One year ago, on 29 February 2020, the then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and MullahBaradar, Taleban Deputy Leader for Political Affairs, signed the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” in Doha. Simultaneously, representatives of the US and the Afghan government signed the similarly titled but less discussed “Joint Declaration between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan.” Some hopes for an end to the 40 year Afghan wars sprouted, but there was also immediate scepticism or clear-cut rejection of the Doha agreement that primarily catered to US and Taleban interests. It is unclear from its publicly available text whether the two most controversial issues – did the Taleban comply to a reduction of violence and to break ties with al-Qaeda – are covered and what mechanisms exist for verification. This in-built vagueness has strengthened the hand of the Taleban over the Afghan government. AAN co-director Thomas Ruttig went back to the text and found it difficult to nail down what has really been agreed, what was achieved and what has been breached.
War continuing, talks stalling, Doha deal being reviewed
There was hubris in the name of the US-Taleban “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” concluded in Qatar’s capital Doha a year ago. Few are surprised that it has not ended the over four decades long war in Afghanistan so far. It is becoming increasingly questionable that it ever will.
The Doha agreement set up the intra-Afghan talks that began in September 2020, the faltering progress of which have only further diminished confidence. Asad Kosha of Kabul daily Ettilat-e Ruz’s English language affiliate Kabul Now, speaking for many in Afghanistan, wrote in January 2021 about the “slow-moving intra-Afghan talks” resulting from the US-Taleban agreement that
… seemingly ha[ve] reached to the point that leaves little hope for a peaceful prospect to end the ongoing deadly fighting and pave the way for a durable peace settlement.
Many Afghans and a number of Afghanistan watchers already put the term ‘peace process’ in quotation marks. Among them is Professor William Maley, an old-hand Afghanistan watcher at the Australian National University, who wrote in an op-ed for the Tolo website in December 2020 that “the ‘peace process’… has exhausted any potential it ever had to bring peace and security to Afghanistan.” He even compared it to the 1938 Munich Agreement in which the governments of the United Kingdom and France handed over Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany in what today is seen as a prime example of a mislead appeasement policy. [1]
After more than two and a half years of a peace process – first negotiations between the US and the Taleban started in July 2018 accompanied by a surprise three-day ceasefire (AAN reporting here) and resulted in the Doha agreement signed on 29 February 2020, followed by the cumbersome intra-Afghan negotiations also held in Qatar’s capital – trust in its viability is almost at zero. Intra-Afghan negotiations have been slow from the start in September 2020. After the first round ended on 14 December 2020, they now seem at a standstill. A second round of talks that was due to commence on 5 January 2021 has yet to begin. This is the result of rising levels of violence, mainly attributed by the Taleban (AAN analysis here and here), but also the political reconfiguration in Washington.
Everyone is looking to the new US administration since it announced it was “reviewing” the Doha agreement. It has to make a decision between some highly unpalatable options, which all tend towards an escalation of violence.
The first option would be to complete the troop withdrawal of on schedule, risking the collapse of the Afghan government and a takeover by the Taleban, since without direct US military protection the Kabul government would be easier to push over militarily, or it would be so enfeebled that it would give in to Taleban’s political demands, such as to establish “a new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government” as stipulated in their deal with the US, but according to their own vision. As long as the Afghan government forces are paid and supplied, a military takeover would be violently resisted.
The second option would be leaving the remaining troops in Afghanistan without the Taleban’s consent, either with a limited, short term extension of the withdrawal or “conditions based”, rather than one with a new end-date. For example, President Ashraf Ghani has proposed such an approach in a speech in late January.
This would effectively mean ripping up the Doha deal and almost certainly provoke the Taleban to cancel the Doha agreement (despite widespread doubts about whether they have themselves fulfilled their part), walk out from the intra-Afghan talks and further escalate the violence. [2]
Another option would be to try and engage the Taleban about an extension, although they have already publicly said that they would “never” accept it. At the minimum, to avoid triggering a violent backlash, this option (if the Taleban changed their mind) would likely require to further make concessions to them, on the release of more prisoners and lifting sanctions against their leaders. The Taleban claim there are still some 7,000 prisoners held.
The chances to successfully pressure the Taleban into agreeing to such an approach is hampered by the fact that there is no clear-cut pro-peace consensus among Afghanistan’s neighbours and other influential powers. As Kristian Berg Harpviken of Oslo-based PRIO wrote, “[n]eighbors seem to be preparing for continuing conflicts in Afghanistan rather than investing in a path to peace.” He stated that Khalilzad’s approach “to engage the countries either one-by-one or in various ad-hoc groupings… does not represent a working platform nor a concerted will among the neighbors.”
The difficulty of this decision-making for Washington became visible when President Joe Biden failed to mention Afghanistan in his first foreign policy speech on 4 February 2021. But the decision cannot be put off for much longer: the withdrawal date is only weeks away, requiring complex military plans on top of these ominous political considerations.
In addition to the military consequences, the Doha agreement had two significant political ramifications. First, it opened the door for achieving what is the major – bipartisan – US political aim with regard to Afghanistan, pulling out its troops from what also the new administration calls the “so-called forever war” (see new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in his Senate confirmation hearing, quoted here). US troop numbers have dropped steadily from their peak of 100,000 in 2011, down to 8,000 when the Doha deal was signed and a mere 2,500 by mid-January 2021. This was the lowest level since December 2001.
Second, the agreement allowed for intra-Afghan negotiations to start between the main Afghan parties to the war, the Taleban on one side and the various factions in the current set-up of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (IRoA) on the other. [3] By December 2020, both parties had reached an agreement about the procedural framework for the talks, the so-called ‘rules of procedure,’ and exchanged ideas for an agenda for future rounds (AAN analysis here). The Afghan government, despite having been kept out of the US-Taleban negotiations, was forced to pay part of the price the US conceded to the Taleban, the release of a 5,000 Taleban prisoners (AAN analysis here). This weakened the Afghan government’s own negotiating position, having been forced into such a major concession before they even got to the table.
A major shortcoming of the Doha deal, however, is that the Taleban’s agreement to it did still not amount to their acceptance of the Afghan government as their direct negotiating partner. Khalilzad even actively supported their position by developing a formula under which the Taleban would negotiate with an “inclusive and effective national team” instead. This term morphed into a so-called “team of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” (IRoA). This included representatives of major political forces in the ‘republic’ who also question the legitimacy of the government of President Ghani (although for other reasons and purposes than the Taleban).
Another one is that the final deal delinked the troop withdrawal from the wider Afghan peace process, that is to say, the outcome of intra-Afghan talks and shaped those talks to the disadvantage of the Afghan government. These ramifications have been acknowledged by many Afghans and international commentators. James Dobbins, former special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2013-14 under Obama as well as President George W. Bush’s special envoy for Afghanistan in 2001-02, now a member of the Afghanistan Study Group that just published recommendations for the Biden/Harris team. Dobbins counted the Doha agreement “[a]mong President Trump’s few foreign policy achievements,” but at the same time concedes that “[t]he price for this success (…) was U.S. agreement to an accelerated timetable for a full military withdrawal unlinked to the outcome of these talks” (author’s emphasis). If this course is continued, most likely it will be Afghans, not Americans, who will have to pay the price.
