The Afghan Impasse, Part 5: The Envoy Speaks

Full Transcript

Note: We encourage you to listen to the audio if you are able, as it includes emotion not captured by the transcript. Please check the corresponding audio before using any quotes.

[HAUNTING INSTRUMENTAL RUBĀB MUSIC]

JENN WILLIAMS, HOST:

Welcome back to The Negotiators, a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m your host, Jenn Williams. This is episode five of our special series, “The Afghan Impasse,” exploring 20 years of failed attempts to negotiate a peace deal in Afghanistan.

[HAUNTING INSTRUMENTAL RUBĀB MUSIC]

JENN: If you haven’t started with episode one, we recommend that you go back and do that now. 

In this episode, we’re going to do something a little different. We’ve heard from and about US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad a lot this season. He was at Bonn pressuring the four anti-Taliban factions to come to an agreement. 

CLIP FROM “THE AFGHAN IMPASSE,” EPISODE ONE, OF BARNETT RUBIN:

I don’t know exactly what happened. I do know that Zal was yelling over the satellite phone quite a bit. 

JENN: He negotiated the Doha Agreement on behalf of US president Donald Trump. 

CLIP FROM “THE AFGHAN IMPASSE,” EPISODE ONE, OF ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

He adjusted very quickly to saying no, withdrawal is what he wanted. 

JENN: And we heard from reporter Ali Latifi about how he came to be regarded by Afghans. 

ALI LATIFI:

That, like, here’s this stooge of the Americans who made a literal deal with the devil at the expense of Afghan people.

JENN: Usually when a deal goes bad, the blame falls on the politicians. Often, we don’t even remember the names of the negotiators. But in the wake of the return of the Taliban, a lot of people have blamed Khalilzad. So now we want to go back and try to understand what happened from his perspective. Zalmay Khalilzad agreed to sit down with reporter Andrew North for an extended interview. 

Here’s “The Afghan Impasse,” episode five: “The Envoy Speaks.”

ANDREW NORTH:

I wanted to start by asking you to give us a bit more of your background of how you got involved in this. 

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Well, I got involved in Afghan policy in the 1980s. I had been an assistant professor at Columbia University. The Council on Foreign Relations gave a scholarship to young academics to go to government, to experience how real-world policy making works. And I was placed in the Department of Defense because my subject was nuclear issues. And one day, the person that I worked for asked me to come and see him, and he said he just had a lunch with his counterpart in the Department of State, and he said, “I traded you.” 

One of the areas that I was asked to focus on is how to make life very difficult for the Soviets in Afghanistan. I worked on the political track of how to unite the various mujahideen groups, and then, how to make the military side more costly. So that’s how it all started, quite accidentally. 

NEWS CLIP OF RONALD REAGAN:

We’ve just held a very useful, and I might say brief, but also, I’ll add, a very moving discussion with chairman Yunus Khalis. 

ANDREW: Those efforts were on display at the White House back in the mid-1980s, when Khalilzad brought a delegation of Afghan mujahideen commanders to meet President Ronald Reagan.

NEWS CLIP OF RONALD REAGAN: I expressed our nation’s continued strong support for the resistance. 

ANDREW: Khalilzad also had to act as the interpreter for the lead commander, Muhammad Yunus Khalis, because of a dearth of other US officials who spoke Pashto. 

[NEWS CLIP OF MUHAMMAD YUNUS KHALIS SPEAKING IN PASHTO]

ZALMAY KHALILZAD, TRANSLATING FOR KHALIS: 

I have no doubt that the—the US promises of support and commitment to the Afghan cause will be honored in the future as it has been in the past.

ANDREW: Looking back, it’s a kind of historical irony, isn’t it, that Khalis—the man who was speaking in the room as part of the mujahideen delegation—it was under him that Mullah Omar fought, and his faction was part of the group that, in the end, gave birth to the Taliban. 

ZALMAY: Yeah, that’s one of the paradoxes and forgotten elements of our encounter with Afghanistan, dating back at least to the 1980s, when I saw the beginning of the signs, and that the Soviets were going to not be able to sustain what they were doing in Afghanistan. I became an advocate that we should engage the Russians, the Soviets, for a political arrangement for Afghanistan as they withdrew, because we had done what we did, in part, assuming that the Soviets would never leave. So we supported the most extreme elements because we believed they fought the hardest and they would fight the longest. And now, it turns out that our assumption about the Soviets was wrong. And therefore, we need to think about a post-Soviet Afghanistan in a way we hadn’t thought about it, because we didn’t think there would be a post-Soviet Afghanistan when we got into this. But that didn’t go very far, because Mr. Gates—who later on became the director of CIA and the Secretary of Defense many years later—argued, saying that, “I’m falling into a trap of Soviet tricks because they’re never going to leave. This is all—their indications are all deception.” 

