Karzai Arranged Secret Contacts With the Taliban
By AZAM AHMED and MATTHEW ROSENBERG
President Hamid Karzai’s contacts with the Taliban about reaching a
peace deal could explain why he has held up a security deal, straining
his relationship with the United States.
Asia Pacific
Karzai Arranged Secret Contacts With the Taliban
KABUL,
Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been engaged in
secret contacts with the Taliban about reaching a peace agreement
without the involvement of his American and Western allies, further
corroding already strained relations with the United States.
The
secret contacts appear to help explain a string of actions by Mr.
Karzai that seem intended to antagonize his American backers, Western
and Afghan officials said. In recent weeks, Mr. Karzai has continued to
refuse to sign a long-term security agreement with Washington that he
negotiated, insisted on releasing hardened Taliban militants from prison
and distributed distorted evidence of what he called American war
crimes.
The
clandestine contacts with the Taliban have borne little fruit,
according to people who have been told about them. But they have helped
undermine the remaining confidence between the United States and Mr.
Karzai, making the already messy endgame of the Afghan conflict even
more volatile. Support for the war effort in Congress has deteriorated
sharply, and American officials say they are uncertain whether they can
maintain even minimal security cooperation with Mr. Karzai’s government
or its successor after coming elections.
Frustrated
by Mr. Karzai’s refusal to sign the security agreement, which would
clear the way for American troops to stay on for training and
counterterrorism work after the end of the year, President Obama has
summoned his top commanders to the White House on Tuesday to consider
the future of the American mission in Afghanistan.
Western
and Afghan officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because
of the private nature of the peace contacts, said that the outreach was
apparently initiated by the Taliban in November, a time of deepening
mistrust between Mr. Karzai and his allies. Mr. Karzai seemed to jump at
what he believed was a chance to achieve what the Americans were
unwilling or unable to do, and reach a deal to end the conflict — a
belief that few in his camp shared.
The
peace contacts, though, have yielded no tangible agreement, nor even
progressed as far as opening negotiations for one. And it is not clear
whether the Taliban ever intended to seriously pursue negotiations, or
were simply trying to derail the security agreement by distracting Mr.
Karzai and leading him on, as many of the officials said they suspected.
As
recently as October, a long-term agreement between the United States
and Afghanistan seemed to be only a few formalities away from
completion, after a special visit by Secretary of State John Kerry. The
terms were settled, and a loya jirga, or assembly of prominent Afghans,
that the president summoned to ratify the deal gave its approval. The
continued presence of American troops after 2014, not to mention
billions of dollars in aid, depended on the president’s signature. But
Mr. Karzai repeatedly balked, perplexing Americans and many Afghans
alike.
Peace Contacts Fade
The
first peace feeler from the Taliban reached Mr. Karzai shortly before
the loya jirga, Afghan officials said, and since then the insurgents and
the government have exchanged a flurry of messages and contacts.
Aimal Faizi, the spokesman for Mr. Karzai, acknowledged the secret contacts with the Taliban and said they were continuing.
“The
last two months have been very positive,” Mr. Faizi said. He
characterized the contacts as among the most serious the presidential
palace has had since the war began. “These parties were encouraged by
the president’s stance on the bilateral security agreement and his
speeches afterwards,” he said.
But
other Afghan and Western officials said that the contacts had fizzled,
and that whatever the Taliban may have intended at the outset, they no
longer had any intention of negotiating with the Afghan government. They
said that top Afghan officials had met with influential Taliban leaders
in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in recent
weeks, and were told that any prospects of a peace deal were now gone.
The
Afghan and Western officials questioned whether the interlocutors whom
Mr. Karzai was in contact with had connections to the Taliban movement’s
leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, whose blessing would be needed for any
peace deal the group were to strike.
Though
there have been informal contacts between Afghan officials and Taliban
leaders since the very early days of the war, the insurgents’ opaque and
secretive leaders have made their intentions difficult to discern.
Afghan officials have struggled in recent years to find genuine Taliban
representatives, and have flitted among a variety of current and former
insurgent leaders, most of whom had only tenuous connections to Mullah
Omar and his inner circle, American and Afghan officials have said.
