Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Kabul on Monday for an emergency meeting with Afghanistan’s political leaders. At issue is the failure of President Ashraf Ghani and his rival Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah to bury their political hatchet and work together to implement a Taliban peace deal.
Pompeo threatened to withhold $1 billion in assistance for Afghanistan if the Afghan leaders do not form an inclusive government and move forward on the peace process. “We note that Afghan leaders are acting inconsistently with their commitments under the Joint Declaration, chiefly failing to establish an inclusive national team to participate in intra-Afghan negotiations or take practical steps to facilitate prisoner releases by both sides as a confidence-building measure to reach a political settlement and achieve a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire,” Pompeo said. He then promptly flew off to Qatar, where he met with Taliban chief negotiator Mullah Baradar, who did not merit the same degree of opprobrium.
There is something deeply wrong with the State Department when the United States treats the Taliban better than the elected Afghan government, no matter how dysfunctional Afghanistan’s leaders may be.
First, consider the dispute between Ghani and Abdullah: This is not simply the result of Afghan veniality but is rather a direct result of special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad’s misguided maneuverings. Khalilzad is a deeply unpopular figure in Afghanistan. While he promotes himself as a skilled diplomat to American audiences, Afghans see him as a businessman who once promoted and sought to profit off the Taliban and a dishonest interlocutor who prioritizes his own image above all else, even once raising trial balloons about his presidential run in Afghanistan.
While Americans see him as an immigrant success story, Afghans see him as an ethnic chauvinist who promotes Pashtun factions above minority groups. Afghans and regional actors in neighboring countries with whom Khalilzad met say that the U.S. special envoy first mulled sidelining the new elections entirely to avoid the complication of Afghans expressing their popular will and then applied pressure behind the scenes to avoid a second-round vote that could delay the unveiling of his plan. Had Pompeo and Khalilzad simply allowed democracy to take its course rather than meddle in the elections and the resolution of fraud accusations, they likely could have avoided the current Afghan impasse.
More broadly, the plan for which Pompeo and Khalilzad appear to sacrifice everything the U.S. has so far achieved in Afghanistan is a disaster. It requires little of the Taliban, fails to address the Taliban’s intertwinement with al Qaeda and does not address Pakistan’s support for the group. Khalilzad promised the withdrawal of U.S. forces as a precondition to talks, but he did not demand a similar withdrawal of the foreigners (Pakistanis, Chechens, Saudis, Yemenis, and others) who augment the Taliban’s ranks. It is as naïve as the Kellogg-Briand Pact and slightly less effective. While praising the deal, Pompeo and crew ignored intelligence showing the Taliban had no intention of honoring even its paltry agreements. And while Khalilzad avoided consultations with the democratically elected Afghan government and its security officials, he committed the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners before intra-Afghan talks would even begin.
Somewhere along the line, Khalilzad evidently forgot to ask the Afghan government what it thought about releasing a brigade of hardened terrorists who murdered men, women, and children to impose their medieval vision on society. Republicans criticized President Barack Obama for releasing five battle-hardened Taliban members from Guantanamo Bay, but Pompeo now demands Kabul release a thousand times as many.
Pompeo’s demands are all the more insulting given what they omit: On March 20, the Taliban attacked an Afghan army and police post, slaughtering 24 Afghan soldiers and police. They reportedly burned one prisoner alive. Across Afghanistan and, indeed, outside the State Department, this seems far more unhelpful to the cause of peace than the slow pace of Afghan government formation.
U.S. foreign assistance is not an entitlement. But Afghans see the writing on the wall: As the U.S. winds down its assistance to the elected Afghan government, Pakistan is maintaining, if not increasing, its subsidies of the Taliban. The Afghan government understands that, whatever spin Pompeo wishes to put on it, the U.S. is abandoning it. As such, it is better to be abandoned before springing enemy fighters from prison rather than immediately after.
Perhaps Pompeo was willing to agree to what, on its face, is a horrible deal because he understood that President Trump wanted out of Afghanistan and saw no reason to pay $30 billion annually to maintain the U.S. presence there. That’s fair enough. But in such a case, it is better to withdraw without throwing Afghans under the bus or embracing and empowering the Taliban.
Simply put, Pompeo’s pro-Taliban strategy makes no strategic, military, or moral sense. It will remain a lodestone around his legacy and diminishes U.S. security not only regionally but also worldwide.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
