The underlying theme in President Trump’s State of the Union address on February 5, 2019 was withdrawal. Trump pointed to the nearly seven thousand American servicemen killed in the United States’ long post-9/11 wars and the more than fifty thousand who were wounded. He also asserted that the US had “spent more than $7 trillion in fighting wars in the Middle East.”
The president said that the two thousand US soldiers in Syria were being withdrawn now that ISIS was largely evicted from the territory it had held there. Trump also confirmed that his administration was holding “constructive talks” with the Taliban. Progress in those negotiations, Trump said, would enable a drawdown of the estimated fourteen thousand US troops in Afghanistan, leaving some kind of residual force to focus on “counterterrorism.”
All of this was consistent with what Trump had said during the presidential campaign, when he repeatedly complained about the trillions of dollars that the US had spent on its post-9/11 wars in the greater Middle East.
Trump’s State of the Union address acknowledged the obvious: he seemed to be reversing course on Afghanistan. After many months of debate in the National Security Council, on August 21, 2017, Trump had announced his new “South Asia strategy,” which was to remain in Afghanistan for an unspecified length of time without announcing any withdrawal dates until “conditions” had improved.
In early 2018, as ISIS was on the run in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon increasingly treated Afghanistan as “the main effort” and started moving significant resources to the country including Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets.
Now that stay-the-course strategy in Afghanistan was dead and it was to be replaced by direct American negotiations with the Taliban and a withdrawal of US troops.
In early December 2018, the Pentagon received an unexpected order to draw down the number of US soldiers in Afghanistan to zero. Just as Mattis resigned, that order was revised. Trump ordered the Pentagon to pull out seven thousand US troops from Afghanistan, about half the American servicemen in the country. As with the abrupt announcement of the pullout of US troops from Syria, this did again what Trump repeatedly had criticized Obama for during his campaign: gave America’s enemies a heads-up about US military plans.
The hastily announced drawdown was not a politically useful message to send to the struggling Afghan government, or to Afghanistan’s problematic neighbors, or to the Taliban, which had recently started negotiating directly with the United States. The principal Taliban demand was the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. Trump styled himself as a great dealmaker, but he was giving the enemy what they wanted without exacting any concessions. The Art of the Giveaway, again.
Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who was Trump’s special representative for Afghanistan, was leading the talks with the Taliban on the American side. Those talks were directly between the United States and the Taliban, long a key demand of the Taliban, which reviled the Afghan government as a puppet of the United States. Following a marathon six days of discussions between American diplomats and the Taliban in the Qatari capital, Doha, in late January 2019 Khalilzad tweeted, “Meetings here were more productive than they have been in the past. We made significant progress on vital issues.” This tweet precipitated a flurry of news stories about a potential peace deal.
Khalilzad also tweeted that he had briefed Afghan president Ashraf Ghani “on the progress we have made.” The Afghan government was excluded from the Taliban talks despite the fact that their outcome would likely deeply affect the Afghan people that it represented. Afghans were asking: Were the United States–Taliban talks a prelude to peace, or a betrayal of a US ally in which the terms of their surrender to the Taliban were being discussed without them?
The veteran American diplomat Ryan Crocker certainly thought it was the latter. Under the self-explanatory headline “I Was Ambassador to Afghanistan. This Deal Is a Surrender,” Crocker, writing in the Washington Post on January 29, 2019, compared the negotiations with the Taliban “to the Paris peace talks during the Vietnam War. Then, as now, it was clear that by going to the table we were surrendering; we were just negotiating the terms of our surrender.” The Paris peace deal was followed by the eventual collapse of the South Vietnamese government, which was America’s ally, and the unification of the country under North Vietnam’s communist leader, Ho Chi Minh.
Taliban officials told reporters in late January 2019 that the United States had agreed to a draft peace agreement that American troops would withdraw from Afghanistan within a year and a half. This would mean US troops would leave Afghanistan a few months before the American presidential election in early November 2020. President Trump could make good on one of his signature campaign promises, which was ending America’s foreign wars.
