by David Loyn
In what Nicholson called a “tough neighborhood,” Russia also continued to play a disruptive role.34 It was payback for the defeat of Soviet forces by U.S.-backed mujahideen in the 1980s and an opportunity to pick at an open wound as the long war went on. The success of President Putin’s campaigns of dezinformatsiya have become well known. In Afghanistan, they successfully planted the absurd idea that the U.S. was arming and financing Islamic State forces. There was a story—never properly sourced, so hard to deny—of white helicopters landing at night in the north of the country to drop the weapons. It was picked up in public by the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who talked about “flights of unmarked helicopters.” He conjured a vision of thousands of IS fighters massing on the southern borders of Central Asia, “and it is not difficult to get to Russia.” The story “grossly exaggerated” the number of IS fighters, according to Nicholson.
Russia was using the story to justify its support for the Taliban, against the worse threat of Islamic State. “This narrative is used as a justification for the Russians to legitimize the actions of the Taliban,” said Nicholson. They clearly “provide some degree of support to the Taliban.”35 He had credible evidence of Russian support to the Taliban beyond the disinformation campaign, when Afghan elders handed over weapons taken from the Taliban that investigators tracked to Russia.
MUTUALLY HURTING STALEMATE
Analysts who watch peace processes like to say the one essential precondition is a “mutually hurting stalemate,” where both sides know they cannot win on the battlefield and both are still under military pressure. While keeping up that military pressure, Nicholson was more focused on the possibility of a peace deal to end the long war than any commander before him. The “number one metric,” he said, was how reconciliation was going, and said in 2018, “There’s tremendous potential to advance the reconciliation dialogue.”36
As early as 2016, General Dunford called the conflict a “stalemate.”37 There was no doubt that the government was hurting. Attrition rates in the Afghan army, through both death and desertion, meant recruitment only just kept up with demand. Figures were not publicized, but at the beginning of 2019, Ghani said forty-five thousand Afghan troops and police had died since his presidency began in 2014.38
There was pressure on the Taliban too that led more of them to want to negotiate. Research of every violent death by the BBC over the month of August in 2019 revealed that 50 percent of those who died across the country were Taliban.39 After an attack on the southwestern city of Farah was repulsed, fifty Taliban fighters, including some key leaders, were tracked by the marines to a house in Musa Qala in Helmand, destroyed with a HIMARS rocket. “So where does this leave us at the end of that action?” Nicholson said. “Afghan forces in control of Farah, and many of the enemy leaders who led the attack are now being pulled out of the rubble in Musa Qala.”40
The Obama administration had accepted the Afghan government’s desire to lead on talks—they should be “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led.” That meant the negotiations should be between the Afghan government and the Taliban, with the U.S. and other international actors facilitating the process, but not directly talking to the Taliban about the future shape of Afghanistan. Another issue was over the location of talks. The Afghan government did not want to go to Doha or Norway, both places that had been mentioned as possible venues, but hold talks in Afghanistan. The geometry of peace was hard to align, as the Taliban, for their part, did not recognize the Afghan government and would not talk to them in Afghanistan or anywhere else, so there was no progress. But they were under sustained military pressure, increasing the influence of those in their ranks who thought it was time to talk.
16
TALKING TO THE TALIBAN—II
It is not the duty of America to draft laws and suggest systems for other countries.
—Taliban open letter to the American people, 2018
“OUR LIFE IS UGLY”
On March 26, 2018, hundreds of people had gathered to watch a wrestling match between Helmand and a visiting squad from neighboring Farah Province. It’s a big Afghan sport, and the stadium was full. Elsewhere in the sports universe, Afghanistan’s cricket team had just qualified for the World Cup for the first time, after beating Ireland, and people were in good spirits. At sunset, as the last wrestler was downed in the dust, a suicide bomber drove his car at an upmarket SUV leaving the stadium. Perhaps he thought it contained a government official. In fact, the car was driven by Haji Mauladad, a popular local figure, who had brought the team from Farah and was leaving to arrange a celebration meal for the wrestlers. He was among fifteen people killed; many others were injured. Mauladad’s children were seen screaming in his car as it burst into flames, but only one could be saved.
The incident had an impact beyond any other attack, sparking an extraordinary protest. “These were sportsmen, they had nothing to do with politics. There were a lot of children there,” said BBC reporter Auliya Atrafi, who was in the stadium with members of his family. He said the protest that followed was caused by an “accumulation of violence.” The sight of the screaming children in the back of the burning SUV “was horrific even by Helmand standards.”1
A group of local people began with a simple sit-in and hunger strike in a tent. “The only aim of the sit-in is to stop fighting from both sides,” said one of the organizers, Iqbal Khyber. “The Taliban should not send bombers and the government should not drop bombs on them.”2 They took only water for several weeks, some were hospitalized. Qais Hashemi said as a drip was inserted to keep him alive, “If they save my life today, tomorrow I will die in a suicide attack.”3
They then took a new approach, setting off to the northern Helmand town of Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold, walking defiantly through some of the most dangerous territory in the country. From there, they headed to Kabul. Just nine men when they started, they gathered people and support along the way, striking a chord everywhere. The violence had gone on too long for no good reason anyone could see. They blamed the corrupt governing elite as much as the Taliban. The Kabul-born, U.S.-educated New York Times correspondent Mujib Mashal chronicled their progress, as they walked through the fierce heat of the Afghan summer not eating or drinking in daylight hours during the fasting month of Ramadan.
