Why Talking to the Taliban Is the Right Move

CSS Current Affairs

In 2012, while I was serving as senior adviser to the State Department special representative
for Afghanistan and Pakistan, I met in Istanbul with a group of Iranian scholars and former
diplomats. After listening to the Iranians protest the United States’ purported plans to
establish permanent bases in Afghanistan, I told them that they were worrying about the
wrong thing. Their problem was not that U.S. forces would stay forever; it was that, sooner
or later, they would leave, and the Iranians and their neighbors would once again be stuck
with a problem that they could not solve. (CSS Current Affairs)
Sure enough, that time is coming. In December, The New York Times reported, “The Trump
administration has ordered the military to start withdrawing roughly 7,000 troops from
Afghanistan in the coming months.” The U.S. government and the Taliban are reportedly
close to agreement on a partial framework of a peace deal. Now it is the turn of strategists
in Washington to worry about the wrong thing. They fear that the Trump administration is
repeating the mistake made by the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan: negotiating a troop withdrawal that leads to the collapse of the U.S.-backed
government or a civil war. Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, for
example, described the negotiations as a “surrender.”
The negotiations do not represent surrender. Nor are they the reason that the United States
is aiming to withdraw its troops; that has long been Trump’s intention. Negotiating in the
shadow of a predetermined decision to withdraw may not be the best way to run a peace
process, but the real danger is that, regardless of the negotiations, Trump will order an
unconditional withdrawal and cut the assistance that sustains the Afghan state.
THE PATH TO PEACE
U.S. President Donald Trump’s current policy of negotiation constitutes a break with the
South Asia strategy that Trump announced in August 2017. In the speech laying out the
strategy, he hit all of Washington’s war-drunk high notes: “the men and women who serve
our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory,” he said, warning, “a hasty withdrawal
would create a vacuum for terrorists.” “In the end,” he promised, “we will win.”
Most important to Trump, as always, was not to be his predecessor: “Conditions on the
ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on,” he said. “America’s
enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.”
The strategy was also supposed to change “how to deal with Pakistan,” which, the president
said, has “sheltered the same organizations that try every single day to kill our people.”
“That will have to change,” he said.
There was, however, never any “plan for victory,” and Pakistan’s behavior did not change. If
Trump’s decision to withdraw was dictated by “conditions on the ground,” it was only
because his strategy had failed to alter those conditions. The U.S. military had defined
government control over 80 percent of the population as the benchmark for success, but in
January, the U.S. Department of Defense Special Inspector General for Afghan
Reconstruction reported that from August 2017 to October 2018, the proportion of the
Afghan population living in areas under government influence or control remained constant
at 64 percent. “Conditions on the ground” had not improved since the start of the Trump
administration, when General John Nicholson, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told the
Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States and the Afghan government were
in a “stalemate.” Two years later, Trump’s South Asia strategy had not moved the stalemate
any closer to victory. A devastating National Intelligence Estimate issued in August 2018
reported that, if anything, the Taliban was gaining ground.
Although Trump is hardly known to accept intelligence estimates at face value, this one
confirmed that his original instinct to pull out had been right. Some in the administration,
most likely led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, convinced the president to try
negotiations before a unilateral withdrawal. Pompeo hired Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned
Afghan-American Republican foreign-policy figure who had worked on Afghanistan in the
Reagan and both Bush administrations. As special representative for Afghan Reconciliation,
Khalilzad was given a few months to negotiate a deal before Trump pulled the plug.
A negotiated solution was always the only way out of Afghanistan, but the military insisted
that the United States and the Afghan government should negotiate only from a “position of
strength,” which was always just over the horizon, defined by a Soviet witticism as an
imaginary line that recedes as one approaches it. The longer the United States waited for
the position of strength, the weaker its actual position became, so when Trump finally
accepted the inevitable, Washington was hardly in a position to impose terms.
Kabul and Washington had hoped that military success would force the Taliban into direct
negotiations with the Afghan government. But there was no such success, and the Taliban,
which reached agreements with the government in 2001 and 2004 only to find the United
States unwilling to accept them, had concluded that negotiating with the Afghan
government without an agreement with the United States was pointless. The Taliban has
not ruled out talking to the government, but it insists on first reaching an agreement with
the United States on ending what it calls the “occupation.” The choice facing Washington in
2018, therefore, was between direct negotiations with the Taliban and no negotiations at
all.
Now the two sides are reported to be close to an agreement under which U.S. forces would
withdraw and the Taliban would guarantee that any future government in which they
participate would join the fight against international terrorism. Some critics worry that the
United States will remove its troops in return for nothing but unenforceable promises by the
Taliban. According to negotiators, however, the agreement would rely not on trusting the
Taliban’s promises but on carefully sequencing the components of the agreement and
insisting on monitoring mechanisms. The best counterterrorism program would be a
political agreement that stabilizes Afghanistan, puts an end to incentives to mobilize
terrorist support, and closes ungoverned spaces that terrorists can exploit. The putative
agreement specifies, as Khalilzad tweeted in January, that “Nothing is agreed until
everything is agreed, and ‘everything’ must include an intra-Afghan dialogue and
comprehensive ceasefire.” Those internal Afghan talks, Khalilzad also tweeted, should be
conducted by a “national, inclusive, and unified #Afghan negotiating team,” and he met with
groups of women and youth to illustrate what he meant.
That intra-Afghan dialogue is where Afghans, with international backing, can defend their
rights. The relationship of the troop withdrawal to the dialogue is yet to be agreed upon, but
the U.S. and Afghan position is that any timetable for withdrawal should be linked to the
implementation of the political settlement, not just to a calendar.
HISTORY’S WARNING
Trump could still upend this framework and opt for a unilateral withdrawal and aid cuts.
Such a decision could well lead to the collapse of the Afghan government, a scenario that
recalls the end of the Vietnam War. The Paris Peace Accords, reached in January 1973,
provided for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam within 60 days.
Although they included provisions for a cease-fire and a political settlement, these were to
take place after U.S. forces left. The United States failed to make its withdrawal conditional
on either, and so neither happened. The South Vietnamese government nonetheless
survived for over two years. Only in 1975, when a war-weary U.S. Congress cut off all
military and financial aid to South Vietnam, did Saigon finally fall.
A similar story played out after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Under the Geneva
Accords of 1988—negotiated by Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, and the United
States—all Soviet troops would withdraw from Afghanistan by February 1989, and Pakistan
and the United States would stop providing aid to the mujahidin based in Pakistan by May
1988. Yet the accords made no provision for a political settlement within Afghanistan. When
the deadline for cutting off aid to the mujahideen arrived, the United States and Pakistan
asserted that they would continue to support the mujahideen for as long as the Soviet
Union supported the Afghan state. The Soviets withdrew on schedule anyway. Over two
years later, in September 1991, the United States and a collapsing Soviet Union agreed to
stop providing aid to their clients. The Soviet Union collapsed in December. Short of money
to pay his armed forces and feed Afghanistan’s urban population, Afghan President
Mohammad Najibullah resigned and fled in April 1992. According to a UN peace plan, an
interim government formed abroad was meant to replace him, but fighters inside
Afghanistan had no stake in that agreement. The country collapsed into civil war.
Such a scenario could play out again in Afghanistan. The United States could catastrophically
reduce its military and financial assistance with or without negotiations—but the
negotiations provide the only path to stability after the inevitable withdrawal. Trump must
allow his negotiators and the Afghan government to take the time they need to reach a deal
that links the implementation of the withdrawal agreement to an Afghan political
settlement, and he must maintain the flow of aid needed to keep the Afghan state
functioning.
Courtesy: Foreign Affairs