The Trump administration has yet to announce a policy on Afghanistan. For that, at least, we must be thankful. There is no basis on which to offer any recommendations: that would require shared goals and values, which do not seem to exist. Perhaps it might be possible—eventually, at least—to seek clarity on goals, lack of which was at the core of the United States’ past failure.
The post–9/11 international operation in Afghanistan was based on a misunderstanding that generated incoherent policy. The UN and many Afghans thought that international involvement would help Afghans build peace, or even democracy. The United States thought it would consolidate victory in a war without end that would reestablish the primacy of American power. Both were wrong.
When victory proved impossible to define, let alone achieve, after spending an estimated $2.3 trillion on a war that caused the deaths of 2,324 U.S. military personnel, 3,917 U.S. contractors, 1,144 allied troops, 69,095 Afghan military and police personnel, at least 46,319 Afghan civilians (likely a significant underestimate), 52,893 opposition fighters, and 66,650 people in Pakistan, the United States withdrew its troops in 2021, ended its aid programs, and walked away. The structures established during the twenty-year international operation melted away overnight, and the Taliban strolled back into power.
The UN talks on Afghanistan that led to the 2001 Bonn agreement set out to transform the fragile interim government arrangements into a “fully representative government.” That objective, however, was not shared by the United States, for which counterterrorism, as it defined it, was the top priority. Its consequent decision to exclude Taliban leaders—including those who surrendered—from the political process limited the representativeness of the government, all but guaranteeing the insurgency that would come twenty years later.
It could have been otherwise. Evidence, including dossiers compiled on Taliban detainees in Guantánamo by the Department of Defense, shows that virtually all of the Taliban leadership tried to surrender and might have been included in the Bonn process. But the United States, through repeated direct interventions, prohibited such attempts. Ever since the Taliban regained control in August 2021, the international community has unanimously urged it to form an “inclusive” government. The story of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is a story of a decades-long campaign based on a counterterrorism doctrine that forbade such inclusion. I witnessed much of this failure firsthand, during my time as an advisor, first to the UN mission to Afghanistan and then to the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. What were the roads not taken? And why did the road that was lead to such ruin?
From the very outset of the 9/11 attacks, the highest levels of the Bush administration made it clear: they were not interested in the politics of Afghanistan. On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, the director-general of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, met Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in the State Department. Armitage recounted:
I literally then took [Ahmed] privately to my room and said: … “No American will want to have anything to do with Pakistan in our moment of peril if you’re not with us. It’s black or white.” And he wanted to tell me about history. He says, “You have to understand the history.” And I said, “No, the history begins today.”
History began on September 11, and any attempt to offer an analysis of the Taliban other than as “those who harbor terrorists” was off the table. In an October 1 videoconference with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Pakistan CIA station chief Robert Grenier, who had been talking to senior Taliban leaders since September 12, proposed a strategy “to motivate first the Taliban, and then others in the south [of Afghanistan], to join the international coalition against al-Qa’ida.” Rumsfeld greeted the presentation icily, and did not call back when the connection dropped. At a Principals Committee meeting two days later, Vice President Dick Cheney settled the matter once and for all. “We need the Taliban to be gone,” he said.
When the United States launched military operations in Afghanistan on October 7, the administration had not yet decided whether to become involved in building a successor regime there. At a press conference on October 11, Bush announced: “One of the things we’ve got to make sure of is that all parties . . . have an opportunity to be a part of a new government . . . I believe that the United Nations would—could—provide the framework necessary to help meet those conditions.” Delegating—or relegating—the political job to the UN signaled that the United States considered it to be secondary to its primary mission: killing and capturing terrorists.
Leading the job of helping Afghans build a new government would be Lakhdar Brahimi, the former foreign minister of Algeria and a veteran UN troubleshooter, who would serve as the head of the UN Special Mission to Afghanistan (UNSMA), which since 1994 had been tasked by the UN General Assembly with facilitating consultations about how Afghans might achieve “rapprochement and reconstruction.” (I served as a member of Brahimi’s team.) Once appointed, Brahimi organized talks among four Afghan groups between November 29 and December 5 in Bonn, Germany. He knew that including the Taliban would be needed for peace, but that inviting them to participate while the war was going on was impossible. The process laid out at Bonn instead called for an “Emergency Loya Jirga” (Pashto for “grand assembly”) to be held within six months, which would
decide on a Transitional Authority, including a broad-based transitional administration, to lead Afghanistan until such time as a fully representative government can be elected through free and fair elections to be held no later than two years from the date of the convening of the Emergency Loya Jirga.