Among them is a high school student who went home to complete his final exams before rejoining the others; a poet who still carries in his chest one of the four bullets he was shot with; a bodybuilding champion who abandoned his gym and has lost 20 pounds of muscle on the journey. They are day laborers, farmers, retired army officers, a polio victim on crutches, a mechanic who was robbed of his sight by war.4
A shopkeeper, Muhammad Anwar, took a bus from the western city of Herat to join them. “I told my wife I am going to join my friends,” he told Mashal. The marchers walked in single file along the edge of the highway, staying in mosques and depending on well-wishers to wash their clothes and give them food. Their message was simple: “Our life is ugly,” one man would call through a megaphone, the marchers responding, “It is war. It is war.”
The Taliban did not touch them, although they moved them on from one village just as they were sitting to eat, saying an offensive was about to start. They did not want to be blamed if the peace marchers were hurt. Once in Kabul, the marchers staged sit-down protests outside a number of embassies and delivered a letter stained with the blood of one of the marchers to the UN and to the Pakistan embassy.
DEATH IN THE DESERT
There had been evidence for some time that the Taliban too were weary of war. They were taking heavy casualties, particularly in continued offensives, against provincial capitals, that were always repulsed. Some Taliban commanders interviewed for the British defense think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, were concerned at the deterioration of the movement. One said, “There are thousands who think that the war has nothing to offer but destruction and the slaughter of Afghans, but they keep this [close to] their heart.”5 Th
e tight security around the relatively few foreign soldiers now in the country meant the Taliban were no longer killing “infidels” but fellow Afghans. Some of those interviewed said they would be willing to sever all links with al-Qaeda and even allow a limited U.S. military presence to continue in Afghanistan.
President Ghani had been trying to start an “Afghan-owned, Afghan-led” peace process since he took office in September 2014. Pakistan, though, wanted to exert continued influence, and under pressure from the U.S. and China, Ghani agreed to cross his red line that insisted talks should be in Afghanistan. On July 7, 2015, the Afghan deputy foreign minister, Hekmat Karzai, nephew of the former president, sat down for the first face-to-face talks between an Afghan government delegation and the Taliban. The talks took place in the Murree hills, close to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, with American, Chinese, and Pakistani observers.
A number of senior Taliban leaders opposed the initiative, and their demands for assurance from the leader of the movement, Mullah Omar, forced out a secret. The founding leader of the Taliban had died of tuberculosis two years previously, and Mullah Akhtar Mansour had assumed leadership, issuing statements in the name of the Amir ul-mu’minin, “commander of all the faithful,” as if Mullah Omar were still alive. The peace process was put on hold in a power struggle for control of the Taliban after the announcement of his death, including gun battles in Helmand between rival factions.
Mullah Mansour emerged from the fighting as leader, a more worldly and more public figure than the reclusive Mullah Omar. As aviation minister in the Taliban government in the 1990s, he was familiar with international business. In early 2016, Afghan government officials met Pakistani officials, again with the U.S. and China in the room to draw a new road map for peace. The same day, a Canadian hostage, Colin Rutherford, who had been held for five years, was released.6 Mansour put out a statement saying the release was due to the Taliban’s “humanitarian sympathy.”
In Doha, the international peacemaking group Pugwash held “Track II” talks—meetings bringing together the Taliban with leading Afghan figures, including those in government but not present in an official capacity. There were women in some of the meetings, who said they had good discussions with the Taliban. One said they and the Taliban ate together and were surprised by how much they had in common.7
Although the Taliban political office had not been recognized since the debacle over the opening in 2013, it remained intact, and with the consent of the U.S., Doha remained the place where they could meet visitors.8 Expectations grew that the talks in Pakistan, halted after the announcement of the death of Omar in July 2015, could start again. But the Taliban were taking a harder line than in 2015, insisting this time on preconditions before entering a talks process—complete withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan, official recognition of their Doha office, removal of Taliban leaders from the UN blacklist, release of prisoners—and the process foundered.9
The new Taliban were different from the group who emerged in Kandahar twenty years earlier to counter the banditry of the mujahideen warlords. The older generation, now comfortable in Doha, were more urbane and more willing to talk to outsiders than previously. They had a competent professional media policy, increasingly putting out material in English to communicate beyond Afghanistan. The commanders on the ground were a new generation, more ruthless than their predecessors, confident in their military capacity, and with more of a sense of their role in international jihad than the inward-looking nationalists of the 1990s. They were also far more involved in criminal networks through their control of much of the opium industry.
