Every U.S. president since Bill Clinton has been elected with a mandate to focus on domestic issues and the economy, only to have reality intercede. Joe Biden, the apparent winner of the presidential election, may want to follow suit, but the decisions of war and peace will consume his first days, especially with U.S. troops stationed abroad in war zones. It is fair to question Biden’s foreign policy judgment, who, as a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the incoming president most fluent in foreign affairs since former CIA director George H.W. Bush entered the Oval Office in 1989.
Biden may share President Trump’s goal of drawing down American troops in Afghanistan, but if he wants to succeed, he needs to break with Trump policy on day one.
Put aside Trump’s tweet declaring his intention to bring home all U.S. troops by Christmas. That likely won’t happen. Twitter may be useful in bypassing the media to talk directly to the public, but it is not a back channel upon which the Pentagon will accept orders from their commander in chief.
Rather, it is time to acknowledge and correct the problems underlying the United States-Taliban deal. There is no shortage of writing about the deal’s flaws. In his rush to get the Taliban’s signature on a piece a paper, regardless of its content, Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad cut out the elected Afghan government from important consultations and even blacklisted key officials such as now-Vice President Amrullah Saleh and Hamdullah Mohib. He bypassed any commitments on Pakistan’s part to stop supporting terrorism. And, in the months since the Feb. 29 agreement, he has twisted intelligence and massaged assessments in order to maintain the fiction that the Taliban were adhering to the deal.
Simply put, there can be no success with Khalilzad in office. Afghans have no confidence in him, and the Taliban see him as a useful idiot. Biden should fire him on day one.
Biden’s team should then hold the Taliban strictly to its terms and commitments and, failing their adherence, simply walk away. Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security announced today that it had killed Mohammed Haneef, the chief of al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent. The al Qaeda leader was in Afghanistan and enjoying Taliban safe-haven when Afghan forces managed to kill him. This is not the first time that the Taliban was caught red-handed hosting an al Qaeda leader in violation of their and Khalilzad’s insistence that they had severed ties.
The Trump administration is now pushing forward with delisting 13 Taliban commanders whose finances were frozen by the United Nations. The State Department has said most are dead but has provided no evidence to support this claim. Nor has Khalilzad’s team explained the basis for their faith that the unfrozen assets will not be used by the Taliban to continue the fight in Afghanistan. Indeed, there is little faith in such commitments given how Khalilzad previously turned a blind eye on the return to the battlefield of almost 5,000 Taliban fighters he demanded be released from an Afghan government prison.
Earlier this month, the Taliban tried to take over Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city but symbolically the most important to the Taliban as the former home to the group’s founder Mullah Omar. Afghan forces backed by U.S. airpower beat the Taliban back. Last month, a Taliban terrorist attack in Ghor Province killed and injured scores of children. For the Taliban to engage in such attacks, and even try to seize a provincial capital, is a violation of their agreement. At the very least, the U.S. should support the designation and imposition of financial sanctions upon those Taliban officials responsible for the attacks, even as it considers unfreezing the assets of others.
Biden appears prepared to retain a small counterterrorism presence in Afghanistan of perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 troops. Such a force is not unlike what Khalilzad and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo envisioned before Trump’s “home by Christmas” tweet. It is a small investment not designed to win the war, but perhaps enough to prevent the worst outcomes. However, if Biden wants peace, he must hold the Taliban to account diplomatically. Whoever has the Afghanistan policy lead on Biden’s team — Jim Cunningham, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, is the name most mentioned — might continue the peace process, but also recognize that its only hope for success is to consult with Kabul on every major decision and initiative, recognize that peace is not possible if the reality of Pakistan’s terror support is not addressed, and reinforce that the commitments inherent in the Feb. 29 deal are applicable to all sides and not an à la carte menu from which the Taliban can pick and choose.
He must also walk away from Khalilzad’s scheme to use the Taliban to fight the Islamic State. That is the Afghan army’s job, and it should be equipped and aided so that they might do it effectively. To trust the Taliban to fight the Islamic State when the Taliban remains tightly connected on a family and organizational level with the group is essentially to ally with and empower al Qaeda. It is a scheme that would never have passed muster if congressional intelligence and foreign affairs oversight was more rigorous, and it is an idea for which the U.S. will pay a steep price. If peace is the goal, it is time to recognize that it is hard and must be based on reality rather than diplomatic wishful thinking.
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.
