U.S., Taliban envoys quietly meet in Qatar
Sources say Afghan leaders left out of face-to-face talks
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — In a reversal of a long-standing policy, U.S. diplomats held face-to-face talks with Taliban representatives in Qatar a week ago without Afghan government officials present, two senior Taliban officials said Saturday.
One of the Taliban officials described as “useful” a meeting with Alice Wells, the top U.S. diplomat for South Asia, as well as other unidentified U.S. diplomats. He said the meeting was held in the small Middle Eastern country of Qatar, where the Taliban have maintained an informal political office since 2013.
“The environment was positive and the discussion was useful,” the Taliban official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
U.S. officials neither confirmed nor denied the meeting. In a statement after Wells’ return, the State Department said only that Wells had been in Doha, the Qatar capital. The statement said she had met with the ruling family and that “the United States is exploring all avenues to advance a peace process in close consultation with the Afghan government.”
The New York Times reported on July 15 that such
talks were expected after President Donald Trump’s administration told its top diplomats that they could begin direct negotiations with the Taliban. The Taliban have long demanded direct talks with Washington about Afghanistan’s future, and they have called for a time frame for the withdrawal of the roughly 15,000 U.S. and NATO troops still in Afghanistan.
The office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said Saturday that it welcomed any support for peace efforts. That is also a change in policy because Ghani’s national security team has previously said that Afghanistan’s allies, including the United States, should participate in talks with the Taliban only as observers.
In Kabul on Saturday, Shah Hussain Murtazawi, deputy spokesman for Ghani, repeated the government’s often-stated position that peace talks should be “Afghan owned and Afghan led.”
Murtazawi did not comment directly about the reported meeting in Doha or say whether Ghani’s government was aware that the meeting had been held.
U.S. officials have also taken pains to insist that such talks would not mean abandoning the policy that any peace process would be led by Afghanistan.
“Any negotiations over the political future of Afghanistan will be between the Taliban and Afghan government,” said Stephanie Newman, a State Department spokesman.
But the Taliban have argued that the Afghan government cannot act independent of Washington. They also say that unless they can allay U.S. concerns about the group, an agreement with Kabul would be meaningless.
Only a handful of countries recognized the Taliban’s government in Afghanistan during their 5-year rule that ended with the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Then-leader Mullah Mohammed Omar argued that regardless of whatever concessions they agreed to, including allowing girls to attend school, they would not gain international recognition as long as the U.S. refused to accept them.
The current leadership, most of whom are Mullah Omar’s contemporaries, still believe their future in Afghanistan can be guaranteed only if the United States’ concerns are addressed.
President Barack Obama’s administration had attempted
direct talks with the Taliban, also in Doha, but they were scuttled when then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai objected to the Taliban calling its Doha office the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — the name of its government — and flying the flag that the Taliban flew when they ruled Afghanistan.
There was also a suggestion at the time that the talks would include the freedom of five Taliban members held in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the release of captured U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl. His release was eventually secured in May 2014 in exchange for the five Taliban prisoners, who are living in Doha.
Hopes for peace talks were bolstered recently when the government and the Taliban declared overlapping ceasefires at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The cease-fires were widely respected by both sides and were received enthusiastically.
In addition, peace marchers have drawn widespread support throughout much of the country, building grassroots pressure on the government to hold peace talks.
Ghani has offered to hold another cease-fire for the Eid al-Adha holiday, in late August, and U.S. military and diplomatic officials have approved of that suggestion.
On a visit to Kabul last Monday, the U.S. military officer in charge of Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, was asked about the new U.S. stance on peace talks.
“As President Ghani has indicated, he’s ready to pursue something without conditions — that speaks for itself,” he said. “Everything can be on the table here as we move forward with this Afghan-led process.”
U.S. STRATEGY
The Trump administration is also urging U.S.-backed Afghan troops to retreat from sparsely populated areas of Afghanistan, essentially surrendering control of those stretches to the Taliban and other insurgent groups.
The approach is outlined in a previously undisclosed part of the war strategy that Trump announced last year, according to three officials who described the documents on the condition of anonymity. It is meant to protect military forces from attacks at isolated and vulnerable outposts, and focuses on protecting cities such as Kabul, the capital, and population centers, including Kandahar, Kunduz, Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad.
The withdrawal resembles strategies embraced under Obama and President George W. Bush.
When he announced his new war strategy last year, Trump declared that Taliban and Islamic State insurgents in Afghanistan “need to know they have nowhere to hide, that no place is beyond the reach of American might and American arms.”
After the declared end of combat operations in 2014, most U.S. troops withdrew to major population areas in the country, leaving Afghan forces to defend remote outposts. Many of those bases subsequently fell.
During a news conference last month in Brussels, Gen. John Nicholson Jr., commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said remote outposts were being overrun by the Taliban, which was seizing local forces’ vehicles and equipment.
“There is a tension there between what is the best tactic militarily and what are the needs of the society,” Nicholson said.
The strategy depends on the Afghan government’s willingness to pull back its own forces. A Defense Department official said some Afghan commanders have resisted the U.S. effort to do
so, fearing local populations would feel betrayed.
The strategy could leave as many as 25 million Afghans under Taliban or insurgent rule. Only about a quarter of Afghanistan’s population lives in urban areas, according to CIA estimates. Kabul is the largest city, with more than 4 million residents. Most Afghans live and farm across vast rural hinterlands.
That rural territory includes the province of Helmand in south Afghanistan on the border with Pakistan. At more than 22,000 square miles, Helmand is the largest of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces by area, though fewer than a million people live there.
“Abandoning people into a situation where there is no respect for them is a violation of human rights,” said Mohammad Karim Attal, a member of the Helmand Provincial Council. “This might be the weakest point of the government that does not provide security and access to their people’s problems.”
Helmand includes 13 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts. Of those, the government either controls or heavily influences 229 to the Taliban’s 59. The remaining 119 districts are considered contested, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Hamdullah Mohib, the Afghan ambassador to the United States, disputed that U.S. and Afghan forces were leaving rural areas and essentially surrendering them to the Taliban.
The intent was not to withdraw, Mohib said in an email, but to first secure the urban areas to allow security forces to later focus on rural areas.
Hundreds of Afghan troops are being killed and wounded nearly every week — many in Taliban attacks on isolated checkpoints. Over the past year alone, the number of Afghan soldiers, police, pilots and other security forces dropped by about 5 percent, or 18,000 fewer people, according to the inspector general’s office.
“This brings a very serious tension — when you’ve had significant loss of life, and blood and treasure,” said Paul Eaton, a retired two-star Army general who helped train Iraqi forces in the year after the 2003 invasion of Baghdad. “But it is time to say that we need a political outcome.”
In Kabul on Saturday, Shah Hussain Murtazawi, deputy spokesman for Ghani, repeated the government’s often-stated position that peace talks should be “Afghan owned and Afghan led.”