By Sayed Madadi

For years, the world tried to soften the Taliban’s extremist ideology by exposing them to modernity. As an insurgency they learned diplomacy and negotiation tactics, but their medieval thinking remained just as rigid. Now that the Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the international community continues to appease them, assuming it can convince them to form an inclusive government and ease their regressive policies while alleviating the country’s worsening humanitarian disaster. That is a naïve assumption that overlooks the root causes of the current crisis. Not only will the international community not get what it wants, but it also risks creating a much greater crisis: a Taliban theocracy that institutionalizes its repressive rule at a steep human and economic cost.

The international community’s first priority has been to avert an unprecedented humanitarian and economic crisis, which has been severely exacerbated by the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Efforts thus far have focused on conventional approaches, such as lifting sanctions, releasing frozen assets, and pouring billions of dollars into ineffective and inefficient channels such as the U.N. These efforts ignore the fact that the main drivers of the crisis are political, not economic. The Taliban’s incompetence, discrimination, and intimidation have caused massive human and physical capital flight, disrupted the public sector and the economy, and undermined any sense of trust or stability.

No amount of aid will avert the catastrophe. Even if nearly $1 billion of the $9.1 billion in cash reserves in private banks is released, Afghans are likely to use the money to flee the country rather than inject it into the market by buying critical commodities. The argument that unfreezing assets will bring economic and currency stability assumes that the Taliban will govern the Central Bank as a professional monetary institution — a task they are neither willing nor capable of carrying out. Moreover, there is already ample evidence of misuse of humanitarian aid by the regime: They have discriminated against people in need based on their ethnic and religious identity and have used aid to pay their fighters’ salaries. Thus, as the amount of aid and engagement increases, so too will the group’s grip on power, while poverty will only deepen. President Joe Biden’s recent unjust and illegal executive order to split $7 billion of these assets between 9/11 victims and humanitarian aid will further destabilize the country’s economy while minimizing the international leverage over the Taliban. The question, then, remains: How much aid is the world prepared to provide, and for how long?

As a second priority, the world has tried to encourage the Taliban to form an inclusive government by including non-Pashtun ethnicities in their emirate. It is unlikely that the regime will agree to this as it would, in its view, taint its ethnic identity. One of the reasons that the Taliban’s Islamist ambitions have remained limited to Afghanistan is because of their deep merger with Pashtun identity and the goal of creating a mono-ethnic power structure. Even if they agreed to include other ethnic groups in their government, little would change. Inclusive and representative governance is only meaningful in a pluralistic and democratic system, where the voice and approval of the people drive state legitimacy and public policies. In authoritarian regimes, in which one or a handful of people make all the decisions with no accountability, their identity makes little difference. Old empires and monarchies in the region have long filled their royal courts with ethnic minorities, knowing that they did not have the power to pose any real threat. The Taliban already have several officials from other non-Pashtun communities, including their deputy prime minister, who is an Uzbek; their chief of army personnel, who is a Tajik; and two Hazara deputy ministers. Yet, these ethnic groups — particularly the Shi’a Hazaras — suffer structural persecution at the hands of the regime on a daily basis. Moreover, calls for inclusivity ignore women, the largest disenfranchised group in the country, who have put up the fiercest resistance against the regime. The Taliban will never incorporate women into government.

The third aim of the international community has been to convince the Taliban to soften their medieval governance methods. The result, however, has been the opposite: The group’s extremism has only hardened since their return to power last August. This is in line with the takeaways from years of talking peace with them and experiences in other parts of the world, which show that appeasing authoritarian rulers only emboldens them. During the negotiations in Doha, I observed how compromises made as confidence-building measures only solidified the Taliban’s intransigence and their refusal to abandon their maximalist positions. The most striking example of this was the release of 5,000 of their prisoners in the face of U.S. pressure; most of those released returned to the battlefield and the gesture did nothing to help at the negotiating table. The futility of international investment in the Taliban’s political office in Qatar is evidence that the rare tendency of some of their leaders to compromise has no effect on the group’s broader worldview — thus, such leaders are easily sidelined. A key example is the movement’s co-founder, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar: He was expected to become the highest Taliban decisionmaker, but instead has completely lost his relevance and authority to hardliners, such as the leader of the notorious Haqqani Network, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who runs the Ministry of Interior. The more the Taliban consolidate their power, the more unyielding they become to domestic demands and external pressures. They expect that in the end, the international community’s national security interests will trump its stewardship of humanitarian values; in the Taliban’s view, it will ultimately acquiesce and give them access to financial and political resources.

