President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw 7,000 US troops from Afghanistan on 20 December 2018, the day after he announced the withdrawal from Syria. US defence secretary James Mattis resigned forthwith. A few hours later the Afghan government and diplomats in Kabul woke up in shock, worried there would be chaos. Their shock was all the greater because Trump had, reluctantly, agreed to a 4,000-person increase in the US military presence in Afghanistan in 2017; but he stuck to his withdrawal decision despite criticism and told CBS on 23 December, ‘We’ll see what happens with the Taliban. They want peace. They’re tired. Everybody’s tired. I don’t like endless wars. What we’re doing has got to stop at some point.’

In three days, Trump’s U-turn, which Mattis had unsuccessfully opposed, completely changed the situation around the US participation in the 38-nation coalition against the Taliban (1), and the content of the Doha talks that began last summer. It also strengthened Vladimir Putin’s position; since 2016 Russia has been conducting parallel negotiations with the Taliban, whom Putin sees as a lesser threat than ISIS. He brought the Taliban into talks as a political force that cannot be ignored and has got them to negotiate with representatives of some sectors of Afghan society.

In September 2018 Trump appointed Zalmay Khalilzad as Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation to refresh the dialogue with the Taliban that began in July. Khalilzad, a US citizen of Pashtun extraction from the Noorzai tribe, was well known in the region. He ran a department of the US thinktank RAND Corporation in the late 1990s and negotiated security arrangements for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project with the Taliban, then in power. He represented the US in Afghanistan at the start of the US intervention in 2001, first as a special envoy, then as ambassador (2003-05).

What was there for him to negotiate? In meetings from July to December, the Taliban would only discuss prisoner exchanges and the removal of names from the terrorism blacklist, while they waited for a US plan for complete military withdrawal. Trump appears to have partially yielded to this demand, to hasten a swift resolution.

Taliban strengthen their position

The Taliban clearly sensed the US’s weakness. ‘Everyone’s tired,’ Trump had said, but the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — as the Taliban call themselves — is still gaining ground. Exact figures are hard to establish, but collating sources — from the optimistic US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) (2) to the pessimistic Long War Journal website (3) — suggests the Taliban control at least 50 out of 407 districts and are strong challengers in more than 200 others, leaving just 38% of the country under full state control. This despite more coalition ordnance being used in 2018 than in any year since the departure of the main NATO forces in December 2014: 7,362 missiles were fired in 2018 according to US Air Forces Central Command, compared to 4,361 in 2017 and 947 in 2015 (4). US war weariness is evident. Between October 2001 and October 2018, 2,401 US soldiers died in Afghanistan and the cost of the war topped US $900bn — more than the Marshall Plan. The US army has been in Afghanistan for over 6,000 days, longer than the two world wars and Korean war combined.

Morale is low in the Afghan National Army too. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, President Ashraf Ghani revealed the previously classified information that 45,000 members of the Afghan security forces have been killed since they took over from NATO in 2014; this is a massive increase, since the total number of Afghan troops and police killed since 2001 is 58,596, according to the Watson Institute (5). So the Taliban, feeling themselves in a position of strength, are holding firm on the principle of US withdrawal, which they insist must be complete, especially as no one knows what Trump’s withdrawal announcement means in practical terms.

The fourth round of Doha talks began in January with a vague agenda and ended with well-intentioned commitments to keep discussing a ceasefire, a negotiated withdrawal, a guarantee that Afghanistan would never serve as a terrorist base to threaten the US, and an undertaking from the Taliban to enter into dialogue with the Ghani government. Khalilzad took encouragement from the fact that the new Taliban chief negotiator was Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who cofounded the movement with Mullah Mohammad Omar. Baradar is a Durrani Pashtun from the Popalzai tribe (like former President Hamid Karzai), which has more experience of international relations, and is a long-time advocate of negotiation. He was arrested in Karachi in 2010 and released in October 2018 at the US’s request.

