America plans to pull troops out of Afghanistan in exchange for the Taliban severing its ties to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. The details remain hazy
AS HE LEFT the Qatari capital of Doha on August 5th, Zalmay Khalilzad, America’s envoy for Afghan peace talks, did not quite say that a deal with the Taliban was a matter of crossing the “i”s and dotting the “t”s, but he came close. He declared that the two sides had made “excellent progress” towards an agreement that would allow America to bring its troops home. What was left, he said, were “technical details” and “steps and mechanisms” for implementing it.
But those “intra-Afghan” negotiations are the most serious sticking point. “The negotiations between the Taliban and the United States were the easy part,” says Laurel Miller of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, and a former State Department official. The Taliban have long denounced the Kabul government as little more than an American puppet.
For Ms Miller, the coincidence of the election and the peace process will cause serious problems. “This is a train crash that many have seen coming for a long time.” Even so, she warns that cancelling elections would remove one of the government’s few advantages over the Taliban: its claim to democratic legitimacy.
A thoughtful deal—one in which American troop reductions would be conditioned on cautious political reform, rather than hasty constitutional upheaval—could reduce the risks of such perfidy. Yet Afghans are not convinced that a thoughtful deal is what they will get. In March, Afghanistan’s national security advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, raged publicly that “what we’re getting is a deal that doesn’t end in peace”.
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