The Afghan Impasse, Part 3: The Art of The (Separate) Deal

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[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 three of our special series, “The Afghan Impasse,” exploring 20 years of failed attempts to negotiate a peace deal in Afghanistan.

[HAUNTING INSTRUMENTAL RUBĀB MUSIC]

Just a quick note: These episodes are meant to be listened to in order, so if you haven’t started with episode one, we suggest you go back and do that now. 

In this episode, we’re going to hear from reporter Sebastian Walker. Seb has been reporting on Afghanistan for Vice News and Al Jazeera since 2009. He did extensive coverage during the administration of US president Donald Trump, spending time in Helmand, Kandahar, Ghazni and Kabul, as well as Doha and Washington.

NEWS CLIP OF DONALD TRUMP:

Our country needs …

JENN: In June of 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency, he was pretty clear on what he felt the country needed. 

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP: … a truly great leader, a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal. 

JENN: The Art of the Deal was Trump’s best-selling book, back when he was known as a celebrity businessman and not a politician. On the campaign trail, Trump had promised to bring US service people home. But once he got into office, no one knew exactly what would happen next. Here’s Sebastian Walker with “The Afghan Impasse,” episode three: “The Art of the (Separate) Deal.”

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP:

Nearly 16 years after September 11th attacks, after the extraordinary sacrifice of blood and treasure, the American people are weary of war without victory.

SEBASTIAN WALKER:

This is US president Donald Trump in August 2017, talking for the first time in his presidency about the path forward in Afghanistan. These were his first official remarks on the war after becoming commander-in-chief. 

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP: I share the American people’s frustration. I also share their frustation [sic] over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most importantly, lives trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations.

SEBASTIAN: As a candidate during the 2016 campaign and before, President Trump had often criticized America’s war in Afghanistan as a disaster. He’d said, in fact, that it was a mistake to ever get involved. But after taking office, nobody on any side of the Afghan conflict was quite sure what he would do with the war he inherited. 

UNIDENTIFIED AFGHAN MAN:

I was the Afghan ambassador in Washington, D.C., so I witnessed the election period and the transition from President Obama to President Trump.

SEBASTIAN: Hamdullah Mohib. 

HAMDULLAH MOHIB: It was nerve-wracking for someone like me, who was trying to navigate the space in Washington as the elections were unfolding, because we wanted Afghanistan to be part of the agenda. But at the same time, we wanted to make sure that it also doesn’t become a negative campaign issue. Knowing that there are people on both sides in the Republican and the Democratic party that are contemplating an exit from Afghanistan, we were worried that any rash decision or policy that may be mentioned on the campaign trails would end up implemented.

SEBASTIAN: I was Middle East bureau chief for Vice News, and tasked with covering Afghanistan. When the time came for Trump’s first big announcement on his plan for the war, I too remember thinking anything was possible. 

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP: 

Thank you very much. Thank you. Please be seated. 

SEBASTIAN: He took the stage at Fort Myer base in Virginia, flanked by his vice president, secretary of state and key military officials. Was this the moment Washington was announcing its withdrawal from Afghanistan? 

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP: My original instinct was to pull out. And historically, I like following my instincts. But all my life, I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office. 

SEBASTIAN: Rather than withdrawing, Trump effectively doubled down on a war he said the US military should be, quote, “fighting to win.” He even committed to sending more troops. Dubbed the South Asia Strategy, it was a stunning reversal of everything he’d messaged up to that point, based presumably on the advice of his generals. 

SEBASTIAN: What do you remember about the conversations that you were involved with ahead of that strategy announcement? 

UNIDENTIFIED AMERICAN MAN: 

One of the different changes with the Trump administration was that the role of combatant commanders into the national security process was less. And I’m not criticizing that, I’m just saying that’s just the way that it was. 

SEBASTIAN: General Joseph Votel was head of the US Central Command for the first two years of the Trump administration, overseeing all US forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan. 

JOSEPH VOTEL: There was a discussion. There was a lengthy debate about this in the national security process. So my belief is, what happened is that through a lengthy discussion, through the interaction, I think they took the president through a process that—again, we’re not trying to change his mind; his, his inclination was to get out of Afghanistan. And I think that stayed true throughout his whole administration. But it was about how we did that. 

