How Peace Negotiations Fail: The Case of Afghanistan and the Taliban (2020–2021)

Abstract

ChooseTop of pageAbstract <<An Overview of the Afghan…The Conceptual FrameworkConclusionContributorAcknowledgmentBibliographyThe Taliban capture of Kabul on August 15, 2021, was the final nail in the coffin of the failed peace process between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban. Drawing on both rationalist and ideationalist approaches to peace processes in peace and conflict resolution literature, this article highlights seven causes of the failure of these peace negotiations. These include a flawed peace design, lack of mediator and guarantor, costly concessions, indivisibility, ideology and identity, and the absence of a mutual stalemate.

For over thirty years the Taliban have been engaged in and actively instigating violence in Afghanistan. Prior to the lengthy period of American and international intervention, the Taliban were a primary party in the Afghanistan civil war. Despite a brief decline following the US invasion of Afghanistan, the group was quick to begin a campaign to ruthlessly undermine the internationally supported government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (“the Republic”). The international project in Afghanistan ended via a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. But the war has not ended in Afghanistan.

Scholarship and public discourse on the failure of Afghanistan’s peace process identify a range of factors that contributed to its failure. These include:

This article seeks to explain the reasons for the failure of this highly controversial, and ultimately flawed negotiated settlement, not in the least due to the fact that the generally accepted pre-conditions of successful peace accords did not exist in the context of Afghanistan. First, the article provides a historical overview of Afghanistan’s peace process during the republican Afghanistan (2001–2021). Second, it contextualizes the case of Afghanistan within the broader theoretical and conceptual trends of peace settlements proposed in the literature. The key literature on the failure of political settlements is presented to establish a framework for analysis. The article then tests the talks between the Republic and the Taliban (2020–2021) against the frameworks established within the peace and conflict resolution academe.ChooseTop of pageAbstractAn Overview of the Afghan… <<The Conceptual FrameworkConclusionContributorAcknowledgmentBibliography

An Overview of the Afghanistan Peace Process

There are three distinct historical trends that track how armed conflicts end. Data from 1940 to 1990 demonstrate that prior to the 1990s only around 40% of instances of civil war (17 out of 41) moved to engage with at least some negotiation, though interestingly 90% of the 17 negotiated cases reached a ceasefire agreement. Having said this, Walter retrospectively finds only 20% of negotiated cases were settled with finality.¹ Throughout the 1990s, by contrast, most wars ended through negotiated settlements. After September 11, 2001, though, as the rhetorical threat of transnational Islamic terrorism loomed prominently in policymakers’ minds, the portion of conflicts settled by decisive military victory increased for the first time.² Indeed, it is worth noting on this point in particular that wars that included a US-designated terrorist organization as part of the post-9/11 “war on terror” lasted longer than those without such designations and did not end in peace settlements.

Lise Howard and Alexandra Stark suggest that what explains these three distinct trends is the distribution of power in the international system and prevalent international norms of a particular era.³ The bipolar international order during the Cold War hindered the successful peaceful settlement of conflicts, as proxy wars were fought between the US and the USSR on foreign soil. By contrast, the unipolar order of the 1990s increased the chances of negotiated settlements. The 1990s and the “war on terror” era differ in terms of salient global liberal norms. With the ascendance of the US and the liberal order, negotiated settlement and democratization through state-building emerged as global mores in the 1990s. These norms were challenged and replaced with “stabilization” as a norm when the illiberal entities including authoritarian states and Islamic fundamentalism flourished after 9/11. Stabilization refers to the goal of major powers to stabilize the vulnerable and weak states to prevent cascading spillovers of risks and security threats such as terrorists and refugees.⁴ Moreover, regardless of norm changes in the third trend of conflict resolution, as Islamic fundamentalism was antagonistic to any form of compromise, non-negotiation with such insurgencies was arguably a forced hand to some extent.

The war in Afghanistan marked a shift from the second phase (the 1990s) to the third phase (post-9/11). Nonetheless, Afghanistan nullifies the proposition of Howard and Stark concerning both phases. The world, including the US and its allies, largely ignored the conflict in Afghanistan in the 1990s and did not attempt to support intra-state peace—either via military or diplomatic support mechanisms. After 9/11, though, the US toppled the Taliban regime arrested and prosecuted its leaders, accusing them of linkages to the suddenly prominent transnational force of Al Qaeda. Famously, of course, Bush declared “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” following the American invasion of Afghanistan, as Washington sought to delegitimize the influence and means of coercion of all Islamic insurgencies in the Middle East and North Africa. Faced with the resilient horizontal organization of the Taliban though, the corollary constant persistence of the government of Afghanistan for settlement, and humiliating US military losses in Afghanistan, the Obama administration reversed the policy of non-negotiation.

Unlike the US and the international community’s initially hostile approach toward dialogue with the Taliban, Hamid Karzai, the first president of the post-2001 republic, adopted a conciliatory approach right from the beginning at the national level. Karzai’s government went so far as to even require the delisting of the Taliban leadership from the UN1267 sanction list in 2005. Several initiatives were taken by the government of Afghanistan including the Strengthening Peace Program (Program Tahkim-e-Solh; as led by the Strengthening of Peace Commission established in 2004), an amnesty bill, the Charter for Compromise and National Reconciliation (ratified by the parliament in 2007), the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP), the Consultative Peace Assembly, and the 2010 establishment of the High Peace Council.⁵ While the Taliban insurgency expanded throughout these years, the peace offers and efforts for reconciliation and reintegration of the Taliban failed and faded, leading Christia and Semple to ultimately critique such initiatives as “lackluster.”⁶

Nevertheless, although the pre-conditions of successful peace negotiations were not met, Karzai’s efforts arguably did lay the groundwork for parallel international action in the realm of “negotiat[ing] with terrorists.” In 2005 the German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), tested the waters in talking to the Taliban and negotiating with two high-ranking Taliban members for 10 weeks in Zurich.⁷ Two years later, Michael Semple, the deputy to the European Union’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, spoke with high-ranking Taliban leaders. During the course of 2009 and 2010, Kai Eide, UN Special Representative to Afghanistan met with Taliban representatives. Finally, mediated by Germany and the US, republic, and Taliban delegates met in Doha in early 2010 and Munich in November 2010 and May 2011 and agreed to allow a liaison office for the Taliban in Qatar, which was finally established in June 2013. The controversy over the Taliban raising their flag over the liaison office caused a deadlock in the planned peace process in Qatar for over five years.