This Emergency Loya Jirga, Brahimi told the delegates, would include representatives of those Afghans who, for one reason or another, could not participate in Bonn—including, but not limited to, the Taliban. But when the Loya Jirga was held the next June, the United States ensured that the Taliban were excluded. It had decisively defeated the Taliban, it thought, and saw no reason to negotiate.
And indeed, the Taliban’s leadership, overwhelmed by the United States’ force and firepower, had run out of options. Many shared the view of Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef, who announced in Islamabad on December 7 that “the Taliban [are] finished as a political force.” Zaeef added: “I think we should go home.”
On December 5, Taliban leader Mullah Omar had turned over leadership to Defense Minister Obaidullah and left Kandahar on a motorcycle. That same day, the UN announced that the UN Talks on Afghanistan had named Hamid Karzai as president. Karzai was a young scion of the Popalzai tribe of Afghanistan’s founding ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani, who had supported the Taliban’s effort to bring order to Kandahar before breaking with them over their extremist practices. Karzai had enjoyed U.S. support for an effort to align southern Pashtun tribes with the northern non-Pashtun resistance led by Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Obaidullah led a Taliban delegation to Karzai, who had reached Shah Wali Kot, a district center about sixty kilometers from Kandahar City, and showed him a letter in which Omar handed over power. Later that day, Karzai announced the Taliban’s surrender to several press outlets. The agreement—which became known as the Shah Wali Kot Agreement—provided that:
1. The Taliban would recognize Karzai as the leader of Afghanistan.
2. The Taliban would turn over to him the four provinces remaining under their control (Kandahar, Uruzgan, Helmand, and Zabul).
3. Karzai would release Taliban prisoners, grant an amnesty to the Taliban and allow Mullah Omar to live in Kandahar “with dignity.”
4. Mullah Naqibullah, a prominent Mujahideen commander who had neither fought nor joined the Taliban, would become governor of Kandahar.
5. The Taliban would surrender their arms to Mullah Naqibullah.
This agreement could have enabled the Emergency Loya Jirga to play the role the UN had originally envisaged for it. The Taliban had neither demanded nor been given positions in the interim government agreed to at Bonn, and the truce and amnesty would have facilitated their inclusion in the Loya Jirga as one of many stakeholders in the next stages of reconstructing political authority in Afghanistan.
But it was not to be. According to journalist Bette Dam, “A few hours after his announcement of the surrender, a furious Rumsfeld had phoned [Karzai] and ordered him to rescind the agreements made with the Taliban in public.” The very next day, Rumsfeld declared to reporters, “I do not think there will be a negotiated end to the situation,” and publicly threatened Karzai with a cutoff of U.S. support. “Our cooperation and assistance with [the opposition forces in and around Kandahar] would clearly take a turn south if something were to be done . . . that was inconsistent with what I’ve said,” Rumsfeld said. “To the extent our goals are frustrated and opposed, we would prefer to work with other people who would not oppose our goals.”
What Karzai could never make Washington understand was that by finding a negotiated way to remove the Taliban from the battlefield, he was supporting U.S. goals, not opposing them. But Washington wouldn’t listen. Instead, they made a radically different decision, one that would put an end to any hopes of implementing either the Shah Wali Kot agreement or other such truces: sending Taliban leaders, along with captured al-Qaeda leaders and fighters, to Guantánamo.
When the camp opened in January 2002, among others whom U.S. special forces transferred there were five senior Taliban leaders who had surrendered: Mullah Fazl Mazloom, Mullah Noorullah Noori, Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwah, Abdul Haq Wasiq, and Muhammad Nabi Omari. For years, no one reported what happened to these detainees. But in 2011, WikiLeaks obtained classified government files—including dossiers from each detainee’s Guantánamo interrogation—that corroborated other reporting. By taking a look at these files, along with reporting and my own interviews with senior U.S. foreign policy leaders, a picture of a different sort emerges: one of a battered Taliban that had mostly abandoned the fight in return for amnesties promised by U.S.-supported Afghan leaders and a U.S. government stubbornly determined not to accept those surrenders. Here are those detainees’ stories.
