The US-Taliban Deal: A Year Later

On February 29, 2020, the United States and the Taliban — after having been at war for over 19 years — signed the historic Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan. The agreement stipulates that the Taliban will prevent anyone from using Afghan soil to threaten the United States and their allies and enter into negotiations with other Afghan sides to forge an Afghanistan that is also at peace with itself. In return, the U.S. promised to withdraw its military forces from Afghanistan. While some parts of the agreement have been implemented over the past year, others remain open and raise questions. Meanwhile, fighting between Taliban and Afghan government forces as well as terror attacks continue across Afghanistan.

Intra-Afghan Negotiations: Delayed and Ongoing

According to the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, intra-Afghan negotiations between the Taliban and other “Afghan sides” — the current Afghan government is, as a concession to the Taliban, not explicitly mentioned in the agreement — were supposed to start on March 10, 2020. However, they actually kicked off on September 12, 2020 in Doha, Qatar. The main reason for the delay was haggling over the release of Taliban prisoners, which was in turn caused by a lack of clarity as to what had actually been agreed upon. 

The start of negotiations was welcomed as a historic opportunity. But no one expected swift progress. Negotiating the U.S.-Taliban Agreement took 18 months — and the U.S.-Taliban negotiations covered considerably fewer and less controversial points than the intra-Afghan negotiations, which have the gargantuan task of reconciling the Taliban’s and Afghan government’s views about what a peaceful Afghanistan looks like. Accordingly, intra-Afghan negotiations were always going to be fraught and drawn-out in the best of cases.

“The gap of what the Taliban and the Afghan government want [out of a peace agreement] and on what they are willing to compromise is very large,” Afghan researcher Ibraheem Bahiss summarized. This refers to the Taliban’s demand for an “Islamic system,” which, although not further specified, means a major overhaul if not complete change of the current republican state on the one hand, and the Afghan government’s desire to safeguard most of the current constitution, which is vilified as a Western copy by the Taliban, on the other.

In any event, the intra-Afghan negotiations started with setting rules and procedures for the actual substantial talks. The rules were finalized on December 2, 2020, nearly three months after the start of negotiations. After a recess in late December, the intra-Afghan negotiations resumed in early January 2021. The Taliban delegation and Afghan-government team are currently negotiating on an agenda — talking about what exactly the actual substantial talks should be about. However, this has also not gone smoothly, with reports indicating that talks have stalled and may have even been suspended for several days in late January.

“The progress of talks has been extremely slow,” Bahiss said. “This is caused by the large gap between the negotiating sides as well as that all sides — the Afghan government, the Taliban, other Afghan actors participating in the negotiating team led by the Afghan government — have been hedging their bets, waiting to see what the new U.S. administration will do.”

As of writing, the Biden administration was just beginning to formally address Afghanistan policy. On January 22, a White House press release noted that National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had held a phone call with his Afghan counterpart, Hamdullah Mohib, in which he “made clear the United States’ intention to review the February 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement.” Where such a review will lead remains to be seen, but there are indications that the new U.S. administration might try to stick to the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, but seek adjustments.

Given the little time left, it is unlikely that intra-Afghan negotiations will yield any clear results by the end of April 2021 — the date set by the agreement for a full U.S. withdrawal.

Continuing Taliban Attacks

As the talks go on, fighting continues across Afghanistan — mainly because the Taliban, who had agreed not to attack U.S. personnel, have consistently rejected calls for a ceasefire with Afghan government forces.

“It does not make sense to end 20 years of war in one hour. In our perspective, it will be logical to discuss the main aspects of the problems and the war and then finalize a ceasefire so that the problem is resolved permanently,” Mohammad Naeem, the spokesman for the Taliban’s political office in Doha, Qatar, told TOLO News on September 16, 2020.

That said, Abdul Salam Hanafi, a member of the Taliban negotiating team, claimed in an interview with the Taliban outlet Al-Emarah that was broadcast on September 27, 2020, that “after the signing of the [U.S.-Taliban] Agreement the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan [i.e. the Taliban] have considerably brought the level of [military] operations down.”

