What the Taliban Want in a Peace Deal

A peace initiative in early 2018 by President Ashraf Ghani led to a positive response from the Taliban, and a brief but observed ceasefire. Peace talks in Qatar between the Taliban and the United States were renewed. Multiple, coordinated signals from the Taliban on a negotiating agenda made them appear sufficiently flexible to encourage a belief in Kabul that a settlement was feasible. A final settlement could take many years to achieve, but investing in the process is justified by events to date.

This chapter presents core elements of the Taliban’s vision as to how a peace process should unfold. These are derived from scores of interviews conducted in 2018 with people close to, or in touch with, core members of the group. A remarkably consistent Taliban vision emerges from those conversations, suggesting the group may be releasing a trial balloon of sorts. Though Kabul or Washington would be unlikely to embrace the Taliban’s exact proposal as detailed below, it is nevertheless much more pragmatic than Taliban demands of the past, and closer to what skilled negotiators could eventually sculpt into a viable political settlement.

Important changes in 2018

The year 2018 brought unusually positive momentum in the years-long effort to end the war in Afghanistan through a political settlement. In January 2018, prospects for peace seemed as dim as they had ever been: the Taliban then launched some of their most devastating attacks ever in Kabul, prompting statements from the Afghan and US presidents that peace with the group was nearly off the table. The very next month, however, President Ghani used the second Kabul Process conference to make probably the most forward-leaning public peace offer in his government’s history, including the tabling of a constitutional review process and the full acceptance of the Taliban as a political party.

This offer set off a chain of events that collectively gave the Afghan peace process—nascent though it remains—considerable momentum. In March, pro-peace sit-ins, marches and demonstrations broke out across Afghanistan. In subsequent months, a series of conferences rallied support for peace among Afghanistan’s neighbours, the donor community and Islamic scholars. In June, the warring parties observed a nationwide ceasefire, for the first time in 40 years, over three jubilant days. In July, media reports emerged that the Taliban and US had restarted direct talks in Qatar. In September, the Trump Administration signalled seriousness by appointing the dynamic and respected Zalmay Khalilzad to lead them. The Taliban in turn elevated their own negotiating team, with press reports indicating that senior figures based in Pakistan (senior shura member Amir Khan Mottaki) and Qatar (former Guantanamo detainees Muhammad Fazl and Khairullah Khairkhwa) joined recent meetings.

One effect of this cascade of events has been a commensurately elevated discussion in Kabul and across Afghanistan about what the content of a political settlement actually should be. Where once the discourse around this issue limited itself to preliminary issues like whether to recognise a formal Taliban office in Qatar, a visitor to Kabul now encounters deeply substantive conversations across the Afghan political elite on the core components of a potential deal: the form and make-up of a post-settlement government, potential revisions to the constitution, mechanisms for reabsorbing Taliban fighters, and—perhaps most controversially—how to address the presence of foreign troops.

The great unknown remains what the Taliban think about these questions and, indeed, whether the insurgency is actually open to making peace. The group has sent mixed signals over the last year. It agreed to the June ceasefire (likely failing to anticipate the depth of pro-peace sentiment the ceasefire would reveal within its own ranks), and its own public statements suggest the group is taking the dialogue with the US seriously. On the other hand, the Taliban continue their years-long refusal to negotiate with what they call the illegitimate Afghan government, did not formally accept a second proposed ceasefire for the Eid al-Adha holiday in August 2018, and have maintained an intense military campaign in nearly every corner of Afghanistan. What, then, do the Taliban ultimately want?

In the last months of 2018, the author conducted scores of interviews in Afghanistan with people close to the Taliban, influential former members of the group, and prominent non-Taliban Afghans and foreigners who have established their own informal channels of communication with the group. These channels have multiplied over the last year, and provide substantial insight on the Taliban’s potential positions, priorities and internal debates. One should be careful not to overstate the reliability of such insights. There could be a vast gulf between a view expressed in a private conversation today and an official negotiating position someday in the future. Some themes, however, emerge consistently across these conversations, tracing back to different parts of the Taliban hierarchy, and suggest the group has an increasingly coherent and consistent view of how a peace agreement should proceed.

What the Taliban want

Since the fall of their regime in 2001, the Taliban have consistently proclaimed two fundamental objectives: they want foreign troops out of Afghanistan and an Islamist government restored to power. For years, they rigidly held to these demands. But more recently, the Taliban’s agenda has evolved such that compromise is now conceivable.

The Taliban have been consistent in their demand that all foreign troops leave Afghanistan before serious political talks can take place. This demand has progressively softened, first to a demand that intra-Afghan negotiations begin only after the US issues a timetable for its troops to withdraw, and more recently for the US to simply state an end date to its military presence. Taliban members also subtly note other points of potential flexibility, for example, that the US could more or less unilaterally choose that date, that it could be conditional (for example on the successful conclusion of an Afghan political settlement), and that a future legitimate Afghan government could ask a US troop contingent to stay in Afghanistan after all.

Taliban interlocutors explain the shift in their thinking by pointing out that Afghanistan could become another Syria if foreign troops leave too quickly. What does not appear to be negotiable, however, is the Taliban’s insistence that understanding on US withdrawal come first in the process. They evince little openness to discussing internal political issues before related assurances are in hand, and it would be a mistake to interpret the modest flexibility in their position as a sign that they ultimately want foreign troops to stay.

