On Feb. 21, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that, after two decades of war, nearly 2,500 American deaths, and a trillion-dollar investment, the United States and the Taliban had reached an “understanding” for a one-week pause in violence, to be followed by a broader agreement. Much of the agreement, supposedly taken in “consultation with [Afghanistan’s] Government of National Unity,” remains shrouded in secrecy and secret annexes, but the broad outline is known: America and the Taliban will sign the deal, which will be followed by a U.S. withdrawal and intra-Afghan negotiations in order to bring about a political solution. To borrow an expression I heard in Afghanistan, Pompeo has taken a cucumber, painted it yellow, and now sells a banana. Simply put, President Trump and Pompeo may want out of Afghanistan, but there are problems with the past, present, and future of their deal.
The past is precedent
There is simply nothing new in the agreement. Today, the test of Taliban sincerity is a one-week reduction in violence. During the Clinton administration, it was the willingness of the Taliban to allow U.S. aid programs to help girls’ schools or fund crop substitution, as if the willingness of a group dedicated to the West’s demise would have any scruples about cheating its taxpayers. Then, as now, diplomats grasped at assurances that the Taliban would abandon terror. In 1997, Zalmay Khalilzad, who is today the special envoy but at the time was a businessman seeking a cut of a Taliban oil pipeline deal, brought Taliban leaders to the U.S. to meet with oil executives and diplomats. In a meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth, the Taliban’s acting minister of Islam and culture, Amir Khan Muttaqi, lied outright, assuring the diplomat that they would not “allow terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base for terrorism.” Muttaqi lied, and today, he remains an unrepentant member of the Taliban’s leadership team.
Pompeo may accept the same Taliban assurance that they will abandon terrorism, but nowhere does he nor do they define “terror.” This is a broad problem in international affairs, and it is why Turkey says it counters terrorism while supporting the Islamic State, or why Iranian leaders say they oppose terrorism while bankrolling Hamas and Hezbollah. Perhaps the agreement defines terrorism in a secret annex, but why would this be necessary unless that definition falls short? Alas, it seems that Pompeo is guilty of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s conceit: He has become so invested in the art of the deal that he is blind to the loopholes through which Taliban brigades might charge.
Money also matters. The late communist leader Najibullah held on to power in Kabul for three years after Soviet forces withdrew. The reason was not his popularity, but rather, he benefited from a Moscow-directed peace dividend that channeled savings and hardware from the Soviet withdrawal from East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia to Afghanistan. When that money ran out, however, Najibullah lost his ability to dispense patronage and retired to the U.N. compound where he remained until the Taliban seized and murdered him four years later. Current President Ashraf Ghani might not even have that longevity, given international donor fatigue and Trump’s belief that the $30 billion annual price of investment in Afghanistan is no longer worth it.
The problematic present
Pompeo insists that this deal is the product of careful consultations with all parties. That is false. Khalilzad met repeatedly with Taliban representatives in Qatar, but he actively avoided meaningful consultations with the democratically elected Afghan government. This deliberate slighting ultimately led to a diplomatic blowup a year ago when Hamdullah Mohib, the Afghan president’s top security aide, complained that Khalilzad was acting more as a viceroy than as a negotiator. Pompeo and Khalilzad responded with fury, blacklisting Mohib, denying him visas to the U.S. and instructing American officials to boycott any meeting that he attended. They also imposed a de facto visa ban on Taliban critic Amrullah Saleh, the former intelligence chief and interior minister (and now newly elected vice president). Consider that Pompeo today brags about meaningful consultation with Afghanistan’s government yet treated the elected government’s interlocutors worse than Taliban terrorists freed from Guantanamo Bay or the North Korean leadership. Khalilzad, who did business with the Taliban, engaged with the Iranians, and is neck-deep in the knuckle-fighting of Iraqi Kurdistan’s oil industry, is no snowflake. Pompeo did not blacklist Mohib and Saleh to salve Khalilzad’s feelings, but rather to avoid any critical assessment of their deal. Again, there is Clinton-era precedent for this. As negotiations for the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea neared their conclusion, South Korean President Kim Young Sam lashed out about the “half-baked” agreement in a New York Times interview. Clinton was furious and threatened to blackball Sam. Clinton got his way on the deal, and North Korea eventually got nuclear weapons.
