Afghan Peace Deal: Bracing for an Uncertain Future

Almost 18 years after launching the “War on Terror”, the United States finally negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020 to end the conflict; the key highlights being the withdrawal of foreign forces within fourteen months and the recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate stakeholder in Afghanistan with a rightful share in running Kabul’s affairs. The continued exclusion of the nation’s elected leadership from the Faustian Bargain, along with a deliberate ambiguity maintained by Washington on actual terms agreed with the Taliban hardly leaves any doubt on the absence of any long-term plan for Afghanistan. The Trump administration’s self-congratulatory disposition seemed to overlook the sense of urgency the deal created for the Afghan leadership that remains ill-prepared to deal with the post-withdrawal scenario. The last few months made it apparent that President Trump’s push for peace stemmed more out of the need to wind up the American mission in Afghanistan, eventually rewarding the Taliban’s fifteen year long consistency over the gradual stability its electoral politics was beginning to witness.
As expected, after agreeing to the ceasefire, the Taliban resorted to violence citing non-fulfilment of its core demands. In the negotiations preceding the deal, the ubiquitous absence of the Afghan government spoke much about the American acknowledgment of Talliban’s superior bargaining position and the compulsions to exclude the very stakeholders it spent more than a trillion dollars consolidating over these two decades. The deal also witnessed a change in the benchmarks the US originally began with to define its agendas for Afghanistan. From its initial objective of uprooting extremism and establishing democratic and inclusive institutional structures suited to Afghanistan’s multi-ethnic demographic mix, the final agreement saw the Taliban being accorded priority over the elected government. On its part, the Taliban promised no more than pledging against hosting the Al-Qaeda on Afghan territory. There has been no word from the American authorities on the Taliban’s own ideological outlook, which openly calls for upending the post 9/11 Washington-guided democratic experiment.
The peculiarity is profound in the abnormally long title of the Agreement, namely, “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States”, which in a way marks a symbolic negation of two decades of the American efforts towards nation-building in Afghanistan. The text of the agreement repeatedly highlights America’s refusal to recognize the Taliban as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, yet the terms only suggest why the opposite is true.
On the occasion of the deal, Secretary of State Pompeo spoke on Washington’s success in eliminating the Al Qaeda leadership that made the nebulous Af-Pak frontier its base of operations against the American led international forces. The success of anti Al Qaeda operations notwithstanding, defining America’s success only through drone strikes and intelligence operations against the AQ subdued merits of the hard-won democratic reforms. Further, less than a week after the deal, Trump’s statements that “Countries have to take care of themselves”, and that the Taliban could overrun Kabul after withdrawal demonstrate an indifference towards the future of the nation. The Taliban have been hailed as an effective counterweight to the growing influence of the Islamic State in Afghanistan. In the past months, there have been reports of joint operations carried out by the American forces and the Taliban against the Islamic State.
In the present state of affairs, the larger question hinges on the situation the vacating Americans are leaving Afghanistan in. Not only elected govt was excluded from the year-long negotiations, the post-deal phase has not ended violence as promised. Moreover, it leaves the political actors more fragmented than ever since 2002. For the political leaders, Khalilzad’s efforts are limited to enforcing consensus for installing a unity government, wherein Abdullah Abdullah and other senior opposition leaders were offered important roles.
At a time when Afghanistan’s political stakeholders are supposed to provide a unified front to the Taliban’s superior bargaining position, a new crisis developed after former CEO Abdullah Abdullah refused to accept the electoral result and held a separate swearing-in ceremony declaring himself as the new president of Afghanistan, refusing Ghani’s offer for selecting “40% of his cabinet and a role overseeing peace negotiations with the Taliban”. The present state of affairs substantially bolsters the Taliban’s claims of being the sole stakeholders in the Afghan politics.
In the author’s interviews with officials from the Ghani Administrations, it is known that after President Trump suspended peace talks with the Taliban last November, he had conveyed his dissatisfaction with President Ghani on Khalilzad’s handing of the situation. Khalilzad was still given a free hand, considering Trump Administration’s greater priority to a speedy withdrawal. Once talks restarted in December, Khalilzad finalised the deal, making promises on behalf of the Ghani administration without its consent, one of them being the release of 5000 prisoners, which tops the Taliban’s list of demands. In its next stage the agreement calls for an intra-Afghan dialogue between the Taliban and other political stakeholders to make way for a post-settlement dispensation. The proposal was inserted even after the Taliban refused to recognize the elected government as a legitimate party and aspires to settle for nothing less than a complete acquisition of the political machinery.
To sum it up, after spending over $2 trillion in last two decades the US leaves Afghanistan with a strengthened Taliban, higher opium production, a factionalised political leadership, and almost 40,000 dead civilians. While plans on exiting Afghanistan were laid down in Obama’s first term, the present terms of the deal portray that it is Taliban’s ability to modulate the violence and not the preferences of the Afghan populace that became the sole consideration for America.
The Author is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford and a Senior Contributor with Oxford Political Review.