When Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad embarked on his mission in September 2018 to end the American military engagement in Afghanistan, few people placed much hope in his efforts. Almost three years later, even fewer people could believe the staggering failure of the peace process he spearheaded as the Taliban entered Kabul uncontested. There was a fundamentally flawed process design at the core of that failure which not only upended the opportunities for reaching a political settlement but also contributed to the disastrous unraveling of the republican government. Three aspects of that process design were particularly consequential: A two-stage process that reduced the republic of Afghanistan to a subsidiary party; Ghani’s backchannel contacts with the Taliban; a lack of mediators and a lack of institutional framework for civil society engagement in the peace process.
Two-stage process
Delinking the withdrawal of foreign forces from a political settlement disrupted the balance of leverages and incentives required for any meaningful negotiations to progress. The Taliban insurgency had two key demands, which were the withdrawal of international forces and a Sharia-based governance structure replacing the Islamic republican system. Those demands were interrelated as the post-2004 constitutional order was a direct byproduct of the US-led international military intervention. The Taliban wanted not only the foreign troops to leave, but to erase any sign and legacy of their presence in the country. That was the logic behind their insistence on negotiating directly with the United States instead of a more direct adversary, the Kabul-based government. For them, the country Afghanistan had metamorphosed into after they were ousted from power in 2001 neither had the legitimacy to exist nor the merit to be sustained.
In that context, a process in which the US negotiated its withdrawal and left the Taliban and the Republic of Afghanistan to hammer out the details of a shared political future was fundamentally flawed and destined to fail. That arrangement redacted the entire peace process to the US-Taliban talks and made the other component of the process secondary to, dependent on, and an extension of those negotiations. The negative implications of such a design became more obvious during the so-called “intra-Afghanistan talks.” The Taliban often reminded the Republic’s negotiating team that they were at the table only to fulfill their commitment to the Americans rather than out of a genuine will to work towards a comprehensive peace agreement. Even on the Republic’s side, many thought that the fate of the negotiations had already been decided between the US and the Taliban.
The American commitment to a complete pullout before and regardless of a political settlement effectively left the Taliban with maximum leverage but minimum interest. The Taliban believed that it had resolved all points of difference in its talks with the US and had no need to see the direct negotiations through. The agenda of direct talks with the republic made that clear. In the republic’s calculus, it had more than 7000 Taliban members in custody—even after the release of 5000 prisoners in August 2020. The government was also the only authority to initiate the process of delisting the Taliban members from the UN sanctions lists. The Taliban, on the other hand, had not even included those issues in their agenda. It instead considered prisoner release and delisting as American commitments, and preconditions for their presence at the intra-Afghanistan table rather than an outcome of it. That left the republican team empty-handed, unable to offer anything the Taliban wanted in return for a ceasefire, a concession of extreme value to the republican constituency.
The two-stage process did not just give away the republic’s leverage against the Taliban. It also undermined the government in the country’s domestic political scene. Once the US committed to a full withdrawal, the authority and legitimacy of the government were challenged by political factions long before the Taliban arrived on the outskirts of the capital. Building the much-needed political consensus became incredibly difficult for Ashraf Ghani Administration as political actors bandwagoned on the American appeasement of the Taliban, trying to negotiate their mini-deals with the insurgency to protect their wealth and interest. The President’s divisive politics and stubbornly autocratic management further complicated that task and weakened the republic’s position at the table. This was clearly at play within the negotiating team where the political standing of the members’ patrons vis-à-vis the presidential palace in Kabul steered their relationship with the team’s leadership loyal to President Ghani.
Ghani’s backchannel contacts with the Taliban
The intra-Afghanistan negotiations could not produce a political settlement because of the limitations of a linear, single-track, and static negotiation table that suffered from a high trust deficit and a structural ineptness to address it. Personal relationships between negotiators of the two sides were utilized only towards personal objectives because the rigid process design could not harness them for the benefit of the official talks. At least on the republican side, most hid their communication with the Taliban. On several occasions, members had come under harsh criticism from their teammates for meeting with the Taliban ‘without authorization.’ As external events and stakeholders continuously derailed the formal talks, the entire process came to a halt for weeks simply because one of the parties did not show up at a scheduled meeting.