Inter-Afghan dialogue is long overdue. If the Taliban want to talk, they should talk to Afghanistan’s elected government. And if they believe they have the Afghan people’s support, they should run in Afghanistan’s elections. Alas, just as the Taliban agree to such a dialogue, Khalilzad’s and Pompeo’s machinations may have undercut it. Afghanistan held its elections on Sept. 28, 2019, but, amid widespread allegations of fraud, the Independent Election Commission declared incumbent Ghani the victor only on Feb. 18, 2020. According to the official results, Ghani won 50.6% of the vote, enabling him to bypass a runoff. Afghan officials privately say they came under tremendous pressure, first to put off the September vote altogether, and then, to quiet complaints about irregularities in order to avoid a second round. Whereas the State Department once encouraged international observation to bolster legitimacy, in the last year, it discouraged it. Trump interlocutors such as Fox News commentator and retired Gen. Jack Keane told challenger (and Afghan Chief Executive) Abdullah Abdullah to “stand down” for the sake of unity ahead of Taliban talks. The U.S. should not be in the business of subverting democratic elections, however — nor should it ever believe that a government whose electoral legitimacy remains cloudy can enter talks with a strong hand.
Of course, this is not the first time Afghanistan has had national dialogue. Afghans were engaged in dialogue a decade ago. But, on Sept. 20, 2011, Taliban suicide bombers assassinated former Afghanistan President Burhanuddin Rabbani at his home alongside four other members of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council. That murder should not have surprised; the Taliban have always approached national dialogue as an asymmetric warfare strategy to distract and delay opponents until a final military push. The Taliban’s 1996 seizure of Kabul, too, came against the backdrop of national dialogue.
A future of failure
Stopping “endless wars” may make for a popular slogan, but it is no strategy. Renewed civil war in Afghanistan is a given, as the Taliban seek to achieve at the point of a gun what they can never achieve at the ballot box. But, for Trump and other neo-isolationists, such events are not the responsibility of the U.S. to prevent.
Three problems loom large, however. The first is Taliban and al Qaeda intertwinement. Taliban deputy leader Sirajuddin Haqqani’s Feb. 20 New York Times op-ed ignored the Taliban’s al Qaeda problem. Both the United Nations and the U.S. designate Haqqani as a terrorist because of his al Qaeda partnership, and al Qaeda eulogized Haqqani’s father, Jalaluddin, upon his 2016 death. U.N. reports suggest the Taliban-al Qaeda relationship is ongoing.
The second is the Islamic State. While the Afghan government may not survive a civil war, it is also unlikely that the Taliban will triumph. They failed in 2001. Those who lived under Taliban brutality do not seek to return to it, and the younger generation of Afghans find music, Bollywood, and video games more compelling than Taliban austerity. If no side triumphs, then a dangerous vacuum emerges into which ISIS is ready to step. The group has staged a number of bloody attacks and bombings over the past year. The 2020 withdrawal from Afghanistan could easily become Trump’s version of Barack Obama’s 2011 departure from Iraq — that is, a decision reversed by the exigency to fight ISIS.
The third problem is Pakistan. While Americans remain frustrated that Pakistan has provided safe haven for Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the insurgency went the other way, with Pashtun nationalists from Afghanistan striking into Pakistan. That age might return. One senior Afghan official told me bluntly that Americans never understood counterterrorism and that the real fight would begin once American forces got out of the way. “If a bomb goes off in Kabul,” he suggested, “then one should go off in Lahore. And if an attack occurs in Jalalabad, then there should be two such attacks in Rawalpindi.” Such attacks can destabilize Pakistan and embolden reactionaries, never a sanguine occurrence in a nuclear power.
Wishful thinking about diplomacy has now become a bipartisan disease. Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini once declared that he was “not interested in personal power,” a notion the New York Times affirmed when Richard Falk, then a Princeton University professor, declared, “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.” How sad it is, 40 years later, that Trump and Pompeo are approaching the Taliban with the same sophistry, especially when the consequences of the self-delusion could be as consequential.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
