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Wednesday, 11 September 2024

To Save Afghanistan, Try Differently

Published in News

By Sayed Madadi

As global attention shifts further away from Afghanistan to Ukraine and elsewhere, time is running out to change course before the country’s freefall under the Taliban becomes irreversible. There is no silver bullet for the problems facing Afghanistan and some of what is needed and possible could very well require uncomfortable, tough decisions and strategic patience to yield any results. But pivoting away from the counterproductivity of current efforts to appease the Taliban, as I have argued before, is necessary if the country’s future is to be saved.

Proponents of ongoing leniency justify it in the name of averting worse outcomes, such as the rise of Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), a deadly civil war, or a full-scale famine. They fail to acknowledge, however, that the Taliban are not a guard against those worries, but rather an enabler of them. According to the U.N., since the Taliban’s takeover, the economic catastrophe is only deepening toward a point of irreversibility despite more than $2 billion spent in aid, and ISKP recruitment has increased dramatically. Therefore, if Afghanistan is to avoid any or all of those outcomes, the limits of the Taliban’s ability and willingness to change must be put to the test. The international community needs a two-pronged, interlinked approach to normalize the economy and stabilize the political scene. While economic support could incentivize commercial activity, it is the political solutions that will ensure stability.

Supporting People: Minimal but Effective

The first step should be to rethink the current aid architecture, focusing on effectiveness, accountability, and conditionality. It is critical for aid money to build resilience by supporting economic activity at the local level instead of fueling further dependency through short-term, piecemeal interventions. Efforts should rely on domestic capabilities, especially human capital, to minimize costs, cater to local needs, increase employment, and sustain capacity for the future. Even after the departure of hundreds of thousands of educated Afghans, enough operational and technical expertise remains to execute such programs. Additionally, supporting small businesses and entrepreneurship, especially in the areas of food production, basic commodities, and agriculture, would help to rebuild local supply chains given the complexities that remain around international trade and transactions. The growth of grassroots civil society in recent years as foreign funding dried up shows that such times of crisis also provide opportunities for creativity. One solution is to let an international organization such as the ICRC manage the Afghanistan Red Crescent Society in order to play a more robust role in humanitarian response. The organization suffers from corruption and low capacity, but it also has the widest reach of any indigenous institution. Ensuring its independence by removing it from Taliban control and boosting its efficiency by decentralizing its operations would allow for the incorporation of local perspectives in the implementation of what is now a fully foreign-driven agenda.

The accountability of aid money is just as important as many have already raised concerns about the transparency of these programs. There has been, unsurprisingly, reluctance on the part of U.N. agencies whose overhead costs are disproportionately high compared to their programmatic spending to be fully open to outside scrutiny, including from the media. There is also a growing trend of NGOs mushrooming to undertake humanitarian activities similar to the early days of the post-2001 era. It is important not to repeat mistakes of the past. In 2015, I reviewed financial documents from the two largest national NGOs: the Afghanistan Development Association (ADA) affiliated with Jilani Popal, the former head of local governance, and Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance (CHA), then run by Salam Rahimi, who later became President Ashraf Ghani’s chief of staff. They both had submitted the same report to the Ministry of Economy for more than five consecutive years — each year executing around $12 million in development money. Recently, I also came across an organization engaging in humanitarian activity that, in addition to what it officially charges for its services in distributing aid, had a designated line in its fundraising appeal for donations as “tips,” without clarifying where the money would go. Humanitarian response can provide employment, but it must not turn into a lucrative business enterprise.

To that end, three layers of accountability measures are necessary. At the highest, the international organizations should have regular reporting cycles to publicize the financial and programmatic details of their activities. Entities such as Transparency International and Freedom House that track global accountability and access to information can partner with credible platforms such as Etilaat-e-Roz newspaper in setting up a designated accountability portal to track the expenditure of international aid in Afghanistan. Parallel to that, local and community-level accountability platforms should be set up to involve beneficiaries. This is important not just in identifying the right priorities, but also in supporting community-engagement practices that would strengthen the foundations for any meaningful democratic experiment in the future. To avoid commercialization and duplication, a uniform structure should be built into the design of aid programs based on past experience and existing institutional foundations. As a third-layer support system, easy-to-use, homegrown technological solutions could allow access to information, crowd-sourced reporting and documentation, and cost-effective feasibility studies and impact evaluations.

While the rapidly deteriorating economic situation and the power vacuum left by the disintegration of the republican state pushed the international community to assume the primary responsibility for mitigating the crisis in Afghanistan, the Taliban must begin to play their role if the outside world is to entertain any further meaningful engagement. It is obvious that humanitarian aid alone cannot solve all of Afghanistan’s problems. A calibrated degree of conditionality, thus, is necessary to prevent increasing aid from empowering the Taliban and to gauge their will to transform. Conditionality of aid and more robust diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, however, must be part of a comprehensive architecture with specific expectations of deliverables rather than vague, immeasurable commitments such as those made by the group in the Doha Agreement. Efforts thus far have failed to account for such delicacies. The U.S. Treasury comfort letters and general licenses allow transactions on issues related to “rule of law, citizenry participation, government accountability and transparency, human rights, access to information and civil society” without accounting for the shrinking space for such work under a cabinet full of sanctioned terrorists. Blank checks like these could foster aid embezzlement on the one hand and help cement the Taliban’s rule on the other.

Demands for gradual sanctions relief, asset defreezes, and similar actions should solicit in return clear changes in behavior from the regime. The Taliban must immediately end its campaign of arbitrary retribution and address the problem of legal ambiguity by acknowledging the validity of previous legal frameworks until they are reviewed — a key step to any economic and political normalcy. Moreover, the international community must define a series of fundamental non-negotiables to support and protect the people of Afghanistan against the Taliban. Key among them are the rights and civil liberties of women. It cannot be acceptable in 2022 for a regime, under whatever pretense, to remove half the population from public life. The international interest in paying the salaries of teachers and medical workers must be used as meaningful leverage to not only open schools to girls, but also influence the content of the curriculum and the broader issue of women’s employment. Of course, conditionality can only be effective if violations are met with credible consequences.

