Professor William Maley and Dr Niamatullah Ibrahimi – Written evidence (AFG0004)

1. The authors of this submission are specialists on Afghanistan, and most recently co-authored Afghanistan: Politics and Economics in a Globalising State (London: Routledge, 2020). Dr Ibrahimi is Lecturer in International Relations, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and is author of The Hazaras and the Afghan State: Rebellion, Exclusion and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Hurst & Co., 2017).  He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science and of The Australian National University, and worked in Afghanistan as an analyst for the International Crisis Group. Professor Maley is Professor of Diplomacy at The Australian National University, edited Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (London: Hurst & Co., 1998), and is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Co., 2006); Transition in Afghanistan: Hope, Despair and the Limits of Statebuilding (London: Routledge, 2018); The Afghanistan Wars, 3rd edition (London: Macmillan/Red Globe Press, 2021); and Diplomacy, Communication, and Peace: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 2021).

2. From the questions posted by the Committee for comment, this submission specifically addresses Question 2 in greatest detail, and Questions 1, 3, 9 and 11 in somewhat less detail.

Question 2. What are the prospects for the implementation of the peace agreement between the US and the Taliban signed in February? To what extent have its provisions been implemented, and what are the principal challenges?

3. The prospects that the 29 February 2020 US-Taliban Agreement will lead to peace in Afghanistan are poor. Like the 27 January 1973 Paris Accords on Vietnam, the Agreement is best seen as an ‘exit agreement’ rather than a ‘peace agreement’. Its flaws were obvious from 29 February, and the timeline that it set out rapidly fell by the wayside. The following paragraphs identify some of the problems arising both from the wording and form of the Agreement, and from some of the assumptions underpinning it.

4. It has been widely noted that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was not a party to the 29 February Agreement, having been excluded from its drafting. Since it was not a party, it can hardly be criticised for being slow in giving effect to it. Two other features of the Agreement have been less widely noted. First, to find a precedent for such an exclusion, it is necessary to go back to the Munich Agreement of 29 September 1938, in the negotiation of which the Czechoslovak Republic played no part. (Even in the case of the Paris Accords on Vietnam, the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Vietnam, Trần Văn Lắm, was a signatory to one of the Accords.) The Munich Agreement remains the paradigmatic example of the dangers that can result from great powers sacrificing a small ally.[1] Second, the 29 February Agreement made withdrawal commitments to the Taliban not simply on the part of the United States, but also ‘its allies’; and with respect to ‘all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel’. We are not aware of any evidence in the public domain that Her Majesty’s Government, or any other allied government with personnel deployed in Afghanistan, had delegated to the US negotiator the right to make such a commitment, which plainly lies with the sovereign authorities of individual states to make. Furthermore, the elaborate listing of personnel to be withdrawn is patently broad enough to compromise the ability of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to deliver aid programs in the future.

5. The single greatest obstacle until now to implementation of the 29 February Agreement has been the provision dealing with prisoner releases (an issue which the Munich Agreement also addressed, in Article 8). There is some evidence to suggest that this provision was inserted hastily and at the last minute; according to US congressman and former Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski, on 15 February 2020 ‘during a meeting attended by more than a dozen members of Congress at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, I asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about a rumor that the deal might also commit the Afghan government to releasing Taliban prisoners — a huge upfront concession that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani understandably did not want to make. Pompeo told us categorically that the deal would say nothing about releasing prisoners.’[2] The provision on prisoner releases actually supplied a rare example of a negotiator booby-trapping his own agreement. The United States had no right whatsoever to make a commitment that the Afghan government would release prisoners in its custody, and no reason whatsoever to be surprised when this became a point of contention, and a major obstacle to progress. Two factors contributed to this contention.

