Brian M Downing
Serious negotiations have been underway to find a settlement for the eighteen-year war there. Actually, wars have been going on there since 1979 when local insurrections brought instability and Soviet intervention. All sides are weary of war. China wants stability to better exploit the country’s mineral wealth and to prevent ISIL from gaining a foothold. Perhaps the best sign of serious talks is the absence of a Taliban offensive this spring.
What might Afghanistan look like after an agreement? Will it be stable? Should the US seek to maintain a presence or head out through Khyber?
The settlement
Details of the talks aren’t known but a general outline can be surmised from the power positions of various groups.
The Taliban has long insisted on a US pullout. Russia, China, and Iran will press for that as well. There are no compelling US business interests. Almost all US concerns are in support of the war and development programs, not in the exploitation of the oil, copper, iron, and rare earths. Those are firmly in the hands of China and to a lesser extent India. The US may be offered the opportunity to continue funneling money into the Kabul government – a consolation prize of sorts.
The Taliban will govern large parts of the south and east, perhaps all of the Pashtun region. They have won control over swathes of the south and east by force of arms and also by providing a more competent and fairer government than Kabul has. As Bernard Fall once noted, a country losing an insurgency isn’t being outfought, it’s being outgoverned.
Foreign powers will funnel money to the government in Kabul but only after an elaborate system is arranged to distribute power and funds to local governments. These will include the Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, and Turkmen regions and their local powerholders, some of them leaders of the old Northern Alliance. This will attempt to restore the political formula of the past when Britain and later Russia bestowed money on Afghan kings, who then strategically distributed it in a manner that held the country together and kept rivalries in check.
Sources of instability
The outline of a settlement will be hard to arrive at and extremely difficult to implement successfully.
International jihadism is ensconced in parts of the Taliban regions. The Taliban itself is generally more concerned with building “Islamism in one country” but it has an internationalist wing. Nonetheless, the presence of rival Islamist groups is irksome. ISIL has a few cells in the country which are backed by Saudi money in order to channel their destructive energies against Iran. Other groups such as al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Islamist Moment of Uzbekistan are entrenched in the southeast and firmly backed by Pakistani intelligence and local Pashtun tribes who are violently hostile to most outsiders.
Even in Pashtun regions, peace will be hard to come by. Many tribes despise the Taliban and will oppose if not fight, literally, local Taliban government. It remains to be seen how harsh Taliban rule will be but if it returns to its old methods, it will face population loss, brain drain, and insurgency.
The peoples that composed the old Northern Alliance showed a measure of unity while fighting the Russians and later the Taliban, but enmities resurfaced at war’s end. This is likely to recur after an agreement. Rivals will bicker over disbursements from Kabul, water, and land. Feuds from a distant day will reignite.
China Inc has been buying up oil, copper, and iron assets. Chinese-built roads and railroads send raw materials out through Uzbekistan in the north, Pakistan in the south, and Iran in the west. Chinese engineers and workers are everywhere but keep low profiles. In coming years hostility toward them will replace that once felt for British troops in the nineteenth century, Russians in the twentieth, and Americans in the twenty-first. Yes, the future belongs to China – and they are welcome to it.
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Afghanistan holds very little security interest to the US. The American presence began after the 9/11 attacks as a rash, poorly thought out effort to destroy al Qaeda. It soon degenerated, predictably, into an unwinnable insurgency against a reconstituted Taliban. Osama bin Laden has been killed but al Qaeda is firmly ensconced there. Forty years of war have destroyed the country and turned its political leaders, from Kabul down to village elders, into corrupt, fractious thieves.
The US should welcome any settlement as an opportunity to get out of Central Asia and concentrate on pressing security interests elsewhere. While departure may be seen by some as dishonorable, it has the attraction of saddling US adversaries – Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan – with an endless and expensive burden.
© 2019 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.