In early 2019, as the negotiations between the United States and the Taliban gathered pace, Kabul was a city on edge. The Taliban were at their strongest since their regime fell in the months after the 9/11 attacks. Twenty-foot-high concrete blast walls surrounded the “Green Zone” that sheltered the US embassy and key Afghan government buildings. It was the largest US embassy in the world, yet the US officials working there rarely left the Green Zone, and if they did, it was by helicopter.
Discussion of the withdrawal of US troops created a crisis of confidence among the many Afghans who had benefited from the post-Taliban era. The beneficiaries of that era included women and ethnic minorities such as the Hazaras as well as the new millennial generation of urban Afghans who were children when the Taliban were in power and had no nostalgia for an era when the country was taken back to the Middle Ages. A senior Afghan female official described the United States–Taliban talks simply as a “betrayal.”
President Ghani and Khalilzad had a five-decade relationship that stretched back to when they were young Afghan students who both attended the American University of Beirut. They had quite different styles, crystallized in the books they each had written. Ghani cowrote Fixing Failed States with development expert Clare Lockhart, a technocratic account of how to fix countries such as Afghanistan, while Khalilzad wrote The Envoy, a memoir of his many years as a diplomat. If Ghani was the workaholic technocrat, Khalilzad was the wheeler-dealer looking to work out an arrangement.
Khalilzad hadn’t spoken to President Trump directly about his negotiations with the Taliban, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Khalilzad seemed to be trying to fulfill a campaign promise by Trump that the United States should extricate itself from its expensive foreign wars. “Trump sincerely wants to get the fuck out of Afghanistan,” a Trump administration official explained. Khalilzad was given wide latitude to make that happen.
Khalilzad joked with his Taliban counterparts, asking them, “When was the last time you were in Kabul?” All concerned knew full well that it had been at least eighteen years since any of the Taliban leadership had set foot in the capital city.
Khalilzad told the Taliban negotiators, “You know there has been quite a lot of change since you were last there. It was a dead city before 9/11. Now it’s an alive city. Women are driving. Women are in the cafés and restaurants. There are millions of people.”
Khalilzad’s point to the Taliban was that they needed to accommodate themselves to all these new realities.
The “framework” for a possible peace agreement that Khalilzad negotiated was that the Taliban agreed that they would not allow Afghanistan to be used as a launching pad for attacks by international terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. This was a demand that the United States has made for the past two decades, since al-Qaeda had bombed two US embassies in Africa in August 1998, killing more than two hundred people, attacks that the group had carried out when it was based in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The Taliban continued to shelter bin Laden after those bombings, even as he was planning the far more lethal 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, the Taliban then refused to hand bin Laden over to the United States and the long Afghan War began.
In return for the Taliban pledge that they would no longer provide a safe haven to international terrorist groups, US forces would withdraw from Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war. Also, there were discussions between the Taliban and US officials about a cease-fire, as well as of direct negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
Khalilzad told the Taliban, “We’ll talk to you directly in Doha about our core interests on counterterrorism and your core interests on our troop withdrawal timeline, but you have to guarantee that you’ll talk to the other Afghans, including the Afghan government, and also other key stakeholders to resolve your own inter-Afghan conflicts, so that once we do leave, there’s some stability in governance, institutions, and a political roadmap for the country to move forward, so you don’t just revert back into civil war.”
The Taliban agreed to that, sort of, but then they said, “We want agreement with you first on the first two issues, counterterrorism and troop withdrawal, before we’ll move into the negotiations with the other Afghans, but trust us. We’ll move into negotiations with the other Afghans.”