Additionally, access to the Central Bank’s foreign reserves must be conditioned on reforming its Board of Governors to include international representatives such as officials from the International Monetary Fund, allowing robust independent monitoring mechanisms as many have suggested, and fully implementing the Central Bank Law. The Taliban must allow this board to appoint an independent expert as governor of the bank and monitor recruitment and operational processes at senior levels. The issue of Afghanistan’s assets abroad, however, goes beyond the bank’s reserves. There are commercial properties abroad that produce revenue, hundreds of military aircraft in neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan the fate of which has not been declared, hundreds of millions of afghanis in an European country that were printed in the last months of the republic, and a growing number of embassies vacated by diplomats as they run out of resources and supplies, including blank passports. A comprehensive but lean arrangement such as an U.N.-mandated taskforce involving other entities like the Asian Development Bank and Organization of Islamic Cooperation, can be established to manage all of Afghanistan’s foreign belongings until a truly representative government is in place in Kabul.

Political Roadmap: Decentralized Pluralism

Interventions to address the economic crisis can only be effective if political solutions are also implemented in parallel to ensure lasting stability. The Taliban have taken their grip on power and their brutality to new heights in an environment of legal ambiguity and political uncertainty. The best solution remains a political process to define a roadmap for the country’s future that would include all segments of Afghan society. A decentralized, pluralistic configuration would cater to the country’s political and socio-cultural diversity. The Taliban have utilized operational decentralization in their insurgency and know its merits well. They have to give in to political decentralization to ensure a basic level of stability and even their own survival. During the peace talks in Doha, they showed some degree of openness in informal engagements to democratic practices at the local level. Their rejection of national elections stems as much from their ideological rigidity, which considers sovereignty to be divine, as from their insecurity about winning public votes. Thus, pressuring them to allow other ethnic groups and political forces to define preferred forms of government in their regions would be a starting point, especially if they continue to dominate national politics.

Such a political process should be comprehensive and multilayered. One of the reasons the Doha talks failed was because of the simplicity of their design and the lack of a comprehensive, long-term roadmap. The reliance on a single-track direct negotiation would make the entire process vulnerable to the whims of individual actors, who could sabotage it when their narrowly defined interests are not served maximally. Additionally, it would limit the space for broad representation by enabling a select group of individuals on behalf of wide and diverse constituencies without necessarily speaking for their interests or being accountable to them. It also does not need to begin with the immediate conventional practices of holding grand meetings and conferences. That was what happened in Bonn in 2001 and in the Doha talks in 2020 and it proved disastrous. The last thing the international community should do is to bring back the corrupt old guards or to mobilize a new such class. The focus should be on structural changes rather than tokenistic incorporation of individuals into the Taliban’s emirate.

Such a political process should begin with a series of unilateral measures by the Taliban to establish trust and their willingness to work with others. They should realize that despite a near absolute hold on power, they are on the vulnerable end of any potential conflict. The unsuccessful talks in Doha can possibly provide a foundation to build on. For example, the U.N. should demand the Taliban sign the principles document that was developed in preparation for the Istanbul talks that ended up not taking place. This short document asked the Taliban to commit to civil liberties, democratic processes, equality of all citizens, and freedom of expression, among others, as the guiding principles of any meaningful negotiations. More broadly, the world should pressure the Taliban to provide the bare minimum of an environment conducive to political activity. Coherent and credible alternatives will eventually emerge on the ground in organic and indigenous ways. A basic level of protection for political dissent and diversity is required to ensure those alternatives are non-violent. The Taliban’s intransigence must be seen not as a constant to accept but an obstacle to overcome.

Precondition: Collective Action

Admittedly, achieving these objectives will not be easy. But any chance of success requires reestablishing the credibility and authority of the international community — which equally suffers from a trust deficit — so it can play a positive and effective role. The first step in doing so is better internal coordination and cohesiveness. Disunity and lack of consensus have been one of the key factors undermining global efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan. There appears to be a lack of coordination even between the two American envoys: Rina Amiri, who is communicating a more critical approach on human rights, and Thomas West, who often appears more ready to compromise on the political front. It is imperative to mobilize more cohesively in pressuring the regime. Individual bilateral engagements only bolster the Taliban’s ability to bargain and play multiple stakeholders against each other. Additionally, working with regional countries remains critical to the effectiveness of external efforts. Using a more robust and coherent strategy of carrots and sticks can still yield some results.

The other component is a holistic, multi-dimensional negotiation strategy. The Taliban use a maximalist approach that starts negotiations from very low bars in order to use every ordinary matter as a point of leverage. For example, contrary to previous promises and assurances, they have taken the entire country and its people hostage, partly to use as bargaining chips against the international community to solidify their rule. The outside world, however, barely knows what it wants from the regime and what it would do if its demands are rejected. The European Union reopened its diplomatic mission in Kabul despite none of its five-point engagement benchmarks being fully met. Similarly, while almost all of Taliban leadership are on multiple sanction lists, they are roving around the globe, as we recently saw in Turkey, to expand diplomatic alliances; they are also expected in London for an upcoming donor conference. In order to negotiate effectively, the international community needs to have clarity about its interests and priorities. Limiting engagement with the Taliban to the U.N. mission in Kabul and the group’s Doha office by penalizing travel against sanctions would be an example of such strategic calibration. Sanctions will not have any consequences for the Taliban if transgressions (by the regime and members of the international community) are not addressed. Unless the international community uses its leverage effectively, it will soon have to give in even more helplessly than it already has — all to the detriment of Afghanistan’s future and undermining its own national security interests.