The assertion of a considerable decrease in Taliban operations does not withhold scrutiny, however. For example, a recent report from the United Nations stated that “[f]rom 13 July to 12 November [2020], the United Nations recorded 10,439 security-related incidents, representing an 18 percent increase compared with the same period in 2019.” Armed clashes, which made up 63 percent of the mentioned incidents, increased by 38 percent when compared to the same period in 2019. The United Nations attributed “92 percent of all security-related incidents and 95 percent of armed clashes” in the mentioned period to “anti-government elements,” of which the Taliban form an overwhelming part.

While the Taliban reject such U.N. reports regularly as mere propaganda, other sources confirmed to The Diplomat that Taliban attacks have indeed increased. On January 8, 2021, a man from Zherai district in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar told The Diplomat via telephone that the situation in his district is “without doubt much worse” than a year ago. “The Taliban don’t only attack government positions more often, but these attacks also involve more Taliban fighters than before,” he added. Another civilian from Helmand’s Nad Ali district, which has often seen heavy fighting in the past few years, echoed the same sentiment.

In yet another example, an officer of the Afghan National Army told The Diplomat that “Taliban attacks on an army post in Mullah Nuh Bobo [a place in Andar district in Ghazni province, which is located along the main ring road connecting most parts of Afghanistan] have doubled or tripled in 2020 when compared to 2019.”

This culminated in a large attack on the night of December 8, 2020, that started with a car bomb and was followed by a ground assault of Taliban fighters, the officer added. “Army soldiers fended off the attack. However, some days later, we had to give up the heavily damaged post.”

The Taliban’s use of vehicles that are rigged with large amounts of explosives and driven into their targets by suicide operatives has, in general, increased. According to Hugo Kamaan, a researcher focusing on suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (SVBIEDs), the car bomb in Mullah Nuh Bobo was the 50th Taliban SVBIED that he had documented since August 20, 2020 — a frequency that has not been seen before. And there have been several more since.

An independent security analyst in Kabul confirmed the situation described above as, indeed, representative. “The number of security incidents recorded by our sources on the ground across the country during 2020 is significantly higher than in previous years, mostly because of an increase in Taliban attacks. And such an increase can be observed in the majority of provinces,” according to the analyst. 

“Amongst the increased Taliban attacks that came in different shapes, the most noteworthy were two large Taliban offensives in areas surrounding the provincial capitals of Helmand and Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in autumn 2020,” the analyst added. With these offensives the Taliban — despite U.S. forces supporting their Afghan counterparts with airstrikes — succeeded in strengthening their positions at the doorsteps of the provincial capitals of Kandahar and Helmand. This in turn affected, amongst others, the above mentioned districts of Zherai and Nad Ali.

In a reaction to the Helmand offensive, U.S. officials engaged the Taliban again diplomatically, announcing on October 15, 2020 that U.S. and Taliban representatives had “agreed to re-set actions by strictly adhering to implementation of all elements of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement and all commitments made,” which “means reduced numbers of operations.” Although the Taliban at least implicitly acknowledged the re-set, it did not stop them from launching a similar offensive in Kandahar in late October 2020 and fighting has remained at high levels across most of the country since.

Taliban Suicide Attacks in Cities

Since the signing of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, what the Taliban did do was refrain from conducting high-profile attacks in the capital Kabul and actually trying to overrun provincial capitals — both of which had occurred regularly in previous years — the security analyst noted. This is understood to be a Taliban pledge included in classified annexes to the U.S.-Taliban Agreement.

However, Hanafi’s assertion that the Taliban have ceased to conduct “very big” [suicide] attacks in cities is more than questionable. For example, on July 13, 2020, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a so-called complex attack involving a truck bomb and a subsequent assault by armed men in Aybak, the small-town capital of the northern province of Samangan. The attack targeted a compound of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s secret police, killing 10 government employees and wounding 54 other people, among them civilians.

Later suicide bombings with explosive rigged cars in cities such as the provincial capitals of Ghor, Khost, and Paktia, some followed by armed assaults, usually remained unclaimed. However, it is hard to think of any group other than the Taliban that would be able to conduct such attacks in those particular cities.