However, with the facilitation of Pakistan and China, the government of Afghanistan met with a Taliban delegation in Urumqi, China, and Murree, Pakistan respectively in May and July 2015. After the death of Mullah Omar in 2011, the new leader of the Taliban was revealed in 2015, and the process was stopped.

After two years, the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stated that the US was prepared to directly negotiate with the Taliban. Subsequently, in February 2018 the Taliban requested the same in an open letter, as the government of the Republic simultaneously offered a peace plan at the Kabul Conference. The offer included reintegration of the Taliban into the state and acceptance of the Constitution including its amendment provision. As a part of the offer, the government announced a unilateral ceasefire on Eid (June 12–17, 2018) before extending the same for another ten days. The Taliban ignored the government’s peace offer and only observed the three days ceasefire during Eid.

A month later, in July 2018, based on President Donald Trump’s instruction to seek direct negotiation with the Taliban without the involvement of the government of Afghanistan, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia Alice Wells met with a Taliban delegation in Qatar. A Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation was appointed. Yet, despite asking both the Afghanistan government and the Taliban to prepare and introduce their respective negotiating teams, ultimately the government of the Republic was excluded from US-Taliban talks and the world was told that government-Taliban negotiation would follow after the conclusion of the US talks. Following one and a half years of formal talks beginning in October 2018, the US and the Taliban concluded an agreement on February 29, 2020, which secured a safe withdrawal for American forces still in Afghanistan. The second phase of the peace talks between the Republic and the Taliban then commenced on September 12, 2020.

In early 2021, there were high hopes for an unprecedented opportunity to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan.⁸ Nonetheless, progress was very slow. Before moving to substantive issues, at the initial stage, the parties negotiated the procedural issues. Three points stood out in the Taliban’s position in the first round of the talks in the second half of 2020: denying legitimacy to the Republic; rejecting Shia jurisprudence as a base for negotiations and exclusively advocating for Sunni jurisprudence and insisting on the US-Taliban deal as a base for the talks with the Republic.

While the Republic favored a status quo, the Taliban tried to buy time and postpone talks as much as possible. The Taliban delegates were telling the republic side that the dispute between them was not so intense and that it would be resolved very quickly once the international troops were out. As the time for the pullout of the American troops was getting close, they withdrew from the process, including a regional summit in Istanbul planned for April 2021. The Taliban stated that they would not set for negotiations until all the international troops fully withdrew from Afghanistan. Before the talks reached a positive outcome, the Taliban took over Afghanistan’s capital Kabul on August 15, 2021, with the President of the Republic fleeing the country only days after promising to stay the oath he took to the constitution.ChooseTop of pageAbstractAn Overview of the Afghan…The Conceptual Framework <<ConclusionContributorAcknowledgmentBibliography

The Conceptual Framework

There are many instances of the failure of both politically negotiated peace accords and decisive military defeats to bring about sustainable peace in the aftermath of war. The literature on the failure of peace processes falls broadly into four categories. The first examines whether peace created through a decisive military victory of one of the parties or a negotiated settlement is sustainable. Licklider’s findings generally confirm Wagner’s hypothesis “that negotiated settlements of civil wars are less likely to endure than the results of military victories.”⁹ According to Licklider, negotiated settlements are more likely to revert to violence compared to military victory by one side, particularly in the context of war driven by identity-based competition and conflict. Mason and associates in a more hopeful vein note that “the risk of peace failure declines over time following a negotiated settlement so that after 14 years the risk of peace failure is lower negotiated settlement than for government victory, about 43%.”¹⁰ Based on their findings, the duration of peace because of military victory depends on whether the war is won by the state or the insurgents. In the short run, a government victory may establish peace; however, a rebel victory might be durable if it can be sustained at least four years. Afghanistan’s peace negotiations failed before reaching any settlement, however, this theory explains why the decisive military victory of the Taliban on August 15, 2021, did not lead to long-term peace. As Mason et.al. research showed that the risk of peace failure is 200% higher with rebel victory, the emergence of several armed and civil opposition groups to the Taliban including the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan and the Freedom Movement is a clear sign of the peace failure. These movements contest the Taliban’s legitimacy and aim to overthrow them.

A second category of scholarship examines how wars end and how negotiated settlements take place, mostly focusing on international war¹¹ and ethnic war.¹² This article specifically examines the failure of peace talks between the Taliban, as an ethnoreligious non-state insurgent actor, and the Republic of Afghanistan. While having international and ethnic dimensions, the conflict between the Republic and the Taliban does not neatly fit into either of these categories. Importantly, in terms of scope, then, the Doha Agreement, which settled the conflict between the US and the Taliban, will be analyzed to provide a full picture and not just one dimension of intra-state conflict in the post-Doha landscape.

The third category of literature is interested in analyzing how and why an agreed upon political settlement fails. For instance, Joshi and Darby¹³ argue that studying peace agreements will help us to understand why peace settlements fail. Reviewing the peace process between 1989 and 2007, they introduce a debate on 51 provisions within the peace agreements and how they are implemented. Walter discusses the credibility commitment and information problem as two main bargaining challenges to the failure of political settlements.¹⁴ She also defines a successful peace agreement as one that passes three tests: First, the peace accord should be negotiated by all parties in a bargaining process. In other words, it should not be a surrender treaty or capitulation. Second, fulfilling the first criterion would require the agreement to respect the opposition party as a bargaining entity and lastly, the peace agreement should at least sustain one election cycle or five years¹⁵ As the subsequent sections show at least one of the parties, namely the republic was excluded from the first phase of talks and did not negotiate the Doha deal signed between the US and the Taliban in 2020. Many of the deal’s preconditions and terms—such as the release of 5000 Taliban members from the republic’s prison as a precondition for the Taliban to sign the agreement—were imposed on the government of Afghanistan. In other words, it was the capitulation of the republic.

The fourth category of literature examines how peace negotiations collapse and fail. It is also the one that examines how and why civil wars are less likely to be resolved peacefully compared to inter-state wars. Walter¹⁶ in her seminal work categorized peace and conflict studies literature regarding negotiated settlement of civil wars into rationalist and ideationalist.¹⁷ Rationalists tend to argue that parties in a civil war do have a rational cost-benefit calculation. The parties do not opt for a settlement until and unless they win better conditions through peace accords. For the rationalist then, a peaceful settlement is unlikely if the benefit of winning a war militarily is greater than settling it. Given military victory, unlike negotiated settlement, eliminates contenders and provides exclusive control over often vast state resources, a decisive victory would become more desirable. A “bargaining challenge” emerges if there is a lack of trust, high or low cost to the war, imperfect information flows, indivisibility, and costly concession. That is, the rational challenger is unwilling to compromise in a negotiation process, with the cost of war justified on the basis of indivisibility.