6. One was the difference between the wording used in the US-Taliban Agreement, and the wording in the ‘Joint Declaration between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan’ issued in Kabul on the same day. The Agreement provided that ‘up to’ five thousand Taliban ‘combat and political prisoners’ held by the Afghan government ‘will be released by March 10, 2020, the first day of intra-Afghan negotiations’, with ‘the goal of releasing all the remaining prisoners over the course of the subsequent three months.’ The Joint Declaration merely stated that the ‘Islamic Republic of Afghanistan will participate in a U.S.-facilitated discussion with Taliban representatives on confidence building measures, to include determining the feasibility of releasing significant numbers of prisoners on both sides’. Such inconsistency in wording, by creating immediate scope for dispute over what had been agreed, violated one of the most elementary principles of effective diplomacy. In some circumstances, ‘constructive ambiguity’ may be desirable, but not in cases such as this, marked by very low levels of trust between the parties. The other factor contributing to contention was the disposition of the United States to demand even more of the Afghan government than the 29 February Agreement provided. While on its face the Agreement set a ceiling on the number of Taliban prisoners to be released, the United States treated this instead as a target; and furthermore, acquiesced in the proposition that the Taliban should be able to determine exactly who should be released, something which was not specified in any way in the Agreement. This problem became acute at the point when France and Australia opposed the release of specific prisoners who had been involved in the murder of French and Australian citizens[3] – prisoners who were convicted criminals rather than ‘combat’ or ‘political’ prisoners.

7. The 29 February Agreement was also notable for what it did not address. The Agreement was completely silent on the issue of Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, and contained no provision for any kind of ceasefire in Afghanistan. It did not even mention the Afghan government by name. Its withdrawal provisions were not conditioned on any progress being made in ‘intra-Afghan negotiations’, or on any Taliban commitment to protect democratic processes, or human rights, or the rights of women. These last lacunae were serious, for they reflected the depth of the gulf which separated the parties to the Afghan conflict, which is a conflict not just of interests but of values.[4] ‘Peace agreements’ which seek simply to paper over fundamental differences between parties have a long history of failure. As an experienced observer put it decades ago, a ‘political settlement will be inadequate if the peace negotiators have not reached all the issues and leave unresolved some of the disputes that were the basis for the war’.[5] Disputes around explicit religious claims tend to be especially intractable.[6]

8. There is one very dangerous assumption built into the Agreement, namely that developments on the ground will not be disrupted by shifts in political alignments flowing from Afghans’ perceptions of where the so-called ‘peace process’ is heading. Those who make such an assumption have forgotten Thomas Hobbes’s warning from 1651 that ‘Reputation of power, is power’.[7] One of the gravest weaknesses of the way in which the entire process has been handled by the Trump Administration is that it has served to boost the reputation of the Taliban, and diminish the reputation of the Afghan Government. There are plenty of Afghans who have no love for the Taliban[8] but do not wish to be on a losing side. They could easily shift their allegiance prudentially to the Taliban if they conclude that the Taliban are likely to come out on top. Just such a ‘cascade’ led to the fall of the communist regime in 1992, swamping a UN ‘peace plan’ in the process.[9] A further dangerous assumption, implicit rather than explicit, is that the Taliban could be a useful partner in dealing with the threat of ‘Islamic State’. This view overlooks the complexity of the relations between militant and radical groups, which can oscillate between competition and cooperation.[10] For example, a report from the UN suggests that links remain between elements of the Taliban and al-Qaida, notwithstanding the requirements of the 29 February Agreement.[11]