Sayed Madadi was the Director of Foreign Relations at Afghanistan’s State Ministry for Peace and a Senior Member of the Joint Technical Secretariat of Afghan Peace Negotiations in Doha, Qatar. He tweets at @madadisaeid. The views expressed in this piece are his own.

Read at Middle East Institute

 
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Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Afghanistan’s Public Intellectuals Fail to Denounce the Taliban

Published in News

By Omar Sadr

The exponents of Afghan ethno-nationalism desperately aim to present a benign image of the Taliban.

Unlike most societies, political alignment in Afghanistan is not divided along the right and the left axis. Most of the policy debates in the last two decades of the so-called republic were shaped by the right — either Afghan/Pashtun ethnonationalism or political Islam. At times, both these political strands were amalgamated with naive populism. 

Currently, political fragmentation and polarization under the Taliban have become an existential conflict over culture and ethnicity. The Taliban are a terrorist group, having successfully synthesized both Islamic extremism and Pashtun/Afghan ethnic chauvinism as their ideology. Ironically, they rule over one of the most diverse countries in the world.

The Taliban use two vague criteria to dismiss all progress made in the past two decades or, for that matter, any undesirable but transformational changes that occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s: Afghan and Islamic values. The first category denies internal social diversity while the second rejects Islamic pluralism. After usurpation of power by force, the group proudly boasted of committing over a thousand suicide attacks. Now, it is officially forming a suicide bombers brigade within its security agencies. 

Organic Intellectuals

The exponents of Afghan ethnonationalism desperately aim to present a benign image of the Taliban. Having fundamental, political and social ties with the Taliban, in the words of Antonio Gramsci, they form the Taliban’s “organic intellectuals.” Unlike the traditional intellectuals, Gramsci argues, organic intellectuals are linked with a social class. Contrary to Gramsci, I use it as a negative term as they represent the extreme right. Their genuine undeclared mandate is to articulate and represent the interests and perceptions of the Taliban and to downplay the risks of the group’s rule.

In other words, these organic intellectuals are systematically engaged in PR for the Taliban. The irony is that the same people are recognized as the voices of Afghanistan rather than of the Taliban in Western academic and think-tank circles. Afghan ethnonationalism and its exponents are only challenged by the Persian-speaking Tajik and Hazara intellectuals, whose voices have been relegated to the margins due to acceptance of the Taliban order as the new normal.

The organic intellectuals have the nature of a chameleon, speaking in two different languages to address different audiences and constituencies. On the one hand, they praise and welcome the establishment of the so-called “order,” albeit Taliban-centric, but, with a liberal audience, they speak the language of peaceful coexistence, “cultural particularism,” relativism and political pragmatism. To incorporate such a self-contradictory stance, they adopt a fence-sitting position.

The justifications of the Taliban made by these organic intellectuals contradict both the realist and moralist approaches in political philosophy. First, let us address the five justifications before returning to the philosophical questions.

The Taliban Order

To begin with, treating the Taliban-centric order as default and ignoring the ideological dimension of the Taliban, it argues that the group is adaptable to political and policy reforms. Thus, it tries to undermine the possibility of a thorough transformation of the current scenario through any means.

The telos of political reform is expanding the horizons of rights and liberties. In a totalitarian regime, the goal of reform is not to improve the condition of individuals and communities but to consolidate the regime’s power. To suggest political reform essentially means to work with the existing political framework, not its transformation. This entails admitting the terms and conditions of the totalitarian regime.

Compared to reforms in an authoritarian regime, the prospect of successful political reform and change toward emancipation in the totalitarian regime is limited because, in the latter, the state is based on a rigid doctrinal ideology. An ideological state does not accommodate change and reform unless there is an alteration in the constituent ideology. The longer a totalitarian regime stays in power, the less likely the possibility for political transformation. Thus, change in a totalitarian regime is easier to achieve in the early stages, when its power is not consolidated. 

The Taliban government currently installed in Afghanistan is not simply another dictatorship. By all standards, it is a totalitarian regime. A totalitarian regime, according to British philosopher John Gray, is not the one that negates liberal democracy — it is one that brutally suppresses civil society. The Taliban have created a monstrosity equivalent to that of other totalitarian states. 

Political Pragmatism

The second justification of Taliban apologists is political pragmatism — the Taliban is a reality that could not be done away with and thus it shall be acknowledged. As part of my research on the Afghanistan peace process, I conducted an opinion poll in 2018 that showed the Taliban’s popularity as below 10% across the country. Thus, this so-called pragmatism is constituted upon a false assumption. But the Taliban are a reality, like racism, Islamic fundamentalism, bigotry and slavery. Also, they are a reality fostered by sponsors: the Pakistani establishment.

Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that bigotry, racism and fundamentalism could not be eradicated through endorsements by the intellectuals and those who have a moral commitment to fight them. Irrespective of the logic of morality, one cannot buy the argument to accept bigotry or extremism just because they were a reality. Endorsing the Taliban is equivalent to recognizing their wicked acts. 

Third, it is proposed that if we accept the Taliban as a reality, the costs of establishing political order would be reduced. For example, it can prevent another civil war. This argument is built based on a false assumption regarding the nature of the Taliban. Historically, the group has been extremely violent by nature: War, jihad and suicide bombings are an integral part of its ideology. What country in the world prides itself on having suicide squads?

In the seven months of their rule, the Taliban have killed, tortured and humiliated numerous civilians, former security officers and women’s rights activists, primarily ethnic groups like the Tajik and Hazara. Moreover, they maintain strong ties with an international community of jihadists, including al-Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Turkistan Islamic Party, among others. 

