President Trump threw a wrench into the Afghan peace process when, last October, he announced his desire to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by Christmas. That tweet upended a timeline negotiated over months and enshrined in the Feb. 29, 2020, peace deal with the Taliban. Trump’s subsequent shake-up in the Pentagon leadership, seemingly motivated by his frustration that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and top generals were not accelerating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan underscores both Trump’s rejection of the decadeslong logic of U.S. force projection and his desire to bring U.S. forces home before the end of his presidency.
While Trump’s moves have thrown Afghanistan into turmoil, it is not likely U.S. forces will completely abandon the country before inauguration day. Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller said that current Pentagon plans envision reducing U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half, to 2,500 men by Jan. 15.
That will push critical decisions about the future of U.S. policy in Afghanistan to President-elect Joe Biden. As vice president, Biden was skeptical of nation-building and reportedly argued for only a small U.S. presence of the relative size which he will now inherit to focus more on select counterterror missions.
Whether that mission alone can be successful is worthy of debate: to focus on countering Al Qaeda or Islamic State terror without addressing their interplay with the Taliban or Pakistan’s culpability in Afghanistan’s insecurity is to treat the symptom and not the disease. Alas, there appears little hope that Biden’s team will change. Jarrett Blanc, a former Obama administration official and partisan pundit, ridiculed the notion of holding Pakistan to account in Afghanistan last spring but was unable to otherwise address how to reduce Pakistani empowerment of the Taliban.
Biden’s team will likely seek to re-engage in the Taliban peace process but will say they will do so more effectively. That won’t be hard. From the very start of the U.S.-Taliban agreement, there were questions about Taliban sincerity. Trump’s desire to withdraw led his team to turn a blind eye toward Taliban cheating. Desperation is never an effective negotiating strategy. Likewise, adversaries will test U.S. seriousness after any deal. The Taliban tested Trump from day one and found they would suffer little, if any, consequence for terror and cheating.
Still, some on Biden’s team reportedly believe that the best way to move forward to intra-Afghan dialogue and an eventual peace would be to maintain consistency by keeping Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad in his current position as chief negotiator, at least on a provisional basis.
This would be a mistake. Certainly, Khalilzad is well-qualified. He was born in Afghanistan and speaks the country’s languages. He has a nearly quarter-century-long history with the Taliban, first as a businessman and then as a diplomat. Sometimes, however, strengths can also be weaknesses. Detachment can be a virtue, especially against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s complicated tribal dynamics.
The issue is not limited to Afghanistan. Negotiators are seldom as indispensable as they may believe; quite the contrary, envoys who span administrations in order to maintain continuity and preserve institutional knowledge are rarely successful.
Consider the Middle East peace process: Dennis Ross shepherded talks with the Palestinians from the tail end of the Reagan administration through the George H.W. Bush administration years and then as special envoy under Bill Clinton. He knew the players intimately, but his tenure was largely marked by failure. The hope that accompanied the signing of the Oslo Accords turned into despair amid violence and terror. Both Israelis and Palestinians tested American resolve. Ross and his team too often would turn a blind eye toward cheating and terrorism to keep the process alive. A focus on daily minutiae blinded Ross’s team to the broader failure of their efforts. Simply put, they became so ingrained in their ways that they lost sight of the forest through the trees.
Nor was Ross alone. Former Secretary of State James Baker spent seven years as a special envoy for the United Nations secretary-general during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to resolve the Western Sahara dispute, but made little headway and may actually have set the process back as the Polisario Front took advantage of his process to empower themselves without any intention of accepting peace.
Back to Afghanistan: Khalilzad may have shepherded the process which culminated in the Feb. 29 agreement, but he did so at significant costs to its content. He cut the Afghan government out of the process, in effect fulfilling the Taliban’s goal to delegitimize Afghanistan’s elected government. On a personal level, his tenure has been rocky. While he meets with the Taliban, he continues to blacklist critics like Afghan National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib and Vice President (and former intelligence chief) Amrullah Saleh. Those grudges now undercut the broader mission.
If Biden shuffles the deck and appoints another envoy, he can uphold what Khalilzad did right while correcting what Trump’s special envoy did wrong. As the United States and other international partners seek to encourage intra-Afghan dialogue, a new special envoy would enable a fresh start with all Afghan government officials. Likewise, because the Taliban have tested Khalilzad and found him either unable or unwilling to enforce the redlines of the Feb. 29 deal, he has lost the credibility needed to bring peace home. A fresh face, with clear Biden backing, could question conventional wisdom and would have the authority to re-set American credibility and give the U.S. an opening to insert new, fresh ideas into the process, including perhaps those that would hold the Taliban’s sponsors to account. Indeed, it was a willingness to shake-up a peace team and consider fresh ideas that enabled Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to make a breakthrough in Middle East peace.
Khalilzad is a patriot and can contribute without being a special envoy. Biden’s team can consult him as an experienced Afghan hand, just as they might also talk to George H.W. Bush’s special envoy Peter Tomsen whose encyclopedic knowledge of Afghanistan has no parallel, or countless others. But, it is a new time in Afghanistan. Personnel is policy. If Biden wants to be successful, only new faces can push Afghan reconciliation forward and give the country hope for peace.
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.
