Retreat from Afghanistan

The United States has decided to retreat from Afghanistan, promising a complete withdrawal within 14 months if the Taliban keep their commitments, including to not allowing international terrorists to operate from territory they control. The agreement was signed Saturday in Doha.

This is a necessary, even if less than glorious, end to US participation in a war that has gone on far too long. Eighteen years after toppling the Taliban regime in the aftermath of 9/11, the diminishing returns are insufficient to keep the US committed, especially in an election year. America and its NATO allies are leaving the field to the Afghan government and its opponents, which will now be expected to negotiate a political settlement, after a major prisoner exchange.

Everything now depends on the intra-Afghan political settlement. Negotiations on this agreement are supposed to start on March 10. Will it protect the human rights many Afghans have come to enjoy? Will women be forced out of politics and girls out of school? Will minorities suffer as they did under the previous Taliban regime? Will the margins of freedom of speech and religion shrink? Will politics continue in the semi-democratic direction they have taken for two decades, or will a religious autocracy be restored, especially in the countryside from which it has never entirely disappeared.

There can be no doubting President Ashraf Ghani’s commitment to maintaining what he can of liberal, modern Afghanistan. But he will need to compromise with a potent insurgency that backs Taliban political demands. Few think the Taliban can overrun or seize Kabul, but they can certainly displace the Afghan security forces in many provinces and bring enormous pressure to bear on the capital once the Americans are gone. After the Soviets left, their guy lasted three years in power, but he eventually ended up tortured and hung from a “traffic control box.” I imagine Ghani, who literally wrote the book (or at least a very good book) on statebuilding, will not wait around for that to happen.

Are all the Americans really leaving? I doubt it. I suspect Washington has insisted on some remaining, covert presence for counter-terrorism forces. The Taliban, though religious extremists like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, unlike them do not have ambitions beyond Afghanistan. All three jihadist forces compete for the same political space inside Afghanistan, so it is not completely unreasonable to think the Taliban might secretly welcome the Americans doing their dirty work for them by killing their jihadi competitors.

Only time will tell whether the peace agreement with the Taliban will hold and some sort of political settlement among the Afghans will emerge. The Taliban have good reason to keep the peace during the American withdrawal, which is supposed to slow if they don’t. But they have little incentive to compromise with Ghani once the Americans are gone, unless the Afghan security forces do much better in fighting them than has so far been the case. US and UN sanctions on the Taliban are supposed to come off early in the process.

With this agreement, President Trump gets some bragging rights on foreign policy that he has lacked. Nothing else he has tried has worked: there is no nuclear or missile agreement with North Korea, Iran is not returning to the negotiating table despite “maximum pressure,” Venezuela is still in the hands of President Maduro, only Israel has welcomed the Middle East “deal of the century,” and the trade war with China has failed to produce progress on the main issues, even if a mutual but partial stand-down of tariffs has attenuated some of its worst impacts on Trump’s farming supporters. Trump needs this Afghanistan agreement more than the Taliban and gave up a lot to get it.

For the sake of the Afghans, let’s hope it holds.