The fact that Taliban suicide attacks in cities have decreased was one of several reasons that led to a 30 percent reduction in civilian casualties in the first three quarters of 2020 when compared to 2019, despite the continued violence noted above. While this is a positive development, it is qualified by the fact that, although the Taliban have caused fewer civilian casualties, this was due to a decrease in causing injuries to civilians. The number of civilians killed by the Taliban actually increased from 922 in the first three quarters of 2019 to 1,021 in the same period in 2020.

Unclaimed Attacks and Assassinations

More worrisome is an increase in civilian casualties caused by undetermined insurgents — from 281 civilian casualties in the first nine months of 2019 to 415 in the same period of 2020. This was mainly caused by a significant decrease in claims for attacks. This is readily apparent from the Twitter accounts of the official Taliban spokesmen Zabihullah Mujahid and Yousuf Ahmadi. While their tweets before the signing of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement consisted largely of claims for minor and major attacks across the country, in the wake of the signing of the agreement such claims almost completely vanished from official Taliban tweets. Such claims appeared again more frequently during the latter half of 2020, although they still don’t seem to be as prevalent as before. As shown above, this is not caused by an actual decrease in Taliban attacks.

Many unclaimed attacks were most likely conducted by the Taliban. This conclusion derives not only from the fact that there is often no other actor that could have been behind such attacks, but also from unofficial Taliban claims. For example, pro-Taliban social media accounts have unofficially claimed several larger attacks in different provinces. While these unofficial claims could not be confirmed, they do seem credible. Furthermore, a Taliban member who is officially in charge of PR for one province continues to issue claims for incidents via an unpublicized WhatsApp group, while official Taliban channels remain silent.

Special cases of unclaimed attacks are assassinations of civil servants, human rights activists, and journalists, which are usually conducted with pistols or with explosives that are attached to the cars of the victims. While there are no official statistics available, the New York Times has documented the apparent targeted killings of at least 136 civilians and 168 members of Afghan government forces during 2020, describing this as higher than in “nearly any other year of the war.” The fact that since late 2020, hardly a day in Afghanistan has passed without such a killing seems to confirm this.

Afghan government officials accuse the Taliban of being behind these assassinations. However, the Taliban have rejected this and in hardly veiled language blame government officials. At least some of the assassinations might, according to sources quoted in the mentioned the New York Times article, also have been conducted by other factions that belong to neither the Taliban nor the government, but use the current murky situation to settle scores. However, in most cases the Taliban remain the most likely culprits. Whoever is behind these assassinations has continued to conduct them.

Airstrikes and Night Raids

Airstrikes and special forces night raids — praised by some as being an effective tool against the Taliban and other insurgents and criticized by others for causing civilian casualties that alienate locals — have decreased during the past year. Exact figures are hard to come by as the release of previously available official data has been discontinued. Publicly available data sets are inaccurate as they are based on U.S. and Afghan government as well as Taliban claims that have become rarer due to political considerations in the ongoing peace process.

However, a U.N. report from late 2020 confirms this author‘s observation on the ground that airstrikes have overall decreased. Specifically, the report stated that “[f]rom 13 July to 12 November [2020] (…) [t]he total number of air strikes decreased from 689 to 416,” apparently referring to the combined number of U.S. and Afghan Air Force airstrikes when compared to the same period in 2019. While it is not clear how exactly the airstrikes still being conducted are divided between the U.S. and the Afghan Air Force, U.N. figures on civilian casualties suggest that there has been a considerable decrease in U.S. airstrikes, but an increase in strikes conducted by the Afghan Air Force.

While the Taliban have several times accused U.S. forces of having conducted aerial bombings in an alleged breach of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, U.S. forces have argued that such strikes are being conducted in defense of Afghan government forces attacked by the Taliban and, hence, do not constitute a violation of the agreement.

Night raids have decreased even more drastically than airstrikes. “Since the signing of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement night raids by special forces have completely stopped in our area,” a resident of Saydabad, a district in the central province of Maidan Wardak, told The Diplomat by telephone on January 8, 2021. This was confirmed by a recent in-depth investigative report published by The Intercept, which documented an escalation of such night raids in Maidan Wardak between late 2018 and the signing of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, but also stated that there have hardly been such raids in Afghanistan in the past year.