9. Finally, it should be noted that the abandonment by the US of a ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’ formula in favour of a two-stage process[12] has arguably had the effect of creating a perverse incentive for violent behaviour by the Taliban, whose bargaining power at the stage of intra-Afghan negotiations would be enhanced by control of more territory, and by a perceived capacity to cause mayhem. In recent months, while the number of major attacks claimed by the Taliban has fallen in urban centres such as Kabul, the overall level of violence has remained extremely high, with grievous effects on ordinary Afghans. A meticulous study in August 2020 by Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network concluded that the Taliban ‘in the first six months of 2020, caused 43 per cent of all civilian casualties, a greater proportion than in 2019 and more in terms of absolute numbers.’[13] Furthermore, Taliban violence targeting Afghan National Security forces and local government institutions outside the cities has continued unabated. There has been a spike in the number of targeted assassinations of Afghan religious leaders, human rights activists, civil society actors, and women members of the Afghan security forces in Kabul and other urban centres.[14] On 14 August 2020, Fawzia Koofi, a leading voice of Afghan women and a member of the team appointed by the government to negotiate with the Taliban, narrowly survived an assassination attempt that targeted her while she was travelling in the vicinity of Kabul.[15]

10. Given all these difficulties, it would be alarming if major powers were not thinking of ‘Plan B’ approaches[16] to be taken in the event that the situation in Afghanistan were to begin to unravel, for example through major defections or the threatened loss of state control over major urban centres, as occurred briefly in Kunduz in 2016 and Ghazni in 2018. Strong and credible reaffirmations of support for the Afghan government may help to avert this peril, but if the situation on the ground begins to deteriorate rapidly, embassies and other Western actors should not be left simply to improvise, as many were forced to do in Saigon in 1975.[17] There are many Afghans now vulnerable because after 2001 they accepted in good faith the promise that Afghanistan would not be abandoned as it was in the aftermath of the collapse of the communist regime in 1992.

Question 1. Which regional and global powers are playing the most significant role in Afghanistan’s political and security environment? What scope is there for that role to be more positive and constructive than it has been in the past?

11. As noted above, the 29 February Agreement failed to address the problem of Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. From Kabul’s point of view, this risked giving to Islamabad what it has been seeking to achieve for decades,[18] namely indirect control over Afghanistan through a government in Kabul either fully or partially dominated by groups such as the Taliban. The failure of the Agreement to confront issues of Pakistan’s support for the Taliban makes it more difficult for elites in Kabul to agree on a national strategy to make peace with the Taliban, for two reasons. First, compromising with the Taliban movement without any guarantees that it would work independently of Pakistan’s security and political ambitions would be perceived by Afghan elites as a capitulation to Islamabad’s polices. No Afghan political leader would be keen to depart the scene with such a legacy. Second, a political settlement in Afghanistan that appeared as a victory for Pakistan would likely be seen as a threat by other countries in the region, mostly notably India, which has committed significant political and economic resources in support of the post-2001 government of Afghanistan.

12. There are some indications that in their violent campaign against the US, United Kingdom, other Western powers and the Government of Afghanistan, the Taliban have received significant support from Tehran and Moscow. In recent months, it was  even reported that certain Iranian and Russian state agencies had offered bounties to the Taliban for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan.[19] However, these tactical and instrumental overtures by Tehran and Moscow that stem from their broader tensions with the US elsewhere in the region are unlikely to mean that these countries are ready to embrace the return of the Taliban to power in Kabul.[20] This serves to highlight a broader point about the challenges of finding a regional agreement in support of a peace process in Afghanistan. While all of Afghanistan’s immediate neghbours and regional powers such as India and Russia have an interest in the abstract in a stable Afghanistan, this shared interest is often overshadowed or overborne by bilateral tensions and rivalries between countries in the region, including between Iran and Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, and China and India. These tensions will not be easily overcome.[21]

Question 3. What might US policy to Afghanistan look like under each of the US presidential candidates? What will be the likely direction of the Trump Administration’s policy to Afghanistan up until the election?