Recently Afghan-US relations have been strained by a rekindled discussion about an interim government that could replace the government of President Ghani, something the president has always been fiercely resistant to. These ideas seem to have been promoted by the US whose chief negotiator Khalilzad (who has just been confirmed in his position by the Biden/Harris administration). Khalilzad had pushed such ideas earlier, hoping to avoid the 2019 presidential election giving legitimacy to a new Afghan president and to make a power-sharing deal with the Taleban easier. That they are back on the negotiating table became clear from statements from two members of the IRoA negotiation team in early January 2021 (see here and here), one of whom, Muhammad Amin Ahmadi, the president called back from the Doha delegation in February, apparently in anger that Ahmadi voiced support for an interim government.
Talk of an interim government was further kindled by reports that the Taleban’s deputy chief negotiator, Sher Muhammad Abbas Stanakzai, allegedly told the media during a visit to Moscow that Ghani should step down. [4] In addition, a draft 8-page paper has been circulated, titled “Agreement on a Political Settlement in Afghanistan between the two parties at intra-Afghan peace negotiations” dated 9 January 2021, reportedly “floated privately by U.S. officials and ha[ving] been supported by the Taliban, Pakistan (…) and some Afghan opposition figures.” It was later circulated on the social media, with references to a new “Islamic Power Sharing Government” or “Islamic Peace Government” (both terms appear as possible alternatives in the document). Ghani reacted strongly to these ideas by making clear, in a CNN interview on 9 January 2021, by stating his “main goal” was to “hand over to an elected successor,” rejecting thereby the idea of any other form of a transfer of power. Later he added, more strongly, “Be assured that as long as I am alive, they will not see the formation of an interim government. I am not like those willows that bend with the wind.” Then, in a BBC interview broadcast on 22 February (https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-56145953), he suggested that new elections could be held after a peace agreement was concluded, apparently conceding when pushed that this could take place but it was not fully clear whether they would be held prior to or at the end of his five-year tenure (in 2024). [5]
A ‘peace’ agreement?
While casual commentators have often referred to the Doha deal as a “peace agreement,” it is highly doubtful that the two parties ever meant it to be. Hence its title is “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan”, not “Agreement Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” (author’s emphasis). [6]
Beyond the semantics, the modest ambitions of the United States for the deal were clear early on in the process. US chief negotiator Khalilzad appeared to have carte blanche from Trump as long as he sped up troop withdrawal before the 2020 US election. The primacy of haste meant he was quick to drop conditions when obstacles arose, such as when he failed to convince the Taleban to allow the Afghan government to the negotiating table. He dropped the ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agree’ principle postulated at the beginning of the negotiations, but never accepted by the Taleban (AAN analysis here) and started presenting the Doha agreement as a first step only toward a future “comprehensive peace agreement.” This, he suggested, the domestic parties to the war needed to hammer out in their intra-Afghan negotiations. Dobbins confirmed this when he wrote that the US was ready to sell (he uses the word “price”) any chance of the intra-Afghan negotiations ending the war for an “accelerated” withdrawal timetable, thereby delinking the troop pull-out from an existing (or near) peace agreement.
The fact that the US wanted a full withdrawal regardless of the cost for Afghanistan also points to another factor standing in the way of a genuine peace agreement: the peace talks began as a result of political considerations, not because of what is called a mutually hurting stalemate in negotiation theory, meaning a situation where all parties to the war had genuinely come to the insight that they would not win it. [7] Closest to such an understanding was the US, although Trump mainly pointed to the costs of the war rather than publicly acknowledging they had long past the point of being able to win. [8] There is reason to believe that both the Taleban and (parts of) the Afghan government still believe they can win.
The Taleban had consistently pursued a double strategy of fighting and talking at the same time. They were not alone in this; the US had explicitly used the same approach under Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (see this analysis by Barnett Rubin). For the Taleban, the Doha agreement was a milestone on one of two possible avenues back to power. The first allows them to get rid by diplomatic means (and minimal loss of fighters) of their main obstacle to power – the presence of US and allied forces protecting the Afghan government. The other avenue is an all-out military victory.
The Taleban have long claimed that they remain Afghanistan’s legitimate government, toppled by what they consider an ‘illegal foreign intervention.’ They insist that they retain their original legitimacy derived from stopping the inter-factional wars that broke out after the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989 and the collapse of the Najibullah government when they swept to power in the 1990s.
The Afghan government also does not seem to believe there currently is a mutually hurting stalemate, as long as it has the support of the international community, if not direct military support then at least financial assistance to maintain its armed forces. It has repeatedly claimed its armed forces are able to defend the country even without US troops on the ground, for example President Ghani in a June 2020 speech at the Atlantic Council or Minister of Defence Asadullah Khaled speaking to parliament in November 2020. [9]
Its 305,000 soldiers and policemen, plus armed intelligence units, auxiliary forces and a large array of community defence forces, some of them actually free-floating militias, [10] are surely capable of at least putting up a lengthy fight and preventing the Taleban from marching straight back to power in Kabul and other areas of the country. However, while accurate numbers are hard to come by, the Afghan government is already taking heavy losses on the battlefield, which would soar under a full scale assault by the Taleban. [11] Combine this with the government’s dire domestic revenuesituation, it would not be able to pay its beleaguered fighters if external financial support erodes, making its resistance unsustainable in the long run.
It is common knowledge in Afghanistan that many fighters only fight as long as they are paid and as long as they believe they can win. Afghanistan has experienced in 1992 what happens when these factors change. Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin found their ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan, a legacy of the Soviet era the new Russian elites then wanted to shed, too costly and stopped military and economic support for the Najibullah government in Kabul. This led to many key government military leaders changing sides to the winning mujahedin. (As the mujahedin were deeply fragmented and organised along ethnic lines, this did not lead to a stabilising realignment of forces but to a new round of wars.)