International efforts thus far have assumed that the Taliban are a conventional state apparatus that intends to abide by international law. However, groups like the Taliban derive their legitimacy partly from defying the international order. For such regimes — as we have seen in North Korea, Syria, Iran, and in the old Soviet republics — grim prospects of human suffering and hunger or the attractions of political acceptance are no deterrent to bad behavior. Unless the international community realizes that, its current approach — including the decision about the fate of frozen assets in the U.S. — will only bring further destitution to people in Afghanistan and chaos to the region, both through the worsening humanitarian and economic catastrophe and the empowerment and institutionalization of a predatory and fanatical regime. No one wants to live under such a regime, and the people of Afghanistan, who strive for freedom and dignity, are certainly no exception. Helping Afghanistan must begin by acknowledging that the Taliban are at the heart of the problem, not the solution.

Sayed Madadi was the Director of Foreign Relations at Afghanistan’s State Ministry for Peace and a Senior Member of the Joint Technical Secretariat of Afghan Peace Negotiations in Doha, Qatar. He tweets at @madadisaeid. The views expressed in this piece are his own.

By Sayed Madadi

As global attention shifts further away from Afghanistan to Ukraine and elsewhere, time is running out to change course before the country’s freefall under the Taliban becomes irreversible. There is no silver bullet for the problems facing Afghanistan and some of what is needed and possible could very well require uncomfortable, tough decisions and strategic patience to yield any results. But pivoting away from the counterproductivity of current efforts to appease the Taliban, as I have argued before, is necessary if the country’s future is to be saved.

Proponents of ongoing leniency justify it in the name of averting worse outcomes, such as the rise of Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), a deadly civil war, or a full-scale famine. They fail to acknowledge, however, that the Taliban are not a guard against those worries, but rather an enabler of them. According to the U.N., since the Taliban’s takeover, the economic catastrophe is only deepening toward a point of irreversibility despite more than $2 billion spent in aid, and ISKP recruitment has increased dramatically. Therefore, if Afghanistan is to avoid any or all of those outcomes, the limits of the Taliban’s ability and willingness to change must be put to the test. The international community needs a two-pronged, interlinked approach to normalize the economy and stabilize the political scene. While economic support could incentivize commercial activity, it is the political solutions that will ensure stability.

Supporting People: Minimal but Effective

The first step should be to rethink the current aid architecture, focusing on effectiveness, accountability, and conditionality. It is critical for aid money to build resilience by supporting economic activity at the local level instead of fueling further dependency through short-term, piecemeal interventions. Efforts should rely on domestic capabilities, especially human capital, to minimize costs, cater to local needs, increase employment, and sustain capacity for the future. Even after the departure of hundreds of thousands of educated Afghans, enough operational and technical expertise remains to execute such programs. Additionally, supporting small businesses and entrepreneurship, especially in the areas of food production, basic commodities, and agriculture, would help to rebuild local supply chains given the complexities that remain around international trade and transactions. The growth of grassroots civil society in recent years as foreign funding dried up shows that such times of crisis also provide opportunities for creativity. One solution is to let an international organization such as the ICRC manage the Afghanistan Red Crescent Society in order to play a more robust role in humanitarian response. The organization suffers from corruption and low capacity, but it also has the widest reach of any indigenous institution. Ensuring its independence by removing it from Taliban control and boosting its efficiency by decentralizing its operations would allow for the incorporation of local perspectives in the implementation of what is now a fully foreign-driven agenda.

The accountability of aid money is just as important as many have already raised concerns about the transparency of these programs. There has been, unsurprisingly, reluctance on the part of U.N. agencies whose overhead costs are disproportionately high compared to their programmatic spending to be fully open to outside scrutiny, including from the media. There is also a growing trend of NGOs mushrooming to undertake humanitarian activities similar to the early days of the post-2001 era. It is important not to repeat mistakes of the past. In 2015, I reviewed financial documents from the two largest national NGOs: the Afghanistan Development Association (ADA) affiliated with Jilani Popal, the former head of local governance, and Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance (CHA), then run by Salam Rahimi, who later became President Ashraf Ghani’s chief of staff. They both had submitted the same report to the Ministry of Economy for more than five consecutive years — each year executing around $12 million in development money. Recently, I also came across an organization engaging in humanitarian activity that, in addition to what it officially charges for its services in distributing aid, had a designated line in its fundraising appeal for donations as “tips,” without clarifying where the money would go. Humanitarian response can provide employment, but it must not turn into a lucrative business enterprise.

