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The Daily Beast
If the United States’ longest foreign war actually draws to a
negotiated close, a significant amount of credit will go to a former
U.S. Army colonel and a former senior U.S. diplomat.
In November,
Chris Kolenda and Robin Raphel boarded a plane to Doha, Qatar, for a
conversation with Taliban representatives. It was the beginning of a
quiet channel, never authorized by U.S. officials — who neither paid
them nor asked them to carry any messages — that proved to be
instrumental in convincing the Trump administration, and particularly
senior Pentagon and U.S. military officials, that there was a real
chance to broker an end to the war.
Kolenda, an Afghanistan
veteran himself, had been here before. He had been part of an ultimately
fruitless attempt during the Obama administration to talk with the
Taliban. But this time, talking with the Taliban in Doha, “I was struck
by what I detected was a much higher level of seriousness about bringing
the conflict to a close than I saw in 2011,” Kolenda told The Daily
Beast.
That seriousness was manifested through Taliban leaders
showing pliability about the future of the U.S. troop presence. Despite
their strident public position that U.S. troops must withdraw, the
Taliban communicated to Raphel and Kolenda that there were circumstances
under which they can envision living with a continued American military
presence. And they again vowed that an Afghanistan open to Taliban
political participation would not host a foreign terrorist presence,
satisfying the central U.S. objective of the 17-year war.
“We
were able to vigorously challenge their viewpoints, and didn’t just
accept what the Taliban told us,” Kolenda said. “They said that if an
inclusive government, after a political settlement occurs in
Afghanistan, wants international forces to be in the country to train
Afghan security forces, the Taliban said they would be OK with that,
because they’ll have participated in that decision.”
Over nine
months, Kolenda and Raphel shuttled back and forth between Washington
and Doha three times and, last month, added Kabul to their itinerary.
The Daily Beast can reveal the existence of their informal diplomacy now
that it’s led to Alice Wells, a senior State Department official
holding the South Asia portfolio, meeting with Taliban officials in
Doha on July 23 in the first U.S.-Taliban talks for seven years.
Those
talks were just “preliminary,” according to a Taliban official, and
Kolenda is quick to note that all the hard decisions, including on the
fate of U.S. troops, are ahead. But as recently as June, the Trump
administration was downplaying any prospect of direct talks with the
Taliban, saying only that the U.S. was prepared to facilitate and
contribute to talks between the U.S.-backed Afghan government and the
Taliban.
“The American government’s position has evolved,” said
Raphel, who acknowledges that her quiet, informal diplomacy was one
factor among many. “They finally came to accept that it really is a
stalemate. While the Taliban can’t win in a traditional way, we can’t
win either.”
Several developments among Afghans themselves,
especially a pivotal ceasefire and nationwide peace marches, led to this
new burst of diplomacy. But “Chris and Robin were really useful in
elevating these issues to a young administration that hadn’t been
steeped in the history of the Afghanistan peace process,” said Johnny
Walsh, a former State Department official who is himself steeped in
Afghan peace efforts.
This isn’t the first time U.S. officials
have tried direct talks with the Taliban. In 2011, the Obama
administration tried outreach as a way to marry their troop surge to a
diplomatic settlement. But talks collapsed before gaining any traction,
done in by early leaks and opposition from then-U.S. military commander
David Petraeus. The result was that an already arduous military campaign
had no path to a resolution.
The war continued on as American
administrations changed. While every military officer and senior U.S.
official professed publicly that there was no military solution to the
conflict, they acted as if there were, even as the Taliban racked up
battlefield successes from 2015 to 2017.
But the Taliban were
less isolated than it seemed. With a political office in Doha, the
Taliban fielded quiet diplomatic outreach from a variety of
interlocutors, both governmental and private. Among the private channels
was one from the anti-nuclear Pugwash Conferences.
The key figure keeping a line open to the Taliban in Doha was Pugwash’s
secretary general, Paolo Cotta-Ramusino, an Italian quantum physicist,
who for five years kept a line to the Taliban open, searching for an
opportunity.
Cotta-Ramusino knew Raphel “for many years,” he said,
with Raphel attending several Pugwash conferences. A retired
ambassador, Raphel was a major figure in regional diplomacy. She was the
first State Department assistant secretary for South Asia who had
extensive Pakistani contacts, and was a known quantity to the Taliban.