Today, the reality on the battlefield already looks dire for government troops. They have abandoned many positions, including on key roads, for example on the Wardak stretch of the national ring road connecting Kabul and Kandahar (see this AAN report). The SIGAR reported that in December 2020 Afghan forces abandoned up 200 checkpoints in Kandahar province alone. The Taleban also reinforced their positions around provincial cities such as Kunduz, Pul-e Khumri (Baghlan) and Lashkargah (Helmand), arguing that this was technically outside the city and they had taken back areas where the government had moved in. An offensive in October 2020 led to US airstrikes “in defence of the ANSF,” which the US claim is allowed by the Doha deal (although it is not part of the published version – more about this below.) The overall trend is one of Taleban buoyancy which is the result of a mix of factors: the Taleban apparently having been given free hand in the rural areas by the Doha agreement and a US-designed strategy to concentrate government forces on a more limited number of areas strategic significance combined with the Afghan government’s inability to supply all remaining bases. [12]
Still, the Afghan government continues to present itself as being in a position of strength from which it can negotiate with the Taleban. This confidence has apparently been reinforced by the latest pledges at the November 2020 Geneva conference, which despite some reductions will still prevent a breakdown of the government (AAN analysis here). The government was also encouraged by the joint statement issued on 31 January 2021 by the embassies of 13 key donor countries, including the US, the EU and NATO, saying the Taleban bore “responsibility for the majority” of recent incidents of targeted killings in Kabul and the chance that the Biden/Harris administration might delay the troop pull-out as recommended by many advisors in Washington, including the 3 February 2021 bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group (read AAN analysis of Biden’s position vis-à-vis Afghanistan here). [13]
Many Afghan observers (not all of them impartial) believe, however, that the main aim of Ghani and his government is to cling to power and not share it, particularly after the sobering experience of ‘power-sharing’ under the 2014-19 National Unity Government (AAN analysis here). This argument is more often publicly raised by Afghans living outside the country, such as former advisor to ex-president Hamed Karzai and to the Afghan finance ministry, Torek Farhadi, who was recently quoted as saying that “[t]he most significant barrier to peace in Afghanistan is now the preservation of financial interests of those who are in power… They will keep fighting to preserve their interests. They will sugarcoat their fight in the name of preserving the Republic.” Arash Yaqin, who describes himself as “Heraty-Dutch-American” on his twitter profile (https://twitter.com/arashyaqin) and has worked for the Afghan foreign ministry and the US embassy in Kabul, spoke of a “small circle of (…) Kabul-based elite oligarchs [who] have nothing to offer except a false rhetoric,“ including on peace (both quotes from interviews published here). [14]
What was agreed in Doha, and what was implemented?
In the context of the current Biden/Harris administration review of the Doha agreement there are two major points of controversy. First, there is a lack of clarity whether and how exactly the Taleban committed to a post-deal reduction of violence and how that tallies with current conflict dynamics, including the upsurge of violence noted by the recent SIGAR report which stated that, according to the US military in Afghanistan, “enemy-initiated attacks this quarter (October–December 2020) (…) exceeded those of the same period in 2019”). Second, there are allegations that the Taleban have broken relations with al-Qaeda, but the publicly available agreement does not include how this is measured.
Before we specifically look at them, we will review which other agreements were made in Doha and to what degree they were implemented.
Formally, the February 2020 US-Taleban agreement is a quid pro quo. The US and its allies declare their willingness to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, establish a timetable for this and start reducing troop numbers, in exchange for Taleban guarantees to hinder al-Qaeda and similar groups from organising future terrorist attacks against the US and its allies from the territory the Afghan insurgents control, to hold intra-Afghan (peace) talks and include the issue of a permanent ceasefire in their agenda. The latter is a vehement demand of the Afghan government and large parts of the Afghan public. The completion of the US and NATO troop withdrawal by 1 May 2021 is conditioned on the Taleban fulfilling their commitments and vice versa.
According to the “Joint Declaration between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” signed simultaneously with the Doha deal, the completion of the troop withdrawal is also made conditional on a “joint assessment and determination between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the United States, its allies, and the Coalition.”
US commitments
The US has fulfilled some but not all of its commitments in the agreement. Their main promise was the troop withdrawal, laid out in “Part One” of the agreement, which has happened in line with the timeline so far. Under Trump, troop numbers were swiftly reduced and at least ten bases closed. This happened despite mild rebukes to the Taleban over their failed commitments – a Pentagon spokesman stated in early May 2020 the number of Taleban attacks was “unacceptably high” and “not conducive to a diplomatic solution” while then Defense Secretary Mark Esper said “[t]here has not been a reduction in violence, if you will, from the Taliban side. On the other hand, they have not attacked us or attacked major metropolitan areas.” A report from the Washington-based think tank CSIS quoted CENTCOM commander General Kenneth McKenzie as saying on 15 July 2020 “I would not say that [the Taliban] have yet [kept up their commitments]… we expected to see a reduction in violence. And… the violence against the Afghans is higher than it’s been in quite a while. It’s one of the highest, most violent periods of the war that we see to date. Average lethality is down just a little bit. But the number of enemy-initiated attacks is, in fact, very worrisome.”
Besides the US troops, the agreement also covers “its allies, and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel.” But the Doha agreement does not include concrete obligations for the non-US troops, only the 30 April deadline for withdrawal completion. The total foreign troop number in Afghanistan was given by NATO as 9,592 for February, which means there are 7,092 non-US-troops, down by some 1,500 from February 2020. This means that non-US troops now outnumber Americans in Afghanistan. [15] US CENTCOM’s Quarterly Contractor Survey for January 2021 showed 18,214 US Department of Defence contractors in Afghanistan, 6,346 of them American, 4,745 Afghan and the rest third country citizens. (The October 2020 numbers were 12,562 US; 7,856 Afghan and 5,967 other.) [16]
In a sense, the US (or rather the Afghan government) has even over-fulfilled one point of the agreement, about the release of Taleban prisoners, although not without hiccups. Point 3 of Part One stipulates that the US “is committed to start immediately to work” to “release” [u]p to five thousand (5,000) Taleban “combat and political prisoners” exclusively held by the Afghan government. [17] In practice the US accepted an incorrect Taleban reading of this stipulation, by taking the figure of 5,000 given in the agreement as a goal, not a ceiling (“up to”). (For more AAN analysis on the prisoner exchange see here and here).
A second phase of prisoner release, stipulated in the same paragraph of the agreement, that “[t]he relevant sides have the goal of releasing all the remaining prisoners over the course of the subsequent three months” did not materialise. It is also conceivable that the US, after coming under heavy criticism over the first phase of release unilaterally imposed on the Afghan government, wanted to keep one last bargaining chip for Afghan government in their Doha negotiations.
Two more US commitments have also not been fulfilled on time, at least not visibly. The first is the commitment to “start … an administrative review of current U.S. sanctions” against Taleban members “with the goal of removing these sanctions by August 27, 2020.” The second is a promise of a “diplomatic engagement with other members of the United Nations Security Council and Afghanistan” to remove Taleban members from their separate sanctions list. There is no information publicly available whether these reviews have commenced and what their status is. Diplomatic engagement might well be underway, but the removal has not yet happened.
The delays on the above three (imprecise) commitments were partly a result of the entire timeframe of the agreement slipping behind, caused by the belated release of the 5,000 prisoners (delayed by over five months) to the start of the intra-Afghan talks (delayed by almost six months).
In general, driven by Trump’s urgency for completing the withdrawal or at least coming to an irreversible reduction of troops, the tight withdrawal timeline took precedence over the vague conditions set for its completion. The Taleban used that opening to push for the completion of the withdrawal without emphasising their own commitments or trying to make progress in the negotiations (see also their 16 February 2021 open letter to the US public which highlights US withdrawal in exchange for the Taleban “preventing all threats to the security of other nations from Afghanistan”).
Taleban commitments
The Taleban have fulfilled their commitment to release “one thousand (1,000) prisoners of the other side,” although also not on time. This mainly included captured government soldiers and police. After these releases, Taleban spokesman Suhail Shahin said in mid-August 2020, the movement was not aware of any other security personnel in its custody who still had to be released. In order to implement the prisoner swap, both Afghan parties had direct contacts in Kabul through “technical groups.”