Khalilzad told the Taliban, “We can come up with the contours of what our troop withdrawal timeline might look like and what counterterrorism guarantees you’ll give us, but that’s all going to be conditioned on making progress on the two other issues, a cease-fire and progress on inter-Afghan discussions.” Khalilzad had a mantra: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”
But the Taliban were seemingly in no mood for any kind of real compromise. A senior Taliban negotiator, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, said in an interview with a Pashtu language website in February 2019 that the Taliban would not negotiate with the Afghan government until the full withdrawal of foreign forces, including all troops, advisers, and contractors. Stanekzai also said that the Taliban planned to abolish the Afghan army and that the Afghan constitution would be amended and based on their version of sharia law. In other words, following the withdrawal of all US forces, the Taliban wanted the Afghan government to unilaterally disarm and they would then write a new constitution they regarded as sufficiently Islamic.
The Afghan constitution ratified in 2004 guaranteed the rights of women to work and girls to be educated. Given the Taliban’s dismal track record about the rights of women and girls, it was hard to believe that these rights wouldn’t be curtailed or even abolished in a future Taliban utopia.
Adding to the anxiety of many Afghans was the meeting in Moscow on February 5, 2019, between the Taliban and leading Afghan politicians such as former Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Again, the Afghan government played no role in those discussions. One of the Afghan delegates at the Moscow meeting said the mood of the Taliban there was “victorious.” Nothing, of course, would have given the former KGB officer, Russian president Vladimir Putin, greater satisfaction than handing the United States a bloody nose in Afghanistan just as the US-backed Afghan guerillas did to the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
The Afghan government was increasingly embittered by the fact that they had been cut out of the negotiations with the Taliban. Hamdullah Mohib, the thirty-six-year-old Afghan national security adviser and a protégé of Ghani’s, told journalists in Washington, DC, in mid-March 2019 that Khalilzad was “stonewalling” the Afghan government about the Taliban negotiations. “There isn’t proper access to information. The last people to find out are us,” Mohib told the reporters.
Mohib then launched a supremely undiplomatic attack on the American negotiator, saying, “Knowing Ambassador Khalilzad’s own history, personal history, he has ambitions in Afghanistan. . . . The perception in Afghanistan and the people in the government think, perhaps, perhaps all this talk is to create a caretaker government of which he will then become the viceroy.”
Accusing a senior American diplomat of cooking up a deal with the Taliban so he could become the viceroy of Afghanistan was a strong charge. State Department officials freaked out and summoned Mohib for a dressing down.
After that, whenever Mohib appeared at any meetings with US officials, they all walked out. Relations between the US government and the Taliban now appeared to be warmer than the Trump administration’s relations with the democratically elected Afghan government.
Meanwhile, the cofounder of the Taliban, Mullah Baradar, was living in Qatar, from where he was leading the negotiations with the Americans. The good cleric certainly seemed to be enjoying the diversions of Doha a whole lot more than living in the harsh, mountainous deserts of southern Afghanistan.
In February 2019, when retired general Jack Keane had met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the US presence in Syria, he also took the opportunity to give the president his thoughts about the war against jihadist terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, telling him, “The Afghans are doing the fighting, we are advising them, and we have a small counterterrorism force that is going after the high-value targets.”
Keane went on, “Ever since 9/11, we have said it makes sense to fight specifically only those radicals who could do danger to the American people. So we’re not involved in the entire global radical Islamic movement, far from it, we’re interested in those who may be a danger to the security of the American people. And that’s in four or five places, like against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Let’s assume there’s a miracle and we get a peace treaty in Afghanistan. We should keep a small contingent of American forces there to make certain that al-Qaeda and ISIS do not build a safe haven again and we should keep those forces there indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely?!” Trump asked.
Keane replied, “Indefinitely! We’re doing that right now in Yemen, Libya, and East Africa. There’s no pressure to get out of there. We have established a condition: as long as a particular terrorist organization is a threat to the American people, then we should be involved.”
These arguments seemed to have made some impression on Trump. Five months later in an interview with Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson—long a skeptic of America’s wars overseas—the president said of Afghanistan, “I call it the Harvard of terrorists. . . . I’ll give you a tough one. If you were in my position and . . . a great central casting general walks up to your office . . . and you have some really talented military people saying, ‘I’d rather attack them over there than have them hit us over here and fight them on our land.’ It’s something you always have to think about. Now, I would leave and will leave—we will be leaving very strong intelligence, far more than you would normally think because it’s very important.”