‘No agreement on a ceasefire’

When the fifth round of Doha talks began on 24 February, nothing was any clearer. Only on 28 February did the withdrawal plan appear in the US press (6). The Pentagon proposed the rapid withdrawal of half its 14,000 troops; the remainder would focus exclusively on counter-terrorism for three to five years, while 8,000 other coalition forces would train and supervise the Afghan army. It is not known whether the US agreed this plan with its allies in advance. The Afghan government wants to know whether the US intends to reduce its annual aid budget of $5.2bn, or scrap it, in which case, according to researcher Michael Semple, the current regime will not survive (7).

The Taliban rejected this plan outright, and demanded the complete withdrawal of all foreign forces within six to eight months. The fifth round of talks in Doha was extended by a week, but ended on 12 March without conclusion. Khalilzad tweeted that progress had been made and a ‘draft framework on the two questions of counter-terrorism and withdrawal’ produced. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid declared on the official site, Voice of Jihad, that ‘this round of talks saw extensive and detailed discussions ... regarding two issues that were agreed upon during [the] January talks ... the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan and preventing anyone from harming others from Afghan soil; how and when will all foreign forces exit Afghanistan ... no agreement was reached regarding a ceasefire and talks with the Kabul administration’ (8).

Everything will depend on the withdrawal agreement, and without that, reliable sources say discussions have become bogged down in Taliban rhetoric. The first demand concerns the sequence of events: first withdrawal, then talks among Afghans about a ceasefire and the legitimacy of the current regime. The Taliban do claim, though, that they are ready to sever ties with groups that might threaten the US; the problem is agreeing who counts as a ‘terrorist’.

The Taliban are fighting ISIS, so that is unproblematic; Al-Qaida is trickier because of the close relations between these groups. Al-Qaida’s supreme leader Mullah Atman al-Zawahiri has pledged allegiance to the Taliban leader, ‘commander of the faithful’, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. Siraj Haqqani is one of Akhundzada’s triumvirate, and his Haqqani network operates with external Al-Qaida networks, either directly or through Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, Pakistani Taliban Movement), whose fighters withdrew to Afghanistan after Pakistani forces drove them out of Waziristan. Severing such links will be hard. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called the Taliban terrorists. Some grassroots Taliban activists argue that Al-Qaida has not threatened US security for 17 years.

We have a choice: we either become the lynchpin of Asian integration where roads come to our country and go out to connect Central, South, West and East Asia, or we will become the cul-de-sac Ashraf Ghani

Taliban negotiators are taking care not to upset their base given that a spring offensive is under way (earlier than usual), despite the Doha talks. Around 50 died and 40 prisoners were captured in attacks on major military bases in Helmand and Badghis provinces on 28 February and 11 March. The Taliban are keen to demonstrate their military effectiveness while the US has its back to the wall and wants only to be gone. There is little it can offer to exchange, still less try to impose, that would not be contingent on withdrawal. In these circumstances, any substantial concession would be incomprehensible to Taliban fighters on the ground, and could weaken or split the movement.

The Taliban have no plans to conquer the country militarily, according to statements at the last Moscow conference on 4-5 February. The Afghan army, although weakened by its losses, is still a fighting force. It did not exist in 1994 when the Taliban made their first appearance. The Moscow talks had more substance than their bilateral counterpart in Doha, which are not peace negotiations but talks about the preconditions for such negotiations. And while these conditions remain unmet, the Taliban continue to gain ground.

Putin’s nuanced approach

In the gap between two sessions of Doha, Putin is pressing his advantage. The US, given that it has not won this war, would like to avoid an ignominious exit. As the US is fighting the Taliban on the ground, the enemy it needs to negotiate with is clearly the Taliban. For Russia, the Central Asian Republics, China and Iran, the real enemy is ISIS, though there is marked disagreement about ISIS numbers. Zamir Kabulov, Putin’s special envoy in Kabul, has suggested there are 20-30,000 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, while a UN Security Council report in October 2016 estimated numbers to have fallen from 3,500 to 1,600 (9), probably due to the restructuring of the Taliban movement around the new leader Akhundzada. The situation has changed since then, but numbers may count less than the degree of mobility of small cells.