There is an inherent contradiction in the nationalist stance advocating for so-called reconciliation. The nationalists argue that war is costly and hence we should accept working with the Taliban. However, countless civilians being slaughtered or abused by the Taliban on a daily basis is ignored as the human cost of Taliban rule. A doctrinal state imposes its ideology on every single individual even if it is at the cost of the individuals’ lives. 

Naïve Intellectualism

Fourth, the naive social-media public intellectuals suppose that they can hold the Taliban accountable by citing some verses of the Quran or some articles of the law of Afghanistan. It is not that ideological totalitarian regimes do not understand what law is; rather the Taliban misuses the law to further limit the sphere of civil society and expand the regime’s control. Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism is primarily a denial of law, the emergence of a state in the absence of law. By this standard, the Taliban are simply a totalitarian entity.

The assumption that the Taliban would be held accountable through a Twitter post is naïve. The issue is not negligence in the application of the law by the Taliban; rather, the fundamental issue is the group’s illegitimate rule. The Taliban have suspended a functioning state apparatus by military takeover of the state that led to the collapse of the republic, purging many technocrats from bureaucracy and creating an environment of terror, intentionally undermining the Doha peace talks.

Lastly, cultural particularism suggests that the Taliban represent a specific culture and shall be given time to adapt and develop according to its own history and context. Taking a relativist stance, it is said that there is no ultimate truth and no one is a final arbiter. Thus, relativist logic fails to recognize evil in its totality. The truth about the evil nature of the Taliban could not simply be dismissed by reducing the issue to a matter of a difference of opinion.

Unlike relativists, cultural pluralists are not naïve enough to engage with evil. According to their line of thinking, although ultimate values are diverse, they are knowable; any order which negates and denies peaceful coexistence is outlawed. The Taliban eschews all forms of coexistence. They treat the Persian-speaking Tajiks, Hazaras and other nationalities as second or third-class subjects. They campaign against Persian cultural heritage such as Nawroz celebrations, the Persian language and much of the country’s pre-Islamic heritage.  

The Realist/Moralist Challenge

Exponents of the Taliban have to respond to both a moralist and a realist question in politics. From a moralist standpoint, by neglecting or dismissing any moral standard, they adopt a peace activist cover. They aim to humanize the Taliban in order to make the group pleasantly acceptable. 

The question here is, what is a morally correct stance against a terrorist group that has a track record of deliberately inciting ethnic hatred, racism, ethnic supremacy, oppression, mass atrocities and terror? The answer is clear: Any act that demonizes humans and perpetuates violence for the sake of subjugation of others is condemned. The perpetrator would thus be fully responsible.

On the contrary, any single word that misrepresents the Taliban and presents a false benign image of the group is a betrayal of the moral principle of justice, liberty and claims of intellectualism. Any responsible citizen and public intellectual has a moral obligation to not just renounce them publicly but to denounce totalitarian regimes and any act of terror.

Denunciation not only entails a public condemnation of evil in its totality but also an avoidance of any word or deed that contributes to the consolidation of the regime. By any standard, a terrorist group does not have a right to rule. Anyone who advises or applauds terrorist statements or policies is morally bankrupt. When faced with a totalitarian regime, one can only be either for or against it.

Lastly, the realist question is what British philosopher Bernard Williams calls the Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD): “the idea of meeting the BLD implies a sense in which the state has to offer a justification of its power to each subject.” This is the very first question in politics.

Before any other virtues, a state has to present an acceptable answer to those that it rules. Otherwise, the people who consider themselves alien to the rulers and have a basic fear of subjugation, humiliation and persecution, as well as those who are radically disadvantaged, have every right to disobey. As Williams says, “there is nothing to be said to this group to explain why they shouldn’t revolt.”

Read at Fair Observer

 
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Wednesday, 11 September 2024

A case for democratic pluralism instead of democratic minimalism

Published in News

By Omar Sadr

This paper proposes a theory of democratic pluralism instead of democratic minimalism developed by Shadi Hamid in his book “The Problem of Democracy”. Democratic pluralism will leverage pluralism to create a possibility for reconciliation between liberalism, secularism, religion, and democracy. It presents a framework of democratic pluralism based on four key elements: (1) a conception of democracy that includes performance and political action in the public sphere beyond electoral participation; (2) recognition of diversity and intercultural dialog, alongside the agonistic dimension of pluralism; (3) moderation of individual autonomy and identity politics; and (4) pluralistic accommodation of religion. The paper critiques Hamid’s monolithic notions of liberalism, secularism, and democracy, suggesting that more nuanced approaches to these concepts are necessary. It contends that rather than abandoning liberalism and secularism, exploring compatible versions of liberalism and Islam within a pluralistic framework offers a more promising path for reforming religion and polity in the Muslim world.

Introduction

Shadi Hamid’s theory of democratic minimalism is more accurately about the problem of liberalism. It comes at a time when liberalism is in tension, if not in crisis, both in America and around the world. In the West, the problem is multi-faceted, ranging from eroding trust in liberal democratic institutions to the rise of populism, and democratic backsliding. The tension has made many scholars reflect on what went wrong.

In the Muslim world, the tension is older, deeper, and more classic in nature. It is between Islam and its Sharia as a moral system and liberalism as a hegemonic global paradigm. Presupposing that the incompatibility of liberalism with Islam rendered democracy impossible in the region, democratic minimalism suggests the decoupling of liberalism and democracy as a solution. It argues that democracy prevails if we abandon liberalism and secularism. In policy terms, it suggests the US not pursue liberalism and secularism as an end to its relations with the Muslim world. In doing so, it perpetuates a monolithic notion of liberalism, secularism, and Islamism. This paper constructively deconstructs democratic minimalism’s monoliths. It suggests that, instead of abandoning liberalism and secularism, one has to explore which versions of liberalism and Islam could be compatible with a pluralistic order. Moreover, instead of placing democracy as the end state, the Muslim world should consider pluralism as a framework to reform religion and polity. This would necessitate a more nuanced approach toward liberalism, eschewing mere rejection or adoption.