To that end, three layers of accountability measures are necessary. At the highest, the international organizations should have regular reporting cycles to publicize the financial and programmatic details of their activities. Entities such as Transparency International and Freedom House that track global accountability and access to information can partner with credible platforms such as Etilaat-e-Roz newspaper in setting up a designated accountability portal to track the expenditure of international aid in Afghanistan. Parallel to that, local and community-level accountability platforms should be set up to involve beneficiaries. This is important not just in identifying the right priorities, but also in supporting community-engagement practices that would strengthen the foundations for any meaningful democratic experiment in the future. To avoid commercialization and duplication, a uniform structure should be built into the design of aid programs based on past experience and existing institutional foundations. As a third-layer support system, easy-to-use, homegrown technological solutions could allow access to information, crowd-sourced reporting and documentation, and cost-effective feasibility studies and impact evaluations.

While the rapidly deteriorating economic situation and the power vacuum left by the disintegration of the republican state pushed the international community to assume the primary responsibility for mitigating the crisis in Afghanistan, the Taliban must begin to play their role if the outside world is to entertain any further meaningful engagement. It is obvious that humanitarian aid alone cannot solve all of Afghanistan’s problems. A calibrated degree of conditionality, thus, is necessary to prevent increasing aid from empowering the Taliban and to gauge their will to transform. Conditionality of aid and more robust diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, however, must be part of a comprehensive architecture with specific expectations of deliverables rather than vague, immeasurable commitments such as those made by the group in the Doha Agreement. Efforts thus far have failed to account for such delicacies. The U.S. Treasury comfort letters and general licenses allow transactions on issues related to “rule of law, citizenry participation, government accountability and transparency, human rights, access to information and civil society” without accounting for the shrinking space for such work under a cabinet full of sanctioned terrorists. Blank checks like these could foster aid embezzlement on the one hand and help cement the Taliban’s rule on the other.

Demands for gradual sanctions relief, asset defreezes, and similar actions should solicit in return clear changes in behavior from the regime. The Taliban must immediately end its campaign of arbitrary retribution and address the problem of legal ambiguity by acknowledging the validity of previous legal frameworks until they are reviewed — a key step to any economic and political normalcy. Moreover, the international community must define a series of fundamental non-negotiables to support and protect the people of Afghanistan against the Taliban. Key among them are the rights and civil liberties of women. It cannot be acceptable in 2022 for a regime, under whatever pretense, to remove half the population from public life. The international interest in paying the salaries of teachers and medical workers must be used as meaningful leverage to not only open schools to girls, but also influence the content of the curriculum and the broader issue of women’s employment. Of course, conditionality can only be effective if violations are met with credible consequences.

Additionally, access to the Central Bank’s foreign reserves must be conditioned on reforming its Board of Governors to include international representatives such as officials from the International Monetary Fund, allowing robust independent monitoring mechanisms as many have suggested, and fully implementing the Central Bank Law. The Taliban must allow this board to appoint an independent expert as governor of the bank and monitor recruitment and operational processes at senior levels. The issue of Afghanistan’s assets abroad, however, goes beyond the bank’s reserves. There are commercial properties abroad that produce revenue, hundreds of military aircraft in neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan the fate of which has not been declared, hundreds of millions of afghanis in an European country that were printed in the last months of the republic, and a growing number of embassies vacated by diplomats as they run out of resources and supplies, including blank passports. A comprehensive but lean arrangement such as an U.N.-mandated taskforce involving other entities like the Asian Development Bank and Organization of Islamic Cooperation, can be established to manage all of Afghanistan’s foreign belongings until a truly representative government is in place in Kabul.

Political Roadmap: Decentralized Pluralism

Interventions to address the economic crisis can only be effective if political solutions are also implemented in parallel to ensure lasting stability. The Taliban have taken their grip on power and their brutality to new heights in an environment of legal ambiguity and political uncertainty. The best solution remains a political process to define a roadmap for the country’s future that would include all segments of Afghan society. A decentralized, pluralistic configuration would cater to the country’s political and socio-cultural diversity. The Taliban have utilized operational decentralization in their insurgency and know its merits well. They have to give in to political decentralization to ensure a basic level of stability and even their own survival. During the peace talks in Doha, they showed some degree of openness in informal engagements to democratic practices at the local level. Their rejection of national elections stems as much from their ideological rigidity, which considers sovereignty to be divine, as from their insecurity about winning public votes. Thus, pressuring them to allow other ethnic groups and political forces to define preferred forms of government in their regions would be a starting point, especially if they continue to dominate national politics.