13. The Trump Administration has proved highly erratic, both generally and in respect of the Afghanistan issue, but its commitment to exit Afghanistan seems firmly set, no matter what the potential cost to stability in Afghanistan and the wider region might be. It has failed to respond robustly to Taliban violations of the 29 February Agreement.[22] As a result of this, and of how the prisoner release issue was handled by the US, Afghan confidence in the good faith and political judgment of the Trump Administration has shrunk dramatically. The Afghan government has good reason to fear that the Trump administration could pressure it make major concessions to the Taliban in the hope of securing some sort of ‘peace agreement’ – no matter how defective – in time for the US presidential election on 3 November 2020. A Biden Administration would most likely share a commitment to draw down US troops in Afghanistan, but could be amenable to offering ongoing air support to the Afghan government, which is the form of support which the Taliban most strongly wish to see severed. Much would depend upon exactly who became Secretary of State in a Biden administration. One strong candidate for the position would be Dr Susan Rice, who was considered very seriously as a possible vice-presidential nominee, and who was openly critical of the 29 February agreement.[23] A Biden team is more likely to understand that complex and intractable conflicts cannot be resolved with a ‘rabbit out of a hat’ approach.

Question 9. What is the outlook for talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban following the US-Taliban peace agreement? What role can or should the Taliban play in government, and how can this be achieved?

14. There is no reason to believe that the Taliban are especially interested in engaging in negotiations with the Afghan government. They have never shown the slightest interest in doing so, and have already received the status of a place at the table with the Americans, a firm timetable for the withdrawal of US forces, and the release of thousands of Taliban prisoners. There is no sign that the Trump Administration would be willing to pressure the Taliban to negotiate in good faith. Here it is worth recalling Francis Bacon’s 1597 remark that it ‘is better dealing with men in appetite, than with those that are where they would be’.[24] Where the Afghan government is concerned, a slightly different dynamic is at play. Following the bitterly-contested and low-turnout presidential election in September 2019,[25] the Afghan political elite remains divided, with at least some political figure so hostile to the President that they might well seek to undermine the negotiating position of the Afghan government out of spite. This is one reason why assembling a negotiating team has proved challenging. This, however, is only a symptom of a deeper issue, namely that political life in Kabul is highly pluralistic, something that makes the formation of a ‘united’ negotiating team and the formulation of a ‘unified’ negotiating position difficult, given the seriousness of the issues involved.

15. The Taliban have never displayed any interest in sharing power, and were they to be given positions in the state, they would likely try to use ‘salami tactics’ of the kind used in postwar Hungary by Mátyás Rákosi, and more recently in Cambodia by Hun Sen, to eliminate their opponents. This could well be the trigger for renewed civil strife or civil war. What the Taliban say when they aspire to state power is a very poor guide to how they would use power if they were to obtain it. Like other autocrats in the past,[26] they have a strong incentive to project themselves as being more moderate than in fact they are. A better guide to how they might behave in the future can be obtained by observing how they acted when they occupied territory in the recent past. When the Taliban occupied Kunduz in September-October 2015, it proved a gruesome experience for the residents, marked by killing and abduction of civilians and the hunting-down of women human rights defenders, NGO workers, and journalists.[27]

Question 11. What are the prospects for the return of the almost 2.5 million registered refugees from Afghanistan (UNHCR figures)? What is the impact of hosting Afghan refugees on its neighbours?

16. A failure of the ‘peace process’ to deliver peace is likely to lead to very substantial new refugee flows out of Afghanistan. In 2015, over 200,000 Afghans sought to cross over by sea to Europe.[28] This figure is minute compared to the outflows that would likely follow a return of the Taliban to power, outflows that could run into the millions. There are three reasons why this is the case. First, there would be absolutely no hope left amongst Afghans that international action might be taken to rescue them from Taliban domination. Second, the people of Afghanistan are now distinctly globalised in outlook, as a result of two decades in which they went from being extremely isolated (under the Taliban) to being highly connected to the wider world (under the Karzai and Ghani presidencies).[29] Third, Afghanistan’s population is strikingly young: some 24,559,262 Afghans, or 74.6 per cent of the total population, were estimated on 1 June 2020 to be under the age of 30. Young Afghans have been energetic in pressing for change.[30] Faced with the return of the Taliban, many might opt for exit, with large numbers having a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons set out in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

Received 4th September 2020