{"id":50501,"date":"2019-09-11T14:54:09","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T04:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=50501"},"modified":"2019-09-11T14:54:09","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T04:54:09","slug":"the-breakdown-of-us-taliban-talks-buys-time-to-reset-the-afghanistan-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-breakdown-of-us-taliban-talks-buys-time-to-reset-the-afghanistan-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"The breakdown of US\u2013Taliban talks buys time to reset the Afghanistan strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

US President Donald Trump announced<\/a> on Saturday that he had called off talks<\/a> with the Taliban at Camp David. The meeting had probably been arranged to finalise a deal for the start of a US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

The deal apparently had four main pillars<\/a>: a Taliban guarantee not to allow foreign fighters to use Afghanistan to launch attacks outside the country; the withdrawal of US and\u00a0NATO\u00a0forces; an intra-Afghan dialogue; and a permanent ceasefire.<\/p>\n

The questions marks over that plan are the credibility of any Taliban commitments, the exclusion of the Afghan government from the peace talks, and what happens next.<\/p>\n

These problems are well known to any observer of Afghanistan and certainly to the US lead negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad. He may well have reached the best deal he could with the Taliban, but that doesn\u2019t mean it was one worth taking. Fortunately, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump seem to have a perspective that\u2019s different from the negotiating team\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The Taliban have been consistent in their goals since their ouster as Afghanistan\u2019s rulers in 2001. On Monday, they reiterated their core objective<\/a>: \u2018Our struggle for the past 18 years … will continue until the foreign occupation is finished and the Afghans are given a chance to live by their own choice.\u2019<\/p>\n

Any deal with Taliban representatives wasn\u2019t going to involve the government of Afghanistan\u2014because the Taliban don\u2019t recognise it. And the starting point for any deal had to be the withdrawal of US troops\u2014because that would acknowledge the Taliban\u2019s view that Afghanistan is under \u2018foreign occupation\u2019.<\/p>\n

This gets to the heart of things. In late 2002, after the Taliban were ejected from power, Afghanistan was ruled by the US and its international partners. There were no Afghan institutions able to govern and security was wholly provided by foreign troops. That\u2019s no longer true.<\/p>\n

An elected government now runs the usual institutions of government\u2014finance, education, transport, health, security, and law and order. The security forces owe allegiance to the president and the state of Afghanistan. Government services are limited, as was always going to be the case in a country that\u2019s suffered decades of civil conflict and had a low base for services before that.<\/p>\n

Security remains tenuous. The Taliban and forces like Islamic State and anti-government\u00a0warlords can, and do, conduct violent attacks. That\u2019s why civilian deaths were at an annual high last year and why they\u2019ve been high through 2019. The increased violence has been in part an effort to demonstrate the Taliban\u2019s determination and to undercut US and international\u00a0resolve, but the government and civil society have withstood the violence.<\/p>\n

The Taliban used to have a strong narrative that led inexorably to their return to power. It was: \u2018We live here. You don\u2019t. You are foreign invaders. So, we have the patience to wait you out.\u2019<\/p>\n

Maybe by happenstance and confusion rather than good planning, the past 18 years have changed this. NATO, the US and other partners like Australia are indeed foreigners in Afghanistan, but we are now working with a functioning Afghan state run by committed people who don\u2019t want a return of an extreme fundamentalist Taliban.<\/p>\n

Narrower goals could have been achieved by the US and its partners in Afghanistan years ago. Removing the Taliban from power because of their support for al-Qaeda and leaving with the promise to return to remove any Afghan-based global terrorist organisations was a path open to the international community before now. Arch-realists still see this as a viable path. They say, rightly, that it\u2019s not the business of the international partners still in Afghanistan to seek to build a nation.<\/p>\n

But an alternative realist position is that the new international environment of empowered authoritarians and violent nationalist rulers shows that it\u2019s more important than ever to stand by your friends\u2014particularly if they\u2019re seeking to run a state along principles of democracy and the rule of law and to build civil society. Afghanistan isn\u2019t some version of Europe in Central Asia, and yet it certainly has these features, interlaced with strong tribal customs, practices and mores.<\/p>\n

Vladimir Putin showed the strategic influence that comes from standing by your friends when he intervened suddenly and successfully to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. Democracies need to show that it\u2019s not only strongmen who stand by their friends.<\/p>\n

The Afghan people are now served by a government, and that government has continuing international support\u2014including from Australia. And the Afghan people and the ministers and officials working across Afghan institutions are our partners. They\u2019ve made life-and-death decisions based on the US and other international partners\u2019 commitments of our continuing support.<\/p>\n

The Taliban now need to understand that times have changed since the early 2000s and even 2010s. Because of gains in Afghan governance and security capacity and the growth of NGOs and civil society, the government of Afghanistan with its international partners can now wait the Taliban out.<\/p>\n

With continuing international support, time is on the side of the Afghan government and the men, women and children who live in the majority of the country not controlled by the Taliban.<\/p>\n

Any peace process without the Afghan government at its core and without a continuing strong international security presence and financial assistance to Afghan security forces simply hands too much power to the Taliban for too little in return.<\/p>\n

A peace deal must be led by the Afghan government, with the US and other international partners involved, and with the Taliban at the negotiating table (or as much of the \u2018Taliban\u2019 as the leadership controls).<\/p>\n

How long will it take to bring the Taliban to talks in this way? Who can tell. But the strategic logic has now changed. And a security presence of some 14,000 US troops and 17,000 NATO and partner contributors\u2014including 300 Australian Defence Force personnel\u2014is sustainable for a long time, while Afghan institutions grow more in capacity and civil society grows too.<\/p>\n

The cancellation of the Camp David talks can be a moment to recognise this and to reset the US strategy and the narrative.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s also a moment to recognise that Trump\u2019s instincts on the big things seem pretty solid when it really matters, with the step away from the Korean peninsula bromance done at the right time, the continued pressure on China\u2019s President Xi Jinping, and now this step with the Taliban.<\/p>\n

Trump will have to wait to bring the US troops home. He has sought peace, but with an enemy that only wants to demonstrate US weakness. That\u2019s a mistake the Taliban will wish they hadn\u2019t made, but for which the Afghan people will be grateful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he had called off talks with the Taliban at Camp David. The meeting had probably been arranged to finalise a deal for the start of a US …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":766,"featured_media":50505,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43,1428,806,1088],"class_list":["post-50501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-afghanistan","tag-donald-trump","tag-peace","tag-taliban"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe breakdown of US\u2013Taliban talks buys time to reset the Afghanistan strategy | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-breakdown-of-us-taliban-talks-buys-time-to-reset-the-afghanistan-strategy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The breakdown of US\u2013Taliban talks buys time to reset the Afghanistan strategy | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he had called off talks with the Taliban at Camp David. 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