Such a political process should be comprehensive and multilayered. One of the reasons the Doha talks failed was because of the simplicity of their design and the lack of a comprehensive, long-term roadmap. The reliance on a single-track direct negotiation would make the entire process vulnerable to the whims of individual actors, who could sabotage it when their narrowly defined interests are not served maximally. Additionally, it would limit the space for broad representation by enabling a select group of individuals on behalf of wide and diverse constituencies without necessarily speaking for their interests or being accountable to them. It also does not need to begin with the immediate conventional practices of holding grand meetings and conferences. That was what happened in Bonn in 2001 and in the Doha talks in 2020 and it proved disastrous. The last thing the international community should do is to bring back the corrupt old guards or to mobilize a new such class. The focus should be on structural changes rather than tokenistic incorporation of individuals into the Taliban’s emirate.

Such a political process should begin with a series of unilateral measures by the Taliban to establish trust and their willingness to work with others. They should realize that despite a near absolute hold on power, they are on the vulnerable end of any potential conflict. The unsuccessful talks in Doha can possibly provide a foundation to build on. For example, the U.N. should demand the Taliban sign the principles document that was developed in preparation for the Istanbul talks that ended up not taking place. This short document asked the Taliban to commit to civil liberties, democratic processes, equality of all citizens, and freedom of expression, among others, as the guiding principles of any meaningful negotiations. More broadly, the world should pressure the Taliban to provide the bare minimum of an environment conducive to political activity. Coherent and credible alternatives will eventually emerge on the ground in organic and indigenous ways. A basic level of protection for political dissent and diversity is required to ensure those alternatives are non-violent. The Taliban’s intransigence must be seen not as a constant to accept but an obstacle to overcome.

Precondition: Collective Action

Admittedly, achieving these objectives will not be easy. But any chance of success requires reestablishing the credibility and authority of the international community — which equally suffers from a trust deficit — so it can play a positive and effective role. The first step in doing so is better internal coordination and cohesiveness. Disunity and lack of consensus have been one of the key factors undermining global efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan. There appears to be a lack of coordination even between the two American envoys: Rina Amiri, who is communicating a more critical approach on human rights, and Thomas West, who often appears more ready to compromise on the political front. It is imperative to mobilize more cohesively in pressuring the regime. Individual bilateral engagements only bolster the Taliban’s ability to bargain and play multiple stakeholders against each other. Additionally, working with regional countries remains critical to the effectiveness of external efforts. Using a more robust and coherent strategy of carrots and sticks can still yield some results.

The other component is a holistic, multi-dimensional negotiation strategy. The Taliban use a maximalist approach that starts negotiations from very low bars in order to use every ordinary matter as a point of leverage. For example, contrary to previous promises and assurances, they have taken the entire country and its people hostage, partly to use as bargaining chips against the international community to solidify their rule. The outside world, however, barely knows what it wants from the regime and what it would do if its demands are rejected. The European Union reopened its diplomatic mission in Kabul despite none of its five-point engagement benchmarks being fully met. Similarly, while almost all of Taliban leadership are on multiple sanction lists, they are roving around the globe, as we recently saw in Turkey, to expand diplomatic alliances; they are also expected in London for an upcoming donor conference. In order to negotiate effectively, the international community needs to have clarity about its interests and priorities. Limiting engagement with the Taliban to the U.N. mission in Kabul and the group’s Doha office by penalizing travel against sanctions would be an example of such strategic calibration. Sanctions will not have any consequences for the Taliban if transgressions (by the regime and members of the international community) are not addressed. Unless the international community uses its leverage effectively, it will soon have to give in even more helplessly than it already has — all to the detriment of Afghanistan’s future and undermining its own national security interests.

Sayed Madadi was the Director of Foreign Relations at Afghanistan’s State Ministry for Peace and a Senior Member of the Joint Technical Secretariat of Afghan Peace Negotiations in Doha, Qatar. He tweets at @madadisaeid. The views expressed in this piece are his own.

By Omar Sadr

By Omar Sadr

Nonviolent resistance must mobilize the people and create synergies between different strata within the democratic constituency.