The process also lacked credible and defined safety nets and backchannels to break deadlocks and salvage the talks when the two negotiating parties could not make headways. Multiple actors either tried to offer backchannels or were approached by the parties to do so. However, without their explicit incorporation into the process design, such attempts remained ad hoc and ineffective. In September 2019, months after the State Ministry for Peace was formed, a senior British diplomat conveyed General Nick Carter, British Chief of the Defense Staff’s interest in operating a backchannel with the Pakistani Chief of Army, General Qamar Bajwa. Although Carter remained involved in Afghanistan affairs through his relationships with Ghani and Bajwa, his efforts, disconnected from the official negotiation process, left no positive impact.
Unlike the Taliban who seemed to listen to their advisors, the republican side dismissed most analysis and advice. Instead, it was steered by President Ghani’s political interests and his chief negotiator’s intellectual capacity, none of whom proved capable enough for the complex task at hand.
Later, there were efforts by the American, German and Qatari special envoys to function as backchannels between the negotiating parties. However, they were often considered untrustworthy and partisan by both or at least one of the sides—Ghani government thought of the U.S. and Qatar as too sympathetic to the Taliban. Instead, his chief negotiator was in contact with a group of businessmen from Afghanistan in the Gulf that he thought had credibility with and influence over the Taliban. That also did not materialize in any positive impact. The only potentially effective backchannel, according to its participants, was established by Abdul Salam Rahimi, Ghani’s special envoy for peace and deputy chief negotiator. Mediated by a Doha-based think-tanker who claimed to have built some trust with the Taliban, Rahimi leveraged his family’s political ties to the Haqqanis in initiating a side conversation. As early as May 2021, Rahimi tabled the idea of a “peaceful transfer of power,” something that became center stage in discussions immediately preceding the fall of Kabul. Of course, the departure of Ghani and the Taliban’s uncontested takeover made it impossible to gauge whether those conversations were actually successful in forging an agreement even if sub-optimal.
Lack of institutional role for civil society
The overly simplified process could not incorporate constant demands for inclusivity and representation. The direct impact of that inability was the dissatisfaction of many constituencies who felt left out, and unheard, their interests and gains compromised by the talks. This also hindered the public legitimacy and buy-in of the process. This deficiency uniquely undermined the republican team as the process came under constant criticism from civil society, minorities, veteran groups, and other vulnerable constituencies.
In the absence of multiple and broad-based platforms of engagement and debate, there was little space for the public to pressure the negotiating parties, especially the Taliban, to negotiate more seriously and discuss pressing issues that could near the process to an eventual outcome. The stagnated table in Doha was incapable of fostering broader dialogues away from the interest-driven and confrontational negotiations. Although the government tried to mobilize its constituency, without formal linkages to the actual track-I talks, those efforts failed to bear fruits. For example, the High Council for National Reconciliation sent teams to several provinces to engage with communities, and the State Ministry for Peace established a Civil Society Coordination Board and a Women Advisory Board. Additionally, some NGOs and donor-sponsored initiatives such as the EU-funded Afghanistan Mechanism for Inclusive Peace (AMIP) also tried, all to no avail as they lacked institutional linkage to the actual negotiations, to create bridges between the formal negotiations and a much broader and diverse constituency.
Negotiation without mediation
The fourth important design deficiency that considerably contributed to the process’ failure in producing a political settlement was the absence of a third-party mediator. Rarely have peace negotiations succeeded without an impartial mutual interlocutor bridging the distrust between the parties. With suspicions in Kabul around the mostly secretive US-Taliban negotiations, President Ghani and his inner circle struggled to minimize Ambassador Khalilzad’s role in the then-upcoming intra-Afghanistan talks. However, as the talks neared, Qatar emerged as a more plausible and interested mediator or at least a facilitator. But Ghani considered Qatar only a stretched arm of the US, especially as the Gulf state saw the Afghanistan peace process as a diplomatic lifeline amid the blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
While the Taliban’s rejection of mediation was understandable given their interest in stagnating and stalling the talks, the republican side’s opposition was confounding. With the clock on the American withdrawal ticking, it was obvious that prolonging the talks was hurting the Afghanistan government’s position. A mediator could have brought life-saving speed to the process. Many within the republican team seemed to have realized that since February 2021 and supported Qatar as a facilitator. However, despite constant nudging from the negotiators, Chief Negotiator Masoum Stanekzai refrained—as it only became clear in late June—from formally communicating the request to the Qatari government.