Cotta-Ramusino
was convinced in October 2017 that there was an opening for peace among
the Taliban. Raphel, who thought it was worth exploring, wanted to have
the credibility of a senior U.S. military officer who had fought in
Afghanistan, believed in peace and to whom the military establishment
was likely to listen.
Kolenda fit the bill. He was an adviser to
Obama-era Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and one-time
Afghanistan war commander Stan McChrystal. The former defense secretary
Robert Gates had even tapped Kolenda as his representative for the
aborted 2011 Taliban talks. Kolenda’s experience in Afghanistan is both
representative of 17 years of war and unique within it.
Like
hundreds of thousands of fellow veterans, Colonel Kolenda knew the cost
of the Afghan conflict: he lost four of his soldiers in Kunar and
Nuristan in 2007 and 2008. They include Maj. Tom Bostick, whom Kolenda
visited last week at section 60, gravesite 8755 of Arlington National
Cemetery. But, unusually for a man with his background, Kolenda has for
years, and with passion, urged U.S. officials to pursue a diplomatic
settlement to overcome the high-level inertia that has kept the war
going on autopilot.
“He was appearing on various panels around town talking perfectly good sense, and not a whole lot of people were,” Raphel said.
Kolenda talks about the pursuit of peace with the Taliban as an obligation, not an afterthought or a pipe dream.
“I’m
responsible for the death of hundreds on hundreds on hundreds of these
dudes. I have never lost a wink of sleep because I know we were doing
the right thing in the right way,” he said. “But violence is not an end
in itself. When your adversary is ready to accept your war aims, then I
think you’ve got an obligation to pursue a serious way to end the war.”
The
Taliban’s positions in their talks with Raphel, Kolenda and
Cotta-Ramusino were, at most, evolutions of their previous stances –
often dismissed by Americans – rather than wholesale transformations.
But they heard an urgency from the Taliban. Taliban officials said they
feared Afghanistan becoming a “second Syria,” surely mindful of the rise
of an Islamic State presence there siphoning adherents and political
power from the Taliban.
The Taliban’s public position is — and
remains — that the foreign military occupation of Afghanistan must end
as a precondition for negotiations. But privately, the Taliban indicated
an extraordinary flexibility, and even a theoretical openness to a
residual U.S. troop presence.
If the U.S.-backed Afghan government
amended the constitution, opened up the political system, and accepted
Taliban participation, the Taliban negotiators said, they would
entertain the idea that the resulting government could invite U.S.
forces to stay. Those American troops could continue training Afghan
soldiers — including, hypothetically, ex-Taliban commanders. At that
point, they said, it wouldn’t be an occupation. They were even open to
hosting U.S. surveillance listening posts.
The Taliban,
Cotta-Ramusino said, can put the troop presence question inside a
broader “framework for agreement” on continued international aid. But to
reverse their public position on expelling foreign troops before that
framework would risk a rank-and-file revolt that threatens the Taliban’s
ability to deliver on their promises.
“They don’t want the
troops, but if there are enough guarantees that the troops aren’t
fighting them, then it can be discussed,” Cotta-Ramusino said.
Between
the lines, the Taliban also seemed to recognize that “the days of their
late-Obama-era battlefield gains are over,” as Kolenda put it.
The
Taliban were anticipating that Donald Trump would pull out of
Afghanistan. When he didn’t, reluctantly accepting former national
security adviser H.R. McMaster’s approach to stay indefinitely with a
modest increase in U.S. forces, the Taliban, Kolenda concluded, got a
sense that their leverage had reached a high point, and they wanted to
lock it in — all while warning that Afghanistan was a powder keg that
could blow during elections in 2019.
“They were thoughtful and
serious,” Raphel said. “They had reflected, as anyone would, on their
time in power and that they’d made some serious mistakes.” Raphel
continued: “They say that they do not want any foreign terrorist groups
on Afghan soil and won’t let Afghan soil be used in that way.”
From
Kolenda’s perspective, all that meant the Taliban were willing to live
with the core interests — no terrorism, stability under an inclusive and
legitimate government, human-rights protections, curbing the narcotics
trade — that the U.S. had been futilely fighting to secure.
