Afghan officials have revealed that despite there not having been organized peace talks with the Taliban for years, they are in regular contact with the Taliban, and that the nation’s intelligence chiefs speak with Taliban commanders on a near daily basis.
Talks center on the basis of a future peace process, including a constitution and the political future of Afghanistan, though Afghan officials say that this is still far short of the sot of discussion that could lead to real peace talks.
The talks take place in part through the Pakistani government serving as an intermediary for some Taliban figures, but also through the Gulf state of Qatar, which hosts a Taliban office originally opened to serve the last peace talks.
Officials revealed some very specific issues have been sorted out, with the Taliban wanting special courts to oversee legal challenges related to land seizures since the 2001 US invasion, and agreeing women can hold virtually all political offices except president and supreme court judges.
These sorts of details suggest the talks are really a fair distance along, despite them not being actual peace talks, and there still being no timetable for them to become such. The US, committed to further escalation, has not commented on this matter.
I know everyone is upset about the Trump’s Afghanistan escalation. I am as well, but there may be method — a negotiating strategy — to his madness. We see here a possible future for US policy in Afghanistan.
Inevitably, the Taliban, and whatever passes for a central government — the puppet regime imposed by the US — will have to come to terms. This article points to the beginnings of that process. There is a certain logic — I don’t approve of it, you may not approve of it — behind the idea of ramping up the military violence to incentivize these two parties: the phony Afghan “government” and the genuine populist entity — the Taliban — to come to an understanding. That is to say, to make peace.
If the United States withdrew completely, either on a definite schedule or precipitously — the latter was Trump’s instinct and the unambiguous decisiveness that I favor — the Taliban would have no incentive to make negotiate. They would know that they have the ability to remove the government and take over the country. So, in the event of an American withdrawal or the declaration of a scheduled American withdrawal, the Taliban would simply sit back and wait till the Americans were gone and then move in. With Trump’s Afghanistan “escalation”, the Taliban are possibly incentivized to talk peace with the so-called Afghan government.
I don’t much like it, but I can see the logic behind it. Will it work? Probably not. Faulty logic For the generals, negotiation is the same as defeat. And they can’t abide that. They can’t abide anything less than total surrender of “the enemy” with the triumphant American jackboot on their throat. So the negotiations will be sabotaged, and the escalation will fail.