However, there were doubts about whether they held 1,000 prisoners in the first place and even reports the Taleban had abducted people to reach the number to be released by them. One such accusation came from the provincial governor of Maidan Wardak in March 2020. In late April, Jawed Faisal, spokesman for the Afghan National Security Council, said the Taleban had abducted 164 civilians since their deal with the US.
The Afghan government also accused the Taleban of breaking their promise that the released men would not return to the battlefield. On 25 January 2021, National Security Adviser Hamdullah Moheb stated that “We have recaptured 600 of the freed individuals because they were fighting alongside the Taliban even though they promised they would not fight again” and that other released prisoners were involved in making car bombs and planning attacks on security forces. Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed rejected the accusation and said that only about 40 of the men were back in government custody, most seized during raids on their homes. In February 2021, Vice President Amrullah Saleh claimed that even 85 per cent of the “over 5,500” freed Taleban had returned to the battlefield and that the government had “video and audio clips” to prove this. The Taleban repeatedly accused the government that their troops had killed released prisoners, even as they were being welcomed back by their communities or their homes (one example here) which the government denied.
Also, the agreement only stipulated that the Taleban commit “that its released prisoners will be committed to the responsibilities mentioned in this agreement so that they will not pose a threat to the security of the United States and its allies” [author’s emphasis]. Again, the agreement does not cover the Afghan forces.
There were two Taleban commitments, one part of the Doha deal and one claimed by the US as a verbal commitment, that have become particularly controversial in the context of the Biden/Harris administration’s review of the agreement. The first one is usually summarised as ‘breaking ties’ with al-Qaeda and similar jihadist terrorist groups; the second one pertains to the alleged commitment to reduce violence. Given the lack of transparency about the commitments or any known monitoring mechanism in the published text of the agreement, it is difficult to judge whether the Taleban have fulfilled their commitments or not. In the case of the reduction of violence it is even not officially known what exactly they had committed to, although scattered statements allowed to piece this together.
It is possible, though, that there is a secret mechanism. A 28 February 2020 Washington Post report, based on an interview with General Austin “Scott” Miller, then joint commander of the US troops and NATO’s Resolute Support mission (RSM) in Afghanistan, indicated that the US military had established a kind of ‘hotline’ with the Taleban that had already been used during the ‘reduction of violence’ week before the agreement was signed. After the signing, Miller also was a regular participant of US-Taleban meetings. If the US had used the hotline in the following month, though, it had done so rather discreetly.
The new US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, in a conversation with his Afghan counterpart Moheb stated, according to a White House readout on 22 January 2021 that the on-going US review of the Doha agreement included an assessment of “whether the Taliban was living up to its commitments to cut ties with terrorist groups, to reduce violence in Afghanistan, and to engage in meaningful negotiations.” He also did not call it “commitments from the Doha agreement.”
1. Reduction of violence
The published part of the Doha agreement does not bind the Taleban to stop fighting, observe some kind of ceasefire or even reduce violence. There had been an agreement on a period of a “reduction of violence” (RiV) before its signing, requested by the US and accepted by the Taleban which, according to Khalilzad, was supposed to be “leading to a ceasefire.” (The Taleban had earlier rejected the first US proposal of a six-months’ and then of a three-months’ ceasefire “to get negotiations started”; read AAN analysis here and here.)
Immediately after the signing, on 2 March 2020, Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed confirmed to AFP that:
As per the (US-Taliban) agreement, our mujahideen will not attack foreign forces but our operations will continue against the Kabul administration forces.
After the Taleban offensive just outside Helmand’s provincial capital Lashkargah in October 2021, the US went to the Taleban and protested. US envoy Khalilzad stated that after he and the commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, General Miller, held several meetings with the Taleban, the other side had “agreed to re-set actions by strictly adhering to implementation of all elements of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement and all commitments made” and that the US expected that as a result the number of “Afghans [who] are dying” would “drop significantly.” This quote seems to indicate the US view that there were RiV commitments made by the Taleban beyond the public part of the Doha deal. Otherwise Khalilzad would have spoken about “all commitments” in the U.S.-Taliban Agreement. If the Taleban had entered into additional commitments in Doha, it is unclear whether a possible post-signing RiV was verbally agreed or put into what then US Secretary of Defence Mike Pompeo had referred to as two classified “military implementation documents” to which only the US Congress has access, according to a 1 March 2020 media interview.
Still, on 27 January 2021, Blinken said that his administration had not yet seen certain parts of the agreement. He told journalists:
One of the things that we need to understand is exactly what is in the agreements that were reached between the United States and the Taliban, to make sure that we fully understand the commitments that the Taliban has made as well as any commitments that we’ve made.
It is also not clear, but has often been reported, that the Taleban allegedly had accepted that they would refrain from attacking US and allied troops (except their Afghan allies) and not carrying out larger attacks such as car bombs or ‘complex attacks’ involving suicide bombers in large population centres after the deal was signed. The New York Times reported as much in an 8 March 2020 article, referring to “people familiar with the contents” of the annexes that “are only available to members of Congress … [i]n a secure facility underneath the Capitol in Washington DC.”
Finally, in a statement issued on 13 February 2021, the Taleban confirmed that it had “has significantly decreased the level of operations“, without mentioned whether or not that was part of any secret annex to the published agreement or a verbal undertaking. They explained that “in breaking with past practice, no annual spring offensive was announced or launched the previous year,” that “no district headquarters were conquered in succession like the years past, no numerous and complex attacks targeted the enemy in major cities, nor were plans sketched for the takeover of cities.” They claimed most fighting had occurred “where our Mujahideen have been forced to defend their areas, or where the public has been safeguarded from harmful check posts, or (…) gunmen” and accused the government of being behind the recent series of targeted killings in Kabul and other parts of the country. This was contradicted by the recently released UNAMA “Protection of Civilians” report which noted the first ever increase in post intra-Afghan talks violence levels in the last quarter of 2020, mostly the result of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and targeted killings.
The US government confirmed only a part of this. In February, it marked one year without any US troops being killed in combat in Afghanistan. In a report released in November 2020, the lead inspector general for Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, the US special forces mission in Afghanistan, stated that “[a]s the U.S. drawdown continued, the Taliban largely refrained from conducting attacks targeting U.S. or coalition forces.” He added that the Taleban had conducted a “small number” of attacks “against U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan… from July through September,” including “instances of indirect fire and surface-to-air attacks.” But he did not explicitly referred to the attacks as breaches of the Doha deal. Also the commander of the US military’s Central Command, that covers Afghanistan, General Kenneth McKenzie, when speaking about “simply too high” Taleban violence in mid-February 2021, did not explicitly say this violated the Doha agreement. For this author, these omissions are too regular to be ignored.