From Putin’s viewpoint, the Taliban have a plan to regain control of the nation, whereas ISIS’s objective is globalised terror that could destabilise neighbours in Central Asia, Chechnya and China. Hence Russia’s attempted rapprochement with the Taliban, ongoing since 2016. Kabulov explained that the Taliban had become an unignorable political force. ‘They gave up the global jihadism idea’ (10).

The Moscow conferences have always been multilateral. They brought together countries likeliest to share Russia’s view of the situation — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and China — on 29 December 2016; these were joined by the Central Asian Republics on 15 February 2017. The US ignored an invitation to join on 14 April 2017, but Trump chose that day to launch ‘the mother of all bombs’, the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) on an ISIS affiliate in Achin, Nangarhar province, on the border with Pakistan. On 9 November 2018, as the US relaunched bipartisan dialogue with the Taliban, Russia organised the first bipartite meeting between a Taliban delegation from Doha and the Afghanistan High Peace Council, a government body with a consultative role.

If there is competition, Putin scored a point there. He was thinking two moves ahead after the surprise announcement of the partial US withdrawal. On 4 and 5 February 2019, with the Doha talks on hold, Putin organised an even more unexpected conference, through Moscow’s Afghan diaspora, for the same Taliban delegation and an Afghan delegation of President Ghani’s main opponents: the brother and former comrades of commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. Other attendees included the leader of the Shia party, Hezb-e-Wahdat (Islamic Unity Party), Muhammad Mohaqiq, and four formerly influential Pashtuns; a royalist party (Maaz) veteran; the son of Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, interim head of state in 1992; the former Taliban ambassador in Pakistan; and Mohammad Hanif Atmar, a presidential candidate who will stand in July’s elections against Ghani, whose security advisor he was until August 2018. Former President Karzai chaired the talks.

Russian bridge-building

The current Afghan government was humiliated as the High Peace Council was not invited. Ghani called it a betrayal and told the participants that nothing could be accomplished without the involvement of the legitimate government. It was as if Putin had anticipated a US withdrawal, a weakening Afghan army, Taliban territorial gains and a faltering, if not collapsing, government.

However, the Moscow conference did attempt to build bridges. Karzai reported back to his successor about his mission and backed a proposal to create an intra-Afghan negotiating commission. On 4 March Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov used a meeting with the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to offer reassurances that, in the right circumstances, he would facilitate the Doha dialogue. The next day, Uzbek foreign minister Abdulaziz Kamilov visited Doha where he met and prayed with the chief Taliban negotiator, Mullah Baradar, and assured him that Uzbekistan wanted to invest in the Afghan economy. On his way home, he stopped in Kabul to give Ghani the same message.

Everybody's tired. I don't like endless wars. What we're doing has got to stop at some point Donald Trump

Despite the (sometimes clumsy) precautions, the regime in Kabul had good reason to feel sidelined. Ghani called a Loya Jirga (grand assembly) for 27 April, and will select a representative commission from every sector of Afghan society, to be an acceptable negotiating partner for the Taliban. Statements from the Taliban’s Moscow delegation suggest this is conceivable.

The most recent Moscow conference issued a joint press release which said, ‘The intra-Afghan dialogue must continue on regular basis’ and ‘systematic reforms be put in place in all national institutions, including the security sector, after a peace deal is signed,’ respecting ‘the principles of Islam in all parts of the system’ and ‘support[ing] a powerful centralised government with all Afghan ethnicities having a role in it.’ The communiqué also backs the ‘protection of social, economic, political and educational rights of Afghan women in line with Islamic principles’ (11). The women on the delegation, Fawzia Koofi, vice-president of the Afghan National Assembly, and Hawa Nooristani, a member of the High Peace Council, were able to address the Taliban delegation freely. The head of the Doha delegation, Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, has insisted that the Taliban do not want a monopoly on power: ‘Taking the whole country by [military] power will not help because it will not bring peace in Afghanistan’ (12).

