The Prospects for Peace

Afghans have lived with repeating cycles of violence, corruption and government collapse, often featuring the same destructive personalities. The US wants to promote a transitional agreement and leave the details to be worked out between the Taliban and the current government. The US prefers to withdraw as soon as feasible from Afghanistan. A short-term peace between a strong and confident Taliban and a perpetually weak government is possible, but attempts to construct a long-term settlement are not likely to succeed and the pattern of government collapse and civil war would then be repeated.

Afghans are ready for peace. With each successive government they have been ready for peace, but each time peace has eluded them. It is unlikely to be different this time. To understand why that is, one must understand the past, and more specifically why and where Afghanistan is today, without valourising or eulogising contributions, both in lives lost and money spent.

Seventeen years after the world rallied to oust the Taliban, the movement now holds sway in half the country. Corruption is so rampant you have to pay a bribe just to pay your utility bill. The Afghan National Security Forces are poorly trained, poorly equipped, and reinforcements rarely arrive in a timely fashion. Most Afghans see their own government, the US and its neighbours as villains. And a 2018 Gallup poll said Afghans hold no hope that their future will be better than their present, which they say is increasingly dismal and dangerous.

Lawlessness is at frightening levels in the cities and in the villages. Many of the crimes are perpetrated by the local police force, set up with US funding and at the behest of the international community, despite the warnings of locals. This force has further alienated people from their government and the international community. Militias loyal to warlords have been regularised by receiving Interior Ministry registration. Ethnic divisions have deepened and in a country where sectarianism was never a problem, terrified Shia are fleeing their homeland. In addition, the Taliban and Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K)^{Footnote 18}  are in competition for territory.

Power through violence

Over the past four decades, Afghans have lived through successive governments, all of which have come to power through violence. The former Soviet Union invaded in 1979, claiming to be invited to protect the pro-Moscow government of Babrak Karmal. When the USSR left, Kabul’s Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government hung on for another three years until the mujahedeen, who were called freedom fighters by the United States, took power.

The names of those mujahedeen leaders, who were installed in Kabul in 1992, will sound familiar to anyone following today’s Afghanistan. They were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Hamid Karzai, Abdur Rasool Sayyaf, Ismail Khan, Atta Mohammad, Rashid Dostum… The list goes on. This is important to know and remember in the larger context of where Afghanistan is today, because unbridled corruption and relentless squabbling characterised their rule from 1992 to 1996 as it has their rule after 2001.

Allowing these same people to lead a post-2001 Afghanistan and in the interim 18 years grow in strength, influence and wealth was a devastating mistake, from which it is difficult to recover. Their presence, influence, accumulated wealth and heavily armed militias are important obstacles to a lasting peace. After these mujahedeen destroyed most of Kabul and killed tens of thousands of people, the Taliban took power in 1996. They ruled with a heavy hand until 2001. Afghans celebrated their departure. Again they hoped that the new government would (finally) be better than the last. But the post-2001 regime has proven to be no different than previous ones. The difference is that the repercussions of failure are far graver than at any time in the past. This time, it was quite literally the world that had come to Afghanistan to rid the country of the Taliban, and for Afghans, this represented their best chance for prosperity, justice, freedom and peace. That this did not happen has devastated the hopes of many for their future.

Life under Taliban rule

The Taliban’s rule offered no justice, freedom or lasting peace. It was marked by an international boycott that was economically devastating for Afghans. The heavy handed approach denied rights to women and girls, but the Taliban imposed restrictions and edicts which also angered many men, including many who counted as Taliban. And yet there was stability. Criminals had been disarmed and many had fled the country (only to return with the Taliban’s overthrow at the end of 2001). There was no lawlessness. The taking of bribes was exceptional. Travel throughout the country, with the exception of a small enclave in northern Takhar province, where Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance still held some control, was safe any time of day or night.

The Taliban carried out public punishments almost weekly, but that is no different than what is the weekly Friday practice in Saudi Arabia. The legal system that led to the punishments were suspect and closed to public scrutiny, but that, too, is true in Saudi Arabia where courts are closed and defence lawyers are provided by the state. It is also true that there was no freedom for women in Taliban Afghanistan, but what is also true is that at the end of 2018—after nearly 18 years of international engagement—the World Index says Afghanistan is the second worst country in the world to be a woman.

The reality is that Afghanistan was and is a deeply conservative culture governed largely by ancient traditions that are also reflected in their interpretation of Islam and its edicts. For all of these reasons, simply getting rid of the Taliban was never going to be enough to properly secure Afghanistan’s future as a country at peace.

