The endgame in Afghanistan

Is New Delhi ready with a plan to deal with an Afghanistan once again dominated by the Taliban?

When Afghanistan’s Vice President and trenchant Taliban critic Amrullah Saleh tweets, “We have been bitten not once but multiple times by the same snake from the same hole,” there are no prizes for guessing who the ‘snakes’ are. Or, why he lashed out, within hours of the Ashraf Ghani government and the Taliban signing a first-of-its-kind written agreement, in Doha, earlier this month.

The Ghani government clearly fears being reduced to irrelevance, unable to control the Afghan endgame. Under the active prodding of outgoing US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, it is the Taliban that has emerged as the arbiter of Afghanistan’s destiny. For Amrullah Saleh – who barely survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban -- and the government he serves, it could all end badly.

In a plush suburb of the Qatari capital, Doha, where high-ranking members of the Taliban have been the recipients of Qatari and American largesse since 2013, there’s a sense of triumph. Six years after the release of the infamous ‘Taliban Five’ from the US-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, and two years after the freeing of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now the Taliban’s main interlocutor, from a Pakistani jail to this luxe safe haven at the behest of the Afghan-born Khalilzad, the Taliban are a heartbeat away from retaking Kabul, albeit as part of an interim government, on the lines of an Iran-style ‘High Council’, with representation from across the ethnic divide.

But the question is, will President Ghani and the political elite who have risen to prominence these last 19 years cede space – or power -- to the Taliban? And does incoming US President Joe Biden, presented with a Trumpian fait accompli, know what he may have unwittingly signed on to?

The taking of Kabul?

With US-led coalition forces holding back from attacking the Taliban as part of Khalilzad’s key overture to bring them to the negotiating table this September, President Ghani’s remit has not only been drastically limited to just the capital, the Taliban have expanded their footprint to roughly half the country. In the countryside, there is little to distinguish them from other Afghans. This was brought home to US soldiers sent to clear villages of Taliban forces. They found themselves conferring with village headmen who, only days before, they had faced down as Taliban commanders. Already in control of some 53% of the Afghan countryside, they collect taxes, enforce Islamic Sharia, hold tribal jirgas and run a shadow government.

The drawdown’s striking parallel with the shambolic Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1977-78 that had the Mullah Omar-led Kalashnikov-toting Talibs in Toyota vans sweeping across the Afghan-Pakistan border and taking Kandahar, and then Kabul, is lost on no-one. “It’s another Syria,” warned Davood Moradian, director of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies, in a recent interview. Moradian believes the Taliban is hoping “to recreate the circumstances that brought them to power in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal.” As the Northern Alliance, headed by Dr Abdullah Abdullah (head of the High Council for National Reconciliation) stitches together an anti-Taliban alliance of old -- minus, President Ghani -- with America bringing troops down to a quarter of what it was a year ago, and the Taliban circling the capital, Kabul could be on the brink of another protracted siege.

Biden’s baby now

Or will that change? US President-elect Joe Biden will see both the military and his new foreign policy team weigh in against losing the strategic gains from the prolonged occupation. Or risk allowing neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, in through the backdoor. Afghan security have raised the Taliban’s known links to the Haqqani network, managed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, and have pointed to the Al Qaida and the Islamic State–Khorasan, which routinely take responsibility for attacks on civilians and military targets, as proof of the enduring link between the Taliban and its proxies.

Talking to the Taliban was a part of Trump’s election-driven ploy to ensure that US and NATO troops exit, without being targeted. But the Afghan peace process is also caught between the incoming and outgoing US administrations. Biden has named an old Iraq hand Gen. Lloyd Austin as his Defense Secretary. But there is no clarity on whether Khalilzad will have his brief extended, and if, in the few weeks left, he can get the Taliban to roll back violence and seal the deal.

Afghan officials, who foresaw the ploy months ago, had warned that the Taliban is trying to “run out the clock on the withdrawal of American troops, remaining in negotiations long enough to secure a full US withdrawal, after which they will capitalise on their advantage on the battlefield to seize control of the country by force.”

Both sides are drawing it out, arguing over whether Islamic jurisprudence -- Hanafi fiqh -- or the current, more progressive and inclusive Afghan Constitution should be the tool of governance, especially when it impacts “liberties of women, minorities, the education system, as well as the press”; and whether the US-Taliban February peace agreement becomes the basis for intra-Afghan talks.

