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Leveraging the Taliban's Quest for International Recognition

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Leveraging the Taliban's Quest for International Recognition Leveraging the Taliban’s Quest for International Recognition Afghan Peace Process Issues Paper March 2021 By Barnett R. Rubin Summary: As the United States tries to orchestrate a political settlement in conjunction with its eventual military withdrawal from Afghanistan, it has overestimated the role of military pressure or presence and underestimated the leverage that the Taliban’s quest for sanctions relief, recognition and international assistance provides. As the U.S. government decides on how and when to withdraw its troops, it and other international powers retain control over some of the Taliban’s main objectives — the removal of both bilateral and United Nations Security Council sanctions and, eventually, recognition of and assistance to an Afghan government that includes the Taliban. Making the most of this leverage will require coordination with the Security Council and with Afghanistan’s key neighbors, including Security Council members China, Russia and India, as well as Pakistan and Iran. In April 2017, in a meeting with an interagency team on board a military aircraft en route to Afghanistan, U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s new national security advisor, retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, dismissed the ongoing effort to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban: “The first step, the national security adviser said, was to turn around the trajectory of the conflict. The United States had to stop the Taliban’s advance on the battlefield and force them to agree to concessions in the process .... US talks with the Taliban would only succeed when the United States returned to a position of strength on the battlefield and was ‘winning’ against the insurgency.”1 1 Donati, Jessica. 2021. Eagle Down. PublicAffairs, 232. Kindle. Page 1 of 9 | Afghan Peace Process Issues Paper This was a constant refrain in U.S. government debates throughout my own time in government. During the early stages of the 2009-11 surge, some even tried to estimate exactly when the military balance would have changed enough for the United States to open talks — in April 2010, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who at the time was serving as commander of the U.S. and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Afghanistan, estimated the tipping point would come in June or July.2 Today, even those who no longer harbor delusions of changing the battlefield equation still often believe the leverage of the United States, its international partners and the Afghan government derives primarily, if not entirely, from the presence or absence of foreign troops on the ground that could prevent a Taliban military breakthrough. This approach ignores the leverage deriving from the Taliban’s goal of gaining legitimacy in the form of sanctions relief, international recognition and assistance from wealthy countries. Taliban leaders have stated repeatedly that in addition to the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan, they want the lifting of all sanctions imposed against them (which they refer to as the “blacklist”) and the release of all detained Taliban members. When in power, they sought diplomatic recognition and foreign aid. They now seek to succeed where they failed in the past. Ultimately, they want what the Doha agreement calls “the new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government,” in which the Taliban will hold substantial — perhaps dominant — power, to have “positive” relations with the United States, to be recognized internationally and to receive the foreign assistance that every Afghan government has needed to function since the late 19th century. Reports from the negotiations between the United States and the Taliban in Doha in the lead-up to the May 1, 2021, withdrawal date for U.S. troops indicated that these are precisely the offers the United States has put on the table in an attempt to persuade the Taliban to accept an extension of the timetable.3 When the Taliban tried to rule Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, they failed to win diplomatic recognition and assistance except from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; Saudi Arabia suspended diplomatic relations after Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar broke a previous agreement by refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden in August 1998. Today, if the Taliban gained control of the central state apparatus in Kabul by force, they would still lack international recognition, and they would not have the means to extend their authority over the whole country. They would face an armed opposition that is not just better organized, equipped and trained than in 2001, but more closely networked with international supporters. The Afghan civilian population, now accustomed to a higher level of service delivery and linked among themselves and to the world by the internet, would be far more difficult to control. The Taliban’s quest for recognition and eventual eligibility for aid provides some of the most important leverage that other actors have over them. They reject being labeled as terrorists and seek to be recognized as a legitimate movement and, ultimately, a government or part thereof. Since the 2 Author’s contemporaneous notes. 