The Taleban, meanwhile, have raised counter-accusations lately of an increase of US air strikes. The UNAMA annual civilian casualties report for 2020, however, noted “counteracting civilian casualty trends between” the US and the Afghan forces following the Doha agreement. This included “record high levels” of civilian casualties caused by Afghan Air Force airstrikes and “ the highest number of civilian casualties from airstrikes by the Afghan Air Force since UNAMA began systematic documentation in 2009.” In contrast, international military forces airstrikes caused 17 per cent of all airstrike civilian casualties, a drop by 85 per cent from 2019 and the lowest number recorded since 2009. US forces all but ceased carrying out airstrikes between the signing of the Doha deal and the Taleban’s October offensive near Lashkargah.
As the 31 January 2021 joint statement by the EU, 13 embassies and NATO made plain, they disagree with the Taleban about the wave of targeted killings and put the “responsibility for the majority” of those incidents on them. The Economist’s description is likely the correct take of the situation and shared by a number of independent observers and media (see also the AP here):
No single group is likely to have conducted all the attacks. A variety of bomb designs has been used. Personal rivalries and organised crime may be behind some, as may other militant groups. But the Taliban are almost certainly the main perpetrators.
The unclear relationship between the Taleban and al-Qaeda
In contrast to the issue of violence levels, the Doha agreement contains five very concrete points on what the Taleban committed to do on countering international terrorism. This included sending a “clear message” to groups such as al-Qaeda (the only group mentioned by name in the agreement) “that threaten the security of the United States and its allies (…) have no place in Afghanistan.” The Taleban committed that they will not allow them “to use the soil of Afghanistan [the part under their control] to threaten the security of the United States and its allies,” “not [to] host them,” to “instruct” their own members “not to cooperate with” those groups and their members and to prevent them from “recruiting, training, and fundraising.” The Taleban are also not to provide visas, passports and similar documents as well as entrance, asylum or residency to individuals “who pose a threat to the security of the United States and its allies” – but this seems to refer to a time when the Taleban are already part of the “new post-agreement Islamic government.” (Passports or visas eventually issued currently by their Islamic Emirate would not be recognised anywhere.)
There even seems to be a backdoor for foreign fighters ready to give up the fight to seek “asylum or residence in Afghanistan according to international migration law and the commitments of this agreement,” but the Taleban are obliged to make sure “that such persons do not pose a threat” any longer to US and allies security.
In their 13 February statement, the Taleban insisted that “no entity has taken any steps against the United States of America and its allies from the soil of Afghanistan.” The US does not dispute this. But given the lack of a known monitoring mechanism in the Doha agreement, it is more difficult to judge whether the Taleban have fulfilled their other anti-terrorism commitments. For example, it is not spelled out in the agreement what it means to give a “clear message” to al-Qaeda that they “have no place in Afghanistan” or could monitor whether instructions are given not to work with al-Qaeda and similar groups. There is also no provision that commits the Taleban to hand over or expel foreign fighters, and the provision to make sure that “those seeking asylum or residence in Afghanistan… do not pose a threat” seems to indicate that such (former?) fighters could be allowed to stay if they refrain from violence (and seems to contradict the stipulation that they “have no place in Afghanistan”). This would also require a mechanism through which fighters renounce the use of violence and possibly give up their arms. Only the Taleban could do this in the current situation and it would be difficult to monitor even if there was a mechanism.
As the authors of a recent International Crisis Group (ICG) report (p14, footnote 47) put it, “the Taliban have made no public demonstration or assertion that they have acted on commitments to prevent their membership from interacting with or hosting al-Qaeda figures.” Taleban negotiator Stanakzai, at his 29 January 2021 press conference in Moscow, stated that the US negotiating team in Doha had not mentioned “any problem to us – and we have a daily channel where our military people sit with their military people and discuss what is going on in Afghanistan.”
At the same time, for some months now, there has been an increasing number of reports on alleged al-Qaida sightings in Afghanistan and even of active cooperation with the Taleban, insinuating a continuing or even more intensive al-Qaeda-Taleban cooperation. For example, the Afghan news agency Ariana, quoting sources in the Afghan Ministry of Defense, reported on 28 December 2020 that during two airstrikes within three days 15 al-Qaeda members and 17 Taleban were killed in Nawa district (Helmand province) and that “these Al-Qaeda fighters used to train the Taliban to make bombs.” In November 2020, General Yasin Zia, chief of the Afghan army’s general staff alleged there were al-Qaeda fighters present in an “Taliban-influenced area between Nimruz and Farah provinces,” that some of them had been killed and that the Taleban still had a “close coordination and conduct operations with” al-Qaeda. A spokesman for the governor of Badakhshan described an attack on a checkpost in the province’s Arghanjkhwa district in July 2020 during which “seven Afghan security forces were killed“ as “a joint assault by the Taliban, al Qaeda and Daesh.“
The latest UN report about the Islamic State, al-Qaeda “and affiliated groups,” dated 3 February 2021, stated that
Member States report little evidence of significant changes in relations between Al-Qaida and the Taliban. (…) The killing of several Al-Qaida commanders in Taliban-controlled territory underscores how close the two groups are.
There are references to two al-Qaeda commanders killed in Taleban-controlled territory in the UN report. The first one is about Muhammad Hanif, announced on 10 November 2020 by Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) by tweet after an operation in Bakwa district (Farah), without giving a date (reported here). The tweet called Hanif a “senior leader” of AQIS and that he had been “given a safe haven and protection by the [Taleban] there.”
The second reference is about “al-Qaida media chief Husam Abd al-Ra’uf, also known as Abu Muhsen al-Masri” who was reported killed in Andar district (Ghazni province) on 20 October 2020. Al-Rauf/al-Masri is described in media reports as al-Qaeda’s second in command (see here and here). The original source of this report was an NDS tweet, as The Associated Press (AP) agency reported on 25 October 2020. According to the AP, this report had been confirmed by Amanullah Kamrani, the deputy head of Ghazni’s provincial council, who said that al-Rauf/al-Masri’s death was the result of a raid by “Afghan special forces led by the intelligence agency.” According to the AP report, “Kamrani alleged, without providing evidence, that the Taliban had been offering shelter and protection to al-Rauf.” It further said that “[n]either Kamrani nor the intelligence agency offered details on how authorities identified al-Rauf, nor how they came to suspect he was in the village.” It further quoted Wahidullah Jumazada, a spokesman for Ghazni’s provincial governor in Ghazni speaking about Afghan forces having killed six suspected militants in the raid, without mentioning al-Rauf had been killed. Kamran, a former Hezb-e Islami member, had worked with the NDS in setting up a so-called Uprising Force, a local anti-Taleban militia, in Andar (AAN reporting here).
Earlier, there have been reports about “dual-hatted“ Taleban and al-Qaeda military commanders, originating from the Afghan Ministry of Defence or US government sources (see here and here). In May 2020, the NDS reported the “busting” of an “Haqqani-ISIS cell in Kabul.
The UN’s al-Qaeda report also called the fact that the wife of a former leader of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) – the group’s South Asian franchise – was on the Taleban list of 5,000 prisoners held by the Afghan government and to be released under the Doha deal as “[f]urther evidence of close relations between the groups.”