In pre-2001 Afghanistan, there was next to no international engagement. As a result, wild and scary exaggerations of what had occurred during the Taliban rule became fact. And in a post-2001 Afghanistan, the very ones who had given rise to the Taliban were re-invented as heroes with giant monuments to the likes of Ahmad Shah Massood, whose militias, along with Abdur Rasool Sayyaf’s, had killed thousands of Hazaras during their last rule. Hazaras at the time of the monument’s construction said they could say nothing for fear of being called Taliban.

The reality is that neither side is better or worse than the other, but the more important reality is that neither side is a viable partner for long-term peace and this is the real dilemma of the Afghanistan of 2019. Despite the presence of 42 countries with a combined military force of 150,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the war is lost, though it was never clear what winning was to look like. It is also not clear whether any of those countries who sent their soldiers to Afghanistan had clearly formulated a picture of what victory amounted to.

Benchmarks vs sustainability

There were some vaguely prescribed notions of a constitution, elections and a national security force, but the success of these vague notions was measured not by the quality or sustainability of any of them but by pre-assigned benchmarks. A constitution was written, but it was one that gave overreaching powers to the office of the president. Elections were held and each successive one was more corrupt than the previous poll. Finally, the conduct of the 2014 elections had proven to be so corrupt that the US stepped in to declare there would be no winner or results announced. Instead the two leading candidates would share power and a unity government was cobbled together. As in the past, unity eluded them.

Lessons unlearned

What is particularly telling is that by the period 2014-2013, there was still so little understanding or knowledge of Afghanistan and its history that the US and its allies thought a unity government could even be a solution. In 1992, many of these same leaders who make up the power behind the two factions in the present unity government went to Mecca and swore on the Quran that they would adhere to an agreement. They promptly returned, threw aside the agreement and began killing each other.

In 2014 they did not kill each other, but their squabbling and bickering has paralysed parliament, further entrenched power structures and, most devastatingly, have succeeded in deepening ethnic divisions.

A National Security Force of 350,000 soldiers and police were inducted into service to meet another benchmark, but most received barely four weeks of training and their weapons were often considered second rate. In 2011, first-hand observation identified that the ill-trained Afghan army had one helmet for every five soldiers. Even in 2011, Afghan soldiers were not allowed to use live fire when training with US troops.

But the benchmark was met and boots were on the ground—many of them with holes in them because the contract for the boots had gone to some warlord’s relative. The United Nations insisted it wanted to have a small footprint. Why would you want a small footprint in a country devastated by three decades of war? A sasquatch-size UN footprint was needed.

The Afghanistan of January 2019 is remarkably similar to the Afghanistan of 1992 to 1996. The only reason rockets are not raining down on Kabul today is because of the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Past to future to past again

Today, the US-led coalition is where the former Soviet Union was in 1986-1987, talking national reconciliation and holding ‘proximity’ talks. The participants then were the former Soviet Union’s proxies in Kabul and the US-backed mujahedeen. Today it is the US-backed proxies in Kabul and the Taliban, currently aided and/or wooed by neighbours: Pakistan, Iran, Russia and China.

Today, Washington’s peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is the go-between in proximity talks between the Taliban and Afghan government representatives, while at the same time working to orchestrate ‘direct’ talks. The Taliban, however, is steadfast in its refusal to talk to Kabul, willing at least for the moment to talk only to the US. Mr. Khalilzad has had a hand in post-2001 Afghanistan since the Taliban’s collapse. First he was US President George Bush’s special representative, and then US ambassador to Afghanistan. So the way Afghanistan looks today is in no small part the result of Mr. Khalilzad’s earlier involvement.

Since September 2018, in his latest incarnation as US peace envoy, Mr. Khalilzad has made it clear that he is a man in a hurry. This is understandable given US President Donald Trump’s statements criticising his generals and his often-stated disinterest in staying in Afghanistan.  President Trump was opposed in August 2018 to sending more troops to Afghanistan, but then buckled to his generals. He was in fact right. The presence of a few thousand more troops meant more US money being spent and to little effect. The decision to send more troops was made, like most decisions since 2001, with no long-term strategy in mind.

Talks and who is talking

The Taliban have been insistent on talking directly to the US because they understood when they were last in power that if Washington is against you, no matter what you do you will never be an acceptable partner to any government. They also understand that the current government in Kabul is bitterly divided, and the interlocutors that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has put forward are weak, and do not have widespread support in Kabul. Various power structures are trying to be heard. Hamid Karzai leads only one. 

