Misguided Talks With the Taliban Won’t Bring Peace to Afghanistan

Dark, bizarre, surreal: we are short of adjectives to accurately capture the current political situation in Afghanistan. On May 8, even as they were in talks with the US, the Taliban attacked the Kabul office of a US aid NGO, killing nine. On May 5, the Taliban mounted attacks on armed forces outposts in northern Afghanistan, killing more than a dozen servicemen.Earlier in March, the Taliban’s shadow police subjected women to public lashings evoking comparisons to their brutal medieval-era style rule between 1996 and 2001. This is to say nothing of the 75,000 plus Afghan civilians who have been killed in heinous acts of terrorism since 2001. And despite all this, the US seems determined to strike a deal with the Taliban through negotiations which erode the authority of the Afghan national unity government, a government midwifed by them and one that couldn’t have survived this long without them. On May 9, the US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad tweeted that slow but steady progress was made on the framework to end the Afghan war and the Doha round of talks were now getting into the ‘nitty-gritty’.If we are to believe Khalilzad, the US remains hopeful of forming an interim government involving the Taliban on the basis of this quid pro quo: the US will scale down its presence in Afghanistan in return for security guarantees by the Taliban. Though the details are yet to be worked out, there appears to be an in-principle agreement on this broad arrangement between the US, the Taliban, and the Taliban’s minders – the ISI. If it works out, President Trump will appeal to the voters in the 2020 presidential elections that he has brought soldiers back from Afghanistan – from a war he now refers to as “ridiculous”.

This article first appeared in The Wire