On Feb. 29, U.S. and Taliban envoys signed an agreement.
Only time will tell if it’s actually a peace deal.
There’s uncertainty because America’s accord with the nihilistic, violent group that’s bedeviled Afghanistan for decades seemed mostly focused not on bringing peace to a nation that’s endured decades of war, but on the shared American and Taliban objective of withdrawing U.S. troops.
The Taliban’s motivation is evident: It looks to increase its malevolent presence beyond the broad portion of Afghanistan it already controls.
And the motivation has been evident ever since then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Indeed, a drawdown will likely be a feature in his 2020 reelection effort.
That is if the pact holds. By Wednesday, just five days after the deal was signed, the Taliban had carried out at least 76 attacks spanning 24 provinces, sparking a retaliatory U.S. airstrike. The “reduction-in-violence period is over,” a Taliban spokesman said after the brief respite from the carnage.
Pentagon officials seem resigned to that fact. “This is going to be a long, windy, bumpy road,” Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said on Monday. He was referring to the accord, but could have been referencing a generation of warfare that’s seen about 800,000 U.S. troops serve in Afghanistan.
The initial mission was to topple the Taliban, which sheltered al-Qaida as it planned its 9/11 attack. But over time that clarity of purpose clouded so completely that even Pentagon officials had a hard time identifying, let alone justifying, the mission (as the Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” so vividly exposed).
During the Obama-era “surge,” about 100,000 U.S. troops were in Afghanistan — backed, it should never be forgotten, by thousands of forces from NATO nations who had America’s back when the U.S. became the first and only nation to ever invoke Article 5.
Currently, there about 12,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the deal calls for a reduction of about 5,000 within 135 days if the Taliban meet certain conditions. The eventual objective is to withdraw all U.S. troops over the next 14 months. But that timetable is dependent on diplomatic progress.
These and other conditions fall far short of the original U.S. objectives, however. After an initial rout, the Taliban regrouped and mounted a ferocious insurgency that’s killed scores of Afghans and been among the factors resulting in nearly 3,000 allied casualties. The result was a stalemate that has not been solved militarily, leading the U.S. to sign the deal without the guarantees of peace between the Taliban and an Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani, who was recently reelected in a deeply disputed election.
Strategic and tactical mistakes span the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, although the biggest belong to former President George W. Bush, who turned his focus from Afghanistan toward Iraq.
But another era and U.S. president evoke echoes. After Richard Nixon agreed to a peace deal, North Vietnam accomplished its mission of overrunning Saigon and the rest of South Vietnam. For Afghans’ sake, and for the sake of all allied forces who fought so valiantly and sometimes died during America’s longest war, we hope that this outcome is different.
