On Feb. 29, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement to end violence in Afghanistan, or so Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested at a ceremony in Qatar where the Taliban’s negotiating team is based. “The Taliban demonstrated, even if only for a week, that when they have the will to be peaceful, they can be,” Pompeo declared.
Someone should have told the Taliban that.
Put aside the fact that violence in Afghanistan was not so depressed, as Pompeo claimed. Just because attacks went unclaimed did not mean that they did not happen. As I pointed out in a study of the politicization of intelligence for the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, politicians politicize and twist intelligence more frequently in pursuit of diplomatic agreements than to justify war.
Journalist Stephen Hayes highlights some flaws with the Taliban deal, and I have written here about its other loopholes. Perhaps its biggest one is the Taliban position, voiced by its chief negotiator Abbas Stanikzai, who says that the new agreement only stops the Taliban and U.S. forces from attacking each other, but that the Taliban can continue its fight against the elected Afghan government.
The Taliban agreement, which Pompeo now trumpets effectively follows the same model as last fall’s abandonment of the Syrian Kurds. The U.S. will pull back and leave its allies to their fate at the hands of aggressive, if not genocidal, regional forces.
The Taliban retains its Pakistani support. It remains committed to the violent overthrow of the elected Afghan governance and the imposition of an intolerant Islamist government that makes Saudi Arabia look liberal and approaches the cruelty and tyranny of the Islamic State. The same forces that now justify the betrayal of our Afghan allies try to whitewash the threats of resubjugating close to 17 million Afghan women and openly subordinate countering threats to U.S. security for the sake of a photo-op. Ending “endless wars” may seem like a compelling, populist slogan, but the agreement signed in Doha no more ends the Afghanistan War than President Trump’s flurry of tweets last autumn ended the Syrian conflict.
Both Trump’s supporters and detractors can agree he broke the mold on the presidency. In foreign policy, diplomats, journalists, and analysts have sought to define the Trump doctrine. Often, for both his aides and even for his cabinet secretaries, that involves reading his tweets and retroactively seeking to apply some logic. In most cases, Trump is inconsistent. He has embraced dictators and sang sweet-nothings to the likes Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but at times he has also threatened them and, in the case of Putin’s regime, sanctioned them more than his detractors acknowledge. Trump has walked away from the Iran nuclear deal but likely remains sincere in his desire to negotiate a new deal with Iran. The whole “maximum pressure” campaign is just as likely geared to that as it is to regime change.
But as Trump’s first term comes to a close, there is one consistency to his foreign policy vision: the idea that U.S. allies do not matter.
It is not only a matter of playing hardball with NATO or South Korea with regard to their own contributions to the alliance. Rather, it is a betrayal in a life-or-death manner that can never be reversed. It was former President Barack Obama who first took victory off the table in his declaration of his goals in Afghanistan, but he remained committed to the Afghan government. Trump felt no such obligation; he never recognized that the elected government, however flawed it might be, represented a bulwark against al Qaeda’s desire to fight the U.S. further afield. Likewise, he never understood that U.S. support for Syrian Kurds was not only morally the right thing to do, but it was realistically the best thing to do if the goal was to prevent the resurrection of ISIS and the ability of forces such as Russia, Iran, and Turkey to promote terrorism across the region.
Simply put, the Trump doctrine is betrayal.
It is a lesson that Afghans and Kurds have now learned well, and one which the South Koreans, Japanese, Estonians, Ukrainians, and Israelis should take to heart. Trump has not ceased endless wars; he has just empowered America’s adversaries and betrayed its allies as he lives under the illusion America can and should go it alone.
UPDATE: This article was updated to remove an unnecessary mention of the National Endowment for Democracy.
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.