Taliban interlocutors describe a mostly consistent sequence of events that the US announcement of an end date should set in motion. It would inaugurate immediate talks with the Afghan government (and probably other Afghan factions) on the composition of a transitional government. Interlocutors often told the authors that the Taliban do not necessarily object to many of the provisions of the post-2001 Afghan constitution—even, for instance, holding regular elections and protecting most, if not all, of the rights the constitution gave women. The group will never agree to simply join the system it has for so long decried as illegitimate, however, in part because it would devastate the argument they have made to a generation of fighters that their war is religiously legitimate because the Western-backed government is not. This is the rationale for a transitional government; in effect, the Taliban can afford only to join a new, if similar, government, perhaps under a new, if similar, constitution.

Most interlocutors described a transitional government of set duration, perhaps two years, and a predetermined list of objectives. This would include: a) overseeing a constitutional review process, which would resemble but not precisely follow that laid out in the current constitution; b) conducting a comprehensive reform of the Afghan security services, with an eye towards depoliticising them and allowing Taliban cadres to join; c) mapping out the areas that the government and Taliban respectively control, pending a more permanent settlement in which a single national force takes over; d) providing for former Taliban fighters and prisoners, while also collecting their weapons; e) facilitating the return of refugees, an issue foreigners often omit when listing the core elements of a settlement but which the Taliban tend to include; and f) electing a more permanent government at the end of the transitional period.

The last point is especially crucial. Rarely if ever does one find Taliban interlocutors still calling for a settlement that restores an emirate form of government. Taliban figures are increasingly willing to state that they can accept some form of elected republic—often noting, paradoxically, that the main problem with elections now is the corrupt and chaotic way in which the Afghan government has administered them. The main issues for debate concern the nature of that republic: whether it meets their standard for sharia compliance, how centralised it is (the Taliban unfailingly argue for a tightly centralised system), and whether it can credibly be portrayed as a break from what they consider the Western-dominated Bonn regime.

If the Taliban comes forward with a version of this plan, Kabul and Washington are unlikely to accept it without modification. Washington will be reluctant to commit to troop withdrawals at the outset of a process, and any Afghan president will hesitate to simply cede power to a transitional government. The sequence above fails to address immensely complex and thorny questions associated with each issue it touches. To name just a few: how Afghanistan’s many factions and political groups will divide power under a transitional government; what conservative religious reforms the Taliban will demand; who controls areas that are currently hotly contested; and (most importantly for many Westerners) how to deal with international terrorist groups. Nonetheless, one cannot help but notice that the sequence the Taliban is floating provides more than enough of the basic materials for skilled diplomats in Kabul and Washington to begin outlining a lasting political settlement. If leaders in those capitals were themselves to map Afghanistan’s political transition, they might begin with many of the same elements.

Are the Taliban sincere?

The Taliban are genuinely interested in peace, but far from desperate for it. In the meantime, the group remains committed to its military campaign. This position reflects battlefield confidence. Taliban leaders judge that the group can withstand US military pressure and, if the United States eventually leaves, win the war. If this scenario eventually plays out, all bets are off regarding the scenario described above. With full military victory, the Taliban’s first instinct might well be to restore an emirate. Most Taliban leaders recognise, however, that such a scenario is unlikely to unfold anytime soon. Even the current, much-reduced US presence is enough to keep the group from winning. To take power after a US withdrawal would be bloody and arduous, if it happens at all. For these and other reasons, Taliban leaders are willing to contemplate peaceful alternatives.

Sceptics will point out that the Taliban have had the opportunity to negotiate for peace since at least 2010, when they sent representatives to Qatar to conduct talks with diplomats from the US. Many argue that the group has used this platform only to stall and seek concessions from Washington. In practice, the channel has moved slowly and sometimes painfully so. But Taliban negotiators are not solely responsible for the impasse. Both the Afghan and the US governments have often been internally divided over whether and how to pursue peace with the Taliban, with the result that both have been hesitant to put an offer on the table that meaningfully addresses the Taliban’s two fundamental objectives.

Those who doubt the Taliban’s readiness for peace will point to the sheer volume of Taliban violence. The bloody assaults in 2018 of Ghazni and Farah attest to this; more Afghan cities will come under similar threat in 2019, and smaller attacks will continue every day across the country. The intensity of military effort, however, does not have as much bearing on the Taliban’s interest in peace as it does for the other parties involved in the conflict. Other than during the June 2018 ceasefire, none of the parties—the US, the Afghan government and the Taliban—have pulled their punches on the battlefield, even when they sincerely desired talks.

The tragedy is that a bloody military stalemate has prevailed for years in Afghanistan. Each of the main belligerents is interested in a peaceful alternative but doubts that the others are, and fears what it could lose in negotiations. The major military decisions that each party makes are fraught with hesitation and disappointment: overrunning cities only to lose them immediately, clearing remote areas that prove impossible to hold, sending enough troops to escalate but not win at significant human costs while holding out little hope of breaking the stalemate.

A comprehensive peace agreement remains years in the future, if it ever materialises, but in 2019 there is more reason than ever to invest in its prospects. The omnipresence of peace discussions in Kabul and the overwhelming popularity of the June 2018 ceasefire suggest that serious intra-Afghan negotiations could gather momentum quickly. The big ideas that could define a successful peace deal, one which the Taliban could genuinely embrace, are already circulating among the main Afghan players. The next steps are to get them formally on the negotiating table, and begin making them manifest.