Attachments
Kristian Berg Harpviken
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)
Executive Summary
Brief Points
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The US spearheaded a military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, toppling the Taliban regime and initiating the building of a new democratic Afghan state. The Taliban gradually became a major security threat, while the Afghan government was hampered by capacity problems, corruption, and conflict.
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By 2018, the US government, under President Trump, changed its basic position and decided to withdraw militarily from Afghanistan, which entailed a high likelihood that the Afghan republican government would be replaced by the Taliban. The US and the Taliban had overlapping interests in international military withdrawal.
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The US gave in to the Taliban’s refusal to start negotiation with an Afghan government whose legitimacy it did not condone. The Taliban insisted that the participants in the process had to be, first, the US and the Taliban. The Afghan government, as a result, was sidelined.
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The procedural aspects of the talks were reflective of the parties’ overlapping positions, and the initial US insistence on a full ceasefire was dropped, while the US made unpopular commitments on the Afghan government’s behalf. Various complications and delays led to a situation in which international military leverage fizzled out, seriously undermining the Afghan government.
Images of the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul and the dramatic evacuations of internationals and Afghan citizens in August 2021 are emblematic of a failed peace process, but the real turning point came three years prior, when the United States (US) decided that military withdrawal from Afghanistan, rather than sustaining a fragile Afghan government fighting the Taliban, was its prime objective.
The US entered direct talks with the Taliban, excluding the country’s legitimate authorities, which were highly dependent on international support for their survival. In the process, the US gave in to the Taliban’s demands, with the resultant peace treaty non-committal with regards to a ceasefire, and with built-in vagueness on mutual obligations, mechanisms for monitoring, and consequences of violations. In addition, the US made commitments on the behalf of an unwilling Afghan government, most importantly to a large-scale exchange of prisoners.
In effect, the US-Taliban agreement paved the way for the Taliban’s takeover, an outcome that was not given yet seemed highly likely, whether seen from the vantage point of 2018 (when talks started) or 2020 (when they were concluded). Here lies the core of the US ethical conundrum. However, there is a difference between the right of the US to decide to withdraw and to negotiate the terms for withdrawal, and the US undermining the Afghan republican government negotiation of the key terms for a possible intra-Afghan peace and making commitments on behalf of the Afghan government.