By comparison the Taliban negotiating team in Doha has been strengthened with the induction of the five Guantanamo Bay prisoners, who were released in 2013 in exchange for US Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. These five are formidable and remain so among the Taliban, and more importantly among the fighters on the ground, even the newer generation.

The former Guantanamo prisoners include Mohammad Fazle, the former Taliban army chief, and Khairullah Khairkhwah, former Herat Governor and intelligence chief, whose involvement has given considerable strength to the Taliban team. The others are Abdul Haq Wasiq, who is about 45 and served as the Taliban Deputy Minister of intelligence; Mullah Norullah Nori, who is about 50, notorious for attacks on Shia during the Taliban reign and held senior positions in northern Afghanistan; and Mohammed Nabi, who in the 1990s was security chief in Zabul province. Add to the equation Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban who was recently released from nearly eight years in a Pakistani jail, and the Taliban team is strong. A recent indication of the team’s strength was its ability to bring three representatives of the Haqqani Network to the December 2018 meetings in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

It should be noted that the release of Baradar underscores Pakistan’s readiness to push for negotiations. Pakistan has influence. Its influence is not unlimited, but Islamabad appears ready to use it to push the Taliban into direct talks.

Regional powers

Since his appointment, Zalmay Khalilzad has convinced Pakistan to release at least ten Taliban prisoners, including Baradar and Abdul Samad Sami, a US-designated terrorist who served as the Afghan Central Bank governor during the militants’ rule. This is significant because Pakistan released several it had previously refused to release. What is also significant is Zalmay Khalilzad’s use of regional powers to pressure the Taliban, involving not only Pakistan but also Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where many Taliban have businesses.

The Taliban are under pressure but they are also pushing back. The Saudis have been pressing hard for them to meet directly with the Afghan government. They are unwilling to do so and as a result a meeting in Jeddah was scuttled. They are standing firm on their refusal to meet the Kabul authorities directly without some prior guarantees from the US. The Guantanamo Five are particularly insistent because they also understand they need something for the Taliban in the field to support sitting down with the regime about which they have deep reservations. But on other occasions the Taliban have succumbed to the pressure. They did not want to attend the UAE meetings, but they did. They also did not want to send a delegation to Pakistan when the army chief called them to Islamabad in October ahead of the UAE meeting.

The question is how much pressure can they resist? And perhaps an even more cogent question: what is the value of having them sit with Kabul while it is so deeply divided?

The greater headache at this stage in the talks is President Ashraf Ghani’s stubborn refusal to create a team that can talk to the Taliban. He has dug in his heels demanding they talk now. He was outraged that they refused to meet Afghanistan’s National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib when he was in the UAE. Infuriated by their refusal, he appointed Amrullah Saleh and Asadullah Khaleed to the interior and defence ministries. Neither man is a peacemaker.

The Taliban and Khalilzad have so far discussed foreign troop withdrawal; prisoner releases and exchanges, including the two professors kidnapped from the American University in Kabul; an interim government; and a ceasefire. Zalmay Khalilzad is not seeking a peace agreement. He wants the two sides to decide on a roadmap to the future, which effectively leaves all the details to be worked out after the US has left Afghanistan.

Mr. Khalilzad would not have taken this job unless he was pretty sure he could force a deal and he has moved fast and purposefully. Pakistan has given in on prisoners. It is likely Pakistan will get more from the US in exchange for its cooperation, perhaps on trade matters. Its economy is a mess and a free trade deal with the US or some quota concessions will be welcomed, as would concessions on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) deal it needs. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are competing to be in President Trump’s good books so will do what they can. Iran needs a deal and has limited options. China wants a deal for its mega projects in Pakistan to proceed peacefully. As well, Beijing hopes for more projects in Afghanistan. Russia too, wants a deal so Moscow will not likely be a spoiler.

The Taliban also want a deal because they understand they can never take control of Afghanistan’s cities from outside. They have political ambitions, but for the time being they seem to be more regionally focused than seeking a complete take-over.

US agenda

The likeliest scenario is that Mr. Khalilzad will indeed cobble together a deal but long-term peace is not his agenda. His aim is rather to reach an agreement that allows a US troop withdrawal to take place at the conclusion of a negotiated agreement between the two warring sides. When it breaks down—and it will eventually—it will be seen as an Afghan failure, not a US one.