Same-same but different for Afghans

Hold the applause for the peace deal and look to Iraq for likely outcomes.

Afghan Taliban militants and villagers celebrate the peace deal in Laghman province . Picture: AFP

Over dinner in Kabul one night in December 2009, two Taliban-aligned leaders from Kandahar assured­ me that if the US and its allie­s left Afghanistan, the Taliban would stop any international terrorist­ group operating from its territory. In May 2011, a Taliban negotiator gave me an identical promise during discussions in Norway, undertaking not to allow attacks on any other country.

A decade since that 2009 meeting — after hundreds of billions of dollars spent and 100,000 Afghan civilians killed and injured — the most striking thing about the US-Taliban agreement signed last weekend is how little the Taliban negotiating position has changed.

The Taliban still refuses to recog­nise the Afghan government; it still denies having a close relationship with al-Qa’ida, despite­ extensive evidence to the contrary. It still refuses to repud­iate the Haqqani network, an al-Qa’ida terrorist ally whose leader is political deputy to the Taliban leader and serves as head of the Taliban’s military council. It still reserves the right to continue attackin­g the Afghan people and security forces — as it did this week, killing several service members. It still demands the departure of all foreigners, control over key aspects of local governance and participation in any post-American power structure in Kabul.

For his part, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani — whose government was not invited to the Doha talks that produced the agreement — has expressed strong reservations about the deal, including a lopsided prisoner exchange that would require Kabul to release 5000 detainees in return for only 1000 prisoners in Taliban captivity. The so-called “inter-Afghan talks” included in the agreement, and supposed to start next week, are also controversial in Kabul, where political leaders rightly see them as a Taliban attempt to sideline the elected government.

What has changed, of course, is the US position. For years, Washington insisted that the rebels recog­nise the Afghan constitution and acknowledge the government before peace talks could begin. President Barack Obama tried a counter-insurgency approach, with a “surge” of troops and aid dollars that successfully suppressed the insurgency for a time, before withdrawing the US-led International Security Assistance Force on a predetermined timetable in December 2014.

Since then, US strategy has pursued the twin tracks of counter-terrorism (striking al-Qa’ida, the Taliban and, since 2015, Islamic State across the region) and ­security force assistance — thousands of trainers and advisers, and billions of dollars in technical aid to the Afghan government.

The Taliban waited out the counter-insurgency campaign, biding its time and building up forces­ in its Pakistani safe haven, until ISAF departed. It knew how long it needed to wait, since the international community help­fully announced the exact withdrawal timetable and stuck to it.

Once ISAF left, the Taliban launched a series of offensives in which several cities were captured and briefly held by Taliban fighters, starting with Kunduz in Septem­ber 2015. An annual cycle emerged, with Taliban spring offensives in rural areas, followed by government counter-offensives in the late summer and autumn, then a series of urban bombings, assassinations and terrorist raids through the winter months.

Though government troops succeeded every autumn in recapturing most areas taken by the Taliba­n in the spring, across time three things became painfully clear. The first was that, with each successive campaign season, Kabul was gradually losing control of its territory and population, while contested areas and Taliban strongholds expanded. The second­ was that the cities were increasingl­y under threat. And, worst of all, the Afghan military and police were suffering un­sustainable losses: in January last year, Ghani said 45,000 security personnel had been killed since he took office in September 2014, a loss rate of almost 12,000 a year.

There were ways to fix this without putting combat troops back into Afghanistan. More focus on building up the Afghan Air Force; better intelligence, logistics and maintenance support; and a different balance between Afghan special forces and the ordinary police and troops who protect the population, would all potentially have made some difference.

But rather than do this, the Americans turned their attention to Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (which emerged just as the ISAF withdrawal from Afghanistan was occurring). The Afghan government struggled to get the attention and support it needed to reduce its losses and Donald Trump campaigned in the 2016 presidential election on pulling out all remaining US troops, now down to 13,000 from a high of 100,000 during Obama’s surge. At his advisers’ urging, Trump later increased assistance to the Afghan forces and ramped up airstrikes and counterterrorist raids to pressure the Taliban, while quietly negotiating a withdrawal behind the scenes.

Australia has been a loyal US ally and a good friend to Afghan­istan throughout this process, committing combat troops during the surge, then providing security force assistance in the post-ISAF environment. Australian advisers, trainers, special forces and the ­reconstruction taskforce in Oruzgan province made major contrib­utions throughout the campaign and Australians can be proud of what our soldiers, diplomats, aid personnel, police and intelligence agencies have done. Afghans I talk to are aware of, and grateful for, our help.

Yet Australia’s contribution, like that of almost 50 other nations in the US-led coalition, was never going to determine the war’s outcome. The decisive player is and always has been the US. And clearly, even though international losses in the conflict are manageable in a purely military sense (so far this year coalition forces ­suffered four combat and three ­accidental deaths, while last year they lost 17 people in combat, six in accidents and three through “friendly fire”), any loss of life is tragic, and any number of deaths hard to justify in a conflict that has dragged on for almost two decades.

This is the reason Trump’s campaign promise to “bring American troops home from the ridiculous and costly endless wars” resonated so strongly with voters and why the President, facing a re-election battle in November, seems determined to follow through on that promise. The deal commits the US to pulling its own troops, and coalition forces, out of Afghanistan during the next 14 months, with initial withdrawals in the next four months.

As a consequence, though the Taliban has remained consistent across the past decade, the US has softened its negotiating stance to the point where Washington seems willing to accept some deeply dubious assurances from the Taliban (whose leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, wasted no time in declaring victory after the agreement was signed) as a pretext for pulling out. Trump seems as politically desperate to leave Afghanistan in 2020 as Obama was to exit Iraq in 2010. As someone who has watched Afghan­istan closely through multiple deployments and visits since 2005, I am holding my applause.

For one thing, it’s doubtful the agreement will hold. The Taliban has already engaged in serious acts of violence since the deal was signed and the US has launched airstrikes in retaliation. I would be surprised if the Afghan government agrees to even a few of the actions the deal calls for, since Kabul had no seat at the negotiating table. And I would be amazed if Taliban junior commanders — who operate fairly autonomously — simply stop fighting now the deal is done.

Then there are the extremists of Islamic State, deadly enemies of both Kabul and the Taliban, who are not party to the agreement and are likely to increase rather than decrease violence.

As we watch this play out, it’s worth remembering where Islamic State comes from. In Iraq, a US president — desperate to withdraw and to fulfil a political promise — pulled out, then ignored repeated warnings of a resurgent threat and increasingly desperate calls for help from Baghdad, only to be forced to re-intervene when Islamic State conquered a third of the country in less than 100 days in 2014. Almost six years later, the campaign against Islamic State is still going, Iraq remains unstable and Iranian influence there is stronger than ever.

Iraq is not Afghanistan, the ­Taliban is not Islamic State and history never exactly repeats itself. Still, the parallels are striking. So, it’s worth asking ourselves: are we prepared to bet that the outcome in Afghanistan in 2020 will be so different from Iraq in 2010?

The lives of our Afghan partners, along with Afghanistan’s enormous progress on literacy, infant­ and maternal mortality, public health, gender equality, democratic representation, wom­en’s education, media freedom, and a host of other issues, depend on the answer to that question, and I for one am sceptical.