Salman Rafi Sheikh
Just when the negotiations were reportedly heading towards a withdrawal deal, the Afghan war has gone into a hardly unexpected spiral of fighting between the government troops and the Taliban. After the Afghan Govt.’s announcement of “Khalid Operation” against “the terrorists”, the Afghan Taliban have launched their own annual “Spring Offensive” to continue to push towards their conquest of the country. Importantly enough, this has happened at a time when the Taliban had just agreed to the inclusion of an official Afghan delegation in the next round of negotiations with the US in Qatar. For now, therefore, Afghan peace talks are in a pushback mode, with critical consequences for future looming large.
The US chief negotiator for talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, took to twitter to express his ‘anger’ over the Taliban’s announcement of new offensive.
“The quickest way to prevent casualties is to agree to a ceasefire. Taliban senior leadership should allow their representatives to come to the table and discuss. I will continue to press the case”, he wrote in a series of tweets last week, showing how talks have already lost the track and have been overpowered by fighting on the ground.
Hitting directly the “Spring Offensive”, he wrote further, “The Taliban’s spring offensive announcement is reckless…. “It is irresponsible to suggest that an increase in violence is warranted because the government announced a security plan. The Afghan people have clearly voiced their desire for peace.”
But Khalilzad can hardly blame the Taliban for not sticking to the table. The real reason for drift and stalemate is the potential spoilers of negotiations and opponents of a deal (re: Kabul and New Delhi, its only supporter) that might bring the Taliban back to power.
The intention was clear when “Khalid Operation” was announced in March 2019. This operation is pretty much in line with the current Defense Minister (former chief of Afghan intelligence agency, NDS) Asadullah Khalid’s slogan of ‘complete elimination of the Taliban from Afghanistan.’
While this operation is typically Kabul’s offensive and Kabul being technically not a part of the peace process, the Taliban are hardly in a position to discredit Khalilzad/the US for inciting the Afghan gov’t to take this step. Kabul being not in talks means Kabul is in a state of war with the Taliban, a situation that it has shrewdly used to its advantage.
But the consequence of this fighting, resulting from Kabul’s absence from the process, is that talks have stalled, something that Kabul and New Delhi have been looking to do, as we reported previously, for quite some time now.
This means that a new fighting season being just round the corner, Khalilzad/the US and Pakistan and the Taliban wouldn’t be able to do deal that might bring the Taliban back in the political fold and end the political life, as we know it, of the present political elite, a potential end that might also mean a major setback for New Delhi’s great many geo-strategic interests in Afghanistan.
India was, accordingly, quick to convey its concerns to the US about any possible towards replacing the Ghani govt. with an interim govt—something that Pakistan’s PM Imran Khan had recently suggested. The Indian press reported that in his meeting with Gokhale, Khalilzad was told that ‘Indian government’s view [is] that a political structure should be in place when the US drawdown takes place, and that this should be an elected government and not an interim administration which is not constitutionally mandated.’
However, notwithstanding what Kabul and New Delhi seek to achieve, a major source of trouble for them remains their inability to achieve a political consensus within Afghanistan over how to proceed and which way their own wind must blow.
As it stands, Abdullah Abdullah, the government’s chief executive and Ghani’s current coalition partner and his opponent in the up-coming presidential elections, has threatened to boycott a grand council of thousands of elders that Ghani has called for next month to discuss peace plan. Abdullah and other opponents of Ghani think that Ghani might use this platform to campaign for his election and establish himself as the country’s leader in the face of other contenders.
All this has accumulated to lead talks to a stalemate, postponing negotiations for an “indefinite period”—a situation that directly serves the interests of those actors who want to maintain their rule at the expense of peace through a negotiated settlement.
What this also shows is that the mantra of ‘Intra-Afghan’ dialogue was only a ploy that Kabul was using to somehow de-legitimize talks. As such, when this demand was just going to be fulfilled, Kabul put a spoke in the wheel by announcing a military operation against the Taliban right at a time when the Taliban launch their offensive every year, giving them an additional reason this year to launch it again and postpone talks.
For, now, therefore, Kabul and New Delhi can relax that a peace deal isn’t in the offing and that they have another year of fighting. For the millions of Afghans, this will be the 18thconsecutive year of war. But the spoilers are most obviously there like never before.
