By Omar Sadr

Published March 21, 2023 as part of a collection of essays produced from a colloquium hosted by the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies and the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC in July 2022. Introduction The post-2001 war in Afghanistan was fought between the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Taliban, and NATO led by the US from 2001-2021.

Introduction

The post-2001 war in Afghanistan was fought between the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Taliban, and NATO led by the US from 2001-2021. While the US-Taliban war ended through a negotiated settlement, the Republic of Afghanistan-Taliban war did not. The Republic-Taliban peace negotiations (September 2020-April 2021) which was the second phase of the Doha peace process ended with the fall of the Republic and the Taliban military victory. Using the bargaining challenge approach, this paper tries to answer the question of why the Republic-Taliban war did not last through a negotiated settlement. It argues that the bargaining problems between the Taliban and the government were exacting. First, it will examine the failure of a settlement between the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan based on the bargaining challenges. Then, it will analyze some of the key policy implications of the findings.

Bargaining Challenges and Failed Peace Talks

A settlement allows parties to find a negotiated agreement to resolve disputes over the power, resources, and nature of the state. The peace process in Afghanistan was imagined around one of the following types of settlement by each party of the conflict: power-sharing, formation of an interim government, and/or inclusion of the Taliban into an electoral process. The chances of resolving the Taliban conflict were doomed to failure as the necessary conditions for any of the three proposed formats of the settlement were not available.

Not every peace talk ends in a negotiated settlement. More importantly, not every peace agreement creates sustainable peace. The peace process fails if the necessary and sufficient conditions for an agreement are not available. The conflict resolution literature indicates that compared to interstate war, historically, civil wars have rarely ended with a negotiated political settlement. One of the key reasons that armed conflicts are less likely to end through a negotiated settlement is bargaining obstacles. This essay analyzes at least four bargaining challenges as causes of the failure of Afghanistan peace talks: the cost of war, the indivisibility of stakes, ambitious leaders and lack of mediations, and finally credible issues and lack of guarantors.

Cost of War

The cost assumption would argue that the Taliban and the Republic would have agreed on a settlement if the cost of the war was so high for the parties. A predominant assumption suggests that the conflict reached a stalemate between 2011 to 2014 when the Taliban could not advance into the main cities and the government could not recapture the rural eras. This has been a misleading assessment. Based on the Correlates of War, there are four costs in a war: stalemate, length of the war, magnitude (deaths per every thousand people), and intensity (deaths per month). Except for the military stalemate, the cost of the Afghanistan war in terms of intensity, magnitude, and duration had increased by the fall of the Republic on August 15, 2021. The 2021 Global Peace Index report indicated Afghanistan as the world’s least peaceful country as it had “the highest total number of deaths due to internal conflict of any nation.” 1 Technically, a military stalemate would be materialized when a lack of advancement in the battleground is coupled with a perception that the military balance will not change soon. The Taliban’s calculation of the stalemate was shaped by two factors.

First, the Taliban differentiated a military stalemate with the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) from a stalemate with the international troops. They did not consider ANA determinant in the stalemate. Second, the Taliban’s perception of military stalemate was also shaped by the reduction of international troops and the timeline of troop pullout since 2011. The Taliban assumed that with the withdrawal of the international troops, the military balance will change in their favor. Both these factors were evident in the scale of violence on the battlefield. A study of the Long War Journal showed that since 2017, the Taliban had gradually expanded its area of control. Though the Trump administration increased the level of troops in order to force 2 the Taliban to an agreement with the US, the Taliban significantly increased the level of violence across the country by all measures as soon as they signed the agreement with the US in February 2020 to test the capacity of ANA. In April 2021, when the Biden administration announced the complete withdrawal by September 2021, the Taliban captured around 80 districts. By the time the US left Bagram Air Base, the Taliban had claimed control of 220 out of 398 districts. Hence, 3 as winning militarily was more favorable for the Taliban, the conflict did not reach a “mutual hurting stalemate” between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban.