This paper suggests democratic pluralism based on at least four key elements (1) a notion of democracy based on political action in the public sphere besides electoral participation (2) recognition of cultural diversity, and intercultural dialog along with the agonistic dimension of pluralism; (3) moderation of individual autonomy and identity politics; and (4) twin tolerance as a standard of pluralist secularism.

What does democratic minimalism entail?

Hamid builds the theory of democratic minimalism based on segregating values that he does not consider intrinsic to democracy. In this analysis, only democratic legitimacy, political stability, and the peaceful transfer of power are intrinsically related to democracy (Hamid, 2023 p. 53). In other words, the purpose of democracy at the minimalist level is its ability to function as a mechanism for conflict resolution. He argues that values such as liberalism and social justice or issues such as economic development are not intrinsic values of democracy; rather, they are by-products of democracy or accidentally attached to democracy (Hamid, 2023 p. 54). However, it is not clear from the Hamid’s analysis who is to decide what is intrinsic to democracy and what is not. The choices are arbitrary. Why should stability be considered intrinsic to democracy but economic development not be? In other words, how is short-term stability minimal to be accepted as inherent to a minimalistic democracy?

The Hamid reconceptualizes the Schumpeterian notion of democracy with a particular policy mandate. Although the Hamid’s main critique of the Schumpeterian notion of democracy is its instrumentalization of democracy as a particular mechanism of elite decision-making, he reproduces a different version of instrumentalized democracy. For Hamid, a minimalist notion of democracy is a means to reorient the US foreign policy in West Asia and North Africa (WANA)1 from endorsing liberal autocrats to supporting democracies where Islamists may come to power. Moreover, his justification for the signification of democracy falls in the same end-oriented trap: he argues that the purpose of democracy is to create legitimacy or stability through predictability. In other words, Hamid justifies democracy based on what political scientists Jack Knight and James Johnson call a set of first-order functions of institutions.

In their book, The Priority of Democracy, Knight and Johnson (2011) distinguish between the first and second-order tasks of institutions. The first-order task of the institution refers to the function of an institution in how it addresses certain social, economic, or political challenges. On the contrary, the second-order task of an institution refers to a meta-level where the institutions manage and determine effective institutional arrangements. Knight and Johnson suggest that “benefits of democracy are derived from its second-order effects: the way in which democratic institutional arrangements facilitate effective institutional choice” (Knight and Johnson, 2011 p. 20). The first-order function of an institution is to resolve the problem of collective action and generate short-term stability by creating predictability and legitimacy. The second-order function is how the process of effective and efficient institutional arrangement should be. Hamid does not articulate whether the concept of minimalist democracy seeks to address the first-order task or the second-order function of institutions. Contra to Hamid’s approach, a democratic minimalist should consider democracy as a second-order task. Nonetheless, the Hamid does not engage with the existing body of literature on democracy from the collective action and institutionalist theories. This negligence results in an analytical error.

Moreover, Hamid takes it for granted that democracy is a mechanism for conflict resolution and, hence, short-term stability. In fact, there are cases such as the failure of republican Afghanistan (2001–2021) where democracy did not succeed in the test of being a mechanism for conflict resolution. If democracy by itself does not function as a conflict resolution mechanism, then other qualities and factors should be considered.

Potential limitations of “democratic minimalism”

The concept of democratic minimalism is not novel. Earlier theorists of democracy have talked about similar types of democracy. The Schumpeterian notion of democracy is considered a minimalist notion of democracy as it limits democracy to only a mechanism for aggregation of citizens’ preferences.

A minimalist democracy presents at least theoretical and methodological errors. On the theoretical front, minimalist democracy does not capture non-electoral forms of political participation. Wedeen’s (2008 p. 103–147) study of Yemen shows how qat chews function as miniature public spheres. Yemeni social interactions are frequently structured around the communal consumption of qāt, a stimulant leaf ingested daily during gatherings. These “qāt chews” function as a nexus for multifaceted discursive exchanges among participants of varying degrees of familiarity. Such gatherings facilitate a broad spectrum of dialogs, notably encompassing intensive deliberations on overtly political subjects. This social phenomenon serves as a significant conduit for public discourse and sociopolitical engagement within Yemeni society. For Wedeen, qat chews are a “site for the performance of citizenship for the critical self-assertion of citizens the existence of whom is made possible through these exercises of deliberation” (Wedeen, 2008 p. 120). These mini-public spheres facilitate political participation and deliberation beyond electoral contestation in authoritarian circumstances. A theoretical framework that does not account for discursively organized political action in the public sphere would render understanding democracy incomplete.

On the methodological front, minimalist democracy does not have utility beyond the large N and transhistorical studies. Stripping down democracy from all substantive qualities would only allow a binary or nominal notion of democracy in methodological terms. In other words, a nominal classification would not allow the possibility of understanding various forms and practices of democracy. For instance, Przeworski et al. argue that “alternative definitions of democracy give rise to almost identical classifications of the actual observations” (Przeworski, 2009 p. 10). This is because the minimalist notion of democracy is exclusively generated from its methodology. Apart from electoral participation, democracy can be practiced through several channels that a minimalist democracy does not accommodate.

To distinguish democracy from liberalism, one does not need to take refuge in a minimalist notion of democracy. Instead, a substantive model of democracy also provides the possibility of doing this. Wedeen’s analysis of Yemen qat chews public sphere highlights how one can conceptually and practically distinguish between liberalism and democracy. She states, “Qāt chews are the occasion for performing an explicitly democratic subjectivity—one that relishes deliberation—but it does not follow that such occasions necessarily produce explicitly liberal debates or forms of personhood” (Wedeen, 2008 p. 145). To do this, Wedeen suggests that political analysis should theorize “performative practices” rather than “the values to which people subscribe” (ibid: 145).