‘The path of peace’

In courting the Taliban, Putin is trying to do what the British, and then the Pakistanis, did: favouring the establishment of a regime in his debt as a way of controlling Afghanistan and making it a buffer state against insurrection and terror. This means containing, then eliminating, ISIS, which Russia views as a major domestic and regional threat. By inviting the Taliban to meet an Afghan opposition delegation, most of whose members are veterans of the Northern Alliance that took power in 2001, Putin wants them not to repeat the errors of 1996, when they alienated all the non-Pashtuns of the north and isolated themselves internationally. Former Northern Alliance strongman, Atta Muhammad Nur, told Al Jazeera that it was necessary ‘to find the path of peace’, and the first step was to form an interim government that included the Taliban and which would organise transparent elections (13).

A new Great Game is being played out. Shortly after being elected, President Ghani told the London Conference on Afghanistan in December 2014, ‘We have a choice: we either become the lynchpin of Asian integration where roads will come to our country and go out of our country to connect Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia and East Asia or we will become the cul-de-sac, the forgotten piece of history, because time will not wait.’ That has been Afghanistan’s permanent place, always at the crossroads of more powerful empires: in the Middle Ages, during the Russian and British colonial empires, and when blocs clashed after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Today, great economic powers, established and emerging, have their eye on it.

Afghanistan’s considerable mineral wealth includes copper, cobalt, gold and lithium. According to a 2001 estimate from the United States Geological Survey, Helmand province may contain over a million tonnes of rare earth elements. The mine at Mes Aynak, south of Kabul, could have the world’s second-largest copper reserves and recent studies show that gas reserves in the north, alongside Turkmenistan’s gas fields, are 20 times larger than estimated during the Soviet occupation (1979-89). There are oil reserves — in Herat in the west, Helmand in the south and Paktya in the east — totalling 5bn barrels, a vast resource for a country which uses barely 2m barrels per year.

This whets appetites. Afghanistan is at the heart of Chinese ambitions for its New Silk Road initiative. There are plans for gas pipelines, roads and railways, some, such as TAPI, over 20 years old, but stalled because of chronic security problems. This explains the concerns of participants in the Moscow talks. All but Turkmenistan belong to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO); Iran has observer status.

There is competition within the SCO between China, which has huge investment resources, and the Russian Federation, which is poorer but retains a strong influence over the former Soviet republics. India and Pakistan, which joined in June 2017, clashed militarily this February. But the organisation represents 45% of the world’s population though only 22% of its GDP and over 30% of its known hydrocarbon reserves, and includes four nuclear powers. This powerful force strengthens the impression that the West has lost the upper hand — the US under its unpredictable president, the UK in turmoil over Brexit, and the EU, which punches below its weight politically.

Neighbours’ interests differ

No one yet knows what the scale, method or timing of any troop withdrawal will be. It must be hoped that Trump will not act impulsively and pitch Afghanistan into chaos, which will only facilitate the Taliban’s return. The Indian press is worried about losing all it has gained, while Pakistan has gone along with the Doha process, without spurning the more advanced Moscow one and its risky gamble of bypassing the Ghani regime. Iran wants to see the US policy fail, but not so badly that it brings instability next door. China has interests in Afghanistan, Central Asia and Pakistan (to which it will remain loyal if there is conflict with India). The economic and strategic interests of these countries are far from convergent, which may explain why, after 17 years of fighting, the international and regional conferences have still not achieved peace.

How can this interminable war enable the Taliban’s return, with Afghanistan, the US and Russia now begging them to agree to peace negotiations? The answer lies in understanding the Taliban’s political anthropology and the map of their strongholds along the Pashtun Afghan-Pakistani belt, an ancient fault line and source of international terrorism (14). Afghanistan and Pakistan, both victims of a poisoned colonial legacy, urgently need to discuss this, and factor the wishes of border populations into any solution.

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