It is a dark age for Afghanistan. The reemergence of the Taliban twenty years after its initial defeat has brought back a totalitarian regime, leaving the country with an unsuccessful peace process, failed state, humanitarian catastrophe, the deprivation of rights, and an unprecedented rise in ethno-cultural injustice. Despite the twenty-seven years of lived experience with the Taliban, there are many misunderstandings about the group. It is important to note that the Taliban is not just like any other authoritarian government. It is neither a single-party system, a traditional monarchy, nor a military dictatorship. Instead, it is an absolute religio-tribal totalitarian regime.

Immediately after it seized Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban received a proactive, nonviolent pushback from women, civil servants, and human rights activists. I have described this elsewhere as steady, sporadic, and spontaneous. Another common pattern of passive, nonviolent resistance in Afghanistan has been the mass exodus of the country’s non-Taliban citizens, which first took place in 1996 during the Taliban’s initial period of rule. It is now happening again. During the last seven months of Taliban rule, millions have left the country, and many more will escape as the Taliban’s rule becomes harsher. But unlike in the 1990s, resistance to the Taliban has not remained limited to a passive exodus of the non-Taliban from Afghanistan.

A successful long-term, nonviolent movement, however, should neither be submissive, sporadic, nor spontaneous. Indeed, those carrying out nonviolent resistance to the Taliban should abandon a simplistic understanding of passive resistance and instead adopt political defiance as an approach.

To begin with, nonviolent resistance is not a call for obedience and passivity. It is constant activism, which requires the mobilization of the masses. Unlike passive, nonviolent action, nonviolent resistance is defiance, and it leaves no room for submission. This is what Robert Helvey called “political defiance.” Nonviolent action, therefore, will help discourage obedience to the Taliban.

Second, while nonviolent resistance entails noncooperation with the autocratic or totalitarian regime, the secular ideologues of the Taliban consistently suggest cooperating with the regime. Nonviolent resistance does not allow even the acceptance of the regime; it instead aims to overthrow and disintegrate it. Unlike political defiance, cooperation with a totalitarian regime like the Taliban creates obedience. Obedience in turn facilitates the sustainability of totalitarian rule, helping convert the citizens into submissive, atomized individuals who lose their self-confidence and do not dare protest. Historically—be it colonialism, apartheid, or racism—nonviolent resistance has aimed to overthrow the hegemonic and discursive order under these regimes. The same shall go for the nonviolent resistance against the Taliban regime. Beyond being organized, nonviolent resistance must present a plausible alternative to the ideology and institutional infrastructure of Talibanism. In other words, to borrow from Gramsci, it must produce and articulate counter-hegemonic discourse based on the cultural pluralism and rich history of the land.

Third, nonviolent resistance should now move beyond its initial stage of sporadic and spontaneous resistance. Instead, it should adopt a more strategic approach that addresses key questions such as the issues at stake with the Taliban, the effectiveness of various tools of nonviolent resistance, and whether and when to negotiate with the Taliban. Gene Sharp, a political scientist who had extensive influence over the nonviolent movements, has given a conscious warning to democrats on the prospects of negotiations with dictators. He argues that when the stakes of the issues are very high or there is a power asymmetry between the democrats and the dictators, negotiations can be a trap that the democrats must be cautious of. He argues that a “halt to resistance rarely brings reduced repression. … Resistance, not negotiations, is essential for change in conflicts where fundamental issues are at stake.” The issue at stake with the Taliban is both cultural and political. Hence, both the cultural and political forms of nonviolence are crucial. On the other hand, as the people of Afghanistan are suffering from the economic crisis, nonviolent economic actions—such as strikes, boycotts, and hunger strikes—may not be effective. Similarly, government strikes and boycotts of the civil service may not work, as the Taliban could easily replace protesters with its loyalists in the bureaucracy. With this in mind, the effective approach to resistance is the one that targets the weakness of the totalitarian regime and identifies the strengths of the people.

Fourth, the mandate of a political defiance movement does not end with disintegrating the totalitarian regime. Rather, the policy of political defiance shall be aimed at reestablishing a democratic order. This cannot be done by elevating the corrupt political elite to leadership or moving toward an elite-centric agenda. As a totalitarian regime directly assaults the autonomous institutions of the society, political defiance in Afghanistan must revive and establish civic institutions, which strengthen society to stand up against the regime. This will increase the capacity of people to resist the regime for longer.

Fifth, nonviolent resistance is a breath-taking exercise. While the aim is to reduce suffering, resistance itself has great costs. Fighting for liberation and the disintegration of a totalitarian state involves pain, suffering, and risks. However, resistance should avoid any form of hatred; nonviolence is fighting hatred without detestation. Hence, the ultimate end of nonviolence is not avoiding suffering but prohibiting hate, especially ethnic or racial hate. Therefore, nonviolent resistance against the Taliban cannot be sentimental, and any belittling or personal attacks cannot be allowed.