SEBASTIAN: In September 2017, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said an additional 3,000 troops would be deploying to Afghanistan as part of Trump’s new strategy. But it wasn’t long before it became clear that it wouldn’t be enough to turn the tide. 

NEWS CLIP OF AMERICAN MALE REPORTER:

Deadliest day this year for American service members fighting in Afghanistan. Three US troops were killed when an IED exploded … 

NEWS CLIP OF AMERICAN FEMALE REPORTER:

Eleven soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan after a gunman attacked a military academy in the capital, Kabul …

NEWS CLIP OF SECOND AMERICAN MALE REPORTER:

More than 100 people are dead, hundreds more injured, most of them civilians. 

NEWS CLIP OF UNIDENTIFIED MAN SPEAKING: And this is despite all the efforts the United States have been taking, you know, to defeat the Taliban. And what do we have? The Taliban is all but expanding their presence in the country. They gain more territory …

SEBASTIAN: Over the next 12 months. Taliban fighters chalked up notable successes on the battlefield, expanding their control of territory and even briefly capturing Afghanistan’s sixth-largest city, Ghazni, in the summer of 2018, with fighters boldly roaming the streets of a major urban center less than 100 miles from the capital, Kabul.

NEWSCLIP OF VICE NEWS REPORTER SPEAKING OVER HELICOPTER NOISE:

So that road just below us is the main north-south highway. It leads down to areas in the south that are controlled by the Taliban …

SEBASTIAN: Our Vice News team was among the first international journalists to get into Ghazni after the city was retaken. The Taliban couldn’t hold it for long, but the audacity of that attack and others were putting the lie to any narrative of overall progress.

[SOUND OF ROCKETS EXPLODING; SOUND OF AFGHAN MAN PRAYING]

SEBASTIAN: Just weeks earlier, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani had been humiliated on live television when Taliban rockets slammed into the presidential compound as he was holding an Eid prayer in the gardens. 

[VICE NEWS CLIP FROM 2018 PLAYS] 

SEBASTIAN: They didn’t hit the palace, did they? 

ASHRAF GHANI: Ah, well, two, but … 

SEBASTIAN: They landed inside? 

GHANI: Yes, yes.

SEBASTIAN: That must have been pretty scary. 

SEBASTIAN: Ghani shrugged off the incident when I caught up with him for an interview for Vice News soon after. He had much larger concerns: A growing sense that attitudes were changing in Washington, that commitment to the Afghanistan project was at its limit, and that his government’s weak position could see them sidelined from negotiations between the US and the Taliban. 

[VICE NEWS CLIP FROM 2018 PLAYS] 

SEBASTIAN: What do you think the government actually has to offer the Taliban? If they don’t like the conditions that you’re offering, what’s to stop them just waiting out the Americans? 

GHANI: The issue is not waiting out the Americans. Can they wait out the Afghan people? 

SEBASTIAN: And what’s in it for the Taliban? 

GHANI: For the Taliban? Legitimacy. Participation. End of violence.

SEBASTIAN: Ambassador Hamdullah Mohib remembers this period as a crucial turning point in the way Washington was approaching everything. And he saw it play out firsthand, after Ghani made him Afghanistan’s new national security adviser following the disaster of Ghazni. 

HAMDULLAH: To work with the Americans on the South Asia Strategy, to increase pressure on the Taliban. And for a time, it worked. And so there was a push in getting an offensive posture by the Afghan security forces, which was halted as a result of the new shift in the Trump administration, which was the announcement to appoint a special representative for reconciliation in Afghanistan.

SEBASTIAN: You’re talking about Ambassador Khalilzad. 

HAMDULLAH: Correct. 

SEBASTIAN: Zalmay Khalilzad. We heard from him earlier in this series. He’s the Afghan-born diplomat who attended Bonn as a representative of the US. Now, President Trump had given him a new job to negotiate the US exit from Afghanistan. 

HAMDULLAH: And so the South Asia Strategy was working, but it was abandoned. There was no announcement that said no more South Asia Strategy; it was abandoned in, kind of, tactical retreat. 

SEBASTIAN: For General Votel, the negotiations picking up pace was less about setbacks on the battlefield than something that, in his understanding at least, had been part of the Trump strategy from the beginning.