Indivisibility

A peaceful settlement would be unlikely when the stakes are difficult to divide. Conversely, the chance of a negotiated settlement increases as the stakes are divisible. The stake between the Taliban and the Republic was as high as difficult to divide. The Taliban did not claim a share of national revenues or local autonomy which would have been easily addressed. Rather, it aimed to take over the central government to remodel it based on a fundamentalist and tribal set of values and structures as an Emirate. On the other side, the government assumed that the survival of the Republic was at stake. Both sides saw an agreement as self-destructive. So, with the indivisible stake, the Afghanistan conflict was less likely to get into a successfully negotiated agreement.

Lack of concessions and the role of mediation

The third bargaining challenge to the peace negotiation was the lack of good communication and the existence of ambitious leaders in both the Taliban and the Republic which hindered compromise and concessions. This issue could have been addressed by a neutral and skilled mediator. First, both the Taliban and the Republic envisioned two different end states that reaching a middle ground not only required compromising leaders but also skillful mediators to support the parties in their search for compromise. From the beginning, the Taliban outlined its stance in vague and uncompromising terms such as establishing an Islamic state in Afghanistan.

A common thread between Ashraf Ghani’s two main peace proposals, the 2018 Road Map for Achieving Peace in November and the 2019 Seven Point Peace Plan was an effort to keep the status quo and the constitutional order. Presenting the third proposal, Securing End State: A Three-Phase Peace Roadmap in April 2021, four months before his unexcepted escape, he rejected an interim government and explicitly invoked elections as sources of legitimacy, presidential authorities based on the constitution, and the fact that he will not resign.

Moreover, the bargaining position of both sides and their deliberate negligence of the urgency of a peace agreement was also shaped by their understand about the role of the US troops. The government favored a status quo and did agree for concessions, as it thought the US military will prevent the collapse of the Republic and defend it against the offense of the Taliban. On the contrary, aware of the timetable of the withdrawal of the US troops, the Taliban tried to buy time and postpone the talks as much as possible. The Taliban’s negotiation tactic was to avoid negotiation. For instance, they denied participating in a regional summit in Istanbul planned for April 2021 at the very last minute. They were telling the government side that the dispute between them is not so intense, and it would be resolved very quickly once the international troops are out. The bargaining was also challenged by the fragmentation of the Republic team by factionalism both in Kabul and Doha. With a narrow and factional stance, Ghani consistently undermined the High Council for National Reconciliation (HCNR), an institution that was solely authorized to lead and manage the peace process, and deliberately violated the principles of consensus and inclusion on the government side. Kabul was divided on what sort of concession should be given to the Taliban and what should be denied. While Ghani denied a power-sharing transition government, many other politicians including the opposition and HCNR were open for this option. This made numerous opposition politicians in Kabul reach out to the Taliban as an independent party apart from the government.

To bring these divergent positions to a compromise, strong, credible, and skilled mediation was required. Qatar, which was facilitating the talks, was perceived by the government of Afghanistan as a biased party with a vested interest. And the American chief negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad’s intentions were also questioned by Ghani and his close aides. Khalilzad tried to follow Álvaro de Soto and Richard Holbrook’s single-text mediation model applied respectively in El Salvador and Bosnia by presenting a peace agreement draft proposal to the parties in January 2021.