Fazl and Noori
By November 9, 2001, the Taliban-controlled city of Mazar-i-Sharif had fallen to the forces of three Northern Alliance leaders: Abdul Rashid Dostum (Uzbek, former leader of one of Najibullah’s militias), Atta Muhammad Nur (Tajik, an ally of Ahmad Shah Massoud), and Muhammad Muhaqqiq (leader of the Hazara and other Shi’a forces), all of whom were backed by U.S. air power, CIA teams, and special forces. Fazl, the Taliban’s military commander for Northern Afghanistan, and Noori, governor of Balkh and the senior Taliban political figure in North Afghanistan, led a retreat to nearby Kunduz.
Taloqan, Bamiyan, and Herat—provinces controlled by the Taliban in the north, central highlands, and west of the country—surrendered in quick succession on November 11 and 12. On November 13, the Taliban negotiated the surrender of the eastern city of Jalalabad, which stood astride communications routes between Kabul and Pakistan. Shortly after, their supply lines cut, the Taliban abandoned Kabul without a fight.
On the night of November 21, Fazl and Noori drove from Kunduz to Dostum’s fort in Qala-i-Jangi, outside Mazar-i-Sharif. Waiting for them were Dostum, Atta, Muhaqqiq, U.S. special forces, and global media, including New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall, who recounted:
Close to midnight, General Dostum called in the reporters who had been waiting outside to hear Mullah Fazl announce his surrender. . . . Mullah Fazl said they had reached an agreement to end the fighting, and the two men shook hands. The settlement included all foreign fighters. “They are all under my command and they will all surrender,” he said. . . . Dostum spoke of the twenty-five years of war that had pitted men against each other in every village, city, province, and tribe. “We should not wash blood with blood, we should wash blood with water,” Dostum said. . . . As dawn broke, Mullah Fazl drove back across the desert to Kunduz and did as he had promised.
Mullah Fazl delivered thousands of Taliban and foreign fighters into the hands of the United Front, which transferred them to the prison in Qala-i-Jangi, where some of the foreign fighters launched a brief revolt. Fazl and Noori stayed in one of Dostum’s guest houses, until the U.S. took custody of them in January 2002.
Khairkhwah
Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwah, a member of Karzai’s Popalzai tribe, served as governor of Herat. His Guantánamo dossier described him as “a friend of current Afghan President, Hamid Karzai.” According to the dossier,
Immediately prior to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Mullah Omar approached detainee concerning his relationship with Karzai. Omar did not trust Karzai and told detainee that the relationship was under scrutiny. . . . When the Taliban lost control, detainee contacted Karzai to discuss a position with the new government and detainee’s personal safety. Several Karzai associates met with detainee in the time between the Taliban’s fall and his arrest.
According to detainee, he traveled to Chaman, Pakistan in January 2002. In Chaman, detainee called [Ahmad] Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai’s brother, to negotiate surrender and integration into the new government. . . . Pakistani border patrol arrived . . . detainee was arrested. . . . Pakistani authorities held detainee for 18 days until he was transferred to U.S. custody in Quetta, PK.
Wasiq
Abdul Haq Wasiq was the Taliban’s deputy minister of intelligence, and is currently head of its General Directorate of Intelligence. The “Capture Information” in his Guantánamo detainee file requires no further elucidation:
On 24 November 2001, detainee, along with his assistant Gohlam Ruhani, ISN US9AF-000003DP (AF-003, transferred); two Americans; and a translator met at the old government office in the town of Maqaur, Ghazni Province. Detainee was to bring the Taliban Minister of Intelligence, Qari Ahmadullah, to the meeting to provide information that would lead to the capture of Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. Detainee did not bring Qari Ahmadullah but did offer assistance in locating Mullah Omar. Detainee requested a global positioning system (GPS) and the necessary radio frequencies to pass information back to the Americans in order to help locate the Taliban leader. Shortly after the meeting, U.S. forces arrested detainee and AF-003 based on their position within the Taliban and support to Anti-Coalition Militia (ACM) members.
The file commented, “Detainee appears to be resentful of being apprehended while he claimed he was working for US and Coalition forces to find Mullah Omar.”
