One of the most important lessons Russian policymakers have learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is to refrain from forging local allies in their own image and to instead seek to galvanise partners wherever mutual interests intersect. A case in point is the nexus with the Taliban.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah signed a power-sharing deal on Sunday, signalling the end of a months-long stalemate that plunged the country into a political crisis. The breakthrough, which sees Abdullah heading peace talks with the Taliban, comes as Afghanistan battles a rapid spread of the deadly coronavirus and surging violence that saw dozens killed in brutal attacks last week.
The reality is that Afghanistan is a landlocked country thousands of miles away from America and of marginal economic and strategic importance to it. Once the Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban, it began to look at Afghan war through the rearview mirror. And with the monumental crisis created by the Coronavirus pandemic, the American foot will remain steady on the accelerator. The troops are coming home.
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It took the Trump administration 17 months to clinch a preliminary agreement with the Taliban – a first step toward ending more than 18 years of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. The deal is not so much a peace agreement as it is a way for Washington to manage conflict in the southwest Asian nation in the aftermath of the American withdrawal, which is supposed to be finalized by May 2020 (assuming the Taliban uphold their end of the bargain).
India must not commit the error of placing Indian troops on Afghan soil, says the diplomat who coordinated New Delhi’s secret military assistance to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military commander of the Northern Alliance, who fought the Taliban and U.S. forces till his assassination in 2001.
President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel Afghan peace talks will cost more American lives, the Taliban said while the United States promised to keep up military pressure on the militants, in a stunning reversal of efforts to forge a deal ending nearly 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
The notion of the Taliban insurgency as a fractured entity, rife with internal strife, has lingered in much of the commentary and analysis on the Afghan conflict. This is in spite of the last five years, which have witnessed the Taliban pull out of its bloodiest internal crisis and achieve its strongest position since 2001. Long after the United States quietly abandoned its stated aim of “shattering” the Taliban, even Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani was said to refer to his long-term plan for ending the conflict as “fight, fracture, talk.”
While a superpower negotiates an exit from Afghanistan, India stirs up a hornet’s nest in Kashmir. It is the 1980s, and the world is at an inflection point that led to a major insurgency in Kashmir, the Afghan civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the attacks of 9/11. Again today, the world is facing no less an important transition period as the United States is set to conclude a preliminary peace agreement with the Taliban and India’s Hindu nationalist government continues its communications and media blackout in Kashmir after having revoked the region’s nominal autonomy this month.
There’s a famous saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that measure, Washington has tested the limits of sanity with its strategy in Afghanistan: For seventeen years, it pursued the same policy while hoping in vain that it would produce the desired outcome. Recent months, however, have brought a much-needed course correction.
If a negotiated settlement to the war is a priority, and the aim is to facilitate talks between the Taliban and Kabul, then a legitimate, stable Afghan government would be a prerequisite. But Afghanistan’s history to this date indicates that elections are not an effective way of producing legitimate and stable central government there.