In an Oval Office meeting with the Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan on July 22, 2019, Trump improbably claimed to reporters, “If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just 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.” Had Trump contemplated dropping nuclear weapons on Afghanistan? It wasn’t clear. After Khan’s visit to the White House, a number of stories appeared in the media reporting that a peace agreement between the United States and the Taliban was imminent. Retired General David Petraeus, who generally avoided making any kind of public statement criticizing American government policy, took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, declaring that “the kind of U.S. withdrawal that was inadvisable in Iraq eight years ago would be indefensible for Afghanistan today.” This was a strong statement coming from the general who had commanded both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Trump administration seemed to be trying to thread an impossible needle, which was to cut a peace deal with the Taliban, who were demanding a total American withdrawal from Afghanistan, while at the same time ensuring that the country would not revert into becoming a “Harvard for terrorists,” which a complete US withdrawal would surely help to enable. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was treating the Taliban as if they were a government in waiting while it was excluding the legitimate, elected Afghan government from any role in its negotiations with the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the Taliban also had their own disagreements. The “Quetta Shura,” the overall command of the Taliban, wanted all the American forces to leave Afghanistan within six months, while the chief Taliban negotiator Mullah Baradar had agreed with Khalilzad to a timeline of under two years.
On August 17, 2019, Khalilzad traveled to brief Trump about the negotiations at the president’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club where he was spending a working vacation. Trump had only met Khalilzad briefly once before.
Attending the briefing was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, who had been overall commander of the Afghan War, and the CIA director, Gina Haspel. After the meeting Trump tweeted, “Just completed a very good meeting on Afghanistan. Many on the opposite side of this 19 year war, and us, are looking to make a deal—if possible.”
This bland tweet didn’t represent the real disagreements about the Afghan War that were then roiling Trump’s national security team. Khalilzad was pressing to give the Taliban a date certain for getting American troops to zero in Afghanistan. The reliably hawkish Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who had Trump’s ear, had visited Bedminster earlier in the month and warned the president not to go to zero in Afghanistan. The CIA and the Pentagon were adamantly opposed to going to zero and wanted to keep four or five bases to continue counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and across the border in neighboring Pakistan. Even if these bases were staffed by CIA officers, they would still need military units to guard them and to carry out raids.
In their negotiation with Khalilzad, the Taliban had agreed not to let terrorists use any of the areas that they controlled in Afghanistan and, more important, they had also agreed to break publicly with al-Qaeda. In return the United States would commit to a partial drawdown of some five thousand troops with the eventual goal of a possible complete withdrawal, which was conditioned on the Taliban keeping their side of the bargain. The United States also gave itself an important out: When a new Afghan government was installed, the new government could ask for American troops to be posted to Afghanistan and the United States could then potentially agree to such a request.
The next stage, if everything went to plan, was for the Afghan government and the Taliban to sit down together and begin negotiating what role the Taliban might play in Afghan politics going forward. Afghanistan had been at war for four decades since the Soviets had invaded the country in 1979. Might this be the beginning of a lasting peace? No one knew.
But then Trump suddenly developed some serious buyer’s remorse. On September 7, 2019, Trump surprised even his close advisers with a tweet that “the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday.” Trump wrote that he had “cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations,” because the Taliban had “admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great soldiers.”
It seemed that Trump was now focused on the fact that a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban might saddle him with a bad deal in Afghanistan that could become a real headache in his second term, should he secure one. However you dressed it up, Khalilzad was negotiating a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. And simply because the US withdrew its troops from a conflict didn’t mean the war was over, as Obama had discovered when he had pulled all American troops out of Iraq in 2011. It also wasn’t possible to pick a worse moment to be cozying up to the Taliban, considering that photos of the Taliban leadership meeting with Trump at Camp David would have landed on front pages just as the United States started commemorating the eighteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Trump pronounced that the talks with the Taliban were now “dead.”