Sept. 11, 2001, was a national tragedy, the most consequential attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. The Clinton administration had negotiated with the Taliban and accepted the radical group’s counterterrorism assurances. The deaths of almost 3,000 people in New York City, 125 people at the Pentagon, and 265 more onboard the hijacked airplanes underscored the fallacy of that approach. The Taliban violated both its agreement to quarantine al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and to close its terror training camps.
The agreement which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Friday represents willful amnesia and magical thinking. It is compounded by the U.S. government’s deliberate undermining of Afghanistan’s elected government and, more recently, its electoral process, by ignoring massive fraud in order to avoid a second round in presidential elections.
Here are the basic problems with the Taliban deal: Withdrawal is not calibrated to the success of intra-Afghan dialogue. The Taliban are not a unitary organization, and there is no mechanism to prevent the Taliban from playing good-cop-bad-cop by simultaneously holding out an olive branch while ordering supposedly rogue units to attack.
It’s a tactic that Iran has embraced for 40 years. Pompeo has no excuse for falling victim to the same trap. The test of Taliban sincerity is disingenuous: Demanding the Taliban abstain from violence for a week prior to the beginning of the spring fighting season is akin to demanding teenage girls abstain from wearing bikinis in the middle of January.
Most of all, the agreement ignores Pakistan and its continuing efforts to undermine an elected, Afghanistan government at peace with itself and its neighbors. In effect, President Trump and Pompeo have repeated Barack Obama and John Kerry’s playbook by allowing their political desperation for a deal to trump any concern with regard to its substance or long-term impact on U.S. security.
That is bad enough, but counterterrorism suffered another blow that, in the long term, might be just as serious. I wrote here before with regard to Pakistan’s insincerity toward the Financial Action Task Force’s roadmap to end terror finance. Rather than take action against designated groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which call Pakistan home and are responsible for a number of bombings and massacres, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the Pakistani government instead sought to win exceptions for Lashkar-e-Taiba and its front groups. Rather than incarcerate terror leaders from Lashkar-e-Taiba, al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Haqqani Network, it simply created revolving-door justice, slapping sentences on them to appease foreign diplomats and to collect billions of dollars in aid but then quietly letting them go just months later. Most recently, Pakistani authorities in Islamabad allocated 2.5 acres of prime land to Maulana Abdul Aziz, a radical cleric known for his pro-Taliban sermons and for clashes which claimed the lives of at least 300 people 13 years ago.
Simply put, Pakistan is by any measure a state sponsor of terror.
And yet, under U.S. pressure, the Financial Action Task Force today allowed Pakistan to continue on its gray list and so avoid tough “black list” counterterror sanctions. In effect, the State Department put wishful thinking toward Pakistan above recognition of reality and, to use an Animal House reference, slapped Pakistan with a penalty no more serious than double-secret probation.
To believe that turning a blind eye toward terror catalyzes peace is naïve; Pakistan looks at such actions and concludes it can not only get away with murder, but simultaneously get the Trump administration to pay it to do so. If Pakistan can host bin Laden (and never hold any of its officials accountable for that duplicity) and support groups responsible for the deaths of thousands of people and still face no consequences, then Islamabad has no incentive to stop supporting terrorism and other extremist groups.
Trump and Pompeo can celebrate, but Congress and the press should be clear: What happened on Friday makes terrorist attacks on Americans abroad and the U.S. homeland more likely. It mocks the sacrifice so many American soldiers have made since Sept. 11. It betrays a generation of Afghan women. And it rewards a government responsible for sheltering terrorists and killing people.
Trump may want to end “endless wars,” but empowering the Taliban and al Qaeda will never do that. It will only bring those same wars closer to home.
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.