Hence, a wide range of issues including the cost of war, the role of mediation, and indivisibility positively or negatively impact a settlement process. Among all these factors, Walter’s finding,¹⁸ however, highlights only the role of the guarantors as the key to the success of a negotiation. She suggests that the conflicts fail to reach a political settlement because of a lack of credible guarantees, the vulnerability of the parties, and the dilemma of enforcement. More recently, Sticher in 2021¹⁹ proffers support for Walter’s propositions identifying through juxtaposing bargaining theory with social psychology that costly concessions are the key bargaining challenge in the successful political settlement of the conflict.

In contrast, according to Walter, ideationalists consider identity differences, and the incompatibility of warring parties’ goals, ideology, and greed as the key causes of failed peace negotiations. Ideationalists assume that civil wars are primarily driven by value differences that make compromise and reconciliation difficult. What both these two categories miss is the role of the design of the peace process in the failure of the process. Some of the factors such as the role of mediator or guarantor are, of course, linked to the design, however, the design is much broader than each constituting component.

This article merges the rationalist and ideationalists analytical paradigms in suggesting that there are seven key factors that explain the failure of peace negotiations in Afghanistan in the post-Doha era. These factors are a flawed peace process design, the cost of war, indivisibility, lack of mediators and guarantors, costly concessions, and finally the role of ideology and identity.

1. A flawed peace process design

The design of a peace process depends on the way elements, components, and order of negotiating items are agreed upon and organized. Studying 13 cases of negotiations settled through a mixed outcome (both parties win something), Colin P. Clarke and Christopher Paul present a sequential but nonlinear seven-step process of a negotiated settlement. Their process is as follows: military stalemate, acceptance of insurgents as a negotiating partner, ceasefire, intermediate agreement, concession, moderation of insurgents, and guarantor.²⁰

The design of the Afghanistan peace process was agreed upon between the American negotiating team led by Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban as a “two-stage negotiation”²¹ During the initial phase of the talks, these teams set four key agenda issues for the negotiations: the withdrawal of international troops, counterterrorism guarantees, a comprehensive ceasefire, and negotiation between the Republic and the Taliban—the first two items set to be negotiated between the US and the Taliban at the first stage, and the latter ones between the republic and the Taliban at the second stage.

During the first stage, American and Taliban negotiations between September 2018 and February 2020 resulted in the Doha agreement. Negotiations took place in several rounds. The frequency of the rounds of talks was one in a month, but the parties did not make a joint communique at the end of each round. The second stage of negotiations started in September 2020 between the Republic and the Taliban. The parties were only able to reach an agreement on the procedural issues on December 12, 2020. In the second round of talks, beginning in January 2021, the same parties could not reach an agreement about the issues to be added to the substantive agenda.

While, in principle, the two stages were supposed to be two interrelated components of a single negotiation, in practice, the first stage emerged as a principal negotiation and the second stage seemed to be a subsidiary one. Conditioned by a process that did not have any role in its design, the government of Afghanistan became a tributary to the two other parties—the US and the Taliban. The two staged negotiations allowed the Taliban to achieve its core objective in the first stage with the American team, making the second stage of talks with the government of Afghanistan nominal.

To ensure the integrity of the negotiation as a single process, the important principle “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” should have been followed. Khalilzad reiterated the same principle several times. For instance, in a 31 January 2019 Twitter post he stated, “We made significant progress on two vital issues: counterterrorism and troop withdrawal. That doesn’t mean we’re done. We’re not even finished with these issues yet, and there is still work to be done on other vital issues like intra-Afghan dialogue and a complete ceasefire.”²² Despite this rhetoric, the negotiating team arguably failed to adhere to this principle consistently throughout the dialogue.²³

Initially, applied in the 1998 Northern Ireland and the 2012 Colombia negotiations, the “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” principle meant two things. First, the agenda items would be negotiated and agreed upon sequentially. Second, “partial agreement could not be considered agreements on their own.”²⁴ The announcement of the US-Taliban agreement and celebrating it as the Doha agreement on February 29, 2020, was a violation of the principle of “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

At least four factors turned the second stage of the peace process into a subsidiary stage and consigned the government of Afghanistan to a tributary-like status within the process. First, Khalilzad failed to ensure the integrity of the government of Afghanistan as one of the negotiating parties. As Steve Brooking argued, the fact is that the US relinquishing its traditional policy of not talking with the Taliban in the absence of the Republic of Afghanistan was a concession to the Taliban.²⁵ Throughout the negotiation with the US, the Taliban called the Republic a puppet regime.²⁶ This stance ignored the ethos and norms of negotiations in which “the parties need to grant each other recognition with equal standing in the negotiations.”²⁷ This is what William Zartman called “ethos of equality.” This meant that the Taliban did not genuinely enter the peace process. Reifying this exclusionary narrative were analyses that exclusively cast blame on the behavior of actors representing the Republic, ensuring that they were not taken seriously as a sovereign authority. For instance, many analysts, including Clarke and Paul, who devised the master narrative of the peace process, ignored how the Taliban did not recognize the republic as a negotiating entity but as a puppet of the US (the second step of the master narrative).The second related point was the behavior of Washington in pledging on behalf of the Republic, such as the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners and the removal of Taliban leadership from the UN sanctions list. Such actions further delegitimized the Republic, resulting in an observable loss of leverage.

The third contributing factor to failure was the design of the agenda; whereby the most consequential peace accord decisions were distributed disproportionately in favor of the first stage. For example, while a ceasefire was supposed to be agreed upon in the second stage of the negotiations between the Republic and the Taliban, the US already agreed to a ceasefire with the Taliban excluding the Republic forces in the first stage of negotiations. Such a deliberately exclusive agenda-setting process facilitated the fourth design flaw, which was the centrality of the Taliban within the peace process vis-à-vis the Republic government, such that all the players raced to reach out to the Taliban. Many countries including Norway, Russia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, China, and Pakistan designated special envoys and organized their own peace meetings and conferences with the Taliban. These all turned the process into a fragmented process that did not have comprehensive integrity and arguably empowered the Taliban ideologically as well as materially. While at the international and regional level, all actors aspired to become facilitators or mediators, formally their roles and status were not defined, and instead, rent-seeking behavior ensued. Being at the center of attention, the Taliban maximized their means. A design that would have specified a mechanism for the mediator and guarantor would have avoided such pitfalls.

