Challenges loom as Afghan peace process enters critical phase

Editor's note: Azhar Azam works in a private organization as a market and business analyst and writes about geopolitical issues and regional conflicts. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

During a luncheon attended by UN Security Council (UNSC) representatives in January 2018, the U.S. President Donald Trump spurned any possibility of talks with Afghan Taliban, screeching its deadly attacks in Afghanistan. But the "long time" he sought for initiation of peace talks lived short as top U.S. diplomat Alice Wells secretly met Afghan insurgent group on July 23 of the same year in Doha.

Washington had originally coveted to sit on the sidelines of "Afghan-led, Afghan-owned" peace negotiations but Taliban's sheer refusal to hold direct talks with the Afghan government before a definite U.S. commitment to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan forced it to change track and first involve itself in discussions on the issue.

So, the deal between Taliban and the U.S. is fundamentally a gateway to an all-inclusive intra-Afghan dialogue, which covertly started at a hotel in Qatar and outlasted two American commanders in chiefs and has lately reached a defining moment as the two sides signed a milestone agreement in a five-star resort on February 29, 2020.

Saturday's signing of the concord would, however, pave the way for meaningful and substantive dialogue between Afghan political parties and Taliban that indeed would be the key to a peaceful and stable Afghanistan and will eventually decide the fate of the people and their war-riven country.

By promising to cut down its troops initially and within 14 months completely, the U.S. emphatically capitulated to Afghan insurgents' heartland precondition to vamoose from Afghanistan and plausibly autographed a testimonial that would elevate the tally of the graves in the "Graveyard of Empires."

Though the U.S. stance across the countries fluctuates quickly but its perspective about Taliban has specific chameleonic characteristics. Despite its members being on the U.S. Treasury Department's Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) list, it has never been a terrorist outfit for the White House.

In fact, the labeling of Taliban as a terrorist group would have towed the world's biggest economic and military power into an embarrassing situation once it had initiated peace negotiations with it.

The jumbled American statements about Taliban also emphasized that from George W. Bush to Trump, all the successive US administrations knew that they are not going to overwhelm Afghan militants or conquer Afghanistan by force, and at some day, they will be required to pursue a political dialogue with them and flee Kabul.

Top U.S. commander in Afghanistan Austin Miller's last year's disclosure of dialing up pressure on Taliban to "shape the political environment" and chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staffs Mark Milley's recent remarks "A negotiated political settlement is the only responsible way to end the war in Afghanistan" counted as the military's endorsement of American submission in the conflict-ridden country.

It was very interesting that the U.S. would solicit the very UNSC to "remove members of Taliban from the sanctions list" which it had approached about 20 years earlier to ratify its invasion of Afghanistan, topple a government that provided safe-havens to al-Qaeda terrorists and turn down any prospects of consultations with.

With UNSC likely to extend its backing in the wake of peace in the battle-hit country, it is otherwise pretty shocking how the U.S. frequently incurred major diplomatic shifts toward the Taliban through its course of bumpy and grainy Afghan war and engineered international peace and security institution for its consistently patchy objectives.

One must not neglect that any deal between Taliban and the U.S. does not necessarily mean that Afghanistan will lean into peace and stability or it would turn into a utopian state immediately. The real bug lies in intra-Afghan dialogue that was the initial goal and for which the about two-year of hectic process is wielded.

In case the peace process derails, Afghanistan could steer into a deeper pandemonium. And once it does, no one would be in a position to bring back the country from anarchism due to its history of being a country of plethora of tribes, which are equally hostile to each other as they are to the foreign interlopers.

While Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani rejected an all-important clause of U.S.-Taliban deal – the swap of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for 1,000 Afghan security personnel detainees – and his differences with Afghanistan's Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah expand from presidential elections to the formation of negotiation team, the road to peace is threatened.

Release of thousands of fighters was one of the crucial Taliban demands along with complete extraction of the U.S. forces from Afghanistan. It is also the vital pretext that allowed Taliban leadership to overcome the hard-line elements in the unit. Now Ghani's denial could stir up the disciplinarians in armed faction to trumpet their opposition to peace talks and split up further divisions with the Taliban ranks.

As Pakistan, a key facilitator of Taliban-U.S. talks, on March 1 warned the international community and the U.S. to be cautious of "spoilers" that aren't pleased with the deal and can coin hiccups in the restoration of peace in Afghanistan – the peace process is threatening to chunk before it enters into a critical phase in a few days.

If not addressed and settled the right away, Afghan government's renunciation of freeing Taliban fighters, divisions in the Afghan political parties and the prowlers of Afghan peace process could disrupt global peace efforts, which would be disastrous for Afghanistan, the U.S. and the whole region.