However, as the US agreed on a timeline to withdraw its troops in Afghanistan by May 2021, Khalilzad did not have enough leverage on the parties to persuade them to compromise and strike a deal. The only entity that partially accepted the draft was HCNR. Bringing together most of the political parties, HCNR presented a proposal that was closer to the State Department’s draft in terms of the format of the transition, but it departed from it on two points. First, it proposed the 2004 constitution as a legal framework unless it contradicts the agreement. Second, it suggested a decentralized administrative model for the transition period. Not only the Taliban did not give the proposals serious consideration, but they also did not offer any peace proposal. The Taliban’s denial to participate in negotiations after April 2021 deprived a chance of negotiation for both HCNR and Khalilzad’s proposed agreements

Guarantees and Guarantors

The lack of a credible and capable guarantor was the last bargaining challenge in the peace process. A credible guarantor provides assurances to the parties that their existence would not be endangered during the peace accord implementation and the guarantor will hold all parties accountable for their promises. A credible guarantor is one who has an interest in fulfilling its promises as it guarantees to the parties. Moreover, a capable guarantor has the capacity to use forces as a sanction to enforce the terms of the agreement, in case one party does not comply with it. Given the intensity of the conflict between the Taliban and the government, a strong guarantor capable of the use of force was needed. During the talks with the US, the Taliban asked European and Asian countries to play the role of guarantors.

However, during the talks with the Republic, it did not ask for a guarantor. Similarly, Ghani reiterated the National Security Forces as the guarantor of Afghanistan. He totally ignored the need for an external guarantor. Russia and China whose subtle objective was to ensure the full withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan volunteered to take responsibility as a guarantor in mid-2019. However, when it come to the Republic-Taliban talks, it was evident that their proposal was a weak verbal guarantee with no enforcement capacity. Ghani showed little interest in using the opportunity offered by Russia and China. On the other hand, Pakistan which had a substantial influence over the Taliban denied playing the role of a guarantor. 

In the absence of a credible and strong guarantor in the region and within the Muslim majority states, the only option left was the US troops on the ground. As in the 1958 Lebanon agreement, where the US maintained fourteen thousand troops as guarantors, the US should have proactively played the role of a guarantor in Afghanistan. This would have ensured that the belligerents do not walk away from the bargaining table. After signing the agreement, it would have also ensured the security of the parties, cessation of the hostilities, and survival of an agreement. This leverage was lost when the US-Taliban deal in February 2020 set a 14-month timeline for the withdrawal of the US troops. The US also continuously signaled to the parties that whether they make an agreement or not, it is pulling its troops out.

Agreeing on a fixed timeline to withdraw troops was also in contradiction with the initial principles of the negotiations played out by Khalilzad: “nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed.” The US should have conditioned the withdrawal of troops to a successful peace agreement between the Republic and the Taliban. In the absence of a credible and capable guarantor, the challenge of credibility of commitment between the Taliban and Ghani remained untouched. Each side perceived the outcome of the talks as zero-sum which threatened their existence.

Policy Implications

Some important lessons could be drawn from the failure of the peace talks in Afghanistan. First, the failure of peace negotiation in a complicated and protracted conflict such as Afghanistan has numerous causes. The bargaining challenge approach can explain some of the causes of the failure. However, one should not neglect the role of ideational factors such as ideology and identity in Afghanistan. The three-decade war of the Taliban was equally driven by a parochial and contested Afghan nationalism and a fundamentalist political Islam. On the other side, the Republic was envisioned based on a constitutional order which guaranteed a set of fundamental rights for the citizens and established democratic order but also Afghan nationalism. The belligerent parties had incommensurable values and conceptions about rights, liberty, a system of governance, nationhood and the role of Islam.

Second, the bargaining challenge analysis shows that the high cost of the war in terms of duration of the war, intensity, and magnitude, and the offer of mediation did help in the initiation of the negotiation but none of them help the peaceful end of the conflict. The reasons were the absence of a strong security guarantee to address the security dilemma of the parties, poor mediation, lack of a mutually hurting stalemate, and the indivisibility of the stakes.

Third, the Taliban assume that a decisive victory is the end of the Afghanistan conflict. On the contrary, the peace studies literature indicates that the chances of peace failure are 200% higher following a military victory of an insurgent compared to a government victory in the first year of victory. No need to mention that peace failed right at the time the Taliban declared a victory as 5 the National Resistance Front challenged the Taliban. The conflict in Afghanistan would not be resolved until the background causes such as deep contention over the identity, values, ideology, and mechanisms for distribution of resources and power including the structure of the state are not resolved.