And in a sense, what happened in subsequent years—yes, we achieved—Afghanistan may have contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which ended the Cold War with us being victorious. But there was this piece of it that became a problem for us, subsequently. And I think in the case of Afghanistan … I was looking at some photos showing women in the 70s and 80s in the Middle East—Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq—and then show them now, and in so many of them, it looked like they’ve gone back, rather than forward. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, the policies that we pursued, the forces we strengthened, in a significant way contributed to the changes that were inconsistent with our values and, arguably, at least after a certain period, without interest as well.

ANDREW: It was a frank admission from someone on the inside for many of these pivotal moments. One key moment came in December 2001, as the Taliban’s defeat was almost sealed, and Khalilzad was part of the US delegation working with other governments to form an interim Afghan administration at a conference in Bonn, Germany. All the major Afghan factions were represented there, except the Taliban. Was it a mistake, I asked Khalilzad, not to have had them involved at the meeting? 

ZALMAY: Yes, I think, in retrospect, it would have been better to get the Taliban involved in negotiations, or in deliberations about the future, early on. Although when the Bonn negotiations started, there was still some fighting going on, and the Taliban had not reconciled to their fate yet that they were going to be defeated, what was perhaps the biggest lost opportunity was the Taliban reaching out to the chairman of the interim authority, as he was called then, Karzai. That wasn’t taken advantage of. It is clear to me in retrospect, although I was not aware of it at the time, that before coming to Kabul for his inauguration as the chairman of the interim authority, President Karzai was in Kandahar; that he was visited by senior Taliban members at the leadership level with a letter that also had been approved, apparently by the leadership; and that the Taliban would accept the new authority, provided that they could live in honor and dignity in their homes and not to be pursued and persecuted. I became aware of it several years later. President Karzai told me that, yes, that is true, that he had been approached, and that he had told them to go and make a statement to that effect on the local radio, and to turn over some vehicles and weapons that they controlled to the new authority. He said, he reported, that the Talibs did both. 

ANDREW: Is it perhaps unfair to blame President Karzai, in this case, for not fully taking up on this offer? Wasn’t this ultimately because after 9/11, there was an assumption that there was going to be no deal with the Taliban? 

ZALMAY: That’s what President Karzai said, that he had heard loud and clear from former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld that they were to be brought to justice, and no deals. I think the anger and feelings of the leadership of the United States at that time would have made it difficult to reconcile, if you like, with the Taliban, to give them amnesty for those actions or lack thereof. The Taliban, when I talked with them in Doha during some of the social get-togethers with them—you know, my team and their team sitting together—I did raise this issue with them. They expressed great disappointment and anger, even, that that offer had not been taken advantage of. More than the US, and at least in the conversations with me, they blamed President Karzai and the Northern Alliance figures. They believed it was more the Northern Alliance that influenced President Karzai, or did not allow President Karzai to follow through. They thought that 20 years of war and all the loss of life on all sides of Afghanistan was due to that mistake, as they saw it, to that neglect by President Karzai.

ANDREW: But once you were there in Kabul as the ambassador, were you thinking, “Are there opportunities, now, that we can explore to try and bring about a lasting peace?” Because at that time—while you were there—was when the Taliban insurgency started to then take shape again. 

ZALMAY: Yeah. I thought that the people of Afghanistan were supportive of, of the new opportunity. I was surprised by how much, everywhere that I went at that time, there was a demand for more US presence rather than less. And so, in the aftermath of the 2004 elections—which went relatively well; we had some challenges, but overall, with the—given the number of Afghans who voted, President Karzai got elected. I thought this was the time to ask the Taliban and to put down their arms and join in the process. But then, as you know, that actually, in late 2004, I was approached to go as ambassador to Iraq. 

NEWS CLIP OF CONDOLEEZZA RICE:

Today, I am pleased to announce the president’s intention to nominate Ambassador Zal Khalilzad to be our next ambassador to Iraq. 

ZALMAY: I left Afghanistan on a very positive note. In my own personal judgment, things looked pretty good. 

NEWS CLIP OF CONDOLEEZZA RICE: The president and I have chosen Zal for this important job, because he has a proven record of building consensus and achieving results in very tough situations.