In principle, a two-stage process would have not been harmful if the American team led by Khalilzad had remained faithful to the initial framework of “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” This framework would have required the US not to agree to a full withdrawal of the troops and a ceasefire until the national negotiation between the republic and the Taliban was agreed upon. In its January 2021 report, the Afghanistan Study Group mandated by Congress, right after the US-Taliban deal in April 2020, to propose policy suggestions on Afghanistan even stated that the American troop withdrawal should have been conditional on the Taliban acting in accordance with the promises and spirit of the Doha Agreement.²⁸

However, the failure of the Taliban was twofold. First, they escalated the violence in 2020 and did not show enough willingness to settle the dispute with the government of Afghanistan. Second, they also failed to fulfill their counterterrorism guarantees. Accordingly, the Taliban commit to hosting or harboring Al-Qaida affiliates in the areas under its control. One of the key pieces of evidence that proved a breach of this commitment by the Taliban was the killing of Abu Muhsin al-Masri, an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Ghazni under the Taliban-controlled area by the Republic’s forces.²⁹ For this reason, most scholars and analysts characterized the Doha deal a withdrawal agreement that significantly contributed to the disastrous fall of the republic on August 15, 2021.³⁰ Akin to the 1988 Geneva Accord on Afghanistan, where the USSR secured an exit strategy yet neglected to resolve the core conflict between the Afghanistan government and the militant Mujahideen factions, the Americans committed a parallel oversight. They facilitated their withdrawal without adequately addressing the fundamental discord between the republic and the Taliban, leaving the crux of the dispute unresolved.

The design also ignored the discontent of the government of Afghanistan vis-à-vis Pakistan and the issue of safe havens on Pakistani territory. For instance, as early as March 2019, Amrullah Saleh, the republic’s vice-president stated, “there is a pan-Afghan demand that the issue of the sanctuaries in Pakistan and the support by the Pakistan army for the Taliban and other terrorist groups who fight alongside the Taliban be included in the agenda.”³¹

Instead of making the process a two-stage talk where all stakeholders contended to speak with the Taliban separately, an integrated, multi-track process might have been more successful in creating peace in Afghanistan. The suggested tracks are fourfold: Taliban-US, Taliban-Republic, Republic-Pakistan, and finally a UN-organized international conference to secure the required guarantees by the third parties and endorse Afghanistan’s neutrality. The first three tracks could have taken place in a synchronous manner. Given the successful conclusion of these tracks, the United Nations could have facilitated an international summit to endorse agreements by all the aforementioned tracks. Such a multi-track negotiation would have not only addressed the domestic aspects of the conflict but also the regional and international dimensions. Moreover, a multi-track design would have also specified the role of multiple actors in an orderly manner and would diffuse the centrality and therefore power of the Taliban to control both the agenda and negotiation means and ends. In the absence of institutionally agreed multi-track negotiations, ad hoc efforts to settle the dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan did not bear fruit. For instance, in the first half of 2021, efforts by General Nick Carter, Britain’s Chief of Army, to establish backchannel talks between Kabul and Islamabad failed.

Such a design would have also avoided what Christia and Semple called “single authorized channel” talks with the Taliban.³² The danger of a “single authorized channel” of talks with the Taliban was the process being hijacked by the hardliners of the group. The Taliban appointed Sheikh Abdul Hakim Haqqani, the key ideologue of the group as chief negotiator for the talk with the government of Afghanistan, whom no peer dared to challenge.³³

2. Cost of war

There are four costs in war: military stalemate, duration of the war, and the level of casualties both in terms of deaths per every thousand people (magnitude) and in terms of deaths per month (intensity).³⁴ Walter’s 1997 regression analysis of 41 case studies determined that the cost of war is statistically significant only when other variables are held constant in relation to determining the outcome of armed conflict. Relatedly, her research supports the theory that the duration, intensity, and magnitude of war are necessary conditions for the initiation of the negotiations but are not alone sufficient conditions for successful settlement.³⁵ Moreover, all variables of the cost did not positively impact on every single case.

Accordingly, the existing scholarship on Afghanistan suggested that the Taliban and the Republic would have agreed on a settlement, given the military stalemate from 2011,³⁶ whereby the Taliban could not advance into the main cities and the Republic could not recapture the rural areas.³⁷ Indeed, the 2021 Global Peace Index report indicated Afghanistan to be the world’s least peaceful country, the country having “the highest total number of deaths due to internal conflict of any nation.”³⁸ The cost of the Afghanistan war in terms of escalating intensity, magnitude, and intractability should have lent itself to a willingness to negotiate, where such an assessment fails is in relation to the military stalemate.

A military stalemate is not just strictly a lack of battleground advancement but also a perception that the military balance will not change in the near future. Arguably, the Taliban’s calculation of military stalemate changed as the US government announced a reduction of its troops in 2011 and one year later NATO announced the withdrawal of its combat troops by 2014. The Taliban assumed that with the withdrawal of the international troops, the military balance change in their favor. Roggio indeed demonstrates that since 2017 the Taliban gradually expanded its area of control and increased the level of violence across Afghanistan immediately after signing the February 2020 deal.³⁹ The final policy announcement by the Biden administration in April 2021—just a few months before the fall of Kabul to the Taliban—to complete the withdrawal of its troops by September 2021 further assured the Taliban of a lack of stalemate. Conflict within Afghanistan, therefore, did not reach a mutually hurting stalemate to force the Taliban’s hand in terms of eliciting genuine negotiation. In Zartman’s words, the conflict was simply never ripe for resolution.

The “fast-forward” process in Afghanistan did not appreciate how delicate any peace process is. For instance, both in Northern Ireland and the Philippines, moving from a stalemate to the next step of the peace process—either to start negotiation or accept the opposing party as a legitimate actor in a power-sharing arrangement—took decades. If heeded, Barakat and Zyck’s 2010 recommendations of simultaneously increasing the cost of war for the Taliban and targeting cross-border sanctuaries in Pakistan might have resulted in a true stalemate, that could not have been simply neutralized.

3. Indivisibility

Ultimately, in any given peace process, retaining the majority portion of all stakes, whether tangible or rhetorical, is the goal of the parties. Among many others, Pillar argues that:

the likelihood that the two sides in any dispute can negotiate a settlement depends greatly on whether compromise agreements are available. If the stakes are chiefly indivisible, so that neither side can get most of what it wants without depriving the other of most of what it wants, negotiations are less apt to be successful.⁴⁰

The more ‘divisible’ stakes are the more likely the chance of a successfully negotiated settlement. On the contrary, a peaceful settlement would be unlikely when the stakes are difficult to divide among the adversaries; for instance, when both parties fight for two fundamentally different visions of statehood or control over one territory.