By Omar Sadr

Mass deprivation and transgression of women’s rights and the establishment of gender apartheid are often presented as a reflection of cultural and ideological norms and assumptions. This does not suggest that certain cultures are more prone to gender apartheid than others; rather, a state or actor opts to neglect the universality of the regime of rights and appropriates a cultural justification for its policies.

Viewing such a situation through the lens of cultural relativism counters the universality of human rights and presents culture, religion, and customs as bases for the entitlement of rights. In other words, cultural relativism restricts women’s rights as they apply to “their” ascriptive cultures or religions. This contribution considers the cases of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran and argues that relativism denies human rights by demarcating a false line between the universal and the local.

The Taliban, Iran, and Cultural Relativism

While practices of mainstream Muslims across the world defy the limitation of fundamental rights, authoritarian and in certain cases sultanistic regimes in the Muslim world have enforced a conservative form of Sharia law in an idiosyncratic manner. Of all of them, the Islamic Emirate of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Ayatollahs in Iran share a common policy of subjugating and segregating women, to the extent that it constitutes what scholars such as Abdelfatah Amor, Ann Mayer, and Karima Bennoune have termed “gender apartheid.”[1]

Moreover, Juan Cole has argued with respect to the first Taliban rule (1996-2001) and the Ayatollahs of Iran (1980s) that both regimes privatize women by redrawing the line between public and private and bringing medieval motifs to “the modern re-creation of power as representation” and exercising “power as spectacle.”[2] The same logic prevails in the second, current phase of the Taliban, whose project of political Islam emphasizes the privatization of women.

As the Taliban regime is an ethno-religious group that relies both on Afghan ethno-nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, cultural relativists justify gender apartheid with reference to both Pashtun culture and Islam. Cultural relativism, in this case, is based both on local culture and transnational Islamic fundamentalism. Similarly, narrators and defenders of cultural relativism are both local and international.

For instance, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative in the United Nations, Munir Akram, said in a UN meeting in February 2023 that the Taliban’s restriction on women’s rights is rooted in Pashtun culture. He argued, “[T]he restrictions that have been put by the Afghan interim government flow not so much from a religious perspective as from a peculiar cultural perspective of the Pashtun culture, which requires women to be kept at home.”

A few months beforehand, in December 2022, Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan made a similar argument in an OIC meeting: “[E]very society’s idea of human rights and women’s rights are different…If we are not sensitive to cultural norms of these people, even with stipends people in Afghanistan won’t send their girls to school.”

Such remarks by a neighboring country that has been accused of having a vested interest in supporting and preserving Taliban rule can be considered colonialism in that the use of cultural relativism by a foreign actor to justify the deprivation of a group’s rights is a mark of such a system. In other words, colonialism deprived the colonized of their right to self-determination based on relativist assumptions. As Maryam Namazie has argued, cultural relativism is a “racist phenomenon” as it legitimizes the deprivation of rights by segregating people in the same country based on religion. This can be observed in a few cases in Western democracies where Muslim asylum seekers and refugees are treated based on Sharia law. In some of these cases, this has led to ghettoization.

Though many secular nationalists in Afghanistan denounced the remarks from Pakistan, their narrative is also reductionist in that it portrays the Taliban exclusively as Pakistan’s proxy. Such an approach prevents a holistic perspective that considers the domestic sources of the Taliban’s conservative communalism. For instance, on 11 September 2022, the Taliban Minister of Education, Noorullah Munir, framed Taliban practices and beliefs as cultural during a visit to the southern province of Urozgan, arguing that residents do not want their daughters to attend school: “The culture is clear to everyone,” he said. Similarly, on 4 December 2022, Taliban Minister of Higher Education Nida Mohammad Nadim claimed that “education for women clash[es] with Islam and Afghan values.” One should not be surprised by the resemblance between the Taliban phrase “Afghan and Islamic values” and the Saudi Arabia Basic Law of Governance’s phrase “Arab-Islamic values,”[3] as both regimes implement a patriarchal system of segregation and the subjugation of women.