Omari
Meanwhile, Mohammad Nabi Omari, a member of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani’s organization, took shelter in the house of a tribal elder. U.S. forces asked the elder to bring Omari to a meeting. When he came to the meeting, Omari was detained and sent to Guantánamo.
The initial transfers to Guantánamo were followed by years of self-defeating repression. While many Taliban leaders, such as Noori and Fazl, surrendered to the Northern Alliance, others followed Zaeef’s advice to return to their villages. One was Taliban deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. According to Karzai, Baradar sent him a letter saying he had returned to his village and recognized Karzai as president. A few months later, Baradar sent Karzai another letter, this time from Pakistan. He told Karzai that U.S. special forces had come to his village to capture him. As Baradar made his escape to Pakistan, he wrote, he saw his little daughter running into the mountains. Now he would fight forever.
Baradar rose to be the most powerful member of the Taliban after Mullah Omar. In February 2010, the CIA captured him in Karachi in a joint operation with the ISI. Karzai claimed he had been engaged in indirect reconciliation talks with Baradar. In a meeting in his office in January 2012, which I attended, Karzai asked U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman if the CIA and ISI were working together against reconciliation. At the request of U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad, Pakistan released Baradar in 2018. He traveled to Doha, where he headed the Taliban team that negotiated with the United States. Today he is its deputy prime minister for economic affairs.
Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of the Haqqani Network, was one of ten “unilateral” commanders of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen, deemed by the CIA to merit a direct relationship rather than one mediated by the ISI. A member of the Zadran tribe in Khost, he was the most important commander in Eastern Afghanistan. Haqqani joined the Taliban in 1995. Due to the historical relationship between Haqqani and the United States (Congressman Charlie Wilson of Texas had called him “goodness personified”), after 9/11 the United States initially thought it might be able to split him from the Taliban or use him to remove Mullah Omar. Negotiations took place in Islamabad and the UAE, but the best offer from the United States was detention that would end at an unspecified date in return for cooperation. Haqqani refused. After a devastating U.S. air attack on his home in early November, however, Haqqani instructed his commanders to surrender. Meanwhile, the United States had chosen another powerful member of the Zadran tribe, Pacha Khan, to run the area for them. Pacha Khan was a rival of Haqqani’s who had participated in Bonn as a member of the delegation that represented supporters of the former King, Zahir Shah, who lived in exile in Rome.
On December 20, 2001, Haqqani sent a delegation of tribal elders to attend Karzai’s inauguration in Kabul two days later. Pacha Khan told his U.S. military contacts that a “Haqqani-al-Qaeda cavalcade was making its way toward Kabul. Shortly thereafter, amid deafening explosions, cars started bursting into flames. . . . In all, fifty people, including many prominent tribal elders, died in the assault.” But Haqqani stubbornly refused to get the message:
In March 2002, [Haqqani] dispatched his brother Ibrahim Omari to Afghanistan in a bid to reconcile with Karzai. In a public ceremony attended by hundreds of tribal elders and local dignitaries, Omari pledged allegiance to the new government and issued a call for Haqqani followers to return from Pakistan and work with the authorities. He was then appointed head of Paktia province’s tribal council, an institution meant to link village elders with the Kabul government. Soon, hundreds of Haqqani’s old sub-commanders, who had been hiding in fear of PKZ [Pacha Khan Zadran], came in from the cold.
Omari enjoyed some support from the CIA for his efforts, but then, writes Anand Gopal,
as Omari was visiting the house of a government official near Kabul, U.S. Special Operations forces showed up—without the CIA’s knowledge—and arrested him. That week, similar arrests of Haqqani followers took place across [Eastern Afghanistan].
After the United States vetoed the Shah Wali Kot agreement, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil, the last Taliban foreign minister, went into hiding in Quetta, Pakistan. Abdul Bashir Noorzai, a tribal leader and narcotics trafficker from Mutawakkil’s district, reached him by telephone. Noorzai convinced Mutawakkil to leave Pakistan and meet the Americans in Kandahar. Mutawakkil traveled to Kandahar Airfield, where he was arrested. Frank Archibald, a former Marine who had risen in the CIA’s Special Activities Division, questioned Mutawakkil. They talked about “creating a legitimate Taliban political party to join the system.” But when Archibald presented the plan at the CIA headquarters, Cheney refused to listen. “We’re not doing that,” Cheney said. “He’s going to be in a jumpsuit. He’s going to Guantánamo.”
