[For months, hopes of reviving long-stalled peace talks with the Taliban have seemed virtually dead. The insurgents have continued waging an aggressive military campaign in the countryside, where they now control or influence nearly half of Afghan territory, while staging repeated attacks in the capital despite intensified security.]
By Pamela Constable
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Afghan police officers
keep watch at the site of a suicide bomb attack
in Kabul on Friday. (Omar
Sobhani/Reuters)
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ISLAMABAD,
Pakistan — Just a few weeks
ago, after a string of bloody insurgent attacks left 150 people dead in Kabul,
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani lashed out in frustration, vowing to take revenge
on the battlefield of a war that Afghan and NATO forces are still struggling to
dominate after 16 years of fighting.
But Wednesday, in a striking turnaround that
implicitly acknowledged the folly of that threat, Ghani took the opposite tack,
inviting Taliban insurgents to “unconditional” peace talks, offering them
dramatic concessions and recognizing the extremist militant group as a
legitimate political force in Afghanistan’s future.
The violence continued Friday, when a car
bomb detonated beside a highway leading into Kabul, killing two civilians and
injuring 14. No group asserted responsibility, and there has been no immediate
formal response from Taliban leaders to the president’s unprecedented proposal
at the opening of an international conference in the Afghan capital.
But Ghani’s offer — which included a
cease-fire and prisoner swap, passports for Taliban representatives and their
families, Taliban participation in elections and a review of the constitution
as the group has demanded — was cheered by delegates from 25 countries who
gathered to brainstorm how to create conditions for peace.
For months, hopes of reviving long-stalled
peace talks with the Taliban have seemed virtually dead. The insurgents have
continued waging an aggressive military campaign in the countryside, where they
now control or influence nearly half of Afghan territory, while staging
repeated attacks in the capital despite intensified security.
Civilian casualties remain at near-peak levels,
with about 10,000 reported for 2017. Since 2001, when the Taliban regime fell,
the war has cost nearly 200,000 lives, and since 2014 additional violent
attacks by regional affiliates of the Islamic State have heightened the sense
of mayhem.
Until now, the Taliban has refused to
negotiate with Kabul and said it will not join talks until all foreign forces
have left the country. The Trump administration is expanding the size and role
of the U.S. troop presence in an effort to strengthen the Afghan defense forces
and bring the insurgents to a settlement.
There were conflicting versions of Friday’s
car bombing in Kabul. Afghan police officials said it was aimed at a NATO
military convoy but missed its target. A NATO military spokesman in Kabul said
that no military convoy was threatened but that the intended target may have
been a foreign diplomatic vehicle. The blast followed a suicide bombing Feb. 24
that killed three civilians and wounded a dozen when a man detonated a backpack
filled with explosives in Kabul’s fortified diplomatic zone.
The Islamic State said it was behind the
first attack. But on the same day, Taliban forces claimed two suicide bombings
in Helmand province that left three Afghan soldiers dead, while 18 Afghan
soldiers died in fighting with Taliban insurgents in western Farah province.
The Afghan president’s expansive offer came
in sharp contrast to angry comments he made in late January after the spate of
insurgent violence in Kabul, which also left more than 400 people injured. The
attacks included the storming of a luxury hotel, a raid on an army training
academy and a suicide bombing in which an ambulance was used.
At the time, Ghani’s visceral response echoed
comments by President Trump, who abruptly rejected peace talks with the Taliban
— even as his aides continued to affirm that the war must be settled through
peaceful dialogue.
“Innocent people are being killed left and
right,” Trump said Jan. 29. “We don’t want to talk to the Taliban. We’re going
to finish what we have to finish.”
Since then, however, Ghani has made comments
welcoming talks with insurgents under certain conditions. On Wednesday, he went
even further and used more respectful language, treating the Taliban as a
recognized political group.
“We are making this offer without
preconditions, in order to lead to a peace agreement,” Ghani said. He described
his action as an effort to “save the country” and said that he would not
“prejudge” any group interested in peace.
Although the Taliban has not publicly
responded to Ghani’s offer, it has put out several feelers recently. Two weeks
ago, the group issued an unusual written appeal to the “American people,”
asking them to pressure U.S. officials to end the conflict. The letter, emailed
to the news media, cited statistics on the human and economic costs of the war,
while calling U.S. officials “warmongers” and usurpers.
In the past week, Taliban officials have
contacted various interlocutors, including news outlets and academics. On
Thursday, the group posted a letter to Barnett R. Rubin, an Afghanistan expert
at New York University, who wrote an open letter in the New Yorker this week
encouraging the Taliban to join the peace talks. The Taliban response, shared
through Twitter on Wednesday, was polite but dismissed this week’s conference
in Kabul as a vehicle for seeking the insurgents’ surrender.
“Such efforts seek surrender from the Islamic
Emirate at a time when the Islamic Emirate . . . has defeated an international arrogant
power like America,” the letter said, using the formal name of the Taliban
movement.
The letter said the group does not “seek
conflict with anyone, including the United States.” But it claimed that
Afghanistan is “occupied” and that its government is being “imposed on us.” To
recognize and talk with Kabul officials, the letter said, would be to accept
“the same formula adopted by America to win the war.”
In next-door Pakistan, which Afghan and U.S.
officials accuse of harboring Taliban militants, officials endorsed Ghani’s
overture. The Pakistani national security adviser, retired army Lt. Gen. Nasser
Khan Janjua, said the government would do its best to support “this noble
initiative.”
Some Afghan critics, though, saw Ghani’s outreach
as capitulation. Amrullah Saleh, a former national intelligence chief, called
the president’s speech “a total appeasement to the enemy.” He noted that after
the January attacks in Kabul, Ghani called the nation to arms in defense of
peace. “Now he offered the terrorists a super olive branch,” Saleh said.
On Wednesday, Al Jazeera quoted an unnamed
Taliban official as saying the group was ready to hold direct talks with
American officials at its office in Doha, the capital of Qatar. The official
warned, however, that if the Afghan government shuts down or moves that office,
it could sabotage any negotiations. He also reiterated that the departure of
U.S. troops is a precondition for any talks.
The Qatar office was opened about five years
ago as a diplomatic site for Taliban representatives to meet with others. But
little came of that effort, and Ghani recently has been reported as planning to
move the site to Saudi Arabia.
On Tuesday, Afghan officials insisted that
the Taliban must negotiate with them but said they are ready to meet insurgent
officials anywhere. “If you are Afghans, come and talk with Afghanistan,”
Haroon Chakhansuri, a spokesman for Ghani, told Tolo News TV in Kabul. “The Afghan
government is ready to talk.”
Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul contributed to this
report.
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