By Michael Rubin
It has now been almost six months since the United States entered into a peace deal with the Taliban. On Sunday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Vice President Amrullah Saleh announced that they had completed the lopsided release of prisoners demanded by U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, a former business partner to the Taliban. “It is a bitter decision to release the 400 Taliban prisoners but I do it to honor my pledge to Loya Jirga,” Saleh tweeted.
The demand for the Afghan government to complete the final prisoner swap was deeply unpopular. It comes just days after an attack on a Nangarhar prison resulted in the escape of more than 300 Taliban and Islamic State prisoners. Many of the prisoners the Taliban demanded to be released had blood on their hands, having tortured civilians and massacred prisoners in some cases, and were unrepentant.
The prisoner swap did not build confidence. Khalilzad demanded that the Taliban release far fewer prisoners on its end, and rather than do so in good faith, the Taliban simply grabbed farmers and other civilians to inflate its numbers.
In theory, however, the prisoner release enables the next phase, namely intra-Afghan dialogue, to begin. The problem here is that Khalilzad and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were effectively paying the Taliban for something they should have done all along.
By any reasonable metric, the deal has been a failure. Its initial timeline is in tatters, months behind schedule. The Taliban continue to reject the legitimacy of any elected government and instead insist on imposing an unelected emirate upon the entire population. It makes a mockery of Pompeo’s calls to reduce violence.
During the recent confidence-building ceasefire during Eid, a Muslim holiday, the Taliban killed 20 civilians. In the face of such attacks, Khalilzad has simply lied. According to the most recent Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report, Khalilzad insisted that Taliban “violence has been relatively low.” Simultaneously, however, U.S. Forces Afghanistan announced that it launched airstrikes to disrupt imminent Taliban attacks, and on June 22, Afghanistan’s National Security Council issued a statement that found that the previous week had been “the deadliest of the past 19 years,” with 291 Afghan security forces killed and 550 wounded. This came after Khalilzad was caught lying about responsibility for an attack on a Kabul maternity hospital, seeking to absolve the Taliban before intelligence had even been collected. Lying may save face, but it will not change Afghanistan’s reality.
While Khalilzad has finally begun seeking to get Pakistan to support an agreement, Pakistani authorities mocked Khalilzad’s efforts by instead launching mortars into Afghanistan. Frankly, Khalilzad should have known better than to play Pakistan’s game. Prior to reaching the agreement with the Taliban, he might have demanded Pakistani authorities quit shipping ammonium nitrite to the Taliban, and he might have used various sanctions to raise the cost to Pakistan of its intelligence service’s double-game. The same effort to humiliate the U.S. was on display when images of Taliban negotiator Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar standing above Pompeo went viral in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The refusal to tie the Afghan peace process to any metric of Taliban sincerity continues apace at the highest levels of the Trump administration. On Aug. 6, the Pentagon insisted that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan remains “conditions based,” but two days later, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced that the U.S. would cut its presence in Afghanistan in half by November. The Pentagon offered no metrics that justify that decision.
Across the political spectrum, Americans do want peace. So do Afghans, but that peace must be based on something beyond wishful thinking. Polemics about policy opponents seeking “endless war” are both cheap and inaccurate. The debate is not about wanting war to continue but rather how to make diplomacy work.
Alas, the Trump administration is now making the same mistake with the Taliban that the Obama administration made during its high-profile diplomacy with Iran: Both appear desperate for a deal, and neither will voice what they see as the best alternative to a negotiated agreement should diplomacy fail. By signaling that under no circumstances will U.S. negotiators step away from the negotiating table, the State Department gives its adversaries a license to cheat and erode the substance of its agreements. Should Pompeo instead call Khalilzad home and Esper announce not only a freeze in the withdrawal of U.S. forces but a surge due to worsening conditions, the impact may very well empower the diplomacy upon which self-described realists and those seeking to end “endless wars” rely.
To take the Khalilzad method, however, and allow the Taliban to get away with murder not only betrays Afghan allies, but it also empowers al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and it guarantees down the road a far greater threat to Americans at home and abroad.
The article was first published in Washington on August 10, 2020.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
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