[The president said stalled talks with the
militant group were back on and called for a cease-fire — something his
negotiators had deemed unrealistic.]
By
Mujib Mashal
 |
|
President
Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan with President Trump at Bagram
Air
Field in Afghanistan on Thursday. Credit Erin Schaff/
The
New York Times
|
KABUL,
Afghanistan — After abruptly
axing nearly a year of delicate peace talks with the Taliban in September,
President Trump put the negotiations back on the front-burner this week in a
similarly jolting fashion by seeming to demand a cease-fire that his
negotiators had long concluded was overly ambitious.
Despite a sense of relief at the prospect of
resuming talks to end the 18-year conflict, Western diplomats and Taliban
leaders were scrambling to figure out whether Mr. Trump had suddenly moved the
goal posts for negotiations.
They were particularly confused by his
remarks, made during an unannounced Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan, that the
United States was once again meeting with the Taliban to discuss a deal, but
that “we’re saying it has to be a cease-fire.”
Demanding a cease-fire would amount to a big
shift in the American position and require a significant new concession from
the Taliban — one that the Americans have little leverage to extract.
For much of the yearlong talks, the Taliban
and the United States were fundamentally on the same page: The Taliban wanted
the Americans out of Afghanistan, and Mr. Trump has made no secret of his
desire to end what he has called America’s unending wars. But agreeing upon the
details of a deal proved complicated.
In the agreement the two sides were on the
verge of finalizing before Mr. Trump pulled the plug, the best the American
negotiators could get the Taliban to consent to was some reduction in violence.
Discussions on a comprehensive cease-fire were relegated to future talks
between the Taliban and Afghan leaders — only after the United States had
pledged, and begun, to withdraw its troops.
But on Thursday, Mr. Trump suggested the
Taliban position had shifted.
“They didn’t want to do a cease-fire, but now
they do want to do a cease-fire, I believe,” he said. “And it will probably
work out that way. And we’ll see what happens.”
The Taliban seemed surprised by Mr. Trump’s
declaration. While the group’s negotiators have held informal meetings with
United States diplomats in recent weeks about ways to go back to the table, on
Friday their leaders said their original position on a cease-fire had not
changed.
“The Americans walked away from the
negotiating table, and now the ball is on their side — it is up to them to come
back if they want to solve this and get the document to signing and to the
stage of implementation,” Suhail Shaheen, a member of the Taliban’s negotiation
team, said in an interview. “Our positions remain the same.”
It’s unclear how American negotiators could
get the Taliban to agree to a cease-fire now, when they were not able to do so
earlier.
The American military has already begun
scaling back its presence in the country, giving negotiators even less leverage
than they had before. Last month, the top American commander in Afghanistan,
Gen. Austin S. Miller, said the number of troops had been reduced by 2,000 over
the past year.
Mr. Trump, on Thursday, said he was “bringing
down the number of troops substantially.”
For the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, Mr.
Trump’s statements were welcome. For months, Mr. Ghani had unsuccessfully tried
to persuade the Americans not to give away an American troop withdrawal without
a cease-fire because that would leave his government even more vulnerable.
The government has already been weakened by
being excluded from the talks so far because the Taliban refuse to engage
before an American troop withdrawal.
Now, suddenly, the American president gave
Mr. Ghani’s position a boost at a difficult time for him, when he is stuck in a
bitter fight over his re-election in a disputed vote, which is tipping the
country to crisis.
Mr. Ghani met with Mr. Trump at the Bagram
Air Field on the eve of large protests by supporters of his rival, Abdullah
Abdullah. Much of the Afghan capital was under a lockdown by security forces on
Friday morning as thousands marched to a roundabout behind the presidential
palace demanding fraudulent votes be thrown out.
Mr. Abdullah accuses the country’s election
commission of including 300,000 questionable votes in favor of Mr. Ghani.
Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah are partners in a
coalition government brokered by the United States when a similar disputed
election between the two went to a stalemate in 2014. The current power dispute
dividing the country has added to the complications of resuming the peace
efforts.
The hope is that peace talks would eventually
lead to direct negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan leaders over the
political future of the country after the United States commits to withdrawing its
remaining troops, currently about 13,000 or fewer.
Keeping the peace process alive after Mr.
Trump canceled talks in September has required quiet, delicate diplomacy,
including work that resulted in a prisoner swap and some reduction in violence.
Mr. Trump’s latest interjection in what has been a tedious diplomatic balancing
act will once again have his negotiators scrambling to try to pull off what
many Western officials have described as an unrealistic goal.
The Taliban see a cease-fire before the
signing of a deal for the end of the American military presence as an
existential issue. They believe they will not be able to rally their forces
again if they ask their fighters to stop fighting and then the deal breaks
down.
But the government of Mr. Ghani has said
negotiating the future cannot happen under the barrel of a gun, demanding a
cease-fire as a precondition to any talks.
When Mr. Trump called off the talks, the
Taliban realized they had pushed their hand too far by continuing to launch
attacks just days before what was expected to be a signing of the deal. In
recent weeks, American diplomats persuaded the group to reduce large attacks in
the Afghan capital significantly as part of the prisoner swap that saw the
release of an American and Australian hostage in return for senior Taliban
leaders.
But delivering a comprehensive, declared
cease-fire is always going to be difficult internally for a movement that is
trying to maintain unity as it negotiates potentially divisive issues.
One Western official aware of the latest
peace developments said he had not seen a tangible shift in the Taliban’s
position on a cease-fire during the period the talks were called off. The
official expressed concern that if the Taliban were forced to reject Mr.
Trump’s apparent demand of a cease-fire to keep their own ranks united, that
could further complicate the formal resumption of the negotiations.
“There’s probably now some work for U.S.
diplomats to do to clarify to the Taliban what did the imprecise words actually
mean, and whether or not there is a change in position,” said Laurel Miller, a
former United States diplomat who is now the Asia director of the think tank
International Crisis Group.
“The U.S. has been looking for something in
the realm of the reduction in violence,” she added, “but the idea that the U.S.
is on the same page with Ghani on cease-fire being a precondition — I don’t see
that at all.”
Fatima Faizi contributed reporting.