The “stakes” between the Taliban and the Republic were not merely over a share of power in the central or local government. Nor were they divided by economic grievances. Instead, the differences were so rhetorically opposed because the entities envisioned two different types of states. While the government of Afghanistan stood for a republican government based on an electoral mechanism and fundamental rights, the Taliban fought to resurrect an Islamic Emirate based on religious legitimacy.⁴¹ Some allege, that from the beginning of peace talks, the Taliban obfuscated their vision of the state of Afghanistan. Having said this, the Republic contingent acted based upon the assumption that the survival of the state of Afghanistan was at stake. Indeed, Ghani presented three peace roadmaps: in November 2018 at the Geneva conference, in October 2019 after introducing a 15-member negotiating team, and in April 2021 before planned peace talks in Istanbul. While the US advocated the formation of an interim government, the Republic proposed the inclusion of the Taliban in a constitutional process. A common thread among these three proposals was an effort to keep the status quo of constitutional order and democratic legitimacy. Despite the efforts of the Republic, the Taliban consistently showed little interest in transitional government. Moreover, the alternative proposed model of settlement did not favor the core interests of the Republic.

In the absence of appreciation for the indivisibility of the stakes, the peace process in Afghanistan was imagined around the formation of an interim government. The inability to divide the “stake” of the nation-state then, rendered each of the proposed models of settlement unsuitable to the core interest of the conflict parties–the Republic and the Taliban.

4. Costly concessions

The fourth challenge to a successful peace agreement that might discourage at least one of the parties from considering a negotiated settlement as an option is a costly concession. Sticher observes that conflict becomes further resistant to settlement when an out-group preference is inculcated and reified through the denial of opportunities that would see the opposing party better off. Denial of concessions, generally undesirable for the rank and file or constituents of a political actor, fosters in-group cohesion, which in turn reinforces the need for othering and precludes future concessions. This is because either the constituents are not suffering the cost of the war or the animosity between them is very high.⁴²

The Taliban had both a strong in-group preference and an out-group preference, which rendered negative utility to the concessions made by the Republic. Indeed, both the pre-Taliban governments of Afghanistan expressed a high degree of willingness to reconcile and provide concessions. President Karzai embraced the Taliban as brothers, ignored the calls for transitional justice, opened the possibility of a political role to the Taliban, and advocated the cessation of air strikes. Ghani operationalized the aforementioned successful Eid ceasefire to enhance public support for negotiations. Despite this, the Taliban were resistant to making concessions, arguably not in the least due to the underlying ideology of the movement that glorified a holy war and martyrdom.

Sticher argues that concessions become costly for democratic leaders as they are accountable to their constituencies.⁴³ This, however, was not the case for President Karzai and Ghani. It is worth noting, that there was a lack of real democratic oversight over the peace process in terms of there being a lack of mechanisms to bolster constitutionally responsible government in the era of the Republic. That is to say, constraining presidential actions and discretion was limited, and some have correctly noted that this lack of tangible accountability allowed both Karzai and Ghani to manipulate the master narrative to make “justified” concessions that ultimately contributed to the fall of the Republic. Ad hoc consultative assemblies were operationalized as a legitimating mechanism for concessions, for instance, a 1500 people consultative peace assembly in April 2019 called by Ghani proposed that “parties should implement flexibility towards prisoners and act on releasing prisoners…Taliban’s legitimate demands should be recognized.”⁴⁴ Another ad hoc unelected assembly was called in August 2020 to recommend the release of 400 Taliban prisoners preceding peace talks. Meanwhile, opposition to the non-reciprocal concessions made to the Taliban by the Republic from within the Afghanistan electorate, particularly from the Tajiks/Persians and religious minority groups, fell onto seemingly deaf ears. The opposition did not oppose the negotiations as a process, but they criticized the conditions under which the talks were taking place.

The public preference in 2018, at the start of the negotiations, and 2021, at the end of negotiations, indicated that most people had a negative utility toward one category of concessions for the Taliban: a change in the basic human rights and democratic nature of the system. Indeed, as early as 2018, only around 10% of Afghanistan nationals favored legal changes that would align with the Taliban ideology within the country.⁴⁵ The Asia Foundation’s 2019 survey also found a similar tendency:

Roughly 65.0% say they probably or definitely would not vote for (a) a president who would accept a peace agreement with the Taliban even if women were no longer allowed to go to school (65.6%), (b) a president who would accept a peace agreement with the Taliban even if women could no longer work outside the home (65.0%), or (c) a president who would accept a peace agreement with the Taliban even if the central government lost territory (65.8%).⁴⁶

Indeed, data from 2021 demonstrates that most people developed a negative opinion of concessions over fundamental rights and freedom, as the ill intentions of the Taliban gradually become evident throughout the talks.⁴⁷ Given that the process of concession-making was so fraught and lacked popular legitimacy and reciprocity, there is no wonder that in 2022, structural violence in the form of coercive exercise of ceded stakes, if not direct violence, defined the relationship between the average citizen and the state.

5. Lack of Mediation

To bring the divergent positions of the Taliban and the Republic to a compromise, strong, credible, neutral, and skilled mediation was required. In an intractable conflict, such as that which existed in Afghanistan, where the parties are so acrimonious to have reached the threshold of mutual destruction, traditional simple mediation would arguably still not have been sufficient to broker compromise and peace. In this vein, Ronald Fisher proposed the “Contingency Model of Third-Party Intervention.” This model identifies the level of escalation that a conflict has reached and matches it with a particular model of intervention. Fisher identified four different stages of conflict escalation: discussion, polarization, segregation, and destruction.⁴⁸ As a conflict becomes more intense and moves toward destruction, it changes the nature of communication, the perception of the parties of the conflict, and strategies to resolve the dispute. That is why he suggests that third-party intervention including mediation should consider both the level of conflict escalation and the issue to address the subjective and objective elements involved in the conflict. Accordingly, he matches these phases of conflict and party communication with a process typology of third-party intervention consisting of options of conciliation, consultation, pure mediation, power mediation, arbitration, and peacekeeping.