But
skepticism in Washington about the Taliban ran high, as did habituation
to such a long war. Kolenda and Raphel encountered it when briefing
administration officials after their trip. During a follow-up visit in
Doha in January, which Cotta-Ramusino couldn’t attend, the Americans
urged the Taliban to make a public statement that signaled their
willingness for diplomacy on terms the U.S. could accept.
On
February 14, the Taliban delivered. Their statement was
characteristically strident, referencing the “inexperienced policies of
President Trump and his warmonger advisors.” But the Taliban also said,
publicly, that they had “no agenda of playing any destructive role in
any other country” and “will not allow anyone else to use Afghan
territory against any other country.” Its main message was that it was
time for dialogue with the United States.
Yet the Taliban were
still waging war. At the end of January, the Taliban took responsibility
for a massive suicide bomb, hidden in an ambulance, that killed 100
people in Kabul, the capital that only sporadically experiences the
violence that the war has brought to the hinterlands.
Within two
weeks of the Taliban statement, the U.S.-sponsored Afghan president,
Ashraf Ghani, made his own overture. Ghani promised to enter into a
peace process with the Taliban “without preconditions,” and offered the
Taliban recognition of their legitimacy as a party to the conflict,
another Taliban goal. He even floated a ceasefire to underscore his
seriousness, despite the recent suicide bombing. Reuters noted it was a
“change in tone for Ghani, who has regularly called the Taliban
‘terrorists’ and ‘rebels.’”
But while the two statements
seemed to represent momentum for peace, they pointed to a diplomatic
logjam. The Taliban reject Ghani’s government as a puppet and prefer to
deal with its American patron. Ghani, with vocal American backing,
positioned himself as the central figure. A bilateral U.S.-Taliban
negotiation could undermine a government Washington has spent 17 years
backing as the legitimate voice of Afghanistan. “There was a standoff,”
Raphel said.
Within the Trump administration, there was also
strong skepticism that the Taliban could deliver on the promises they
heard via Kolenda and Raphel. For years, U.S. officials have held that
the Taliban are a decentralized umbrella group of factions, rather than a
united force. The impact of that conventional wisdom is to render
diplomacy pointless, since it was unknown if Taliban interlocutors
actually spoke for anyone else. A procession of military officers, for
the better part of a decade, have preached fracturing the Taliban
through so-called “reconciliation” efforts, despite their dismal track
record.
Still, Kolenda, Raphel, and Cotta-Ramusino returned to
Doha in May for another parley with Taliban figures who gave them the
same message — we want to talk to the Americans — as in November and
January. Once again, when they returned to Washington, they continued to
brief the administration on the Taliban’s thinking. “We would brief
Defense Department officials after each engagement — here in D.C. as
well as in Kabul. The senior leadership, we kept them very well informed
with verbal updates as well as written readouts,” Kolenda said.
Not long after came the breakthrough.
On June 5, Ghani unilaterally announced a Ramadan ceasefire as a
peace gesture. The U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John
Nicholson, immediately backed it, even though he didn’t know how the
Taliban would respond. The Taliban’s response was seismic: four days
later, they ordered their own ceasefire — applied to Afghans, not U.S.
forces — for the Eid holiday.
What emerged was an outpouring of
joy and solidarity around the country. Afghan soldiers took selfies with
their Taliban adversaries. Ordinary Afghans that month undertook
massive peace marches from war-torn Helmand province to Kabul, hundreds
of miles distant, demanding a durable peace between the government and
the Taliban.
But the real sea change was taking place 7,000 miles
away. The Taliban, contrary to years of received Pentagon wisdom, had
just proven they had the ability to order and enforce the ceasefire,
meaning they had centralized control over their fighters. If that was
true, it meant there was someone the U.S. could talk to — if the
administration was willing.
The diplomatic logjam, however,
remained. The U.S. couldn’t afford to undercut Ghani. But on June 16,
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a gesture of his own. He didn’t
offer unilateral talks, in keeping with a U.S. mantra that all
negotiations be “Afghan-led.” But he said that “the United States is
prepared to support, facilitate and participate” in discussions between
the Taliban and the Afghan government.