Edmund Fitton-Brown, co-ordinator of the UN monitoring team compiling this report, told the BBC on 29 October 2020 that both groups “were talking regularly and at a high level“ and the Taleban were reassuring al-Qaeda “that they would honour their historic ties.” He added that “[a]l-Qaeda are heavily embedded with the Taliban and they do a good deal of military action and training action with the Taliban.”
The previous report by this UN team, dated 27 May 2020, listed various alleged meetings between al-Qaeda and Taleban leaders. This involved one that included the Taleban’s military chief Sadr Ibrahim and Osama ben Laden’s son Hamza (reported killed in August 2019 “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region,” but without a date given) in which the Taleban allegedly reassures “him personally that the Islamic Emirate would not break its historical ties with Al-Qaida for any price.” [18] The Taleban called this report “false.”
Some direct language suggesting strong ties between the Taleban and Al-Qaeda is also found in a document from the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General referring to information received from US Department of the Treasury (not from its own military) dated 4 January 2021 which stated, without mentioning sources, that:
… as of 2020, al-Qaeda is gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection. (…) Treasury told us Al-Qaeda capitalizes on its relationship with the Taliban through its network of mentors and advisers who are embedded with the Taliban, providing advice, guidance, and financial support. Senior Haqqani Network figures have discussed forming a new joint unit of armed fighters in cooperation with and funded by al-Qaeda. (…) elements of al-Qaeda (…) continue to use the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region as a safe haven. (…) Al-Qaeda maintains close contacts with the Taliban, providing advice, guidance, and financial support. (…)Treasury told us as of May 2020, the Taliban and al-Qaeda maintained a strong relationship and continued to meet regularly.
It appears that much of the information available on the al-Qaeda-Taleban (or Haqqani network-ISIS) relationship goes back to Afghan and probably US and other countries’ intelligence sources. The UN report quoted give “member states” information as their source, which include the US and Afghanistan. These agencies, however, are part of the anti-Taleban coalition, and it has to be figured into analysis that such an important issue as the al-Qaeda-Taleban relationship is a major feature of mutual information warfare in which all parties to the conflict are painting the opposing side as black as possible. Multiple examples exist of how information about active terrorist groups can be factually incorrect or so shallow that it should be treated with caution. [19]
At the same time, Taleban assurances like by their Doha new spokesman Muhammad Na’im to Tolonews as reported on 5 November 2020 and in Stanakzai’s 29 January Moscow press conference that “right now, there is no al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan” cannot be taken at face value. There are incentives for both sides to exaggerate and dissemble.
Another more general issue is the exact status and size of al-Qaeda and its so-called affiliated groups in Afghanistan, the relationship between them [21] and the question of whether al-Qaeda is still important for the Taleban and their aims. The exact location of the surviving al-Qaeda leadership under Osama ben Laden’s successor Ayman al-Zawahiri – whether on the Afghan or the Pakistani side of the Durand line – is unknown. As the UN report quoted above stated, it is even not clear whether Zawahiri is still alive or not and the designated successor, Hamza ben Laden has been reported killed. The UN report also said that “[s]hould a succession to al-Zawahiri become necessary, it may be difficult for the new leader to take up residence in Afghanistan, as such a move could have an impact on the interests of the Taliban, given their peace process obligations” from the Doha deal.
The alleged size of the group seems relatively insignificant in military terms on the Afghan battlefield. The UN’s February 2021 report estimated the “overall number of members of Al-Qaida and its affiliates [author’s emphasis] in Afghanistan (…) at between 200 and 500” and locates them in “at least 11 Afghan provinces: Badakhshan, Ghazni, Helmand, Khost, Kunar, Kunduz, Logar, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Paktiya and Zabul.” The report further referred to two al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in northern Afghanistan, Khatiba Imam al-Bukhari (see also this AAN reporting) with “approximately 150 fighters, mostly in Badghis Province” and the Islamic Jihad Group (sometimes called Islamic Jihad Union) with “approximately 100 fighters active in (…) Kunduz and Faryab under Taliban shelter and control.” The authors of the report added that the Taleban have “forbidden these groups from launching independent operations against [Afghan government forces],” indicating that they not be instrumentalised by al-Qaeda against the Taleban’s intention. If the numbers given for those groups were correct, this would leave ‘core’ al-Qaeda with 250 members of its own, if the maximum figure of 500 fighters is used as the basis.
In earlier years, including during the height of US-Taleban fighting around 2010-12, top US commanders in Afghanistan including generals Jim Jones, David Petraeus and John Allen consistently estimated there were around 100 al-Qaeda fighters in the country, as a Washington Post journalist had compiled. In September 2020 the then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there were fewer than 200 left in Afghanistan. [20]
The Operation Freedom’s Sentinel report quoted above concludes that it is “difficult to discern the extent to which [the Taleban are] meeting the requirement that Afghanistan not serve as a haven for terrorists” and that “[t]he two sides continue to disagree on procedural aspects of the negotiations.”
Conclusions
The February 2020 Doha agreement between the US and the Taleban was a typical expression of former President Trump’s ‘America First’ policy, an extreme version of self-interested policy at the cost of the ‘objects’ of this policy, the population and government of Afghanistan. By signing it, the US had given up leverage over the Taleban, limiting itself to leverage over the Afghan government.
The agreement’s design played into the hands of the Taleban, side-lined the Afghan government, denying it a place in its own right at the negotiating table. It also encouraged the Taleban to maintain high military pressure on the government forces and gave them extra leverage over the delegation facing them in the (long-faltering) intra-Afghan talks in Doha. (There was the suggestion of the resumption of talks reported on 22 February but it remains to be seen whether it is genuine or just a Taleban move to influence the decision-making in Washington.) In the US, it had left behind a scorched political terrain for the Biden/Harris administration that now has a choice between distasteful options, harmful mainly to Afghans, which could result in escalating war and/or government collapse. If war escalated, a mutual blame game would start about who is responsible for the escalation and the potential unravelling of the peace process. Both Afghan parties have advantages: the government is still recognised by the entire international community, but the Taleban have enhanced their diplomatic standing. The reported accusations by the Russian envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov that the US was in breach rather than the Taleban might be a first taste of how this dispute could unfold. Also, the US giving in to the Taleban in multiple concessions during their negotiations as well as later interpretations of the deal signalled to them that there might be room for more concessions.
A careful reading of the text as well as analysis of how the deal has affected the conflict confirms the concerns of many Afghans that the verifiable demands on the Taleban are weaker than what the Americans suggested. While the agreement laid out a concrete, phased timetable for one of the two main outcomes of the agreement, the US and allied troop pull-out, which can easily be verified and monitored, there are no comparable mechanisms for verifying Taleban obligations not to support or give space to al-Qaeda and similar jihadist-terrorist groups. Nor does the agreement hold clear obligations for the Taleban to reduce violence during the intra-Afghan negotiations. There are claims that there have been separate undertakings, either given verbally or included in what has been called two secret annexes, but this cannot be verified.