Western Outreach
The
only known genuine negotiating channel to those leaders was developed
by American and German diplomats, who spent roughly two years trying to
open peace talks in Qatar. The diplomats repeatedly found themselves
incurring the wrath of Mr. Karzai, who saw the effort as an attempt to
circumvent him; he tried behind the scenes to undercut it.
Then,
when an American diplomatic push led to the opening of a Taliban office
in Qatar, Mr. Karzai lashed out publicly at the United States. Afghan
officials said that to them, the office looked far too much like the
embassy of a government-in-exile, with its own flag and a nameplate
reading “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Within days, the Qatar
initiative stalled, and Mr. Karzai was fuming at what he saw as a plot
by the United States to cut its own deal with Pakistan and the Taliban
without him.
In
the wake of the failure in Qatar, Afghan officials redoubled their
efforts to open their own channel to Mullah Omar, and by late autumn,
Mr. Karzai apparently believed those efforts were succeeding. Some
senior Afghan officials say they did not share his confidence, and their
doubts were shared by American officials in Kabul and Washington.
Both
Mr. Karzai and American officials hear the clock ticking. American
forces are turning over their combat role to Afghan forces and preparing
to leave Afghanistan this year, and the campaigning for the Afghan
national election in April has begun. An orderly transition of power in
an Afghanistan that can contain the insurgency on its own would be the
culmination of everything that the United States has tried to achieve in
the country.
“We’ve
been through numerous cycles of ups and downs in our relations with
President Karzai over the years,” Ambassador James B. Cunningham said
during a briefing with reporters last week. “What makes it a little
different this time is that he is coming to the end of his presidency,
and we have some very important milestones for the international
community and for Afghanistan coming up in the next couple of months.”
Mr.
Karzai has been increasingly concerned with his legacy, officials say.
When discussing the impasse with the Americans, he has repeatedly
alluded to his country’s troubled history as a lesson in dealing with
foreign powers. He recently likened the security agreement to the Treaty
of Gandamak, a one-sided 1879 agreement that ceded frontier lands to
the British administration in India and gave it tacit control over
Afghan foreign policy. He has publicly assailed American policies as the
behavior of a “colonial power,” though diplomats and military officials
say he has been more cordial in private.
Mr.
Karzai reacted angrily to a negative portrayal of him in a recent
memoir by the former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, and he is still
bitter over the 2009 presidential election, when hundreds of thousands
of fraudulent ballots were disqualified and, as he sees it, the
Americans forced him into an unnecessary runoff against his closest
opponent.
In
some respects, Mr. Karzai’s outbursts have been an effort to speak to
Afghans who want him to take a hard line against the Americans,
including many ethnic Pashtuns, who make up nearly all of the Taliban.
With the American-led coalition on its way out and American influence
waning, Mr. Karzai is more concerned with bridging the chasms of Afghan
domestic politics than with his foreign allies’ interests.
If
the peace overture to the Taliban is indeed at an end, as officials
believe, it is unclear what Mr. Karzai will do next. He could return to a
softer stance on the security agreement and less hostility toward the
United States, or he could justify his refusal to sign the agreement by
blaming the Americans for failing to secure a genuine negotiation with
the insurgents.
Mr.
Karzai has insisted that he will not sign the agreement unless the
Americans help bring the Taliban to the table for peace talks. Some
diplomats worry that making such a demand allows the Taliban to dictate
the terms of America’s long-term presence in Afghanistan. Others
question Mr. Karzai’s logic: Why would the insurgency agree to talks if
doing so would ensure the presence of the foreign troops it is
determined to expel?
The
White House expressed impatience on Monday with Mr. Karzai’s refusal to
sign the agreement. “The longer there is a delay, the harder it is for
NATO and U.S. military forces to plan for a post-2014 presence,” said
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. “This is a matter of weeks,
not months.”
The
military leaders expected to attend the planning conference at the
White House on Tuesday include Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the commander
of American forces in Afghanistan; Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the former
Iraq commander now serving as head of the United States Central
Command; and Adm. William H. McRaven, head of the United States Special
Operations Command.
In
recent statements, Mr. Karzai’s office in Kabul has appeared to open
the door to a resolution of the impasse over the security agreement. The
presidential spokesman, Mr. Faizi, has said that if one party is
obstructing the American efforts to get talks going, the United States
need only say so publicly.
“Once there is clarity, we can take the next step to signing” the agreement, he said.
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