President Ghani’s objection to the use of ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ for the present day Taliban leadership (that harks back to when they were in power), which confers a degree of legitimacy and a sense of equivalence with his ‘Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan’, may now see both terms jettisoned.

To Ghani, stonewalled by the Taliban, dismissed as a “foreign puppet”, like his predecessor Hamid Karzai, it was clear, Khalilzad’s one concession -- to withdraw “foreign troops” -- had been the hook that brought the Taliban to the negotiating table; the very concession that now puts the Afghan National Army’s ability to crush the insurgency, and his own position as President, in jeopardy. Weeks after Khalilzad brought the Taliban into the big tent in February, Ghani aired his reservations by saying that the last thing he wanted, was to share the same fate as former president Najibullah, tortured and hung from a lamp post by the Taliban. It was a reminder – in case anyone had forgotten -- of the brutality visited on an unsuspecting populace in 1996, (with women bearing the brunt of it) when the Taliban seized power on the back of the Pakistan Army’s push to secure Afghanistan as its strategic backyard against India.

The Taliban’s present leadership privately say that those were very different times. But with virtually every senior leader targeted, and former president Burhanuddin Rabbani’s assassination in 2011 by a suicide bomber when he initiated talks with the Taliban still fresh in memory, most remain wary of the militia.

Attacks since intra-Afghan talks began on September 12, which include bombings on Afghan military bases in Helmand that forced 40,000 civilians to flee their homes, over 300 suicide bombings, and a shocking strike on Kabul University that left 24 students and staff dead, raise legitimate questions on their commitment to a negotiated peace settlement.

Khalilzad has said the new three-page Doha agreement formally “codifies rules for negotiations on a political roadmap, and a comprehensive cease-fire.” But there is no public provision for a commitment to end violence. With the US drawdown underway, the Taliban, whose commanders on the ground are a force unto themselves, are impossible to police. And by January 15, five days before the President-elect is sworn into office, US-led coalition forces will be down to an ineffectual 2,500 troops, pitted against the Taliban who can draw on ten times that number.

By accident or design, the US ‘retreat’ hasn’t made front page. Last year, for Thanksgiving, Trump flew into Bagram Airbase amid much fanfare, and shared a meal with troops stationed in the sprawling six-mile US military facility. At any given time in these past 19 years, it has hosted up to 100,000 foreign troops. But this November, as Trump was pardoning turkeys at the White House, row after row of hangars and pre-fabricated tents at the US’ largest airbase in the country were being dismantled and hundreds of American soldiers flown home. Convoys of covered military trucks, stacked with tanks and guns, are streaming out of Bagram daily, heading to the Torkham border crossing into Pakistan, en route to the US, with Pakistan’s military chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa ensuring safe passage.

But alarm bells are ringing. NATO has warned that pulling out before a durable agreement is reached is pure folly. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says a further drawdown will be “contingent on security guarantees from the Taliban.” Most analysts expect an irascible President Ghani to pressure the Biden team to re-examine the US troop withdrawal. The unspoken rivalry between him and his arch-rival Abdullah Abdullah, who has positioned himself as a more acceptable face to lead the High Council while preparing to take control of the Afghan north, alongside powerful warlords such as the Uzbek strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum and Hazara leader Mohammed Mohaqiq, only complicates matters further.

If anything will impact Biden’s Afghan policy, it will be the US military’s take on exiting precipitately and not preserving some kind of hold, however minimal, over the strategically located state in the face of Russia and China seeking to expand their own footprint. Although it should be remembered that as vice president, Biden was one of the chief votaries of the US troop drawdown, as opposed to Obama, who dispatched 150,000 troops in a vaunted surge, it’s unclear whether Biden still holds to that view.

The new Afghan conundrum is this: Will Joe Biden, facing one of his biggest foreign policy challenges, reverse course, or at least slow down the withdrawal, or honour the February agreement that President Ghani would like to see consigned to the dustbin of history, along with its architect?

Nearly 20 years on, since the start of the US “Global War on Terror,” with America poised to end its longest war, the field is wide open in Afghanistan for another Taliban takeover, and a rapid descent into civil war.

(The writer was formerly Foreign Editor for the Dubai-based Gulf News and has reported extensively on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Middle East)