Biden and Afghanistan

The Taliban have called on US President-elect Joe Biden to stick to the terms of the peace deal the Trump administration signed with the militant group in February. Under the agreement, the US is supposed to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by May 2021. Given Biden’s comments before the elections however, that will not be happening. Although he backs an end to “forever wars”, Biden says he also supports a sustained US military footprint of up to 2,000 troops on the ground — primarily for special operations against IS and other terror threats.

The good news is that this might not be a deal-breaker for the Taliban. Even though their official position is that they want all foreign troops out, the Taliban would quietly acknowledge that the US is a potent ally against their mutual enemy, IS. But there are other stickling points as well. Unlike Trump’s policymaking-on-a-whim strategy, Biden is also expected to consider ground realities while reworking the US approach to Afghanistan. Among those are unacceptable reports of the Taliban maintaining ties with Al Qaeda. Then come the stalled inter-Afghan peace talks. The Taliban and Kabul both accuse the other of delaying the talks, while violence continues to consume the country. This is partly because Trump has shown little interest in following through on the talks.

Biden has, however, demonstrated a desire to ensure that the negotiations do bear fruit. He is likely to make active efforts to push both sides to the table. This gains renewed significance when we examine Kabul’s excuses. Afghan Second Vice President Sarwar Danish claims his government has no legal responsibility to act on the US-Taliban deal’s requirement for intra-Afghan peace talks. Biden could easily remind Danish and others that the only reason he has a job is because of US largesse. Without US aid, the government would collapse. The US-Afghan relationship is not one of equals. All Biden needs to do to get peace talks moving is to remind Kabul of the same.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 12^th, 2020.

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