Drawdown of U.S. Troops

Meanwhile, the U.S. has, during the past year, withdrawn a significant number of troops, at times rushing ahead of its obligations in the U.S.-Taliban Agreement that stipulated a phased withdrawal to be fully completed by the end of April 2021. While there were reportedly around 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the time of the signing of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, as of mid-January 2021 that number had dropped to only 2,500. This drawdown saw U.S. troops vacate several bases across Afghanistan — or, more accurately, the small separate parts of Afghan army bases where the few remaining U.S. forces were stationed. Such bases were namely located in or near Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province; Lashkar Goh, the capital of Helmand province; Gardez, the capital of Paktia province; Gamberi, in Laghman province; Shindand in Herat province; Farah, the capital of the province with the same name; Maimana, the capital of Faryab province; Pul-i Alam, the capital of Logar province; and Kunduz, the capital of the province with the same name.

Afghans express different feelings about the U.S. withdrawal. 

“It is good that U.S. troops left,” a civilian living in a village located on the road to the former U.S. base in Logar said. “When U.S. forces were here, there were many problems; the Taliban would often attack military vehicles coming from or going to the base with explosives or gunfire, frequently also in the bazaar of our village,” he remembered. “But now there is no fighting in the bazaar and the Taliban also don’t come here anymore.” 

A member of the Afghan security forces in Farah does also not miss U.S. forces, either, but for different reasons. 

“Since the signing of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, U.S. forces in Farah have barely conducted any operations. So it does not really matter that they left [in December 2020]. What use are they if they are here but don’t do anything against the Taliban who continue to launch frequent attacks all around Farah City?” he told The Diplomat in early January 2021.

However, other Afghans — including some who are very critical of the United States — had already earlier expressed their fears that a U.S. withdrawal in the absence of stable conditions might cause problems and even lead to chaos akin to the situation in the early 1990s after the Soviet withdrawal that was followed by a devastating civil war.

What will happen to the remaining U.S. troops was, at the time of writing, unclear. The full withdrawal is, according to the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, foreseen by the end of April 2021, but that is conditional. If strictly interpreted, the agreement ties the full U.S. withdrawal solely to the Taliban’s implementation of their counterterrorism guarantees. However, U.S. officials — including the new U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — seem to construe the U.S.-Taliban Agreement more broadly, putting emphasis on the interrelatedness of all parts mentioned in the agreement. Specifically, in the already mentioned phone call with his Afghan counterpart, Sullivan stated that the commitments of the Taliban do not only include cutting “ ties with terrorist groups” but also reducing “violence in Afghanistan, and to engage in meaningful negotiations with the Afghan government and other stakeholders.” With respect to the alleged obligation of the Taliban to cut ties with terrorist groups, Sullivan explicitly mentioned al-Qaida in an earlier interview.

Taliban, al-Qaida, and Other Foreign Fighters

Given that al-Qaida sanctuaries in Afghanistan were what caused the U.S.-led intervention in the country in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the first place, the obligation of the Taliban to cut ties with al-Qaida is a major issue for the United States.

As The Diplomat reported last August, the Taliban’s official denials of the presence of foreign fighters in Afghanistan stand at stark odds with official and independent reports, as well as statements by some Taliban fighters on the ground about such fighters. The existence of foreign fighters in Afghanistan was further corroborated by the killing of the Egyptian Hussam Abdur-Rauf, who was also known as Abu Mohsin al-Masri, as well as the Pakistani Mohammad Hanif — both alleged al-Qaida members — in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan in autumn 2020. In addition, in late December 2020 and early January 2021 several sources in the northeastern province of Badakhshan confirmed to The Diplomat that fighters from Central Asian states are still active among the Taliban in Badakhshan. These sources included recent Taliban defectors and civilians who had seen and talked to such foreign fighters. Independent of each other, sources identified several of the fighters by name, with the most prominent being Mawlawi Ibrahim from Tajikistan and Haji Furqan, a Uyghur who was apparently born in Kazakhstan.

