Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Qatar last February to attend a signing ceremony for the peace deal between the United States and the Taliban. While he was there, he sounded a cautionary note.
“We will closely watch the Taliban’s compliance with their commitments and calibrate the pace of our withdrawal to their actions,” he said. “This is how we will ensure that Afghanistan never again serves as a base for international terrorists.”
It soon emerged, however, that even as Pompeo declared he would hold the Taliban to their commitments, the intelligence community concluded the Taliban have no intention to do so. Any doubt about Taliban sincerity should have evaporated in subsequent weeks. They refused to recognize the Afghan government’s negotiating team for proposed intra-Afghanistan talks. They continued to launch terror attacks against U.S. forces, the Afghan military, and civilians. Efforts by Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to dismiss Taliban culpability proved a case of textbook intelligence politicization when he declared Islamic State responsibility before any investigation.
A U.N. report released late last month throws more cold water onto the notion that the Taliban have changed.
Consider the findings:
- There is little evidence that the Taliban are willing to compromise politically, and the group’s messaging remains hard-line. Although the report identified different factions, negotiating with ‘reformers’ alone while ignoring hard-liners is a recipe for failure, especially if the hard-liners hold the upper hand in Taliban military operations.
- Senior al Qaeda leadership remain present in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan. It is not a passive relationship. Rather, “relations between the Taliban … and al-Qaida remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage,” the report states. This is a key point that eludes professional proponents of peace talks: The issue is not only convincing the Taliban to turn their backs on al Qaeda, but in many cases, it is asking fathers to turn their backs on sons or cousins in favor of a pat on the back from Washington. In Afghanistan’s tribal culture, that is a non-starter.
- Regardless, the report alleged that “al-Qaida and the Taliban held meetings over the course of 2019 and in early 2020 to discuss cooperation related to operational planning, training, and the provision by the Taliban of safe-havens for al-Qaida members inside Afghanistan.” Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri reportedly “met with members of the Haqqani Network in February 2020,” just days before Khalilzad signed his deal. That is hardly an indication that the Taliban have extricated themselves from al Qaeda, as Khalilzad has told the White House and regional officials.
- Because the peace deal made no demand that the Taliban cease their attacks on Afghan forces, the Taliban and al Qaeda interpret the Feb. 29 agreement less as a peace deal than as a surrender, believing they have a green light to seek to topple the Afghan government by force.
- One of Khalilzad’s most curious agreements with the Taliban was committing them to release 1,000 Afghan army and security force prisoners. Had he consulted with the elected Afghan government rather than blacklisting it out of ego-driven annoyance at its hard questions, perhaps he might have realized that the Taliban did not hold 1,000 prisoners. The net result of that U.S. intelligence failure, however, is that Khalilzad incentivized the Taliban to seize new hostages to trade.
By any reasonable metric, the Doha Agreement should no longer be worth more than the paper on which it is written. It may be an uncomfortable question, but it is worth asking whether Khalilzad is so committed to his process that he is unwilling to recognize failure. Part of this may be personal myopia. Khalilzad is known by friends and foes alike for always putting himself first.
During his immediate post-Sept. 11 service in Afghanistan, Khalilzad pushed aside the exiled king, a man too old to harbor ambitions but a widely trusted and unifying figure capable of presiding over a constitutional convention, so that he could remain the center of attention. Khalilzad also has higher ambitions. Looking in the mirror, he sees a secretary of state or defense and is loath to forfeit his platform or admit defeat. The broader issue, and one not mutually exclusive from the envoy’s predilections, is that President Trump wants withdrawal and will not consider Taliban or al Qaeda actions or the credibility of U.S. diplomacy in his decision.
The result of the State Department ignoring its metrics will not simply be theoretical. The Taliban-al Qaeda linkage means that the forthcoming U.S. withdrawal will not only empower the Taliban and undercut the security of the elected Afghan government but will also empower al Qaeda at a time when the group remains as committed as ever to attacking the American mainland. The United Nations found that the Taliban continue to profit tremendously from heroin and the illegal narcotics trade, and that they have also moved into methamphetamine production and trafficking. All of it means that continuing the current peace deal empowers terrorists and drug cartels as cancerous to regional security as those in Mexico and Central America. Make no mistake: Wishful thinking now will kill American civilians later.
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.