It was still a step short
of an agreement for U.S.-Taliban talks, but it was movement in that
direction – even though the Taliban, after the ceasefire ended, killed
30 Afghan soldiers and days later followed up with another wave of
deadly attacks that killed 16 more. Despite the bloodshed, the Pentagon —
which declined to comment for this piece — was warming to a direct
dialogue.
The Taliban backing of the Eid ceasefire had, by late
June or early July, created what Kolenda called “enthusiasm” for peace
talks. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff General Joseph Dunford, Central Command chief General Joe Votel
and Nicholson now wanted to get talks moving, and quickly — cognizant
both of the extreme length of the war and that there would be no
additional resources from Trump for waging it.
Skepticism from
the State Department subsided when the united Pentagon support
coalesced. But there was continued hesitation from some officials:
Wouldn’t a U.S.-Taliban dialogue undermine Ghani?
Wells, the
acting assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, came up
with a formulation that overcame the final bureaucratic opposition. The
U.S. could engage in “talks, not negotiations.” It sounds like a
distinction without a difference, but there was substance to it. The
U.S. would explore with the Taliban mechanisms to kickstart a peace
process to which Washington would contribute under Afghan auspices. But
it wasn’t negotiating the future of Afghanistan — that would be up to
the Afghans themselves.
The State Department declined to answer
specific questions for this piece. But a spokesperson provided a
statement that seemed to echo the concept of U.S.-Taliban talks but not
such negotiations over far-reaching issues impeding on Afghan
sovereignty: “Our policy is to support an Afghan-led peace process. Any
negotiations over the political future of Afghanistan will be between
the Taliban and Afghan government. As Secretary Pompeo said in Kabul:
'United States will support, facilitate, and participate in these peace
discussions, but peace must be decided by the Afghans and settled among
them.' The United States stands ready to do so as requested by the
Government of Afghanistan.”
Kolenda, Raphel, and Cotta-Ramusino
boarded another plane on June 23. This one wasn’t headed to Doha, but to
Kabul. They spent the next week talking to some 40 different Afghans,
including major figures like Ghani, chief executive Abdullah Abdullah,
former president Hamid Karzai, and even the warlord and insurgent chief
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who entertained the Americans at his Kabul villa.
They heard, by and large, enthusiasm for the peace process and a sense
that the U.S. needed to help break the diplomatic logjam inhibiting it.
Publicly,
the U.S. still insisted there was no change in the works. But the
Pentagon was already preparing for the implications of a peace process.
According to a U.S. official, Dunford and Votel started “internal
advocacy” for a “path forward” to integrate Taliban fighters into the
Afghan national security forces in the event that the peace process
sufficiently matures. The Pentagon is already preparing a day when its
enemies and its clients functionally unite.
On July 23, Wells
arrived in Doha to talk with the Taliban. Taliban officials have
confirmed the meeting, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Asked by the Daily Beast, the State Department sidestepped the
existence of the meeting and has thus far only confirmed that Wells
visited Doha on that date. But the overture had begun.
Everyone
involved in the process emphasizes that it has barely begun. Every hard
question about the future course of Afghanistan, and the U.S. presence
within it, remains untested by the likely arduous diplomacy ahead. That
diplomacy must contend with the scars of two generations of war in
Afghanistan.
But it’s diplomacy among combatants. It’s not
fighting indefinitely with little more than gestures at maybe finding a
way out of conflict through training Afghans and gradually withdrawing,
as if the Taliban are irrelevant to the future.
“It’s our
responsibility and our duty to pursue a diplomatic solution to this
conflict and the way things have evolved in the last year or so, it’s
clear there is an opportunity. It’s our responsibility to seize it,”
Raphel said. “We can’t stand by and let it pass, considering the number
of Afghans, Americans and others who have died in this war.”
And
for Kolenda, the process ahead represents the closest thing the U.S. can
call victory: an accord on the future of Afghanistan to secure war aims
left over from the 9/11 attacks. “You’ve got to put personal
animosities aside and look at what’s in the national interest,” Kolenda
said. “It’s not easy to do. It’s not easy to put aside those personal
feelings. But you’ve got to do it, in order, essentially, to win a war
through a negotiated outcome. It’s an obligation.”
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