This is a staged model of intervention in which moving from conciliation to peacekeeping will involve a gradual increase in the level of control by the intervenor. Fisher suggests, however, that complementarity (the operationalization of two or more types of intervention) will be most successful in grappling with complex, identity-based, intractable conflicts. Howard and Stark also argue how successful cases such as Álvaro de Soto’s mediation in El Salvador and Richard Holbrook’s mediation in Bosnia utilized power mediation by following a single-text mediation technique in which the mediator prepared a draft proposal and presented it to the parties and persuaded the parties to compromise.⁴⁹ In light of the fact that the conflict in Afghanistan had already reached the destruction level, a combination of consultation, power mediation, and aid leverage was required for a successful negotiation.

Regrettably, no such mediation was available in Afghanistan. Most importantly, both parties willfully neglected the need for, and importance of, a mediator. Fearing the intervention of other players, Ghani opposed any form of meditation at the early stage of the talks. Recognizing that the talks were not making progress, he finally opted for a mediator. In June 2021, upon the request of Qatar to exclusively mediate the process, Ghani agreed and requested a “joint Qatari and UN mediation in the peace process for an intensive 60-day period (July 10–September 10).”⁵⁰ Nonetheless, throughout the negotiations, Qatar played a mediator role, but its role remained limited to consultation with the Taliban. On the one hand, it did not have the capacity for power mediation. On the other, as a facilitator of the talks, it was perceived as a biased party.

Perhaps most importantly, the United States acted as “the primary catalyst of the process,”⁵¹ with The Afghanistan Study Group characterizing its role as “part party to the talks, part facilitator, and (on occasion) hidden mediator.”⁵² The US had both financial and technical capacity to influence the process. It also attempted to move beyond consultation to a power mediation or arbitration by presenting a peace road map. However, the US, much like Qatar, suffered from a deficit of credibility and neutrality. Many actions shaped the balance in favor of the Taliban, including the Trump administration’s threat to curtail foreign aid at the early stage of peace talks in 2019 should Afghanistan’s presidential elections not be coercively decided, Secretary of State Blinken’s May 2021 letter to Ghani pledging to withdraw troops regardless of the Taliban’s encroachment, and a draft peace agreement in June 2021.⁵³

While it seemed that the State Department followed Álvaro de Soto’s mediation in El Salvador and Richard Holbrook’s mediation in Bosnia as a model⁵⁴ and presented a draft proposal to the parties, the Republic considered the US role as biased in favor of the Taliban.⁵⁵ The only entity that partially accepted the draft was the High Council for National Reconciliation of Afghanistan led by Abdullah Abdullah. Bringing together most of the political parties, the council presented a proposal that was closer to the US-proposed draft in terms of the format of the transition, but it departed from the US-proposed draft on two points. First, it proposed the 2004 constitution as a legal framework unless it contradicted the agreement. Second, it suggested a decentralized administrative model for the transition period.

Finally, the multiplicity of the methods of intervention (including the Moscow Format, Troika Plus, and independent interventions by various regional countries) effectively obfuscated the role of any single party or block. All of these efforts rendered mediation ineffective at best. Khalilzad promised a few countries such as Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Germany, and Norway that they could engage with the Taliban and even host the peace talks. A contact group consisting of these countries was formed in Doha called “Host Country Support Group.” Such a decision exacerbated a zero-sum game between Qatar, the Support Group, and many other regional stakeholders including India and Turkey who felt excluded. For instance, Qatar blamed Uzbekistan and Germany for hijacking the Doha process.⁵⁶ Both Qatar and Khalilzad played disastrous roles as mediators in shaping the process.

6. Guarantees

A fundamental assumption in the literature argues that peace fails when the parties lack a credible commitment. Defecting from the process and returning to violence can have a greater payoff compared to staying in the process. Resolution of war requires the parties to commit to an agreement, the implementation of which may entail the elimination of one of the parties. This is primarily because of a lack of trust.⁵⁷

The parties calculate a number of risks. One of the key risks of a peace agreement is military integration or disarmament of one of the parties in a situation where there is no third party to guarantee the implementation of the agreement. In case one of the parties deceives, the other thinks that it may not have the possibility to hold the opponent accountable to, at the worst, move back to the status quo. Hence, the problem would be insecurity about the agreement implementation phase. In circumstances where a party’s reliance on negotiation or cooperation without a guarantee leaves them in a more vulnerable position, they rationally might prefer to continue the war.

Both parties may remain in this dilemma until there is a solution. The dilemma could be resolved when abandoning an agreement becomes costly—in other words, when “payoffs from cheating on a civil war agreement no longer exceed the payoffs from faithfully executing its terms.”⁵⁸ The dilemma of credibility and commitment, according to Walter, could be addressed by a third-party guarantor. Walter found that only a security guarantee was strongly related to the successful conclusion of 17 peace negotiations. Out of all independent variables, the only one that showed a positive correlation in every case of a successfully negotiated settlement was the security guarantee.

The lack of a strong, credible, neutral, and skilled guarantor to enforce the framework of the precarious peace accords was another overtly deleterious mishap in the peace process. Russia and China volunteered to take responsibility as guarantors in mid-2019. But Ghani rebuffed these offers. Given the positive leverage of Russia and China on the Taliban, it is understandable that they could exert a role as guarantors. Nonetheless, it was evident that their proposal was a weak guarantee of a formal verbal promise with no military presence on the ground. Pakistan, which had a substantial influence over the Taliban, refused to contribute to the peace process by taking a guarantor’s role.⁵⁹ While there is certainly an argument that these parties would not be suitable given their pursuit of partisan foreign policy, the Taliban themselves suggested other European parties.

Ghani was primarily to blame for the lack of a guarantor. He insisted instead that the National Security Forces would play this role. Of course, the assumption that the armed forces of the country would enforce peace in and of itself is counterintuitive in a post-conflict situation. Moreover, precluding military integration and disarmament by a third party, implementation of such agreements is predicated on the expectation of violence. This inability to truly commit to a future in which desecuritization would define the implementation of peace was primarily because of a lack of trust between the parties.⁶⁰ Each party expected others to defect from the peace process. This lack of credible commitment to peace, as manifested in their bipartisan rejection of a security guarantor, all but ensured a continuation of violence following the peace accords.

The Afghanistan case confirms Walter’s thesis from a narrative perspective. The high cost of the war and the offer of mediation did help in the initiation of the negotiation but did not bring about a peaceful end to the conflict. A crucial factor was the absence of a strong security guarantee to address the security dilemma of the parties.