ANDREW: Well, if we now sort of jump forward—obviously, there were various initiatives in the, sort of, the middle years, including the opening of the Taliban office in Qatar, which you were not—as you say, you were not directly involved in at that point. But then how did the Doha negotiations that you were appointed to lead, how did those come about?

ZALMAY: Well, officially, it came about when I got the phone call in 2018, June or July of 2018, from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, if I would come and see him. We had a meeting, and he told me that the president wanted to get the forces out of Afghanistan to bring them home, that he had made a promise during the election to his constituents that these wars like Afghanistan—as he called them, “forever wars”—must come to an end. They were costly; we weren’t succeeding in winning them; that the world that changed; priorities had changed. And he wanted to get them out safely, and that this required someone who could negotiate an exit, and that he had talked to the president, and the president and him would like me to consider doing this. It’s very important that this be done. I took on that mission, obviously. And that’s how it got launched.

[INSTRUMENTAL RUBĀB MUSIC]

JENN: You’re listening to “The Afghan Impasse,” a special seven-episode season of The Negotiators from Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

[CLIP OF LIVELY NEWS THEME PLAYING]

NEWS CLIP OF UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER #1: 

The US special envoy to Afghanistan has said that he hopes to cement a peace deal with Taliban insurgents by next April … 

NEWS CLIP OF UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER #2: 

Zalmay Khalilzad is on a visit to the Middle East in a bid to, quote, “Bring the Taliban to the negotiating table.” …

NEWS CLIP OF UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER #3: 

The Afghan-born US diplomat was appointed last month to find ways to end the fighting …

ANDREW: I’m sure you know this theory put forward by the scholar William Zartman. And he’s talked about the need for a moment of ripeness, in any negotiations when there’s what he’s called “a mutually hurting stalemate,” to be able to bring peace in any conflict. Were the conditions ripe, at that point, for a solution? 

ZALMAY: The condition was ripe for an American agreement with the Talibs. But the conditions for Talibs and the Afghan government to agree? Some people argued that the conditions were right because neither side could decisively defeat the other. Yes, it was a stalemate, I agreed with that, but it was a statement that was not stable. It was a dynamic statement that worked against the government, that if—whenever marginal changes happened, it mostly wasn’t working for the government.

ANDREW: But how could you negotiate successfully when the Taliban realized all they needed to do was to look at President Trump’s Twitter feed? 

ZALMAY: Well, that is true, I did raise that with the president a few times myself. And he would say he understood. I would even joke with him that, you know, even with my best negotiating skills and my personality and smile, there was a limit to how far charm can get to a satisfactory solution when he made statements that indicated he would withdraw unconditionally. And the Taliban would sometimes taunt me to say, you don’t actually represent the president when you put these tough conditions—this is a package deal, interrelated; we would review after six months; we won’t go to next phase, I would say, if the performance hasn’t been satisfactory in the first phase; and that this was condition-based, and nothing would be agreed to until everything is agreed to. But nevertheless, there was this messaging from Washington and a desire not to link, too tightly, withdrawal with the agreement among Afghans, or between the government and the Taliban, because of an assumption, a belief, that maybe the Afghans would not agree with each other. And maybe they would want to drag it out indefinitely, and that therefore we would get stuck as a result. 

ANDREW: The agreement was based around the Taliban committing to contain al-Qaida and cease attacks on US forces in return for an American withdrawal, followed by their Afghan government allies and the Taliban exchanging prisoners and starting their own talks on a settlement. But the Doha deal also included two secret annexes. And I put it to Khalilzad that with the Taliban eventually taking over, those secret elements had made the Doha Agreement even more controversial. 

ZALMAY: Why? Why do you say that? Tell me your logic of why it became controversial because of what happened afterwards. 

ANDREW: Because, you know, when you—because you’ve taken a lot of this criticism personally from Afghans—because of your, your background, they see you in a particular way, and because there were secret annexes in there, and it ended up with the Taliban regaining complete control—

ZALMAY: Yeah. 

ANDREW: —the accusation is that you sold out Afghanistan. 

