Opinion: Was the US ever serious about peace talks with the Taliban, or was it more about mitigating Russia’s role in the region?
Donald Trump announced the collapse of the talks with the Afghan Taliban insurgency in typical fashion: with a bombastic announcement of dubious merit on his favoured social media platform.
It is unfortunate that America’s political discourse is so self-absorbed, a quality that would be less objectionable were Washington not so deeply embroiled in so many countries abroad. A summary look at the record of the past year shows that both the Taliban on one side and the government, quietly but decisively backed by American airpower, on the other, continued to fight long before an American soldier had the misfortune of joining the thousands of Afghans killed.
Just as the Taliban have continued to fight on the ground even after the talks, so have the Americans continued to pound them from the air. This without counting the supporting role of mercenaries such as the twenty-thousand troops of Trump’s friend Erik Prince, whose role, being private soldiers, remains shrouded in secret.
Even strictly diplomatic Taliban officials, such as the negotiation teams’ leader Abdul-Salam Hanafi, were only recently involved in coordinating events on the field. The diplomatic-military fissures that have often crippled insurgent groups do not appear to apply here; there appears to be overwhelming coordination between the Taliban’s field command and their representatives abroad.
Northwest Afghanistan has similarly been a perennial battleground, remote from the rest of Afghanistan and hence only rarely noticed abroad; one rare exception occurred in spring, when a Taliban attack captained by Maulavi Abdul-Karim drove government troops across the border into Turkmenistan. In the year since, the experienced Taliban command in the region has also been eliminated by airstrike: this includes Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim for Helmand, Fazalur-Rahman Mashar for Farah, and Taliban military commander Ibrahim Sadar.
Drawing the United States to the negotiations table could potentially undermine its support for a Kabul regime the insurgents see as foreign-installed at their expense and thus illegitimate; the point of the talks was to weaken the government, against whom the harder military option was simultaneously pursued.
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