3 Farmer, Ben. 2021. “Taliban ask for 7,000 prisoners and removal from sanctions as US seeks troop extension.” Telegraph, March 31, 2021. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/31/taliban-ask-7000-prisoners- removal-sanctions-us-seeks-troop/. Page 2 of 9 | Afghan Peace Process Issues Paper recognition they most seek is from international actors, and since sanctions are also imposed by international actors, these are sources of leverage that cannot be exercised by the Afghan government. Hence the formula that the talks must be “Afghan-led and Afghan-owned” cannot serve as an excuse for disengagement by the United States and others. International powers control what the Taliban want, including both the withdrawal of foreign troops and the lifting of sanctions. Bargaining over conditions for sanctions relief, recognition and assistance enjoys an important advantage over relying on military pressure; the United States and its international partners have a degree of unilateral control over sanctions, recognition and assistance that they do not have over the military situation. The enemy gets a vote on the battlefield, but not in the Security Council. The Taliban believe (rightly) that they can outwait military pressure brought to bear by the United States and NATO; they can never outwait the United States’ unwillingness to give aid. The exercise of this leverage, of course, may not work. The Taliban have never resolved the contradiction between their aspiration to international recognition and their commitment to policies that conflict with international standards. The quest for diplomatic and political recognition has been a constant in the Taliban’s struggle from the beginning through the Doha agreement of February 29, 2020, and beyond. In January 1997, four months after the Taliban captured Kabul, Mullah Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil, who was then Mullah Omar’s spokesman and who later became foreign minister, led a delegation to the United Nations in New York to ask the U.N. secretary-general to grant them Afghanistan’s seat in the General Assembly. They did not realize that the secretary-general is not the emir of the U.N. and that he would be bound by the decision of the General Assembly on this question. During their visit to New York, I chaired a public meeting at which Mutawakkil and his delegation spoke at Columbia University. The tenor of Mutawakkil’s speech suggested that the Taliban were traditional Hanafi Muslims, not “Ikhwanis” like Jamiat-e-Islami and Hizb-e-Islami, and that they would be partners with the United States in the fight against international terrorism! This was also only four months after the Taliban encountered bin Laden and al-Qaida for the first time in Jalalabad. Over the next four to five years, while the Taliban tried to establish their claim to sovereignty by military offensives that brought most of the territory of Afghanistan under their control, they clashed with the U.N. over the rules by which U.N. assistance programs could operate in Afghanistan. They also negotiated with the United States over terrorism, drugs and human rights, especially women’s rights, through diplomatic representatives in Islamabad and New York. The Taliban at that time had little, if any, understanding of the international community, and the United States considered the Taliban as a marginal problem until al-Qaida’s terrorism forced the issue. The Taliban argued that they could not violate Islamic law by handing bin Laden over to non- Muslims for trial, but they tried to find a solution in accord with their religious requirements by asking bin Laden to leave Afghanistan. The United States, understandably, did not care to entrust its national security to the jurisprudential reasoning of mullahs in Kandahar. When the Taliban first emerged as a distinct group, in 1994, they did not articulate any positions on international issues and were not thinking about international recognition. One of their officials told U.S. officials in Peshawar early on that the Taliban were “totally empty-minded politically speaking, Page 3 of 9 | Afghan Peace Process Issues Paper with no links to the whole world and no links to the Islamic world even, and especially no links with the western world.”4 In early 1998, after receiving international demands for a few years, the Taliban responded by listing priorities in an English-language document intended for their international interlocutors.5 It clearly echoed what they had learned their international interlocutors wanted: • Sincere negotiation, support for peace efforts by the U.N. and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and mutual respect and friendly relations with all countries • Respect for U.N. and NGOs’ rules and principles; support for human rights; women’s education, safety, dignity and freedom • Combatting production and consumption of illicit drugs • Opposing all forms of terrorism • Reconstruction of Afghanistan The Taliban’s commitment to these externally defined goals was not really internalized.
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