanistan-Taliban deal — would come next.
Why a deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government is so hard to strike
Experts I spoke to noted a variety of potential problems that could impede an Afghanistan-Taliban deal, and all of them said such a deal could take months to years to make. The issues break down into roughly two categories: how much power the Taliban gets to have, and what America’s future role will be.
Let’s look at each one.
1) How much power does the Taliban get?
In the short term, this is likely the biggest sticking point.
The Taliban wants to govern the country again like it did prior to the US-led invasion in 2001. It therefore aims to obtain as much power as it possibly can in any potential deal.
Some ways it could do that might include taking control of certain government ministries, or even rewriting parts of the country’s Constitution to align more favorably with its conservative Islamist ideology. The Taliban may also push for a deal whereby the government controls the capital and other populous areas while the Taliban takes over parts of the country’s east and south — areas it controlled even at the height of the war.
Finally, and controversially, Taliban fighters could even integrate into the Afghan military. That’d be hard to swallow for many, as the group has killed thousands of Afghans and Americans. It’s unclear if the US would continue to fund or support Afghan forces if Taliban militants join their ranks.
Either of those possibilities would give the Taliban way more authority over the state than it has now.
One idea Ghani, the Afghan president, and the Taliban have already rejected is to form an interim government, where the insurgent group’s leaders would temporarily join the administration and allow talks to continue. The Trump administration and Ghani, though, say elections are the only way to have a democratic and representative government in Kabul.
Ironically, a vote could complicate the talks. Afghanistan will hold a presidential election in July, and as of now there’s no clear front-runner. No candidate, especially Ghani, will want to look like they will make any concessions to the Taliban. That means it’s less likely the government and the militants can find a mutually agreeable arrangement before then.
The insurgents don’t have a candidate in the election, in part because they know they can’t win. “The Taliban represent a small fraction of the Afghan population,” Frances Brown, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “Afghan society in 2019 looks very different from Afghanistan in the 1990s.”
But all of the talks assume one thing: that the security situation in the country remains about where it is — and that depends heavily on US involvement.
2) What is America’s future role in Afghanistan?
Trump has made no secret of his desire to remove US troops from Afghanistan. After months of pushing back against his advisers, the president reluctantly sent 3,000 more service members into the country in September 2017, upping the total to 14,000. He’s now considering cutting that number in half this year, although there’s no indication of an imminent announcement.
Still, the open talk of withdrawal has led to some to speculate the Trump administration would back even a minimal agreement so the military can rush out the door. “Kabuki theater is what this is,” Bill Roggio, an expert on Afghanistan at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies think tank, told me.
Roggio added that a withdrawal now, or at least talk of it, would harm any negotiations the Afghan government has with the Taliban. The insurgents could simply wait for Trump to tire of diplomacy and recall US troops home without completing the negotiations. There’s precedent for this: Despite ISIS’s continued presence in Syria, in December Trump shockingly ordered the return of America’s 2,000 troops stationed there. (However, that drawdown has not yet started in earnest.)
What’s more, it’s highly likely the Taliban will renege on any commitment it makes to the Afghan government if US forces aren’t around to back Kabul. Put together, Roggio said, “the US is debasing itself to the Taliban to get a peace deal that won’t result in peace.”
He’s not alone in that thinking. Vanda Felbab-Brown, an insurgency expert at the Brookings Institution think tank, told me there’s a “high likelihood we’re seeing a repeat of the Vietnam War negotiations.” In that instance, the US left the fight in 1973 after striking a deal with the North Vietnamese in hopes they would negotiate with their enemy, the South Vietnamese, and end the war. That didn’t happen. Instead, the North took over most of the nation, in violation of the US-brokered peace agreement.
Felbab-Brown noted a big difference between that moment and this one, though: The Taliban doesn’t have enough military might and power to control the entire country. But it can definitely control parts of Afghanistan’s more rural communities and engage in fighting multiple areas. Surely the Taliban would try to take control of Kabul, at some point, and that battle “would be a bloodbath,” she said.
Ultimately, few if any experts fully trust the Taliban to keep its word — leading some to wonder why we’re negotiating at all.
“Talking to the Taliban is a waste of time,” a retired Army three-star general who served in Afghanistan and has previously said he believes the US already lost the war there, told me. “Anything we offer remains negotiable. Once we’re gone, they intend to take over Afghanistan.”
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