Politics | Trump’s Afghan deal gives Taliban the upper hand

First things first. The fundamental aim of the Taliban’s war was to get the US troops out of Afghanistan. This has been achieved now after 18 long years where the war remained more or less a stalemate.

Under the agreement, the US will draw down to 8,600 troops in 135 days and five bases will be closed. Other coalition or NATO troops will also be slashed in a time-bound manner to ensure all of them leave Afghanistan within 14 months. Thus, without giving much in return, the Taliban extracted the pound of flesh that it held dearer.

Then, the Taliban will escape the weight of the crushing sanctions imposed on it by both the United Nations and the US by the end of August, and, more importantly, 5,000 imprisoned Taliban men are set to walk free by March 10. The insurgents in turn will release 1,000 soldiers from their custody.

There is an intra-Afghan dialogue to back up the US-Taliban peace process. However, the Taliban was not forced into accepting the Afghanistan constitution or abiding by the primacy of a Kabul-controlled peace process or a reconciliation in the future.

As window dressing, there were diplomatic niceties: a joint statement from the US and Afghanistan governments said that without an Afghan peace deal, the US troop withdrawal would not be completed. Similarly, date and modalities for a ‘permanent ceasefire’ would be announced along with a future political ‘road-map of Afghanistan.’

The fact that needs to be highlighted here is that the Taliban is the only group from Afghanistan that has taken part in talks with the US that has far-reaching implication for the future of a multi-ethnic Afghanistan, which has a democratically-elected government in Kabul, and has been fighting a civil war of one form or another for the last four decades.

Certainly the US got one key assurance: The Taliban, which once harboured Osama bin Laden will not allow “any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”

Such a formulation leaves out the concerns of India, a non-treaty ally of the US, which has always advocated a regional approach to find lasting peace in Afghanistan.

India which enjoys enormous goodwill in Afghanistan had a troubled relationship with the Taliban. Though India's absolute hesitations in dealing with the Taliban is a thing of the past, the contours of the deal doesn’t augur well for New Delhi in any way.

There is no mention about terror groups that are inimical to Indian interests, such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed in the pact. The West is obsessed with the Islamic State for the moment, and rightly so. However that doesn't mean the national security interests of India in a region known for terror sanctuaries remain unaddressed through a selective approach in fighting terror.

Most of the Taliban and other terrorist leaders wanted by the US were either killed or found to be hiding in Pakistan, including Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, the Afghan Taliban leader killed in a US drone strike in 2016.

The fact that without Pakistan playing an active role no meaningful talks with the Taliban can take place worked to its advantage. Considering the deep trust deficit between India and Pakistan, Islamabad getting an upper hand in a pact in Afghanistan will work to the major disadvantage of New Delhi.

American political expediency in dealing with the war on terror, which it itself had launched, is often counter-productive. The revival of Al-Qaeda could be a possibility should the US troops make a hasty retreat from Afghanistan. One of the reasons for emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq was the sudden US troop pull-out by Trump's predecessor Barack Obama.

Usually a ceasefire agreement precedes a pact of the magnitude of US-Taliban agreement. However, the a ‘violence reduction pact’ was all that the US cared to extract from the Taliban to seal a deal — a deal, whose primary aim is to let Trump boast that he had ended America's longest war in history, which Obama sought both in pain and vain. Jayanth Jacob is a foreign policy commentator who is covering the ministry of external affairs for more than a decade. Twitter: @jayanthjacob. Views are personal.