For Afghanistan, resistance in general, and nonviolent resistance in particular, should function as praxis to maintain fundamental freedoms, democratic aspirations, and the recognition of diversity in Afghanistan. It should not hesitate to articulate its ideas and struggle to convert them into norms. Simultaneously, the resistance must step forward to actively practice them. The political defiance of the last few months has had payoffs. Many pro-Taliban apologists have shifted their positions and now criticize the Taliban. This has been caused by consistent protests, both on the ground and on social media, which have increased the cost of supporting the Taliban.

Nonetheless, the Taliban and its secular ideologues present a complicated challenge. This challenge precludes any easy and ready-made solutions. Rather, it requires a strategic approach to mobilize the people and create synergies between different strata from within the democratic constituency.

Omar Sadr is a Research Scholar at the Center for Governance and Markets, University of Pittsburgh.

Read at The National Interest

By Sayed Madadi

When Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad embarked on his mission in September 2018 to end the American military engagement in Afghanistan, few people placed much hope in his efforts. Almost three years later, even fewer people could believe the staggering failure of the peace process he spearheaded as the Taliban entered Kabul uncontested. There was a fundamentally flawed process design at the core of that failure which not only upended the opportunities for reaching a political settlement but also contributed to the disastrous unraveling of the republican government. Three aspects of that process design were particularly consequential: A two-stage process that reduced the republic of Afghanistan to a subsidiary party; Ghani’s backchannel contacts with the Taliban; a lack of mediators and a lack of institutional framework for civil society engagement in the peace process.

Two-stage process

Delinking the withdrawal of foreign forces from a political settlement disrupted the balance of leverages and incentives required for any meaningful negotiations to progress. The Taliban insurgency had two key demands, which were the withdrawal of international forces and a Sharia-based governance structure replacing the Islamic republican system. Those demands were interrelated as the post-2004 constitutional order was a direct byproduct of the US-led international military intervention. The Taliban wanted not only the foreign troops to leave, but to erase any sign and legacy of their presence in the country. That was the logic behind their insistence on negotiating directly with the United States instead of a more direct adversary, the Kabul-based government. For them, the country Afghanistan had metamorphosed into after they were ousted from power in 2001 neither had the legitimacy to exist nor the merit to be sustained.

In that context, a process in which the US negotiated its withdrawal and left the Taliban and the Republic of Afghanistan to hammer out the details of a shared political future was fundamentally flawed and destined to fail. That arrangement redacted the entire peace process to the US-Taliban talks and made the other component of the process secondary to, dependent on, and an extension of those negotiations. The negative implications of such a design became more obvious during the so-called “intra-Afghanistan talks.” The Taliban often reminded the Republic’s negotiating team that they were at the table only to fulfill their commitment to the Americans rather than out of a genuine will to work towards a comprehensive peace agreement. Even on the Republic’s side, many thought that the fate of the negotiations had already been decided between the US and the Taliban.
The American commitment to a complete pullout before and regardless of a political settlement effectively left the Taliban with maximum leverage but minimum interest. The Taliban believed that it had resolved all points of difference in its talks with the US and had no need to see the direct negotiations through. The agenda of direct talks with the republic made that clear. In the republic’s calculus, it had more than 7000 Taliban members in custody—even after the release of 5000 prisoners in August 2020. The government was also the only authority to initiate the process of delisting the Taliban members from the UN sanctions lists. The Taliban, on the other hand, had not even included those issues in their agenda. It instead considered prisoner release and delisting as American commitments, and preconditions for their presence at the intra-Afghanistan table rather than an outcome of it. That left the republican team empty-handed, unable to offer anything the Taliban wanted in return for a ceasefire, a concession of extreme value to the republican constituency.

The two-stage process did not just give away the republic’s leverage against the Taliban. It also undermined the government in the country’s domestic political scene. Once the US committed to a full withdrawal, the authority and legitimacy of the government were challenged by political factions long before the Taliban arrived on the outskirts of the capital. Building the much-needed political consensus became incredibly difficult for Ashraf Ghani Administration as political actors bandwagoned on the American appeasement of the Taliban, trying to negotiate their mini-deals with the insurgency to protect their wealth and interest. The President’s divisive politics and stubbornly autocratic management further complicated that task and weakened the republic’s position at the table. This was clearly at play within the negotiating team where the political standing of the members’ patrons vis-à-vis the presidential palace in Kabul steered their relationship with the team’s leadership loyal to President Ghani.

