Taliban leaders have an interest in negotiating with the United States because of the risk that an Islamic State offshoot will establish a caliphate in Afghanistan, according to a senior diplomat.
“I think the Taliban appreciate … that there is a cost to Afghanistan’s development [imposed] by the ongoing war,” Alice Wells, an acting assistant secretary of state, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee during a Thursday hearing. “And they also see, frankly, the rise of other terrorist groups who pose a threat to themselves and to the future of Afghanistan.”
ISIS Khorasan is chief among a “vegetable soup” of terrorist groups that a unified Afghan government could confront if the Taliban and the U.S.-backed central government ever strike a peace deal. The ISIS affiliate, named for a historic region that stretches across multiple modern countries, has coalesced at the expense of the Taliban, despite an ongoing campaign of airstrikes from U.S. and NATO forces.
“That is a terrorist group that doesn’t recognize Afghanistan as a nation state,” Wells told lawmakers. “This is a group that focuses on [a] caliphate and borderless territory under the organization’s control. That’s a deep threat to all the people of Afghanistan, including the Taliban.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad to lead U.S. negotiations with the Taliban that are intended to foster a peace agreement and an eventual drawdown of American forces from Afghanistan. Khalilzad arranged an “agreement in principle” to cut the U.S. military presence in exchange for Taliban pledges to prevent al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a staging ground and to set the table for unprecedented negotiations between the militant group and the U.S.-backed central government.
“We would assume a peace agreement would provide a unified government that would reflect the will of all of the Afghan people and that would allow a concentrated effort against what will be remnant terrorist forces in Afghanistan,” she said.
Those talks were derailed by a Taliban attack that killed an American soldier, but Wells confirmed that U.S. officials are in “consultations” about how to proceed. The career foreign service officer was testifying instead of Khalilzad as part of a compromise that allowed the lead negotiator to brief the lawmakers in a classified setting before the hearing
“The Taliban do oppose the ISIS Khorasan group,” she said. “They devote resources, significant manpower resources, to combat ISIS Khorasan. I think one of the reasons we put such an emphasis on peace is that we need Afghans to be united against ISIS Khorasan.”
Some lawmakers and officials regard ISIS-K as a greater threat to the United States than the Taliban, one of the reasons why some Republican lawmakers are resisting President Trump’s interest in withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan.“If we leave Afghanistan under the wrong conditions, which I think, frighteningly, we’re actually on track to do, we’re going to be back here anyway,” Republican Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger told Wells.
Pentagon officials reported in June that ISIS Khorasan has gained territory one year after the State Department privately told the Washington Examiner that the organization had “grown stronger … despite a really withering military campaign” by the U.S.
“ISIS has been able to take advantage of the fact of the insurgency and the war that’s going on in Afghanistan, to exploit territory despite what have been very fierce efforts by [U.S. and NATO forces] to target them,” Wells said during the hearing. “We see a resilience and an enduring presence in places like Nangarhar and Kunar, where it can be quite difficult to eliminate their presence entirely.”