Despite these domestic cultural arguments, it is clear that the Taliban’s gender apartheid is not simply due to culture. Rather, it stems from specific political forms and decisions. First, the Taliban constitute a heightened authoritarian regime that manifests features of sultanism. According to Weber, a sultanistic regime is a government in which domination “operates primarily on the basis of discretion.” Totalitarianism is distinguished from a sultanistic regime through the level of autonomy of its state institutions. A totalitarian regime rules through its institutions, but in a sultanistic regime state institutions cannot veto the leader’s decisions; they must simply obey. While certain Taliban figures disagree with some of the gender policies of the regime, they cannot challenge the discretion of the decision of Habitullah Akhunzada.

Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz argue the transition from a sultanistic regime to democracy is less likely to happen peacefully compared to other types of authoritarian regimes as the soft liners would be suppressed by the Sultan.[4] If peaceful transfer to democracy is not an easy process, definitely addressing apartheid in a sultanist regime would also not be easy.

Second, Taliban apartheid is based on denial. For instance, in 1998 Said Shahidkhayl, the Taliban deputy minister of education, claimed that the Taliban have not only “recognized personhood and private autonomy of women” but also “improved women’s conditions.”[5] Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s current spokesperson, claims the same. The group also obscures reality by justifying their policies as short-term measures to be reversed. Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban representative in Qatar, for instance, stated that provisions with respect to women are temporary and will be removed as soon as appropriate conditions are developed. As Ann Mayer has written, the authoritarian Muslim state resorts to “equivocations, obfuscations, and hypocrisy”[6] with respect to women’s rights.

When in 2007 Saudi Arabia was challenged on its denial of the ban on women driving at the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee, the Saudi delegate claimed that “[t]here is no legal provision banning women from driving cars.”[7] Many restrictions on women in Afghanistan and Iran are also not stipulated in statutory laws. This lack of formal provisions can be understood in two ways. First, some restrictions originate from customary provisions such as Mullahs’ and Ayatollahs’ fatwas that are not regularly documented. Second, the Taliban does not have bureaucratic capacity and is still unaccustomed to running the state through formal regulations and bureaucracy. Hence, it at times rules by its leader’s verbal decrees. For the same reason, their policies are not implemented in a consistent manner. Therefore, one should be conscious of not falling into the trap of Taliban equivocations. Instead, their denials should be exposed.

The public execution of violence against women is also a political exercise of power as a spectacle through which the Taliban affirm their authority. Like their first era in the 1990s, the second phase of the Taliban is engaging in public whippings and amputations, as well as the public display of corpses.

Scholars’ analyses of cultural relativism reveal the tensions in coming to terms with communal values versus individual autonomy and human rights, and ultimately demonstrate the danger in using culture and religion to justify gender apartheid. 

Cultural Relativism and the Academy

Relativist scholars such as Alison Renteln advocate for ethical relativism, arguing that no truth assertion is acceptable if it is based on an abstract universal principle ignoring specific culture. Accordingly, she believes that a cross-cultural base for human rights increases the likelihood of its acceptability.[8] On the contrary, refuting the relativist argument, Reza Afshari believes that relativism overemphasizes the cultural significance of state administration of societies in the Muslim world, while Islamist rule such as that of Khomeini is driven by political interest. According to Afshari, “[T]he unrealized Islamic expectations in Iran indicate the problems of a discourse that assumes cultural primacy for a legal foundation for human rights in the modern state.”[9] Afshari argues that drawing a cultural foundation for human rights in a context where the state redefines culture and “subjects it to its modus operandi” is highly unlikely to ensure rights.