Ghani’s backchannel contacts with the Taliban

The intra-Afghanistan negotiations could not produce a political settlement because of the limitations of a linear, single-track, and static negotiation table that suffered from a high trust deficit and a structural ineptness to address it. Personal relationships between negotiators of the two sides were utilized only towards personal objectives because the rigid process design could not harness them for the benefit of the official talks. At least on the republican side, most hid their communication with the Taliban. On several occasions, members had come under harsh criticism from their teammates for meeting with the Taliban ‘without authorization.’ As external events and stakeholders continuously derailed the formal talks, the entire process came to a halt for weeks simply because one of the parties did not show up at a scheduled meeting.

The process also lacked credible and defined safety nets and backchannels to break deadlocks and salvage the talks when the two negotiating parties could not make headways. Multiple actors either tried to offer backchannels or were approached by the parties to do so. However, without their explicit incorporation into the process design, such attempts remained ad hoc and ineffective. In September 2019, months after the State Ministry for Peace was formed, a senior British diplomat conveyed General Nick Carter, British Chief of the Defense Staff’s interest in operating a backchannel with the Pakistani Chief of Army, General Qamar Bajwa. Although Carter remained involved in Afghanistan affairs through his relationships with Ghani and Bajwa, his efforts, disconnected from the official negotiation process, left no positive impact.

Unlike the Taliban who seemed to listen to their advisors, the republican side dismissed most analysis and advice. Instead, it was steered by President Ghani’s political interests and his chief negotiator’s intellectual capacity, none of whom proved capable enough for the complex task at hand. 

Later, there were efforts by the American, German and Qatari special envoys to function as backchannels between the negotiating parties. However, they were often considered untrustworthy and partisan by both or at least one of the sides—Ghani government thought of the U.S. and Qatar as too sympathetic to the Taliban. Instead, his chief negotiator was in contact with a group of businessmen from Afghanistan in the Gulf that he thought had credibility with and influence over the Taliban. That also did not materialize in any positive impact. The only potentially effective backchannel, according to its participants, was established by Abdul Salam Rahimi, Ghani’s special envoy for peace and deputy chief negotiator. Mediated by a Doha-based think-tanker who claimed to have built some trust with the Taliban, Rahimi leveraged his family’s political ties to the Haqqanis in initiating a side conversation. As early as May 2021, Rahimi tabled the idea of a “peaceful transfer of power,” something that became center stage in discussions immediately preceding the fall of Kabul. Of course, the departure of Ghani and the Taliban’s uncontested takeover made it impossible to gauge whether those conversations were actually successful in forging an agreement even if sub-optimal.

Lack of institutional role for civil society

The overly simplified process could not incorporate constant demands for inclusivity and representation. The direct impact of that inability was the dissatisfaction of many constituencies who felt left out, and unheard, their interests and gains compromised by the talks. This also hindered the public legitimacy and buy-in of the process. This deficiency uniquely undermined the republican team as the process came under constant criticism from civil society, minorities, veteran groups, and other vulnerable constituencies.

In the absence of multiple and broad-based platforms of engagement and debate, there was little space for the public to pressure the negotiating parties, especially the Taliban, to negotiate more seriously and discuss pressing issues that could near the process to an eventual outcome. The stagnated table in Doha was incapable of fostering broader dialogues away from the interest-driven and confrontational negotiations. Although the government tried to mobilize its constituency, without formal linkages to the actual track-I talks, those efforts failed to bear fruits. For example, the High Council for National Reconciliation sent teams to several provinces to engage with communities, and the State Ministry for Peace established a Civil Society Coordination Board and a Women Advisory Board. Additionally, some NGOs and donor-sponsored initiatives such as the EU-funded Afghanistan Mechanism for Inclusive Peace (AMIP) also tried, all to no avail as they lacked institutional linkage to the actual negotiations, to create bridges between the formal negotiations and a much broader and diverse constituency.