JOSEPH: We had an end state we were moving towards. We provided some means, some military capability to, you know, set conditions on the ground for this and, and put more pressure on the Taliban to, kind of, come to the table. But what it took time doing was getting, kind of, the political negotiation process going, which ultimately started with Ambassador Khalilzad, you know, kind of, in early fall of 2018, as I recall. Once Ambassador Khalilzad was engaged, then there was definitely a lot of activity and momentum with what he was trying to do. 

SEBASTIAN: But Mohib sees it differently, through a lens where Zalmay Khalilzad’s appointment was a watershed moment, marking a distinct shift and a return to what President Trump had said were his initial instincts all along.

HAMDULLAH: I think it was the two factions inside, battling for what kind of policy they should adopt for Afghanistan. The traditional Republicans who wanted the South Asia Strategy were ousted, and Trump didn’t have the patience to continue with. And so he reverted back to his original thinking on Afghanistan. And I think peace never had a chance in Afghanistan. Peace requires patience. And Trump wanted a quick win. If you were seeing it from the Taliban’s perspective, seeing a desperate America wanting to get out, there was no chance for peace.

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

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]

SEBASTIAN: Zalmay Khalilzad didn’t have the simplest of tasks: Finding a path to extricate the US from nearly 20 years of war in the quickest way possible without causing bigger problems down the road. As he tells it, one crucial aspect was reading the room, understanding that the administration—namely, the president himself—had reached a turning point. 

ZALMAY KHALILZAD: 

He adjusted very quickly to saying no, withdrawal is what he wanted. I asked some questions about what would we want in exchange for withdrawal, because I thought that’s what would be popular with the Taliban. They want us to get out, so what would we ask in exchange? 

SEBASTIAN: It was becoming clear to everyone that the US needed an exit. But deciding to sit down with an enemy the US military had been fighting for so long was a major moment.

JOSEPH: You know, by this time in the war—you know, 2018, 2019—we’ve been at it for a while. By that point, I think we knew we had to talk to our adversaries. 

[NEWS CLIP FROM 2018 PLAYS] 

JOSEPH (2018): I do think the overall strategy is, is working. 

SEBASTIAN: When I met General Votel in Kabul in September 2018, I asked him directly if the prospect of talks felt like a defeat for commanders who’d seen their troops dying for a cause that now seemed disposable.

[NEWS CLIP FROM 2018 PLAYS] 

JOSEPH (2018): I don’t look at it that way. I mean, that’s …

JOSEPH (PRESENT DAY): I didn’t necessarily feel a level of betrayal that we were doing this. I don’t know that anybody else did. And if they did, they didn’t particularly express that to me. I don’t think there were any particular high regards for the Taliban. I think we all knew what the Taliban was. To me, it just seemed like the next step in terms of what we were doing to bring this conflict to the political conclusion that our president had directed. 

SEBASTIAN: But if there was one place where the sense of betrayal was acute, it was inside Kabul’s presidential palace. Here’s Hamdullah Mohib. 

HAMDULLAH: We were obviously trying to control what was happening. And when we saw the first indications that the Americans are willing to throw in the towel is when Ambassador Khalilzad went and had his first meetings in Islamabad with the Taliban, but failed to inform the Afghan government about it. And as we discovered more about what he had said in those meetings, we tried to push back against the Americans. 

ZALMAY: Their preference would have been—

SEBASTIAN: This is Zalmay Khalilzad again.

ZALMAY: —that it be from get-go a three-way negotiations, three-sided negotiations, the government, the United States and the Taliban. We had tried that. 

HAMDULLAH: The first meeting between Ambassador Khalilzad and the Taliban—

SEBASTIAN: Hamdullah Mohib once more.

HAMDULLAH: —first of all, Afghan government was not informed and not briefed about. 

ZALMAY: I kept the government informed. I know that some people in the government say they didn’t know what we were talking to the Talibs about. That, I object to strongly, because I know the facts to be otherwise. 

HAMDULLAH: Second, what Ambassador Khalilzad put on the table during that discussion was everything. He told the Taliban that everything was on the table, including the departure of President Ghani. Now, it wasn’t about the position of Ghani. It was about the compromise that the Americans were willing to make.

