[Afghans fear the Taliban are subverting the peace process, and hope a Biden administration will bring more accountability.]
It
is a desperately difficult time for Afghanistan. American troops, honoring
President Trump’s deal with the Taliban, are still on their way out of the
country, despite the
stalling of peace talks between the insurgency and the Afghan
government, and a wave
of intensified Taliban offensives near important cities.
Officials
in Kabul are very aware that Americans are tired of the war — a fact made clear
by a near absence of the issue in presidential debates, and by Mr. Biden’s
seeming agreement with President Trump’s desire to get out of Afghanistan.
“It
is past time to end the forever wars, which have cost the United States untold
blood and treasure,” Mr. Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year. “As I have long
argued, we should bring the vast majority of our troops home from the wars in
Afghanistan and the Middle East and narrowly define our mission as defeating al
Qaeda and the Islamic State (or ISIS)."
Still,
in Mr. Biden, Afghan officials said they hoped to gain a less capricious and
more communicative ally, though they know he is unlikely to stop the troop
withdrawal.
“We
understand there’s not going to be U-turn on the U.S. side on the withdrawal of
troops from Afghanistan,” said Nargis Nehan, a former minister of mines and
petroleum under President Ashraf Ghani. “But under the leadership of the Biden
administration, we hope and believe that it’s going to be done with a much more
responsible strategy in comparison to the Trump administration.”
Both
in Kabul and Washington, officials with knowledge of security briefings said
there was fear that President Trump might try to accelerate an all-out troop
withdrawal in his final days in office — though the amount of American
infrastructure still in the country would be physically impossible to remove by
January, according to security officials.
A
Pentagon shake-up in recent days, while President Trump has sought to contest
his election loss, has cast more confusion on the issue. Security officials
said that on Thursday, the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller,
was traveling to Washington for consultations.
A
spokesman for the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan, Col. Sonny Leggett, denied
that Gen. Miller was going to Washington for consultations, saying instead that
he was on “preplanned travel.”
American
commanders, while careful not to contravene President Trump in public, have
warned that it was vital to keep the withdrawal contingent on the Taliban’s
keeping their pledges.
Afghan
officials are also publicly urging Mr. Biden to better support the stalled
peace talks in Qatar, which some Afghans felt were pushed too hard by the Trump
administration without enough protections for them. On Monday, Afghanistan’s
second vice president, Sarwar Danesh, called on the
incoming Biden administration to conduct a review of the Afghan peace
process and to put more pressure on the Taliban to negotiate fairly.
A
decade ago, as vice president in the Obama administration, Mr. Biden was
the in-house
skeptic of the war, pushing against the huge troop surge in Afghanistan
that began in 2009.
For
years, U.S. policymakers and officials likened the task of building new
government institutions and modern security forces in Afghanistan in the middle
of a war to building an airplane midflight. In 2009, Mr. Biden sought a
different approach: to focus on international terrorist threats in Afghanistan
and little else.
“I
don’t think he has his changed his mind much since then: to get out of
Afghanistan, let Afghans govern themselves, but keep a light footprint in the
form of counterterrorism, primarily to ensure U.S. national security
interests,” said Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense
minister under Mr. Ghani.
That
approach — keeping a small number of troops in Afghanistan as a
counterterrorism force to keep Al Qaeda and Islamic State loyalists in check —
has been urged by the Pentagon and some American lawmakers.
In
the Feb. 29 agreement with the United States that started the troop withdrawal,
the Taliban agreed to publicly separate itself from Al Qaeda — which was under
the Taliban government’s protection when it launched the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks — and to deny terrorist groups the use of Afghan territory as a haven.
But the troop withdrawal has continued even though last month a Qaeda leader
was killed in a Taliban-controlled district in the country’s east, and there
has been no evidence of any decisive severing of ties between the groups.
Afghan
officials and analysts say they hope Mr. Biden will proceed more cautiously,
and not be as likely to leave Afghanistan at the mercy of the Taliban and
meddling neighbor countries.
“A
commitment to defeating Al Qaeda and the Islamic State is something that is
part of Afghanistan’s formula for long-term stability and serves an important
role here,” said Orzala Nemat, an independent researcher in Afghanistan. “A
symbolic presence of international military forces balances this very weak
position that Afghanistan is in the region, surrounded by nuclear powers.”
Mr.
Biden “knows Afghanistan, he has been here a dozen times as a senator and he
has interacted with many Afghan leaders,” said Mr. Asey, the former deputy
defense minister.
Afghan
officials were quick to note that Mr. Biden and President Ghani have long been
friendly toward each other. But Mr. Asey said that Mr. Biden also had a history
of tension with other important Afghan officials — notably with former
President Hamid Karzai, whom he told that Pakistan was “50 times more
important” to the United States than Afghanistan, and whom he lectured about
corruption.
One
way that Afghan officials hope Mr. Biden can make a difference is by simply
taking their concerns seriously. Some Afghan officials said they felt bullied
by Trump and American officials to accept terms with the Taliban they did not
agree to, particularly on the
mass release of Taliban prisoners.
Human
rights activists said they were also concerned that the peace process included
too few protections for women and ethnic and religious minorities. In that,
they are hoping the American Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris, can be an
important voice as well.
“We
hope she will be a strong advocate for Afghan women within the Biden
administration,” said Ms. Nehan, the former mining minister, of Ms. Harris. “We
felt abandoned by the Trump administration.”
“Whatever
achievement in regards to women’s rights we are talking about does not just
belong to Afghan women, it’s a universal achievement that we all have our own
part in and a responsibility in protecting them,” she added.
While
there are currently around 4,500 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan, Taliban
officials have implied that the February deal would collapse if the incoming
Biden administration prolongs the presence of American forces in the country,
including any counterterrorism forces.
But
for now the Taliban leadership will watch and wait, as their fighters keep up
their offensives.
The
United States has responded by increasing airstrikes in defense of Afghan
forces. While permitted under the February deal, anything drastically more
under a new administration, such as attacking Taliban behind their front lines,
could nullify the agreement.
October
was the deadliest month in Afghanistan for civilians since September 2019,
according to data compiled by The New York Times. At least 212 civilians were
killed.
In
a statement, the Taliban called the U.S. election and its outcome an “internal
issue of the United States.”
“The
Islamic Emirate would like to stress to the new American president-elect and
future administration that implementation of the agreement is the most
reasonable and effective tool for ending the conflict between both our
countries,” the statement said.
But
Qari Mohammad Farooq, a Taliban shadow district governor in Jowzjan Province,
laid it out plainly.
“I
heard that Joe Biden won, but none of them are good for us,” Mr. Farooq said.
“For me it doesn’t matter who won, but it is important that they must leave.”
Reporting
was contributed by Najim Fahim from Kabul, Taimoor Shah from Kandahar and Eric
Schmitt from Washington.
Thomas
Gibbons-Neff is a correspondent in the Kabul bureau and a former Marine
infantryman. @tmgneff