Similar to Wedeen’s analysis of Yemen, I conclude in my paper on “Failed Democracy in Afghanistan (2001–2021): Lack of Deliberation and Pluralism” (Sadr, 2024), that the lack of space for an agonistic public sphere negatively impacted electoral participation which eventually ended in the failure of a Republic in Afghanistan. One cannot understand democratic practices in the authoritarian Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (2001–2021) if one exclusively focuses on electoral mechanisms and neglects alternative practices such as that of the mini-publics.

Relativism and modernisation theory

Hamid is right that Americans should not bother about liberalism and its related values to enlightenment projects overseas. In other words, the U.S. should not export liberalism or put a liberal conditionality in its relations with WANA. However, his reasoning on the question of why is incorrect. He argues that WANA societies follow fundamentally opposing values to that of the US. As a result, the US negates the outcome of democracy if the winner is not desirable. To fix this policy error, Hamid erodes the conceptual integrity of democracy by reducing it to a mechanism of aggregation of preferences of individuals. The question that emerges here is: why do we have to redefine democracy to fix a US foreign policy problem? Cannot we address the pitfall of US policy in West Asia without ignoring the values attached to democracy?

This leads me to assert that Hamid’s diagnosis of the puzzle is incorrect. The problem is not with the values often associated with democracy; rather, the problem is with the ideational basis of the US foreign policy in West Asia, namely modernization theory. The secularist modernizing autocratic states of the region are a byproduct of an approach that enforced an enlightenment model of modernization from above using the state apparatus. These autocratic states often received diplomatic endorsement, strategic partnership, financial assistance, and many more benefits from the US for the same policies (Hashemi, 2009).

Hamid’s concept of “democratic minimalism” by itself infers a sort of relativism. As the concept is developed for and in the context of WANA, it indicates the region is unique compared to the rest of the world. In a sense, it demands a distinct methodological measurement and a particularistic policy treatment for the region as far as democracy is concerned. It presents an exceptional solution to the question of democracy in the region. It provides a certain form of exemption for the region to be considered a democracy. This exemption is presently based on a culturalist analysis which precludes the region from the cultural elements of liberalism. This itself generates a sort of relativism.

In fact, democratic minimalism distinguishes political and cultural liberalism. This distinction is built across the line between progressiveness versus conservativeness. West Asia is pushed to the realm of conservatism so that the denial of certain elements of liberalism is justified.

A monolith notion of liberalism

Hamid adopts a universal notion of liberalism and takes the enlightenment notion of liberalism for granted. It is out of such a monolithic notion of liberalism that Hamid’s decoupling of democracy and liberalism ends in a minimalist democracy. An intellectual critic of liberalism is incomplete if one does not acknowledge and engage with different strands of liberalism.

Alternative versions of liberalism include liberal pluralism (Galston, 2002; Daher, 2009) and modus vivendi liberalism (Gray, 2000). Both of these two versions of liberalism challenge the proposition that considers individual autonomy as the one and only core value of liberalism. William Galston distinguishes two types of liberalism: “one based on the core value of individual rational autonomy, the other on respect for legitimate difference—and argues for the diversity-based approach as offering a better chance for individuals and groups to live their lives in accordance with their distinctive conceptions of what gives meaning and value to life” (Galston, 2002 p. 10).

The problem with the US democracy promotion is not the fact that it promotes liberal values in West Asia; rather, the problem is that it promotes a narrow ideological version of liberalism based on an exclusive emphasis on individual autonomy. In fact, this is not just a pathology of US foreign policy. Liberalism has been in crisis in US domestic affairs as well. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues that US liberalism has been stretched both in its right and left spectrum of ideology. On the left, the concept of individual autonomy has broadened to the extent that it has led to identity politics; on the right, it has led to “neoliberalism” which has caused inequality and a gap between the rich and the poor (Fukuyama, 2022). The contention over what liberalism entails or not is to the extent some liberals do not accept the conceptualization of neoliberalism. While commonly misused as a negative term for capitalism in general, neoliberalism more accurately refers to a specific economic philosophy. This school of thought, closely linked to the University of Chicago and the Austrian School, is championed by economists such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek who criticized state intervention in economic affairs and advocated for free markets as the primary drivers of economic growth and resource allocation. One comprehensive definition of neoliberalism is given by the University of Chicago political scientist, Lisa Wedeen, who qualifies neoliberalism with four key factors: Economic stability measures that prioritize low inflation and minimal public debt, while moving away from Keynesian approaches to managing economic cycles; Opening up trade and reducing financial regulations; Shifting publicly-owned companies and assets into private hands; and Scaling back social welfare programs and government support systems (Wedeen, 2008 p. 187). The New School political theorist, Nancy Fraser considers the latest version of capitalism as neoliberalism which succeeded state-managed capitalism of the post-war era. Issues previously seen as the domain of democratic decision-making are relegated to market forces. Central Banks, global financial institutions, and transnational governance structures such as WTO, NAFTA, and TRIPS who make the rules are not accountable to the public. This shift primarily serves the interests of financial institutions and large corporations. According to Fraser, this process has led to de-democratization (Fraser, 2022 p. 126–130).

To fix liberalism both in domestic and foreign affairs, the solution is not to de-couple liberalism and democracy. Instead, the solution is to craft a pluralistic conception of liberalism. As I argue in my book Negotiating Cultural Diversity, a theory of governance of diversity should encompass three elements: liberalism’s conception of individual autonomy complemented by an appreciation of cultural diversity and the development of a capacity for intercultural dialog. The intercultural dialog should acknowledge the agonistic dimension of pluralism by underscoring the power dynamics in the public sphere. As mentioned in the previous section beyond electoral politics our theories should also consider the political action in the public sphere. While pluralism is not an exclusive feature of liberalism, democratic pluralism can not be built without a moderate notion of individual autonomy. A pluralist liberalism will endorse moderation that scholars such as Fukyama and Aurelian Craiutu have suggested. Moderation on the conception of individual autonomy to control identity politics and inequality.