On May 21, 2016, Mansour was killed by an American drone strike on his taxi as it crossed the enormous expanse of desert in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, south of Afghanistan. His mobile phone signal had been tracked from the Iranian border. The attack crossed a political line. Up to then, drone strikes across the border had been limited to the “Tribal Areas” of the northwest frontier, governed differently from the rest of Pakistan. Mansour, though, was killed in a mainstream Pakistani province.
It will never be known whether Mansour would have been a peacemaker. Barney Rubin, the former senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, a skeptic of the military effort, wrote sharply, “The Taliban do not seem to have interpreted the assassination of their leader as an outstretched hand for peace.”10 General Nicholson had no such reservations. It led to “leadership and financial disruption” in the Taliban, and he counted it a “policy success.” President Obama, who signed off the raid, said Mansour’s death eliminated “one roadblock to peace.”11
Evidence was pieced together by New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall that made a persuasive case for Pakistan’s complicity in Mansour’s death.12 They shared vital intelligence about his movement. He had made the trip from Iran across the southern desert before, but unusually this time, there were some three hundred Pakistani troops at the border, where he was detained for two hours. A Taliban commander told Gall that Mansour called his brother in the six hours after he left the border before he was hit, telling him to look after his children, talking of his own death. She reported that he had been trying to distance the movement from Pakistan, seeking more Iranian support.
In the same way as the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, arrested Mullah Baradar in 2010 when he was seeking peace talks outside the country, so they may have given the U.S. the information they needed to kill Mansour, fearing he might make a peace deal. The Kandahar police chief, General Abdul Raziq, said Pakistani Frontier Corps soldiers were on the scene within minutes and must have been tailing Mansour’s taxi. They had brought reporters with them and conveniently showed them Mansour’s passport in a fake name, as if discovered at the scene, suspiciously undamaged for being retrieved from the fireball that had destroyed the vehicle and two bodies.13 The new Taliban leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada, was an uncharismatic hard-line ideologue with no military experience. There was little progress toward a peace deal during 2017.
EID TRUCE
On June 18, 2018, the Helmand peace marchers finally arrived in Kabul, footsore and burned by the sun after their epic journey, on the last day of the four-day Eid holiday ending the Ramadan month of fasting. It was an Eid like no other, as an unprecedented cease-fire during the holiday allowed the country to glimpse a different future. Bearded fighters, wearing the voluminous black turbans that mark the Taliban, came into the center of towns up and down Afghanistan. Social media was full of images of Taliban fighters embracing police officers, eating ice cream, and in one remarkable encounter, shaking hands with Wais Barmak, the minister of interior, who stopped his vehicle in the middle of a group of Taliban fighters in Kabul.
The cease-fire came about after months of a kind of megaphone diplomacy as all sides stated their positions publicly. It began on February 14, with a 2,700-word open letter in English from the Taliban “to the American people.” The letter spoke in lurid terms about the “felonious act” of the American “war-mongering government” in invading Afghanistan, saying they had failed in all their war aims. After several pages of this, there was an olive branch. The Taliban appealed directly for peace talks. “Our preference is to solve the Afghan issue through peaceful dialogue.” It was clear though that the geometry of peace talks was still not aligned.
In a conference in Kabul to build international consensus for peace, President Ghani tried to break the deadlock with a series of unconditional offers to the Taliban. He offered recognition as a political party, an end to sanctions, lifting of the UN travel ban and the issue of passports to Taliban leaders, release of prisoners, and most crucially, a cease-fire. “We are making this offer without preconditions in order to lead to a peace agreement.” As is the Afghan custom at international conferences, his speech was trilingual, in both Afghan languages and English. The meat of this speech was in Pashto, the language of the Taliban. It was directed at them.
The Taliban’s public response to the Ghani offer wa
s contempt, calling it a demand to surrender. Ghani had not mentioned foreign troops, and the Taliban would need to recognize the existing Afghan government to enter negotiations.14 They still saw themselves as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” and did not recognize the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic led by Ghani. In an emirate, authority is divinely ordained, not derived from the consent of the people as in a democratic republic. This would be one of the most contentious obstacles to talks.
At the beginning of June, Ghani went further. It was then that he put out the idea of an unconditional Eid cease-fire. The Taliban’s answer came two days later in a WhatsApp message to journalists. They would suspend fighting, but only for the first three days of Eid, and only with government forces; they would continue to target “foreign occupiers.”
The truce was the first pause for breath and sign of hope for many years, and in a heady atmosphere, Ghani wanted to keep the momentum toward peace. After meeting the Helmand peace marchers, he offered to extend the cease-fire, unnerving Afghan military commanders, who watched Taliban fighters move into new positions and they could do nothing to stop them. Many Taliban had handed in their weapons at police stations before going into town during the truce, but many had not, and there were reports that they were using the opportunity to build up weapons stores close to vulnerable locations. Amrullah Saleh, a prominent hard-liner against the Taliban, who became vice president in 2019, tweeted that “the anti-Taliban constituency … feel betrayed, confused & sold out.” Ghani’s offer of a truce extension was not reciprocated, and fighting soon began again. The peace marchers kept going, now heading north toward Mazar-e-Sharif.