It would be surprising if these faults were just diplomatic blunders. It seems that the US – more precisely its chief negotiator in the name of the ex-president – was more focused on selling a deal at home than on paving the way for a peace process. (Others have argued that this was meant to provide flexibility to the US but backfired.) The US instrumentalised the overwhelming dependency of the Afghan government of US and other military and financial support and repeatedly confronted it with faits accomplis, such as in the prisoner release saga. This approach continues, as demonstrated by the current new discussion about an Afghan interim government.
Two major points of the agreement therefore remained in the mist. This means that judgement about whether the Taleban have fulfilled these two – alleged – obligations is open for interpretation and political manipulation. While logic seems to indicate that the Taleban, as by far the largest armed opposition faction on the battlefield and, in contrast to all others, with a countrywide reach, is responsible for much of the latest violence, the ambiguity also opens the door for spoilers to make false or exaggerated accusations which in turn push the Taleban into a more aggressive mood (already discernable in their most recent statements). In this tense atmosphere of accusations and denials the US administration needs to make its own judgement about the extent to which the Taleban is upholding its side of the deal. It is easy to see how the coming weeks or months could lead to an unnecessary breakdown of negotiations before they have been seriously tried.
The Taleban, meanwhile, have skilfully stuck to their own, literal interpretation (and sometimes over-interpretation) of the agreement. If anyone expected otherwise, they have been blinded by illusions. More or less plausible deniability has long been an element studiously employed by the Taleban (and other parties to the conflict). Technically, it will be difficult for everyone except the US military and US Congress that has access to the secret annexes to prove that the Taleban have violated their commitments, or which actor is responsible for any attack.
With regard to the “Intra-Afghan Negotiations,” as they are officially called, it is remarkable that both parties chose not to have the word “peace in their title, a although these talks are designed to end the more than 40 years old war. This might be semantics only, but also a sign that on both parties’ actual agenda ‘peace’ does not seem to figure very prominently.
The only way to salvage this peace process – which is unfavourable to Afghans but with no visible alternative to ever harder war – would be fast and solid diplomacy, using the remaining small levers of the Taleban prisoners still held, their desire to get off the various sanctions lists – and the promise of aid once a functioning new government exists. The “Joint Declaration between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” signed simultaneously to the Doha deal includes an obligation, vis-à-vis the Afghan government, to review the implementation of the agreement. In those negotiations, the Afghan ‘republicans’ and the international donor community could throw in their weight to try to keep potential damage to Afghans’ rights and freedoms caused by required compromises to a minimum. It has already supported the Afghan government in its demand for an immediate ceasefire. Also pushing for genuine public and civil society participation in the negotiations might put pressure on both sides for a peace process. So far, neither side is being held to account by their constituencies at present because levels of fear are so high.
A key question now will be whether the Biden/Harris administration will follow the Trump/Khalilzad approach of delinking the troop pull-out from the peace talks.
Edited by Rachel Reid
References
↑1 Also AAN did, see this recent Q&A with former UN and EU special envoy to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell. This author disagrees, as peace processes are also always about power. So, peace, or the end to a war, at least, has been only one aim in peace processes from Colombia to El Salvador and East Timor as covered in the above-mentioned Q&A.
↑2 While in many parts of the country the fighting remains intense, there has been a one year respite for Afghan cities from car bombs and complex attacks, though targeted killings in cities has increased. A new UNAMA report covers this development and a new AAN report is forthcoming next month. There has also been a reduction of ground and air attacks by Afghan government forces. If the Taleban react violently what they see as the US reneging on the deal, large-scale attacks in urban areas could be resumed, with the risk of major cities falling to the Taleban. After the US review of the Doha deal was announced, the Taleban made this clear by threatening that it would lead to a “major war” and emphasising they had refrained, for the sake of the talks, from carrying out their usual annual offensive.
↑3 The IRoA delegation is diverse and divided. They include representatives of the government of President Ghani, including some with a civil society background, and of various of his main political opponents who had supported the unsuccessful presidential run of Dr Abdullah against Ghani in 2019. Dr Abdullah, although formally not part of the government, is now – at least theoretically – responsible for everything that has to do with the peace process as the chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation. While jointly facing the Taleban, they continue to be bitter rivals on the domestic scene. For more detail, see this article by two AAN authors, Ali Yawar Adili and Thomas Ruttig for Italian policy institute ISPI.
↑4 This allegations had been widely reported, however only the “biggest hurdle” part ever came in direct quotes. Listening to the video of Stanakzai’s press conference, he said “the only reason [elat], or hurdle [band] currently standing in the way of peace is the Ghani administration [edara], which doesn’t want it [peace]… However, he does not appear to argue that the Taleban demand Ghani’s resignation as a precondition for a peace deal or a ceasefire (which for them is the same as they see the ceasefire as the last topic on the Doha agenda.) What Stanakzai said is that, in his view, the formation of a “new Islamic government” as a result of the Doha talks and as stipulated in the US-Taleban deal “means that the Ghani administration ends.” He further said, answering a question, “if Ghani today stopped the war and said I step down, and sacrifices himself for a new government and for peace, we will negotiate with the new government.” When asked again whether that meant that a ceasefire was “conditional on Ghani stepping down,” he answered “No. … [ceasefire] is on the agenda [together with] the future order [nezam], constitution, women rights, human rights and a hundred other issues… When we get there, we will try to reach an agreement about it.” He also criticised Ghani for having stated he insisted on serving his full five-year term (see also this Afghan media report). Andrej Serenko, special correspondent of the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta who follows Afghanistan closely, told AAN that the alleged quote had first been published by the Russian newspaper Kommersant (close to the foreign ministry in Moscow), the website Afghanistan.ru (Афганистан.Ру) which is believed to be close to Russia’s special envoy for Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov and Central Asian media while the original Russian news agency reports on the meeting, primarily by government-owned TASS, had no quotes of Stanakzai demanding Ghani’s resignation.
↑5 Here a transcript of this part of the interview, from 1’55”, after having been asked whether he would step aside early if a peace deal was reached:
Ghani: “I have one criteria – holding of elections.”
Q: “Early elections?”
“Elections. The Republic is a system that runs by the will of the people. The source of legitimacy of the next government has to be absolutely clear. It has to be the will of people of Afghanistan.”
Q: “Does that have to come at the end of your 5 year tenure?”
“No.“
Q: “So it could be earlier, if the right conditions are in place?”
“This is a premature discussion“…
Q: “So just to be clear, Sir. Your 5 year tenure matters less than peace?”
“Absolutely. Because… I’m not interested in power.”
↑6 The Taleban are not consistent in their language about it. On their official website, the usually avoid the term “peace agreement” or “peace treaty,” see this transcript of a December 2020 speech by Mullah Baradar or his 16 February 2021 “Open letter to the people of the United States of America.“ In contrast, the deputy head of their Doha negotiation team, Sher Muhammad Abbas Stanakzai, called the Doha deal a “peace agreement or peace treaty“at his 29 January 2021 press conference in Moscow.
↑7 For more on negotiation theories and how they play into the Afghan context, see this recent AAN Q&A; see also this 2010 AAN paper).
↑8 In 2019, Trump publicly mused about a ‘nuclear option’ to end the war when he was quoted as saying “I don’t want to kill 10 million people… I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth, it would be gone, it would be over in literally 10 days.”