7. Ideology and Identity

Finally, it is commonly asserted that wars fought over ideology and identity are less likely to successfully settle peacefully compared to wars fought over political and economic issues. For instance, Sultan Barakat and Steven Zyck argued that the Taliban’s motive was:

multifaceted and, in particular, far more parochial, often related to issues of retribution, respect, and access to resources. The lack of ideological motives coupled with the divergence of objectives has created an opening for the fragmentation of the insurgency, the establishment of a stalemate, and the isolation of high-level insurgent leaders.⁶¹

The question of Taliban identity and ideology remained a matter of speculation. Over time, many analysts proposed that the Taliban became more moderate. They also suggested that “the lures of legitimacy and political influence may eventually tempt others in the Taliban’s aging leadership.”⁶²

This is far from the truth, at least with regard to the group’s coordinated front during the peace negotiations under examination. The Taliban continuously asserted, and indeed continues to assert, the legitimacy of their project from the point of view of Islam, declaring Afghanistan a Muslim state occupied by a colonial great power from 2001 to 2021, and insisting that a pure Afghanistan was an Islamic Afghanistan. However, we must note that the government of the Republic had also been accused of blindly pursuing a divisive, ideological agenda. Apart from Islamist ideology, identity politics also informed a great portion of the Taliban’s motives and cause of the conflict. In the interview with the author, Mazar Mohammad Motmaeen and Farooq Azam, both currently officials of the Taliban de facto government, reiterated that one of the causes of the insurgency was resentment among Pashtuns. The same has been argued by other authors.⁶³

At the micro level, identity politics among the Pashtun tribes also fueled the Taliban insurgency. The long conflict turned into a rotating cycle of revenge among the dominant Pashtun tribes, like the Popalzai and Barakzai, and marginalized groups such as the Zirak (Ishaqzai and Noorzai) in southern Afghanistan. Ethnic majoritarianism among various Pashtun elites also justified the Taliban’s resentment.⁶⁴

In April 2020, ahead of the Republic-Taliban talks, ToloNews leaked a draft of the “Taliban Charter,” which outlined the key normative and ideological inclinations of the group concerning the organization of political order. Like the group’s 1998 draft constitution (Dastur Emarat Islami Afghanistan), the charter was inspired by the “Hanafi-Sunni legal orthodoxy in Deobandi Schools in Pakistan.”⁶⁵ The Taliban were not shy of stating their ideological impetus and stance during the negotiations. However, they did obfuscate their fundamentalist nature in order to secure bargaining power. Two pieces of evidence support this claim. First, the Taliban appointed the group’s ideologue and head of the Clerical Council, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, as head of the negotiating team. Second, in the early phase of talks with the Republic on the code of conduct/procedures of the negotiations, in September 2020, the Taliban took a firm ideological stance. They preferred reliance exclusively on Hanafi fiqh (jurisprudence) as a basis for the negotiation and also called the conflict a jihad (religious war).⁶⁶

By contrast, the Republic was more reserved in its approach to ideology and identity-based politics, erring on the side of conciliation (at least in the context of peace negotiations). It contested the Taliban’s stance on the conduct of negotiations, asserting that it was too narrow to regulate civil relations in a country as diverse as Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the overall policy of the Republic was also shaped by identity politics. The Republic’s oft-criticized ethno-nationalist sentiment was informed by a master state narrative based on the indigeneity of Pashtun-Afghans to the exclusion and detriment of all other identity-based ethnic groups in the country.⁶⁷ Having said this, it is evident that one cannot ignore the role of identity and ideology in the Taliban insurgency and their impact on the behavior of the parties at the negotiation table. To reduce the failure of the peace negotiations between the Republic and the Taliban to bargaining challenges is reductionist.ChooseTop of pageAbstractAn Overview of the Afghan…The Conceptual FrameworkConclusion <<ContributorAcknowledgmentBibliography

Conclusion

Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, many scholars and policy analysts speculated about how the conflict in Afghanistan would end. One of the questions frequently asked, but never answered adequately, was posed by Clarke and Paul in 2014: “Would the Taliban seriously consider a power-sharing government, or would the group use negotiations to win prisoner releases, buy time, and then storm back to take power once international forces left Afghanistan?”⁶⁸ On August 15, the second scenario became a reality. This simple answer required a nuanced analysis, though, one that this article attempted to provide.

Neither the rationalist approach focused on bargaining challenges nor the ideationalist approach focused on ideology and identity can exclusively explain the failure of peace negotiations in Afghanistan. The shreds of evidence analzyed here show that conflict resolution of a protracted conflict demonstrates a complex set of challenges that should not be ignored or reduced to a single factor or approach. In this instance, the cost of war—in terms of intensity, magnitude, and duration—did not warrant a politically negotiated settlement. The cost that matters is a mutual hurting stalemate among all the parties. In a conflict where there are more than two parties, a military stalemate is required among all parties. In other words, a partial hurting stalemate does not work. In the case of Afghanistan, a stalemate was established between the US and the Taliban. The same did not happen between the Republic and the Taliban.

Second, the stakes were were indivisible, making the concessions costly for all the parties. The indivisibility came from two issues: on the one hand, the Taliban and the Republic fought over the central government. On the other, they envisioned two different ideological notions of the state. This connects the ideationalist point that the conflict in Afghanistan was also fought over ideological and identity fault lines.

Lastly, this analyis moved beyond the conventional rationalist-ideationalist divide in the conflict resolution literature emphasizing the design of the peace process. In this instance, the design also suffered from major flaws, including a two-stage peace process that degraded the second stage as a subsidiary to the first phase and the republic into a tributary of the US. The process also lacked a balance of power mediation and a credible guarantor. The findings suggest that peace negotiation should always be considered as an integrated whole, rather than discrete pieces. Moreover, any kind of vagueness with respect to the role of mediators, international and regional stakeholders, and guarantors might further create uncertainty and hence a bargaining challenge.

Having said that, the integrated peace agreement with the Taliban should have at least included five sections: provisions on a ceasefire; provisions on the nature of the state (structural readjustment, institutional reforms); provisions related to fundamental rights (human rights, women’s rights, the rights of religious minorities, and refugees and internally displaced peoples’ rights); provisions related to the status of the international troops; and finally provisions related to the international and national verification of the peace.ChooseTop of pageAbstractAn Overview of the Afghan…The Conceptual FrameworkConclusionContributor <<AcknowledgmentBibliography

Contributor

Dr Omar Sadr is a senior research scholar at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets. Previously, he taught political science at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) in Kabul. He is the author of Negotiating Cultural Diversity in Afghanistan, which won the 2022 book prize for Best Book in Social Science from the Central Eurasian Studies Society.ChooseTop of pageAbstractAn Overview of the Afghan…The Conceptual FrameworkConclusionContributorAcknowledgment <<Bibliography

Acknowledgment

The article is based on research undertaken during the SRF fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets (June- December 2022). A short version of this paper was presented at the USIP Colloquium in July 2022 in Washington and at George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies’ monthly interdisciplinary workshop series, in September 2022. The author is grateful to Dr Dipali Mukhopadhyay, and Dr Benjamin David Hopkins and anonymous reviewers for their comments and to Robert Crews and Diane Skarsgard for their generous support in editing.