However, it is — despite Sullivan’s statements and similar assertions by then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — questionable that the U.S.-Taliban Agreement requires the Taliban to break fully with al-Qaida. According to the text of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, the Taliban did not pledge to cut ties with al-Qaida, but “to prevent any group or individual, including al-Qaida, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” There is detailed and credible evidence that the Taliban are trying to prevent foreign fighters in Afghanistan from launching attacks in other countries by regulating and supervising them rather than by renouncing them. Given that the Taliban had already attempted this before the September 11 attacks — and failed — this is a questionable and risky approach. Nevertheless, the Taliban have shown no sign of altering their current course of trying to control foreign fighters. While the risk that such foreign fighters pose is at times exaggerated, this does not exonerate the Taliban from acknowledging the presence of such foreign fighters and addressing their presence more seriously. 

The Self-Declared Islamic State’s Afghan Chapter

Another terrorist group that is present in Afghanistan and often cited as a potential transnational threat is the Islamic State’s Afghan chapter, known as Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP) and referred to as Daesh, the Arabic acronym of the group, by Afghans. Contrary to other designated terrorist organizations like al-Qaida or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) with whom the Taliban have cooperated and are reportedly still cooperating, the Taliban not only reject the self-styled Islamic State but openly fight it due to ideological and other differences.

While ISKP, which appeared in Afghanistan in late 2014, at first managed to carve out strongholds in the eastern Afghan provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar, several sources confirmed to The Diplomat that, due to Taliban offensives and separate but simultaneous U.S. and Afghan government air and ground operations targeting the group, it had lost all territories under its control in late 2019 and early 2020. At that time, ISKP members surrendered in scores. Others, including several leadership figures, were killed or arrested throughout 2020 and early 2021, as was not only shown in various news reports and government communiqués but also confirmed to The Diplomat by independent well-placed local sources.

These setbacks were heavy, but some ISKP members remained operational — albeit underground — and, after a brief hiatus in late spring and early summer 2020 managed to again launch headline-grabbing attacks. The most notable of those attacks were a large-scale prison break in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar, on August 2 and 3, 2020; armed men storming Kabul University and shooting students on November 2, 2020; and a rocket attack in Kabul city on November 21, 2020. In addition, ISKP continues to regularly claim smaller attacks, often assassinations or detonations of low-yield improvised explosive devices, mainly in Kabul and Nangarhar province, as The Diplomat has verified via ISKP propaganda channels on messaging apps.

Conclusion and Outlook

The signing of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement as well as the start of intra-Afghan negotiations in 2020 raised hopes for peace in Afghanistan. However, the Taliban have not only continued but increased their attacks during the past several months and regularly shown that, at best, they interpret the U.S.-Taliban Agreement narrowly and at worst choose to take great liberties as to when it applies and when it does not. This has dampened expectations that the Afghan conflict will end any time soon. This is all the more the case as, while the Afghan government has halted larger ground operations in the past year, their frustration with ongoing Taliban attacks might change this situation sooner than later, as increased Afghan airstrikes suggest.

With intra-Afghan negotiations not even having scratched the surface of substantial talks, any swift breakthrough remains highly unlikely. This holds true in spite of the fact that a yet to be announced stance from the new U.S. administration might pressure all Afghan sides to move with more urgency.

That said, there is a considerable risk that the looming deadline for a full withdrawal by the end of April 2021 as foreseen in the U.S.-Taliban Agreement will lead to even more friction than exists already. The United States might – and not unjustifiably – argue that, as all other deadlines of the U.S.-Taliban Agreement had been missed, the date for a full U.S. withdrawal has to be adjusted, or that the Taliban have not lived up to their end of the deal and hence the contractual conditions for a full withdrawal are not (yet) in place. 

The Taliban, however, have already indicated that they will not accept a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan beyond the April 2021 deadline. Whether or not the Taliban might adjust such rhetoric to the exact circumstances is hard to predict. Accordingly, a lot will depend on whether the new U.S. administration decides to complete a full withdrawal or how they adjust the plan and what the subsequent Taliban reaction is. Scenarios range from a complete breakdown of the peace process to a continuation of negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, even if the Taliban withdraw from the U.S.-Taliban Agreement, but also mutual accusations from all sides that the respective other side is not serious about peace, with the latter being the more likely.

In view of this, there is little hope that Afghanistan will come to peace in the foreseeable future. And even if Taliban and Afghan government forces agree and actually implement a ceasefire, for which chances are currently low, some attacks would likely continue — be it in the form of unclaimed incidents or violence conducted by ISKP, which remains restricted to the underground, but has proven resilient all the same.