A monolith notion of secularism

Similar to his monolith notion of liberalism, Hamid’s notion of secularism is also monolithic. Hamid criticizes secularism as it distinguishes religion and politics and considers public religiosity as “a problem to be resolved” (Hamid, 2023 p. 60). This is not possible except with coercion, according to him. In WANA, he only highlights authoritarian secular regimes such as Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia. Hamid also takes secularism as a defining benchmark for democracy-religion dynamics. Both of these assumptions are misleading. As political scientist Alfred Stepan discussed, there is a diverse set of secular regimes both in democratic and authoritarian states. Hence, secularism cannot be a good element of religion-democracy (Stepan, 2000 p. 43). While many political scientists make an empirical error in considering secularism as a necessary condition of democracy, Hamid creates a reverse fallacy by proposing the negation of secularism as a necessary condition for a minimalist democracy.

Like Hamid, Stepan considered democracy as a mechanism of conflict resolution. The difference is in how the two authors interpreted this process. For democracy to be a mechanism of conflict resolution, Stepan suggested the principle of “twin toleration,” which means that both state and religion tolerate and respect each other. Stepan explains, “The minimal degree of toleration that democracy needs to receive or induce from religion and the minimal degree of toleration that religion (and civil society, more generally) needs to receive or induce from the state for the polity to be democratic” (Stepan, 2011: p. 116).

Based on this, Stepan distinguished four versions of secularism: (1) separatist secularism where a full separation of state and religion is ensured, such as that of France (1905–1959): in this version, the state bans any form of religious practices and symbol not just in politics in general, but more specifically in the state (2) the established religion secularism, such as those of the Nordic countries, where the state has an official church; (3) the positive accommodation secularism where the state cooperates with churches, for example, in collecting church taxes, the state funds religious institutions, such as that of Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany; and (4) the “respect all, positive cooperation, principled distance” secularism of Nehruvian and Gandhian India, Senegal, and Indonesia. In this model, the state goes a bit further than the positive accommodation secularism wherein it allows multiple religions in the public sphere at the same time. In Europe, it’s only Christianity that is accommodated. Muslims find it difficult to assert their identity as a group. In Indonesia, at least five religions including Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are treated equally. A secularism that respects diversity and treats all religions equally is also called evenhanded secularism (Monsma and Soper, 2009).

Democratic minimalism embraces the public role of religion and the fact that religious parties should be allowed to participate in the democratic process. It assumes that allowing Islamist parties in elections would resolve the issues of diversity. But how can we somehow govern or manage pluralism if the religious-based parties in power neglect or violate diversity? Consider, for instance, certain decisions in Muslim-majority countries such as a ban on alcohol. The answer is evenhanded secularism which subscribes to the idea of equality, not to the idea of separation of religion and state.

Democratic minimalism also cannot respond to a case such as Pakistan where Islamist parties have been enjoying political participation (Nelson, 2017). However, the dilemma is that they also have parallel militant wings. If politics is the end of the war, does minimalist democracy lead us to this goal? The case of Pakistan’s democracy does not give us the outcome that the theory of democratic minimalism desires. Instead, Stepan’s principle of twin tolerance would require the state to take action against those religious-based parties that violate twin tolerance.

Hamid is correct that the autocratic states’ promise of religious reform is shallow. He rightly asks that, since religion and politics are intertwined, how can an autocratic state that does not accommodate dissent tolerate religious reform? While this concern is valid, research also shows that liberalism followed religious reformation in the West. Without religious reformation, which justified tolerance and individual rights from a religious standpoint, liberalism would not have been possible. Political Scientist Nader Hashimi discusses how prominent liberal philosopher John Locke played a leading role in developing and defending tolerance albeit with reference to the teachings of Christianity. Locke’s theology was “rooted in a dissenting religious exegesis” (Hashemi, 2009 p. 68).

Similar to the contemporary Muslim world, in the Middle Ages, Christianity was an intolerant society with continuous waves of religious wars, persecution of heretics and apostasy, and the brutal role of the Pope. Like many Muslim scholars who fled the Muslim world in fear of prosecution in the 21st century, Locke had to leave Britain in 1683 for the Netherlands. Following that, he wrote two crucial books: A Letter Concerning Toleration in 1685 and Two Treatises of Government in 1689. In the earlier book, he distinguished between a true Christian and a true church from an intolerant one. He also advocated for religious pluralism—no church has the authority to declare the other heretical, since all churches are equal. He challenged the role of clerics saying that there is no evidence in the Bible to support their legitimacy. In the latter book, Locke engaged with Sir Robert Filmer, a traditionalist and royalist author. By refuting Filmer’s account of traditional authority, Locke presented an account of individual liberty based on divine providence. According to Hashimi, “Filmer (unlike Locke) attempted to explicitly integrate into his political philosophy the writings of non-Christian thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero, while Locke’s authoritative references are decidedly and exclusively Christian—the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker and Jesus Christ” (Hashemi, 2009 p. 87).

Therefore, the path to an organic ideational and social transformation of the Muslim communities toward democracy and liberalism is rooted in a thorough religious reformation. Hamid’s suspicion of UAE’s model of interfaith summits or Morocco’s Sufi Islam as a path toward liberty and pluralism could be as legitimate as these regimes are authoritarian (Hamid, 2023 p. 72). Nonetheless, a bottom-up religious reformation that can generate discursively organized political action in the public sphere will create an efficient endogenous momentum for liberalization in the Muslim world.