Notes

1 Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.”

2 Howard and Stark, “How Civil Wars End.”

3 Ibid.

4 Fukuyama, State-Building.

5 Sadr, “Fallacy of Peace process in Afghanistan.”

6 Christia and Semple, “Flipping the Taliban.”

7 Gebauer and Stark, “Secret Negotiations.”

8 Afghanistan Study Group, “Afghanistan Study Group Final Report.”

9 Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993,” 685.

10 Mason, Gurses, Brandt, and Quinn. “When Civil Wars Recur: Conditions for Durable Peace after Civil Wars,” 185.

11 See Pillar, Negotiating Peace

12 Downes, “The Problem with Negotiated Settlements.”

13 Joshi and Darby, “Introducing the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM).”

14 Walter, “Bargaining Failure and Civil War.”

15 Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement,” 345.

16 Ibid.

17 The above rationalist and ideationalist factors are studied and categorized by other scholars differently. For instance, Howard and Stark categorize the same factors into domestic factors (such as indivisibility, identity fractionalization, and mutually hurting stalemate) and external factors (role of mediation and guarantees.) See Howard and Stark, “How Civil Wars End.”

18 Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.”

19 Sticher, “Negotiating Peace with Your Enemy.”

20 Clarke and Paul, “Lessons for Afghanistan.”

21 Madadi, “Political Implications of Technical Decisions.”

22 Khalilzad, Twitter Post

23 Ashraf Ghani had a different vision for the sequencing in an August 2009 interview with Fareed Zakaria when he was campaigning for the presidential election against Karzai. He said, “We need to get a ceasefire. This is not going to be an easy issue, but we need to try everything possible so that we can build a ceasefire, and once we have a three-years of a ceasefire then we can discuss the second issue, the exit date for international forces” (Ghani, “Dr Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai on GPS with Fareed Zakaria.”)

24 Bijlert,  “What Other Peace Processes Can Teach Afghanistan.”

25 Brooking, “Why Was a Negotiated Peace Always Out of Reach,” 14.

26 Gul, “Taliban.”

27 Zartman, “Conflict Resolution and Negotiation,” 324.

28 Afghanistan Study Group, “Afghanistan Study Group Final Report.”

29 Brooking, “Why Was a Negotiated Peace Always Out of Reach” 19.

30 Maley and Jamal, “Diplomacy of Disaster.”

31 “Statement of Amrullah Saleh, Hudson Institute.”

32 Christia and Semple, “Flipping the Taliban,” 40.

33 Brooking, “Why Was a Negotiated Peace Always Out of Reach,” 20.

34 Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.”

35 Ibid, 24.

36 Clarke and Paul, “Lessons for Afghanistan,” 49.

37 Ibrahimi, “Modalities of Political Settlement.”

38 Institute for Economics & Peace, “Global Peace Index 2021.”

39 Roggio, “Mapping Taliban Control.”

40 Pillar, Negotiating Peace, 24.

41 Sadr, Political Settlement of Afghanistan Conflict, 34.

42 Sticher, “Negotiating Peace with Your Enemy.”

43 Sticher, “Negotiating Peace with Your Enemy.”

44 The Killid Group, “The Peace Jirga.”

45 Sadr, The Fallacy of Peace Process in Afghanistan.

46 The Asia Foundation, Afghanistan in 2019, 25.

47 Baryalay, Survey of Socio-Political Norms and Values.

48 Fisher, “Assessing the Contingency Model.”

49 Howard and Stark, “How Civil Wars End.”

50 Brooking, “Why Was a Negotiated Peace Always Out of Reach,” 26.

51 International Crisis Group, “Twelve Ideas to Make Intra-Afghan Negotiations Work,” 3.

52 Afghanistan Study Group, “Afghanistan Study Group Final Report,” 9.

53 Toosi, “U.S. to Cut Afghan Aid by $1B;” Ward, “The Biden Administration’s Leaked Afghanistan Peace Plan;”An eight-page sample agreement titled “Agreement on a Political Settlement in Afghanistan between the two Parties to intra-Afghan peace negotiations” was presented to the government of Afghanistan and several other political actors by Zalmay Khalilzad in June 2021. It offered a power-sharing arrangement with a High Council for Islamic Jurisprudence. This draft was different from a January 2019 49-page proposal, “Agreement on a Comprehensive Settlement of the Conflict in Afghanistan” prepared by the Rand Corporation. The draft included a ceasefire, the Taliban renunciation of links with transnational terrorism, and withdrawal of international troops over an 18-month transitional time period. See Miller and Blake, “Envisioning a Comprehensive Peace Agreement for Afghanistan.”

54 Howard and Stark, “How Civil Wars End.”

55 Ghani and his team accused the US chief negotiator, Khalilzad, of being biased several times. Ghani’s National Security Advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, accused Khalilzad of acting like a “viceroy” and undermining the republic. The first vice president Amruallah Shaleh also took an anti-American stance.

56 Brooking, “Why Was a Negotiated Peace Always Out of Reach,” 23.

57 Mason et. al, “When Civil Wars Recur;” and Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.”

58 Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement,” 340.

59 The Nation, “Pakistan Facilitator Not Guarantor of Afghan Peace Process.”

60 Mason et. al, “When Civil Wars Recur;” and Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.”

61 Barakat and Zyck, “Afghanistan’s Insurgency,” 196.

62 Coll, “Looking for Mullah Omar.”

63 Tarzi, “The Neo-Taliban;” and Qazi, “The Neo-Taliban.”

64 Sadr, Political Settlement of Afghanistan Conflict

65 Rahimi, “A Constitutional Reckoning.”

66 Brooking, “Why Was a Negotiated Peace Always Out of Reach,” 20–21.

67 Sadr, Negotiating Cultural Diversity

68 Clarke and Paul, “Lessons for Afghanistan.”ChooseTop of pageAbstractAn Overview of the Afghan…The Conceptual FrameworkConclusionContributorAcknowledgmentBibliography