Coming to Terms With the Taliban

Washington’s playbook has been reduced to “drop back and punt” in Afghanistan. Everybody knows that there have been on-again off-again talks to obtain a political settlement, but there has been much speculation over what exactly is taking place since the Taliban ostensibly ended negotiations in March over U.S. hesitation to release five senior prisoners held at Guantanamo. The talks were nearly invisible in the press, even though their existence was confirmed by the Afghan and U.S. governments as well as by the Taliban itself. Such talks are the sine qua non for American departure from the country in 2014 because without an agreement a prolonged civil war with continued U.S. involvement is virtually guaranteed.
U.S. special envoy Marc Grossman has been engaging in shuttle diplomacy in Qatar, where the Taliban have a political office, as well as in Islamabad, Berlin, and Kabul to try to stitch together a post-2014 settlement, but he has not been able to claim any breakthroughs. The State Department and the intelligence community are acutely aware that without an agreement the situation in Afghanistan will eventually degrade into a major strategic defeat. The best current estimate by the CIA suggests that the wind-down by NATO forces over the next two years would produce an Afghanistan that is one-third controlled by the Taliban when the last foreign soldiers depart, with a gradual erosion of remaining support for the government in Kabul and eventual regime change. The Taliban too are having problems with falling morale and rising casualties, but they are able to exploit their safe havens in Pakistan to keep the government and NATO forces off balance. They are also boasting that they withstood the highly publicized U.S. surge of last year. The Taliban see themselves as winning the conflict and are reluctant to renew negotiations except as a ploy to buy time.

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