Afghanistan: Has Biden inherited defeat in America’s longest war?

With peace talks limping along and violence escalating across Afghanistan, the incoming Biden administration is vowing to “review” Taliban compliance with a withdrawal deal the United States signed last year with the Islamist insurgent group.

U.S. troop numbers are now at an all-time low in America’s longest war, after former President Donald Trump ordered a drawdown to just 2,500 on the eve of President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

But reaching that level, to be followed by a complete withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops by May, according to the deal, was meant to be conditional on a Taliban reduction of violence, severing ties with Al Qaeda, and progress toward peace. None have occurred.

Like his predecessor, President Biden has called for an end to the “forever war” in Afghanistan. But the Taliban have surged attacks nationwide and have been the driving force behind a systematic assassination campaign that has killed dozens of journalists, women, and civil society activists in recent months.

And as the Taliban press their advantage on the battlefield and prepare for a bloody 2021 fighting season, questions are being raised about whether Mr. Biden has inherited a lose-lose situation, in the form of a lopsided deal that the Taliban are trumpeting as a victory that will return them to power.

Analysts say a diplomatic process that was rushed by the U.S. political calendar and a reactive dynamic on the ground, in which each side has constantly tested the other, without adhering to a strategy toward a cease-fire or peace, are to blame for the dire status quo.

“Biden has bad choices,” says Andrew Watkins, the senior Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group. “Both actors are highly resistant to resetting their approach. Unfortunately, the way things progressed over the last year has built up just as much mistrust as at any point during this war.

“Because of the dynamics on the battlefield,” he continues, “there really is no possibility for the Biden team to have a solution that Biden – as vice president 10 years ago – once advocated for, which is to disengage from Afghanistan, but also leave a military footprint indefinitely, purely for the purpose of counterterrorism.”

Search for a middle way

Today such a solution is “not viable,” he adds, because it would prompt both an immediately intensified Taliban military campaign, and then impel any residual U.S. force to intervene on behalf of its strategic ally, the Afghan government, when it faced critical losses. That would leave the Americans in the same support role they have played for nearly two decades, but with far fewer resources.

Still, there are signs that Mr. Biden hopes to find such a middle way, according to his new secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

“We want to end this so-called forever war,” but also to “retain some capacity to deal with any resurgence of terrorism, which brought us here in the first place,” Mr. Blinken said at a Senate confirmation hearing last week.

Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s newly appointed national security adviser, told his Afghan counterpart, Hamdullah Mohib, on Friday that the U.S. review of Taliban compliance would determine whether the insurgents are living up to their “commitments” to cut ties with more radical jihadist groups, reduce violence, and engage in meaningful talks.

Yet part of the challenge has been the hardening, diverging expectations about the deal, enhanced by nearly a year of White House mishandling of its own policy by doing little to curb surging Taliban violence.

“The way the Trump administration claimed that the U.S.-Taliban deal was grounded in conditionality was very publicly and obviously undone every time that it made an announcement about unconditional troop drawdowns,” says Mr. Watkins.

“Even if the Biden team has an interest in turning this around and resetting the tone and tenor of these talks, and of the U.S.-Taliban relationship, it’s still going to face a dilemma, which is: The Taliban have now had almost an entire year to convince themselves and their fighters around the country of a particular interpretation of this deal,” adds Mr. Watkins. “They now believe that they know what the deal means, and what it was supposed to bring about, which is their return to power – full stop.”

“Everybody’s reacting here”

According to a Western security source in Afghanistan familiar with the events, U.S. moves during the past year have emboldened the Taliban, in fact, and at the same time angered Kabul. Exhibit A was the “muted” U.S. response to concerted, large-scale Taliban offensives against southern provincial capitals Lashkar Gah in October, and Kandahar in November, which required U.S. airstrikes to repel.

When the deal was signed last February, there was discussion about “secret annexes” that forbade Taliban attacks on provincial capitals. That gave way within months to a pattern of escalation that included attacks in Kabul and on key Afghan security force bases.

“Not to say that this is a highly centralized, thought-out plan,” says the security source. “Everybody’s reacting here. The Taliban are probing and pushing how much they can get away with; they don’t know what the American reaction is going to be to these different steps. Everybody involved is learning, and making it up as they go along. Each step informs the next one.”

Analysts say the haste with which the special U.S. envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, moved to make a deal with the Taliban – clearly pushing for concrete results before Election Day in November – resulted in a specific American withdrawal timeline, as demanded by the insurgents. In contrast, Taliban promises in exchange to prevent Afghan soil from being used to stage attacks abroad, and for mere participation in intra-Afghan peace talks, with a cease-fire agenda item only, not a requirement – were less tangible.

Even a Taliban commitment to reduce violence by up to 80%, as claimed by the U.S. military, was not publicly written down.

That result, and the overall light touch of the U.S. military and civilian leaders toward the Taliban, has raised questions about the utility of the White House taking a harder line, now. In one example, Mr. Trump telephoned Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar just days after the deal was signed and hailed a “very good talk” in which they “agreed there is no violence.”

“The Americans have the airpower to strike the Taliban, whether they leave or not,” says the Western security source. “But the same question arises, as with [Lashkar Gah]: They can hit them with everything they got, but until when, and to what end? We can delay [withdrawal] several months, but again, to what end? Our options are severely limited, as a result of the process thus far.”

The security source adds: “The basic bottom line is that there is only one actor that has time on their side, and that’s the Talibs.”

Not just a quick fix

The deal has been portrayed by the Taliban leadership to their rank-and-file as the defeat both of a superpower and of its corrupt “puppet” regime in Kabul. That narrative makes it even more challenging for Mr. Biden to end the war on American terms, instead of on Taliban ones.

“The Taliban, ultimately in the short term they had to yield to the more conservative elements, to let them say ‘We’ve got to do these attacks, we’ve got to keep pushing,’” says a Western official in Kabul, who asked not to be named. That is “also so that the Biden administration looks at it, and says, ‘Oh, we can’t delay this much longer, these [Taliban] people mean business.’ That was one calculation.

“But ultimately I think they still want to get something out of the peace process,” says the Western official.

“They are still in Doha, they are still at the table,” the official says. “I think the tone will change in the negotiations, and it might be tougher [on the Taliban] in the short run. But that is why it is so important to reestablish confidence on both sides that this is a real peace process and not just a quick American fix to please Trump.”

Monday, President Ashraf Ghani greeted the U.S. review of the Taliban deal as a “new chapter” in its fraught ties with Washington.

“Ghani of course has great expectations of Biden that he is going to help more with the Taliban,” says the Western official. “But at the same time, I think Biden has very little appetite to continue a war that you can’t win.”