The other reason the lack of a third-party mediation contributed to the process’ failure was the dirt of technical capacity on both sides. Although the Taliban had much more strategic clarity about what they wanted from the talks and possessed better skills and in some ways even more experience in negotiations, their views of complex political and legal issues were very simplistic and rigid. The Taliban used their better negotiation techniques to push for those intransigent views, which made progress more difficult.
In the contact group meetings where the actual negotiation took place, it was obvious that the Taliban were coming with full preparation to counter the republic’s arguments. The republican side, on the other hand, lacked both the strategic clarity and negotiation techniques necessary to manage a process of such fragility and a conflict of such complexity. Strict hierarchy and political infighting disabled it from taking advantage of the available capacity in the negotiating team and the broader peace architecture. One example was their doubling down on religious reasoning against the Taliban’s insurgency and violence or in defense of democratic values, assuming that the Taliban would cease hostilities if they could provide one more irrefutable argument. They dismissed more nuanced arguments from politically less powerful voices who argued that it was falling into a trap where the Taliban forced their intellectual frameworks to drive the negotiations.
Unlike the Taliban who seemed to listen to their advisors, the republican side dismissed most analysis and advice. Instead, it was steered by President Ghani’s political interests and his chief negotiator’s intellectual capacity, none of whom proved capable enough for the complex task at hand. A credible third-party mediator could have helped the process progress by tabling creative ideas. It could also break gridlocks by applying iterative alternatives to conventional methods of negotiations. Equally important, a mediator could have kept the parties accountable against a timeline not necessarily driven by the US troops’ withdrawal.
The third important area where a mediator could have significantly contributed to the success of the process was in managing external stakeholders. The lack of international and regional consensus and the dismissal of allies’ views by the US incentivized many to try exerting influence directly to protect their interests. In addition to their ambassadors based in Kabul, many countries had their special envoys specifically tasked with engaging in the peace process. Such a crowded and chaotic scene took away the parties’ agency, especially of the republican side. The meetings in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, Tashkent, and the Istanbul that eventually did not take place were examples of such an approach that derailed the process, took away the momentum and credibility from the Doha talks, and further undermined its prospects of success. A third-party mediator could have very well created centralized ownership of the process, channeled international engagements more constructively, and maintained focus in the negotiations.
Conclusion
It is hard to argue that had the process design addressed these three issues, it would have produced an outcome in the form of a comprehensive peace agreement. It is equally hard to discount the degree to which a flawed process design dimmed the prospects of a political settlement. Arguably, the poor design of the process also contributed to the disastrous and chaotic unravelling of the republican government in August 2021. The American decision to exclude the Afghanistan government from the withdrawal talks and commit to releasing the Taliban’s prisoners and removing sanctions took away from the republic the ‘fighting chance’ against the Taliban at the table and on the battlefield. Moreover, the absence of track-IIs and other support mechanisms further undermined representation and buy-in by minimizing public pressure on the negotiating parties. The absence of a credible backchannel also stagnated the talks in an environment of mistrust. Negotiations without a third-party mediator further prolonged the process and amplified the negative implications of the lack of technical capacity on both sides. Lacking a mediator, the process was constantly derailed by arbitrary and external deadlines and preferences. While the first shortcoming of the process design was uncorrectable from the beginning, the two other aspects could have easily been fixed at any point throughout the eleven months if there was political will. Although the process might have still failed even if the warnings about its simplicity and fragility were taken more seriously, it would have probably not collapsed the way it did and with the disastrous ramifications that it had.
Note: This essay was submitted as a discussion paper for a colloquium on “Why was a political settlement not achieved in Afghanistan?” convened on 15 – 16 July 2022, by the US Institute of Peace and the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies at the USIP headquarters in Washington, D.C.
