As troops leave Afghanistan, diplomats left to fill mission
Lara Jakes
It was once a sideshow to the U.S. military in Afghanistan and later became one of the largest diplomatic missions in the world. Now, as the U.S. Embassy in Kabul transitions to its newest role, its future is tied to a fragile peace process, one that will withdraw U.S. troops even as violence continues.
U.S. diplomats in Kabul must tiptoe between two rival Afghan leaders — President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah — who have each declared themselves the winner of national elections held last fall. The U.S. Embassy sees helping to resolve the political dispute as a core mission, but Afghan officials have soured on the State Department and its negotiated peace agreement with the Taliban, signed last month.
President Donald Trump has yet to nominate a new ambassador to replace John R. Bass, who left the embassy in Kabul in January. Instead, the State Department appointed a skilled but retired place holder, Ross Wilson, to serve as the embassy’s chargé d’affaires.
And disputes between the Afghan government and the Taliban over negotiating teams and the release of Taliban prisoners threaten to upend the peace process itself — the success or failure of which will determine the mission of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul for generations.
“I think everyone is concerned about where this is going,” said Christopher R. Hill, who was the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad when the Pentagon began withdrawing its troops there amid political chaos in Iraq — the same situation U.S. diplomats in Kabul now face.
Hill said that without clear direction from Washington, American policy in Afghanistan “could be very painful and not terribly successful, at least not in the short or medium term.” As a result, “people will be questioning whether we knew what we were doing,” he said.
Much will depend on whether delayed negotiations between Afghanistan’s elected leaders and the Taliban will produce a power-sharing government that protects political and civil rights as outlined in the country’s Constitution, which took effect in 2004. (People familiar with the discussions said there were efforts underway to rewrite the constitution, but it was unclear how or what would change.)
If the negotiations are successful, the U.S. Embassy in
Kabul is expected to hew to the kind of a diplomatic role that is routine elsewhere in the world: providing and sustaining American assistance to the Afghan government and nurturing relations between Washington and Kabul.
But if not, and if the Taliban end up with widespread control, the U.S. would probably have little relationship with the government, said Daniel F. Feldman, who served as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan under President Barack Obama.
If that happens, Feldman said, the embassy itself could wind up “just there to carry the flag of any ongoing U.S. commitment.”
Afghan officials, who were left out of preliminary peace talks between the Taliban and U.S. negotiators, are similarly flummoxed about the embassy’s plans for the future, given the uncertainty of what the negotiations will yield.
One question is whether a military withdrawal would put the U.S. Embassy in charge of security agreements with Afghanistan. “Then that is still something to be discussed, for both sides,” said Ambassador Roya Rahmani, the Afghan government’s top envoy to the U.S.
“I cannot say how it will unroll at this point because it’s all up to be decided, depending on how the negotiations will happen,” she told reporters this month.
The U.S. negotiations with the Taliban, which spanned more than a year, were led by a special U.S. envoy, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, in what the State Department called an “all-hands-on-deck effort” that included embassy officials. Embassies usually do not negotiate broader strategy agreements, such as the Afghanistan peace framework, even if the results have direct effects on the policies that diplomats are expected to carry out.
Future priorities for the embassy in Kabul are expected to include working toward peace and reconciliation, state stability and helping the Afghan government become more self-reliant, said a senior State Department official who spoke about the diplomatic plans only on condition of anonymity.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul has for years relied on the U.S. military for everything from transportation to food services. And if history is an indicator, the embassy’s fate will largely depend on how troops are pulled back.
Ten years ago, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was responsible for leading the American effort in Iraq as the war began to wind down. Under American protocol, an ambassador outranks a military commander in a foreign country. But the Pentagon had pumped billions of dollars into Iraq and secured a relative, if tenuous, stability by subduing Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shiite death squads that had each terrorized the country.
“There was quite a tradition of the military running this,” said Hill, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad at the time. “It proved kind of difficult to move the center of gravity over to the embassy.”
Over the next year, as all U.S. combat troops left Iraq, military and embassy officials sought to work in “lockstep” — not only with Iraqi officials but also to uniformly outline the American mission’s needs and challenges in Iraq to Washington, said retired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who was the Pentagon’s chief spokesman in Baghdad in 2011.
He said much of the initial Iraqi reluctance to turn to the U.S. embassy “had a lot to do with resources being brought to bear,” given that the Defense Department had been able to provide more staff, equipment, money and other resources than the State Department could in Iraq.
“They could just not leverage what we had started,” Buchanan said in an interview.