U.S. Signals Surrender in Afghanistan (It's Past Due)

The bar appears to have been set very low in the framework peace deal negotiated by U.S viceroy Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban: Afghanistan can no longer harbor groups like Al Qaeda that use Afghan territory for training bases to launch international terrorist attacks. Mujib Mashal outlines the tentative peace framework in "U.S. and Taliban Agree in Principle to Peace Framework, Envoy Says":

As the first step in the framework, Mr. Khalilzad said that the Taliban were firm about agreeing to keep Afghan territory from being used as a staging ground for terrorism by groups like Al Qaeda and other international terrorists, and had agreed to provide guarantees and an enforcement mechanism for that promise.

That had long been a primary demand by American officials, in an effort to keep Afghanistan from reverting back to being the kind of terrorist base it had been at the war’s start, in 2001 after Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

The next set of contingencies laid out by the senior American official involved in the talks would see the United States agreeing to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan, but only in return for the Taliban’s entering talks with the Afghan government and agreeing to a lasting cease-fire.

Those last two points have long been resisted by Taliban officials, and could still provide trouble with the process, officials say. The Taliban delegation in Qatar said they had to break to discuss those details with their leadership.

But the agreement in principle to discussing them at all was seen as a breakthrough after years of failed attempts, American and Afghan officials said.

There is concern among senior Afghan officials about the fact that the Afghan government has still been sidelined from the talks. Officials close to Mr. Ghani say he is particularly concerned that the Americans might negotiate important agreements that Afghan officials are not party to, potentially including the shape of an interim government outside of elections.

One wonders about the status of the Islamic State. Is the Taliban now responsible for guaranteeing ISIS's defeat in Afghanistan? Another question, this one for the United States: If the bottom line for a U.S. military occupation is the presence of Al Qaeda bases, why did the Trump administration threaten Syria and Russia when they set out to purge Idlib Province of Tahrir al-Sham, a.k.a., Al Qaeda in Syria?

U.S. troop withdrawal apparently boils down to either less than a year or a year-plus. The U.S. doesn't want to be seen to retreat under fire; hence, the importance of a ceasefire. In order to negotiate a meaningful ceasefire the Afghan government must have a direct dialogue with the Taliban, something the Taliban has been reticent to initiate.

But the big question for Afghanistan is what happens to the Ghani government. As Rod Nordland and Mujib Mashal wrote on Saturday in "U.S. and Taliban Edge Toward Deal to End America’s Longest War":  

Any peace deal acceptable to the West and the Afghan government would mean recognizing the fundamentals of the Afghan Constitution — guaranteeing civil rights that conflict with the Taliban’s interpretation of Shariah, especially where the rights of women are concerned. Scrapping that constitution would be regarded by many world leaders as a red line that could not be crossed.

But the Taliban are unapologetically antidemocratic, believing in an outsize role for the mullahs in governance. Reconciling those two worldviews seems almost impossible, but somehow the shape of an eventual settlement requires just that.

The passages that jump out of the Nordland-Mashal story are the Ryan Crocker quotes:

Ryan Crocker, a former American ambassador to Afghanistan, said it was a rush for the exits.

“I can’t see this as anything more than an effort to put lipstick on what will be a U.S. withdrawal,” he said. Mr. Crocker said it reminded him of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam.

“By going to the table, we basically were telling the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, ‘We surrender. We’re here just to work out the terms.’ I just cannot see this getting to any better place. We don’t have a whole lot of leverage here.”

What a Vietnamesque retreat in Afghanistan portends is difficult to say. The fall of Saigon ushered in the age of neoliberalism. Today neoliberalism is a zombie paradigm but it still governs the planet. 

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan following 9/11 announced an age of super-militarism and perpetual warfare. Moving U.S. troops out of country and abandoning a puppet government will not end U.S. hyper-militarism; it's merely a rearrangement of pieces on the board. The Great Game is shifting to more direct conflict with China and Russia, as well as an old-fashioned coup in the U.S. "backyard."