ZALMAY: No, that—the— [LAUGHS]. The annex says they’re secret for reasons I’ll explain. There are two annexes. One deals with the withdrawal and the agreement not to attack us as we withdrew. And therefore, it had to specify in the first phase which bases would be the ones that we would leave from, so that the Talibs would make sure, not only that they won’t attack, but there was a perception that others might attack to derail the agreement. And so therefore, because troop movement was involved, they were kept secret. We wouldn’t want to announce, “On, on this day we would leave from this base.” So that’s one annex. Annex two, our deal only with terrorism issues, the commitments that the Talibs have made, some of which, for their reasons, they didn’t want to have it public, because they would be accused by Daesh and others of selling out to the Americans. There was nothing whatsoever on the future Afghan government or favors that the US would do for the Talibs. And I have to tell you, President Ghani, Doctor Abdullah and many allies have seen it, Congress leaders have seen it, and they’ve talked about what it is. So it isn’t, it, it isn’t what some people allege or charge. The documents are the two annexes as I described them. 

ANDREW: But why did the agreement fail in the end? Why did it fail to produce a power-sharing arrangement and instead ended up with the Taliban—20 years later, the Taliban being replaced by the Taliban? 

ZALMAY: Of course we were all very disappointed by that. Even when President Biden came, he had the option—and I briefed him, the first meeting with them, as to where things were. What are you inheriting, Mr. President, and what are your options? And the option was to abandon Doha. Say no, I want to win. I don’t want to leave before the job is done, as President Trump had done with the, with the Iran nuclear deal. Two, to make it condition-based, as the agreement says. I will keep the agreement, but I will—unlike my predecessor, I will insist on it being condition-based, as the agreement says, and I will review it. Third is that you could do what it appeared the previous administration, the president, was interested in doing, and just leave. Whether they adhere to the agreement or not, whether their side delivers on its commitment. And myself and some others argued for a conditional-based approach, not surprisingly. But at the end, he too decided that sticking to conditionality on the political deal in particular introduces an element of uncertainty as to how long will that take. Whether the Afghans, in any reasonable time frame, could agree with each other, and therefore, we would get stuck, and there would be a risk we go back to war against the Talibs. And if we did do that, that would mean, perhaps, that we would have to increase forces, and we will be back to where we were before the agreement. 

NEWS CLIP OF JOE BIDEN:

War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking … 

ANDREW: When President Biden, on April the 14th, 2021, when he made that crucial announcement that it was basically going to be an unconditional withdrawal—

NEWS CLIP OF JOE BIDEN: … and it’s time to end the forever war.

ANDREW: —were you, at that point—you know Afghanistan, were you not thinking, “Right, this is the, this is the signal. The Taliban are now going to move forward. It’s, it’s an open door for them, because the Americans are clearly going home regardless”?

ZALMAY: Well, I mean, I had that sense earlier, even. Then—clearly I was part of the discussions, the briefings, the deliberations. So I knew that was coming long before it was announced. The president instructed me to ask for more time to be added to the clock, four months not to be attacked. The Talibs didn’t attack us, but they said they couldn’t say they agreed to add time to the calendar, because that would not play well with their base of support. But they adhered to saying no attack on US forces, which were the most important.

ANDREW: But I mean, we’re—obviously, we’re focusing on negotiations here. But when you look back at this, do you feel that you had the, the rug pulled out from under you? Because when it came to negotiating power, key things happened that meant, in the end, that it didn’t really matter what deal you came up with. And the critical moment of early July, when Bagram Air Base was closed down, when, when the Americans pulled out in the middle of the night—

ZALMAY: Right.

ANDREW: —that sent an absolutely critical signal.

ZALMAY: Right.

ANDREW: People then finally really thought to themselves, right, if they’ve handed over Bagram, the Americans really are going.

ZALMAY: Yeah. 

ANDREW: At that point, you, you no longer had any cards on the table. 

ZALMAY: Well, the, the key thing is, where we have, I think, a difference of perspective, is that many people—and this may be what President Ghani also thought, that we wouldn’t withdraw unless there was something acceptable to him. And that was a miscalculation. The US had decided to leave. The benefit that the agreement had—with all the challenges in the context that you allude to—was, first, from an American perspective, they meet our core concerns of the United States. One was not to get attacked during withdrawal; safe withdrawal. Not a single American was killed by Talibs during the 18 months. Number two, commitments on terrorism by the Talibs, including a mention of al-Qaida, which was believed to be important domestically. Now, some—and there are arguments how much they’re living up to this or not, but the intelligence community essentially says they are, our intelligence community so far. Then the third was intra-Afghan, to provide an opportunity for Afghans to come to an agreement. If you look at the agreement purely from that prism—the opportunity presents itself, the two sides sat across the table from each other, they did not reach an agreement within the time frame that we have agreed to, and extend it by four months. And the US president did not want to link that withdrawal to the agreement by the Afghans. But we were going to get out anyway, and therefore, the other factors had more weight. Safe withdrawal and terrorism. I think that was a conscious decision at the end, not to link the withdrawal with the political agreement. 