SEBASTIAN: As the negotiations intensified, the five-star hotel in Doha where the Taliban delegation stayed became a hub of activity. The talks were happening behind closed doors, but US generals and Taliban officials couldn’t hide from the cameras completely. US diplomats Laurel Miller and Barnett Rubin, who had both negotiated in secret during the Obama administration, were now outside observers giving interviews to the media.

NEWS CLIP OF LAUREL MILLER:

This is the first time that the US has been willing to be seen, openly and publicly, as negotiating face to face with the Taliban, and putting the question of the American troop presence front and center.

NEWS CLIP OF BARNETT RUBIN:

I’ve been through this, ups and downs, for 35 years, but this is, I would say, the most significant peace process that we’ve managed to see get started.

SEBASTIAN: The Taliban representatives were giving interviews, too. This is Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban’s chief negotiator at the time. 

NEWS CLIP OF SHER MOHAMMAD ABBAS STANIKZAI:

We are in negotiation with the American side, and we are trying that the American forces should go out as soon as it is possible. 

SEBASTIAN: Journalists would book rooms at the same hotel where the talks were happening, in the hope of running into major players at the breakfast buffet or by the pool. And it sometimes paid off. I cornered Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen on a palm-tree-lined balcony in early 2019 to ask how things were going. Vice News packaged up the exchange and pushed it out on social media. 

[2019 VICE NEWS CLIP PLAYS]

SEBASTIAN: If they don’t agree to your conditions, what will happen? 

SUHAIL SHAHEEN:

If you don’t agree? What happened in the last 18 years, it will continue. And that would be bloodshed and destruction for both sides. 

SEBASTIAN: The Taliban were in no mood to compromise, but there was early progress with negotiations around a ceasefire and release of prisoners. The US demonstrated its intent by asking Pakistan to release Taliban co-founder Mullah Baradar, who became their new chief negotiator. The US hoped Baradar could bring unity to the Taliban delegation and facilitate agreements on key issues, like making sure Afghanistan could never again be used as a haven for terrorists. Talking to reporters between sessions, it was clear that the Taliban and spokesman Shaheen had gotten the message. 

[2019 VICE NEWS CLIP PLAYS]

SUHAIL: We have two core issues. The withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan is a core issue for us, and a core issue for the American side is that the soil of Afghanistan should not be used against the Americans and against its allies.

SEBASTIAN: There was also the issue of how to withdraw. A commitment from the Taliban that they wouldn’t attack as the US military was pulling its forces out was a condition that Washington wanted for the withdrawal itself. Something that wasn’t part of the US conditions was obligating the Taliban to make an agreement with the Afghan government. Zalmay Khalilzad says that was seen as just too risky.

ZALMAY: My own judgment was that if we had made it conditional, there was no guarantee. And I said that to the president when he asked me repeatedly, “Zal, can you say in how many months can you commit to getting an agreement?” And I said, “This is—we’re talking about two different, very difficult sides with a lot of differences. I can’t guarantee it.”

SEBASTIAN: But Hamdullah Mohib says that decision was the nail in the coffin for any hope of a democratic government in Afghanistan. 

HAMDULLAH: In our opinion, if, if the objective is peace, by him putting everything on the line means that the Taliban have no reason to negotiate a peaceful settlement. And so it would lead to the catastrophic collapse of the Afghan government. It will take away a fighting chance for our republic. 

SEBASTIAN: For Khalilzad, the terms of the agreement showed that the US had simply lost faith in the Afghan government’s ability to come to an agreement with the Taliban. 

ZALMAY: The fact that we didn’t make withdrawal conditional on a deal, that’s a strategic decision that was made, and that showed lack of confidence—in the government as well as in the other Afghans—whether they would ever make a deal.

HAMDULLAH: This lack of confidence—by whom? Who gave Ambassador Khalilzad any confidence? Why would there be any confidence in him in being able to deliver, but not in the elected president of Afghanistan and also the other elected leaders—the parliament and others—to be able to come together? It was very colonial behavior.

SEBASTIAN: To this day, Mohib says they were blindsided by the extent of the US willingness to sacrifice the gains of the last 20 years to get a deal. And he’s still bitter at how things were handled.

HAMDULLAH: Respect is where many deals either succeed or, or fail, and the Afghan government and the Afghan leaders were not afforded the respect for them to be able to create an environment for themselves, to lead their own country’s efforts. The Afghan leaders were robbed of an opportunity to try to create peace in their own country. 