For Afshari, the Muslim cultural relativists who aim to amend the universal human rights scheme fall into two groups. The first includes those who want to Islamize modernity and human rights. They reject the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), labeling it as a Western value and instead offer a human rights scheme in accordance with Sharia. The second includes those interested in presenting an Islamic base for a modern human rights scheme. In other words, their project is the “modernization” of Islam.

The Islamic Emirate of the Taliban and the Islamic Republic of Iran belong to the first group as they reject the regime of human rights by calling it Western. As Mayer has noted, the Taliban label Afghanistan’s women activists as “servile imitators of the West” and “agents of Western cultural imperialism”[10] Conservative opponents of the Taliban who tend to draw from Islam for a rationale of women’s rights belong to the second group. However, the inability of the Muslim world to amend the gender apartheid policies of the Taliban and Iranian theocratic regimes’ persistent gender apartheid demonstrates that neither the Islamization of modernity nor the modernization of Islam has been able to address this problem.

This failure stems from a multiplicity of human rights schemes that are inherently paradoxical and at times contradictory. According to Mayer, “The relevant textual authorities are conflicting and scant.”[11] For instance, the reconciliation of women’s Islamic rights to enjoy legal rights, to own property, and to do business while avoiding contact with men has not been resolved. Mayer’s research highlights that each Muslim country has developed its own scheme of human rights at the national level that it claims as Islamic though there is no consistency among the various schemes. What unifies them, according to Mayer, is their provision with respect to the regulation of women. Comparing the 1979 Iranian constitution, the 1978 Al-Azhar Drafted Constitution, the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), and the 1992 Saudi Basic Law of Governance, Mayer finds that none firmly acknowledge gender equality and instead contain provisions that confine women to the domestic sphere. A stark commonality between these laws and Taliban rhetoric is the use of the vague phrases, “within the framework of Sharia” or “principles of Sharia.”

Rejecting Cultural Relativism and Advocating for Women’s Rights 

To end the gender apartheid regime, global human rights defenders and the international community must not only reject cultural relativism but should also use all available tools to end the Taliban’s exercise of power as spectacle. Working with the current campaigns for women’s rights in Afghanistan is critical.

In Afghanistan, the women’s movement has three forms: social movements, transnational networks, and professional organizations. The women’s social movement is a grassroots movement inside the country of students and women who previously worked as civil servants, teachers, librarians, and journalists; this group continuously organizes non-violent protests. Transnational networks are composed of former female politicians, parliamentarians, and civil society activists, as well as women human rights defenders, who are mainly in exile in the West. Finally, professional organizations are a small set of the remnants of republican Afghanistan enterprises, civic organizations, and educational institutions that are now partially underground. They support women by providing humanitarian support, access to the legal system, domestic violence shelters, and skill development.  

These campaigns transcend the Muslim relativism stance and attempt to follow the universal human rights scheme. This is necessary, as advocating for the recognition of gender apartheid is based on international law and universal norms of human rights. In the words of the feminist scholar and sociologist Valentine Moghadam, “The women’s rights movement is not ‘identity movements’ but rather democratic and democratizing movements.”[12]

At the same time, the Afghanistan women’s movement and other peaceful resistance show that human rights do not need a common moral foundation as the universalists call for. The mere fact that people claim their rights against Taliban oppression and subjugation proves the appeal of a human rights claim. In this regard, Michael Goodhart’s argument, which suggests that contestation over human rights should not be considered contestation over moral truth, rings true. The global appeal of human rights does not require a common moral foundation, and the fact that modern human rights norms are not incompatible with local values and cultures does not make them irrelevant to society. Rather, Goodhart argues that “human rights may appeal to people enduring subjection because of their transformative potential, both of which depend on compatibility with oppressive social arrangements and the conceptions of dignity that suffuse and legitimate them.”[13]

Read at Jadaliyya