ANDREW: Khalilzad said that there was an assumption at the time that the Afghan government, and the security forces that the United States had built up over the past 20 years, that they were in a stronger position even if they couldn’t win.

ZALMAY: I can tell you the perception was, when I was asked to do the job that I did, that neither side can win. Both sides can produce—given the populations, they control enough people, and if, especially on the government side, if it could pay salary, could generate enough troops to keep fighting. And that the Afghan forces were getting stronger. This was the time, therefore, for a negotiated settlement. What happened? And this was a question that the presidents asked, always, too. You’ve told me you had 300,000, the Afghan forces. That they had better equipment, better benefit, better support among the people, because we always are—data showed, based on polling, that the people were with the government. So what happened? Why? What did we do in terms of building the Afghan army? Was it something we did that should have been done differently? Was this not truly a national Army, but an adjunct force? Through our force, when they saw that we were withdrawing, they said, “Well, what are we going to fight for?” 

I know that there is always a lot of attention to the agreement, to the Doha Agreement, but not to the fact there’s two presidents from two parties to say, “We don’t believe this is working. We want to leave. And the most important thing for us to leave is that we leave safely. That we don’t have Americans get killed, that they will withdraw and get a commitment on counterterrorism from both sides in this war.”

ANDREW: So what are your reflections on what did happen when you look back on it, and given your long involvement of 40 years or more in US policy on Afghanistan?

ZALMAY: Well, I think that you can’t transform a society like Afghanistan, fundamentally, through warfare. Especially on a calendar that is a Western calendar, that the Taliban’s saying, “Oh, you have all the watches and we have all the time.” The victory came easy at the beginning. So we underestimated the challenges of seeking transformation. For some of the problems of Afghanistan, the US military is not the right instrument to solve them. How do you get Afghans to accept each other as citizens of the same country with some set of rules for how differences get resolved, for how decisions are made? And it is a lesson for us in the—in the United States, to know the limits of one military force can achieve in the circumstances, difficult ones like Afghanistan. I feel sad, personally, because I’ve been a witness to big successes in Afghanistan, like their success in pushing the Soviets out without help, but also the tragedy and weakness of the political elite. The selfishness of the political elite to come together to take advantage of the opportunities that they achieve at huge cost. Now, with the withdrawal of international forces, with the great opportunity that these forces provided but wasn’t really taken advantage of, and time worked against them, because of wrong assumption that they made that Afghanistan was so important. And some of our military or political leaders, perhaps without intending to, and wanting to be reassuring, gave them that impression—no matter what, we will stay until the job is done. Ignoring political trends in the United States. And that assumption of us staying there, no matter what, that we will—and we made our own share of mistakes; we are going to learn lessons from that, but I think they, they did miss an opportunity.

JENN: I want to move past all of the reasons why the intra-Afghan negotiations failed and talk about the negotiations that happened after the major talks break down. Because once it became clear that US troops were leaving Afghanistan, deal or no deal, the situation on the ground turned to panic. 

NEWS CLIP OF MALE REPORTER SPEAKING OVER AIRCRAFT NOISE: 

People are literally clinging on to US military aircrafts as they try to take off. The US is in charge of … 

JENN: People wanted out of Afghanistan, and making that happen was going to take a lot of smaller negotiations. Someone was going to have to talk to the Taliban’s second-in-command and arrange safe passage. 

UNIDENTIFIED MAN:

He was so mad. He was basically yelling. He’s like, “What do you guys want to basically turn this into more organized evacuation?”

JENN: That’s next time on “The Afghan Impasse” from The Negotiators. 

The Negotiators is a podcast from Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. This episode was reported by Andrew North. Karen Given is this season’s executive producer. Original music written by Afghan composer Arson Fahim, and performed by Arson Fahim and Afghan rubāb player Siddique Ahmad. Our production team includes Laura Rosbrow-Telem, Rob Sachs, Rosie Julin, Claudia Teti, Japhet Weeks, Jigar Mehta, Amjad Atallah and Dan Ephron. Thanks to Nelufar Hedayat, Govinda Clayton and James Wolley for helping create the show. 

Foreign Policy is a magazine of news and ideas from around the world. We encourage you to subscribe at foreignpolicy.com/subscribe. 

Doha Debates is a production of Qatar Foundation, where the most urgent issues of our time are discussed and debated. Learn more at dohadebates.com.