SEBASTIAN: More than any other issue, the decision to put a timetable for withdrawal of US forces has been viewed as a major strategic error, and the main cause of the dramatic Taliban takeover in the summer of 2021. Here’s General Votel. 

JOSEPH: We’ve had a narrative in our country about not setting timelines, and then we turn right around and do it ourselves. It just sent all the wrong signals about what we were trying to do, where we’re going with this, and basically made it very easy for the Taliban just to—just to wait us out. Because they knew we were tired. We knew we were strategically tired of this. We were impatient. We wanted to be out of here. All they had to do is wait a little bit longer. 

SEBASTIAN: But Ambassador Khalilzad says the deal he structured had provisions to prevent that kind of a collapse. He claims that the US withdrawal was supposed to be phased and conditional. 

ZALMAY: I reached the Congress. I spoke to the Afghan media. This was a package deal, a condition-based one, and that we were going to review the performance of the Taliban when we got to 8,600, at the level that our military leaders thought was safe, we could still do the mission.

SEBASTIAN: In September of 2019, the president hatched a plan to bring the Taliban over for a dramatic summit and photo op at Camp David to finalize the deal. But that event never happened. 

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP: 

Before we begin, I’d like to congratulate all of those incredible people that have worked for so long on our endless war in Afghanistan. Nineteen years going on 20 years.

SEBASTIAN: In February of 2020, when the deal was finally struck, its announcement came almost as an afterthought. Trump broke the news in surreal fashion during a White House briefing on the COVID pandemic. 

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP: Bad things happen, we’ll go back. I let the people know. We’ll go back, and we’ll go back so fast and we’ll go back with a force like nobody’s ever seen. And I don’t think that will be necessary. I hope it’s not necessary. 

SEBASTIAN: The president promised that he’d be keeping a close eye on the situation and meeting personally with the Taliban to make sure they lived up to their end of the bargain. 

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP: So I just wanted to bring that up before we begin on a topic that has become very, very important to everybody. First of all …

SEBASTIAN: But the administration had bigger concerns than what might happen in Afghanistan. 

NEWS CLIP OF TRUMP: At this moment, we have 22 patients in the United States currently that have coronavirus. Unfortunately, one person passed away overnight …

SEBASTIAN: Just as President Trump’s idea to meet personally with the Taliban never happened, neither did the promise to review the deal before the final withdrawal of US troops. By then, president Joe Biden was making the decisions.

ZALMAY: President Biden did ask me to go extend the timetable with the Talibs for an additional four months. But we actually didn’t do that review, because the desire to leave was stronger than the conditionality required in the agreement. 

SEBASTIAN: Whatever the political calculus was, the significance of this pivotal moment in the history of America’s longest war will be debated for decades to come.

JOSEPH: I think the agreement was kind of a death knell. I mean, that was, that was the indication that we were going to leave.

HAMDULLAH: That draft agreement, it was clearly a surrender to the Taliban, and no Afghan government would have been able to endorse a document that totally ignored its own presence. 

SEBASTIAN: In fact, there’s only one person we spoke to who’s still hopeful that something good will come out of the Doha Agreement, as it’s come to be called. That’s the person who negotiated it, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. 

ZALMAY: I think we reestablished deterrence on terrorism, which was what took us there. So for a final judgment on Afghanistan, we are in the middle of this change that has happened. We’ll have to wait a few more years before making a final judgment.

JENN: As soon as the Doha Agreement was signed, the clock started counting down to May 1st, 2021, the day that the US had agreed to withdraw all troops. That gave the Afghan Republic and the Taliban 14 months to negotiate a power-sharing deal that was later extended to 18 months by the Biden administration. Now, that’s not a lot of time, even if all of the parties are motivated and acting in good faith. But in this negotiation, all parties were not motivated and acting in good faith. And the Afghan Republic, in particular, struggled to meaningfully participate. 

UNIDENTIFIED MAN:

It took a very long time for President Ghani to build that team of Afghan delegates and send them over to Doha. Initially, they had a team of, like, 80 people. And then the Taliban said, “This is so imbalanced. They are so disorganized. They are so divided. If they cannot form a delegation to come to Doha and talk with us, how are they going to, you know, make a government?”

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  Sebastian Walker. 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.