- Pakistan will suffer if the USA pulls out without a political settlement
AT PENPOINT
The USA-Taliban peace agreement was heralded as the agreement that would lead to the end of the USA’s longest war, one that had begun in 1999, and which would allow US President Donald Trump to claim that he brought home the troops in his re-election campaign this year. It was a long time in the making, and involved several arduous rounds of talks since 2018 between US negotiators headed by Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban negotiators headed by Mullah Abdul Ghani Bradar. There was an earlier blip last September, when President Trump called a deal reached between the two teams after a US soldier was killed before the signing ceremony, which was supposed to take place in Camp David.
However, the signing ceremony of the later agreement, which took place in Qatar on March 1, also could not hold. This time, while the Taliban showed that they could deliver, the USA showed the kind of duplicity which the Taliban seemed to the last time around. But perhaps it was different in that the USA was promising something it could not. The agreement included a provision for a prisoner exchange: 5000 Taliban fighters to be released from Kabul’s custody in exchange for 1000 personnel of the Afghan Security Forces. The Kabul government nearly tore down the agreement on this, only releasing the Taliban prisoners it holds after the Americans put its foot down.
Perhaps one should not really blame the Kabul government. The general assumption is that it will collapse if the USA stops supporting it. The Kabul government is directly elected, but it depends on the US and NATO troops to remain in office, as the Afghan National Security Forces have not yet developed the ability to fight on their own. The recent presidential election saw Ashraf Ghani re-elected, but only after a delay in the result and allegations of cheating by Abdullah Abdullah, whose third bid it was, and who had himself sworn in to parallel Ghani’s re-inauguration.
Afghanistan is said to be the graveyard of empires, but Pakistan is not an empire, and has no reason to suffer for imperial ambitions of others. Ghani’s election may now be out of the way, but Trump’s is still to happen. These two elections will determine the trajectory of the peace process
There is concern on the US side too, and not just among negotiators, that the Taliban will not stick to their agreement on the Afghan constitution. Both they and the regime seem to be assuming the Taliban will regain power, which shows the USA did not do a good job of cementing the constitution they handed down. More important, it seems that things they introduced, like democratic government and women’s rights, are not owned by the Afghan people. In short, they are not willing to fight, even peacefully, for these changes.
On the other hand, the Taliban’s issues still seem to exist. The first is lawlessness. It should not be forgotten that the rise of the Taliban back in the last quarter of the 20th century was because of the chaos of the country after the USSR left. The second is religion. The Taliban may have horrified the rest of the world by their interpretation of Islam, and the measures they took to enforce it, but that did not seem to cause revulsion against them among the populace. It did not seem to create enough support for them to resist the US invasion, but it enable them to sustain over 20 years of guerrilla warfare.
It would be wrong to see the US-Taliban agreement as a repeat of the USSR’s retreat in 1988. The government the USSR overthrew in 1979, that of Noor Muhammad Tarakai, was not involved. Even the government it had itself overthrown in 1978, that of Sardar Daud, had no claimant left behind. The USSR was not chased out by anyone it had ousted, but by mujahideen who had risen up. Indeed, the USSR made no agreement with any mujahideen, but with another government, Pakistan’s.
The USA is looking surreptitiously over its shoulder at the Vietnam experience, when it withdrew after 58,000 personnel died trying to shore up the South Vietnamese government against a communist takeover. When the USA withdrew its troops, the South caved in, and an image seared into the US collective memory is the last US helicopter taking off from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon, in an evacuation barely ahead of the North Vietnamese advance. That Cold War disgrace partly fuelled its support for the Mujahideen in the 1980s, and there was talk of ‘revenge’ for Vietnam when Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan.
Ashraf Ghani is probably deeply aware of the fate of his predecessor, whom the Soviets left behind, Babrak Karmal. He was strung up from a lamp-post in his capital when it fell. That hanging might be behind Ghani’s hesitance to release the Taliban prisoners. He probably sees no reason to set free men who will merely fight against him, which explains his emphasis on the undertaking not to fight, even though it is probably not worth the paper it is written on.
That might indicate that while the USA will withdraw its troops, the fighting will most likely not be over. The USSR withdrew without making a political settlement. That meant that the Karmal regime had to do what it had not been able to do with Soviet support, and beat the Mujahideen in the ensuing fight. It lost, and Karmal was hanged. The Mujahideen came in, but the ensuing chaos made the rise of the Taliban possible. These were initially those who had fought in the Jihad, but had returned to private life. They came back to fight against lawlessness and ended up being ousted in their turn. Ousted leader Mullah Umar died in exile, but his party survived.
The USA seems to be repeating a combination of the Egypt-Israel and the Palestine-Israel experiences. While there was an Egypt-Israel deal at Camp David in 1978, there was a Palestine-Israel deal through the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. While the initial agreement was signed at Doha rather than Camp David (which was the location originally chosen before Trump shot down the deal the first time), the Taliban-government talks were scheduled for Oslo; the prisoner swap was to precede them.
They were endangered until the USA ‘persuaded’ the Afghan government. It was pressed hard enough on Pakistan to make the Taliban negotiate. Now it is its turn. The Afghan government may not object to talks as such, and in fact has supported them in the past, but it had a presidential election last year, which made Hamid Ghani a president with a four-year term ahead of him, rather than a lame-duck without a future, though there is still the Abdullah wild card. He needs assurances about his future before he dickers. The alternative will be to leave Afghanistan without an agreement, which will tempt the USA, because President Trump wants to ‘bring the troops home’ before his own re-election, as the Taliban well know. That may take the USA out of its longest war, and though it has been fighting since 1999 with over 3000 dead, Afghanistan has been fighting continuously since 1979.
The cost to Afghanistan will be drastic enough, but Pakistan too will suffer, as it has since then. Afghanistan is said to be the graveyard of empires, but Pakistan is not an empire, and has no reason to suffer for imperial ambitions of others. Ghani’s election may now be out of the way, but Trump’s is still to happen. These two elections will determine the trajectory of the peace process.