↑9 There were even more belligerent statements, such as by National Security Advisor Hamdullah Moheb who announced in June 2019 that the Afghan armed forces would “break the Taliban’s backbone in four months.”
↑10 The most recent Quarterly Report of the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR, p59) gives 186,899 Ministry of Defence personnel and 118,122 Ministry of Interior Personnel (MoI) (both without civilian personnel). This includes an increase of nearly 15,000 MoI personnel “as a result of the dissolution of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) and the transfer of some of its personnel to the rolls of other MOI elements.” There are also plans to transition “up to 10,851 ALP members” into the ANA-TF, the Afghan army’s “lightly armed local security force” (p65). For more on the ALP and ANA-TF see this AAN special report and this recent New York Times report.
↑11 The Afghan government has classified the numbers of their casualties (see this SIGAR report, p). Former UNAMA officer and ICG analyst Graeme Smith recommended the following sources to measure them in his blog:
The two best monitors are the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), which recorded violent conflicts since the 1970s, and the newer Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) database. Uppsala takes a more conservative approach, estimating approximately 30,000 battle deaths in 2019, while ACLED looks at a more expansive set of inputs and noted more than 40,000 battle deaths during the same period. These are rough estimates based on public reports, and some analysts doubt their usefulness. Still, early numbers for 2020 from ACLED suggest that thousands fewer people are dying on the battlefields this year.
↑12 According to the SIGAR report (p67), this is part of the Resolute Support Mission driven Checkpoint Reduction and Base Development Plan (CPRBD) that, however, foresees “an orderly reduction or elimination of the most vulnerable (minimally manned or unsupportable) checkpoints [over 10,000 nationwide that bind some 95,000 soldiers and policemen], as well as to consolidate personnel into patrol bases (the new standard fighting structures for the ANA).” The mentioned 200 checkpoints in Kandahar, however, were “abandoned to the Taliban,” with the result of “government weapons and ammunition fall[ing] in Taliban hands.”
↑13 The were earlier examples when apparent changes in the US policy boosted confidence in Kabul. When, for example ex-president Trump cancelled the deal with the Taleban in September 2019, President Ghani retracted his offer of unconditional negotiations, including wide-ranging constitutional ‘reform.’ Trump’s step, however, turned out to be temporarily only (AAN analysis here and here).
↑14 Donor governments also have made it clear before and the during the recent Geneva conference that they are concerned about stagnating or superficial anti-corruption efforts by the Afghan government (AAN analysis here and here, see also the anticorruption chapter in the most recent SIGAR report, p101ff). On 12 February 2021, the US Embassy in Kabul renewed its concerns about corruption in the government’s anti-Covid19 campaign (media report here). Corruption, which includes clinging to power, is an important factor standing in the way of the government being fully ready to compromise about power for the sake of a peace agreement in Doha.
↑15 This had already been reported in December 2020, before the last reduction of US troops.
↑16 There are also contractors deployed elsewhere, elements of which can be assumed to fly in and out of Afghanistan.
↑17 The recent UNAMA torture report which covers the period from January 2019 to March 2020 (ie shortly after the US-Taleban deal) also mentioned that the prisoners interviewed for it also mentioned “8 instances of detention” by United States Forces in Afghanistan. It can be assumed that US forces, while still involved in combat over that period, were occasionally detaining individuals over the short-term for questioning or before handing over to Afghan authorities. There is no evidence for anything beyond that. There are also still two Afghans held in Guantánamo, Asadullah Haroon Gul (called Haroon al-Afghani in the documents there) and Mohammed Rahim (called Rahim al-Afghani). According to a forthcoming AAN report, the Taleban have displayed no interest in non-Taleban detainees at Guantanamo. When the movement had the bargaining chip of captured US serviceman Bowe Bergdahl in its hands, its only efforts were made to get Taleban members freed, negotiating a prisoner swap of five Taleban for Bergdahl. The source for a recent article claiming the Taleban had demanded the release of the two men in negotiations in Doha was weak – an advocate of Guantanamo detainees’ liberty, rather than a member of the Taleban.
↑18 Hamza ben Laden was still reported alive in January 2018.
↑19 This includes numerous reports about alleged Chechen fighters active in Afghanistan, proven to be inaccurate by this AAN analysis. AAN when checking reports on ‘Arab’ or ‘foreign’ fighters in Afghanistan often found that local authorities who had reported such incidents were unable to explain how they came to know the fighters’ origin, variously referring to their “different appearance” or “clothes” or the fact that they did not speak. Also worth recalling is the report about two al-Qaeda training camps in Kandahar’s Shorabak district in October 2015, one of them allegedly so big that “it covered almost 30 square miles,” destroyed in “one of the largest joint ground-assault operations we have ever conducted in Afghanistan,” but which has apparently never been independently verified. Based on press releases only, the operation was reported as “an indication that al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan is far more significant than US officials have claimed in the past.“ It is astonishing that despite the US military having a base in the same district (see photo here) it did not notice its establishment and, after attacking it, did not then take journalists to this apparently extraordinary site to witness its apparent destruction.
More recently, the reported killing in Faryab province of Aziz Yuldash, the leader of some remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan claimed by the Afghan Ministry of Defence (MoD) in November 2020 could also have been misrepresented. While the MoD stated he had “been involved in terrorist attacks and killings of Afghans in the northern provinces,” information received by AAN from an experienced analyst in the country said that he has information indicating the Taleban killed Yuldash. He told AAN Yuldash was killed in a drive-by shooting, had been disarmed before, was unhappy about the “treatment of foreign fighters” by the Taleban and was planning to leave the country.
↑20 The earlier estimates contradict the allegation of Asfandyar Mir and Colin P Clarke writing in Foreign Affairs in September 2020 “[b]y portraying al Qaeda as more of a nuisance than a threat, Pompeo helped President Donald Trump’s administration make the case for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan and making peace with the Taliban.” Pompeo’s estimate was twice as high as the previous ones. Also note the difference between “members” (al-Qaeda) and “fighters” (with KIB and IJG). AAN had repeatedly been told that former Arab (al-Qaeda and non-al-Qaeda) fighters often live with their families (many have married Afghan women), and that sometimes women join the fighting. Sometimes, local officials have included family members in their figures of foreign fighters.
↑21 According to this report, AQIS “incorporated elements from the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, Harakat-ul-Muhajideen, Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and Brigade 313, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Indian Mujahideen (a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Turkistan Islamic Party, Junood al Fida, and other groups.” It is known that individual members or groups switch from one outfit to the other (for example between the various Pakistani Taleban splinter groups), and it is possible that there are overlaps and joint operations but is not clear whether this are occasional or regular appearances. It does not mean that all those groups are pulling together. Afghan and Pakistan Taleban differ immensely even though the latter emerged from a Pakistani support structure for the former during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, while the latter are now fighting to topple the Pakistani government while the former depend on the Pakistani military-intelligence complex for support. Also the anti-Shia sectarian Pakistani groups Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi as well as the Baloch Junood al Fida have their own agendas.