Negotiation without mediation

The fourth important design deficiency that considerably contributed to the process’ failure in producing a political settlement was the absence of a third-party mediator. Rarely have peace negotiations succeeded without an impartial mutual interlocutor bridging the distrust between the parties. With suspicions in Kabul around the mostly secretive US-Taliban negotiations, President Ghani and his inner circle struggled to minimize Ambassador Khalilzad’s role in the then-upcoming intra-Afghanistan talks. However, as the talks neared, Qatar emerged as a more plausible and interested mediator or at least a facilitator. But Ghani considered Qatar only a stretched arm of the US, especially as the Gulf state saw the Afghanistan peace process as a diplomatic lifeline amid the blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

While the Taliban’s rejection of mediation was understandable given their interest in stagnating and stalling the talks, the republican side’s opposition was confounding. With the clock on the American withdrawal ticking, it was obvious that prolonging the talks was hurting the Afghanistan government’s position. A mediator could have brought life-saving speed to the process. Many within the republican team seemed to have realized that since February 2021 and supported Qatar as a facilitator. However, despite constant nudging from the negotiators, Chief Negotiator Masoum Stanekzai refrained—as it only became clear in late June—from formally communicating the request to the Qatari government.

The other reason the lack of a third-party mediation contributed to the process’ failure was the dirt of technical capacity on both sides. Although the Taliban had much more strategic clarity about what they wanted from the talks and possessed better skills and in some ways even more experience in negotiations, their views of complex political and legal issues were very simplistic and rigid. The Taliban used their better negotiation techniques to push for those intransigent views, which made progress more difficult.

In the contact group meetings where the actual negotiation took place, it was obvious that the Taliban were coming with full preparation to counter the republic’s arguments. The republican side, on the other hand, lacked both the strategic clarity and negotiation techniques necessary to manage a process of such fragility and a conflict of such complexity. Strict hierarchy and political infighting disabled it from taking advantage of the available capacity in the negotiating team and the broader peace architecture. One example was their doubling down on religious reasoning against the Taliban’s insurgency and violence or in defense of democratic values, assuming that the Taliban would cease hostilities if they could provide one more irrefutable argument. They dismissed more nuanced arguments from politically less powerful voices who argued that it was falling into a trap where the Taliban forced their intellectual frameworks to drive the negotiations.

Unlike the Taliban who seemed to listen to their advisors, the republican side dismissed most analysis and advice. Instead, it was steered by President Ghani’s political interests and his chief negotiator’s intellectual capacity, none of whom proved capable enough for the complex task at hand. A credible third-party mediator could have helped the process progress by tabling creative ideas. It could also break gridlocks by applying iterative alternatives to conventional methods of negotiations. Equally important, a mediator could have kept the parties accountable against a timeline not necessarily driven by the US troops’ withdrawal.

The third important area where a mediator could have significantly contributed to the success of the process was in managing external stakeholders. The lack of international and regional consensus and the dismissal of allies’ views by the US incentivized many to try exerting influence directly to protect their interests. In addition to their ambassadors based in Kabul, many countries had their special envoys specifically tasked with engaging in the peace process. Such a crowded and chaotic scene took away the parties’ agency, especially of the republican side. The meetings in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, Tashkent, and the Istanbul that eventually did not take place were examples of such an approach that derailed the process, took away the momentum and credibility from the Doha talks, and further undermined its prospects of success. A third-party mediator could have very well created centralized ownership of the process, channeled international engagements more constructively, and maintained focus in the negotiations.

Conclusion
It is hard to argue that had the process design addressed these three issues, it would have produced an outcome in the form of a comprehensive peace agreement. It is equally hard to discount the degree to which a flawed process design dimmed the prospects of a political settlement. Arguably, the poor design of the process also contributed to the disastrous and chaotic unravelling of the republican government in August 2021. The American decision to exclude the Afghanistan government from the withdrawal talks and commit to releasing the Taliban’s prisoners and removing sanctions took away from the republic the ‘fighting chance’ against the Taliban at the table and on the battlefield. Moreover, the absence of track-IIs and other support mechanisms further undermined representation and buy-in by minimizing public pressure on the negotiating parties. The absence of a credible backchannel also stagnated the talks in an environment of mistrust. Negotiations without a third-party mediator further prolonged the process and amplified the negative implications of the lack of technical capacity on both sides. Lacking a mediator, the process was constantly derailed by arbitrary and external deadlines and preferences. While the first shortcoming of the process design was uncorrectable from the beginning, the two other aspects could have easily been fixed at any point throughout the eleven months if there was political will. Although the process might have still failed even if the warnings about its simplicity and fragility were taken more seriously, it would have probably not collapsed the way it did and with the disastrous ramifications that it had.

Note: This essay was submitted as a discussion paper for a colloquium on “Why was a political settlement not achieved in Afghanistan?” convened on 15 – 16 July 2022, by the US Institute of Peace and the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies at the USIP headquarters in Washington, D.C.

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