Hamid’s thoughts on Islamic reformation remain conflicted. Initially, he debunks the idea of Islamic reformation altogether as he assumes it has already happened in the past (Ibid: 75), but later he suggests that Islamic reformation was never shaped against religious despotism. He argues, ‟Islam never experienced something resembling the Protestant Reformation—in part because it did not need one” (Ibid: 212). If the Islamist shift toward political pluralism in the post-Cold War was technical, without any ideological reappraisal as Hamid argues (Ibid: 217), then why is there no need for an Islamic reformation? In contrast to Hamid, I suggest that an Islamic reformation is a much-needed reform in the Muslim world to address under-development and three versions of Islamism: conservative Islamism, radical Islamism, and militant Islamism. I borrow this typology from Kamran Bokhari and Farid Senzai. While all these versions of Islamism do not accept democracy in principle, their reaction to it comes in different shades. The conservative Islamists exemplified by Egypt’s Noor party and Gamaa al-Islamiyah do not accept pluralism but accept procedural democracy or minimalist democracy to use Hamid’s term. The radical and militant Islamists categorically reject democracy and pluralism with two different approaches. The earlier one adopts religious and social activism such as that of Hizb Tahrir and the latter pursues a violent approach such as the Taliban, ISIS, and Al-Qaida (Bokhari and Senzai, 2013 p. 28–30).

Other political scientists such as Ahmet Kuru reiterate the need for reformation in Islam: “In order to solve contemporary problems of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and religious discrimination, Muslim countries need creative intellectuals (i.e., thinkers who criticize established perspectives and produce original alternatives)” (Kuru, 2019 p. 5).

A reductionist notion of plurality in the Muslim world

Hamid’s account of pluralism in West Asia offers valuable insights, but there are nuances to consider. He argues, “ideological diversity of Arab societies is very much a modern condition…Before the advent of modernity, few if any Muslims questioned the idea of Islamic law. They may have disagreed vehemently with particular legal interpretations or how laws were implemented, but that the law had a divine source was not in question” (Hamid, 2023 p. 63). To Hamid pluralism is a modern phenomenon. Therefore he judges the premodern Muslim society based on a modern standard. This ends in presentism where two incommensurable eras are considered by the same measure. Conceptions of “the good” vary significantly across generations and historical periods, often proving incompatible. Evaluating past cultures through the lens of contemporary values is methodologically problematic, risking anachronistic judgments and misinterpretation of historical contexts (Sadr, 2020 p. 25). Having said that, it is important to note that premodern Sharia was pluralistic in nature. Wael Hallaq argues legal pluralism is intrinsic to the framework of Islamic jurisprudence, a characteristic that distinguishes it from the monolithic legal structures often associated with modern nation-states. This pluralistic nature is manifested in two key aspects: firstly, in its recognition and incorporation of local customs as significant factors in legal deliberations, and secondly, in its accommodation of diverse interpretations regarding identical factual scenarios as well as heterogeneous interests across space and time. Far from being a monolith, Sharia was diverse from Northern Africa to Khurasan in Central Asia (Hallaq, 2014). The underlying principle for the mentioned pluralist Sharia is the appreciation of the fact that the premodern Sharia-based political order is fundamentally incompatible with the modern territorialized state which adopted a uniform and codified legal framework.

Moreover, Hamid ignores the rich pluralism that existed in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic era in Central and West Asia. As Fredric Starr argues about the early age of Islam,

Conversion proceeded very slowly. Indeed, Muslim theologians themselves acknowledged that many people of other faiths nominally adopted Islam but did not abandon their prior beliefs. The British classicist Peter Brown speaks of Islam resting “lightly, like a mist” over the highly diverse religious landscape. Only in the combative eleventh century did pluralism come to be seen as an evil and as a threat to the prevailing orthodoxy (Starr, 2013 p. 99).

Hamid takes the hegemony of Sharia for granted. The question one has to answer is how Sharia turned into a hegemonic system eschewing pluralism. This old pluralism of Central Asia was erased as conflict between Islam’s different orthodox sects took its place. For instance, Fredric Starr argues, “It may not be a coincidence that the sharpest conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims arose after the year 1,000, just as the old pluralism was everywhere beginning to fade” (Starr, 2013 p. 518).

Conclusion: balancing liberalism with pluralism

How can we settle politics in a deeply divided society through democracy or alternative models? Democratic minimalism is correct that ideological liberalism cannot resolve the issue of peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic society of West Asia. However, it is incorrect on the point that a minimalist democracy can accomplish the task. Liberalism presents a certain end state and wants us to agree on that. In most of the cases, those end states are value-driven which may be contentious for some others who would not subscribe to it. Liberalism does not have that capacity as it endorses a substantial pluralistic notion of a good life (Sadr, 2020). However, the theory of minimalist democracy cannot bind societies together either. It is thin enough to have the capacity to hold a complex pluralistic society together. What we need is a substantial idea of plurality. That’s not a procedure like democracy–a set of agreed-upon rules. The idea of plurality is so substantial that citizens have to believe in it and the state should endorse it. Pluralism balances the dilemma between liberalism, democracy, and Islam. The proposed democratic pluralism is founded on four components. First, a conceptualization of democracy that extends beyond mere electoral participation to encompass active political action in the public sphere. Second, the importance of acknowledging cultural diversity and fostering intercultural dialog, while simultaneously recognizing the agonistic nature of pluralism. Third, a balanced approach to individual autonomy and identity politics, tempering these concepts to prevent their potential excesses. Fourth, the principle of twin tolerance as a benchmark for pluralist secularism, promoting mutual respect between secular and religious entities. These four pillars collectively form a framework that aims to address the complexities of modern diverse societies including the Muslim world, offering a nuanced approach to democratic governance in an increasingly pluralistic world.

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Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Why Was A Political Settlement Not Achieved in Afghanistan: A Bargaining Challenge Approach

Published in News

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.

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