Archibald managed to prevent that, at least. During a conversation in my State Department office, Archibald recounted how he had personally dragged Mutawakkil off the plane that was supposed to transfer him to Guantánamo. Instead, the Afghan government imprisoned Mutawakkil at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, before he was released into house arrest in Kabul.
Gul Agha Sherzai, America’s man in Kandahar, belongs to the Barakzai tribe, from which the Muhammadzai royal clan originated. He told his American handlers that his rivals, leaders of the Ishaqzai and Nurzai tribes of Maiwand district, were Taliban. Those tribes had enhanced their historically low status through participation in the Taliban regime, but in 2002 they were holding jirgas to declare their support for the new government. “Gul Agha’s approach to opposing tribal factions in Maiwand,” Coll reported, “was to tell the Americans they were all part of the Taliban, ‘and we believed him,’ [a] senior [military] officer conceded.” These reports resulted in bloody raids by U.S. special forces, leading to dozens of deaths, the humiliation of women whose houses were invaded, and the arrest and torture of respected elders. Eventually the Noorzais and Ishaqzais gave up trying to support the government. Instead, they opted to arm themselves—with Taliban assistance—to defend themselves from the United States and its warlord clients.
Throughout all this, several paths weren’t taken. The way the United States treated the Taliban virtually guaranteed the insurgency that followed. The initial U.S. offensive had convinced the Taliban that the United States had defeated them. After watching the United States in action for several years, however, they revised that estimate.
By 2009 it was clear to the incoming Obama administration that the military effort was, at best, stalemated. The idea of negotiation with the Taliban began to gain traction. The U.S. military argued for postponing negotiations until the U.S. had achieved a “position of strength.” But the position of strength had already been squandered.
From there, the effort to find a political solution, in which I participated, moved in fits and starts. When the Taliban began their outreach to the United States, their first demand before negotiations was the release of these five, as what they called a “confidence-building measure.” The Obama administration’s deliberations on whether to release these detainees in order to start negotiations led to a firestorm of resistance in Washington: members of Congress were outraged across party lines, and Congress amended the Defense Appropriations Act to make it nearly impossible to release detainees from Guantanamo. The Department of Defense even leaked to the Wall Street Journal that the State Department’s willingness to consider releasing these detainees showed indifference to the safety of U.S. troops. (Later, in 2014, all five would be released as part of a prisoner exchange for Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.)
When the United States and Taliban were finally able to reach agreement in February 2020, it was because President Trump had radically simplified the process. During his first year in office, the national security establishment was able steer his Afghanistan policy in the direction they wanted. National Security Advisor General H. R. McMaster crafted a strategy that Trump announced in August 2017: doubling down on the military option and pressure on Pakistan. After a year, a National Intelligence Estimate found that the policy was not working. Trump seized on this to abandon the quest for victory and launch negotiations with the Taliban under the leadership of Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the UN, and longtime member of the Republican national security establishment.
For Trump, unlike his predecessor, the character of the government of Afghanistan was not just a low priority but no priority at all. He simply wanted the troops out. He constantly tried to impose deadlines, but insisting on a political solution among Afghans made all those deadlines impossible.
The Doha Agreement, as it was called, faithfully reproduced the American priorities that had guided the policy from the beginning, but in a new context. By then, the threat from al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups had been greatly reduced. The rise of China had changed U.S. security priorities. It was no longer necessary to tie down troops in an unwinnable war in a largely hostile region; it was better to pull out and redeploy in accord with the new priority, great power conflict, which became so important as to earn itself a Washington acronym: GPC.
The Doha Agreement reduced the conflict to the major demands of the United States and the Taliban. The Taliban wanted the United States to withdraw its troops, and that was enough for Trump, as long as he could spin it as a success. Pompeo and Khalilzad prevailed on him to allow the negotiations to go on by promising the main thing Washington had always wanted in return for a troop withdrawal—guarantees against anti-American terrorism. Khalilzad tried to link the political settlement to a political agreement by announcing several times that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” But that was not what the agreement’s text said, and neither Trump nor any other major U.S. political figure insisted on it. Upon taking office, Biden proved no more a believer in a political settlement than Trump.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was so dependent on U.S. financial and military assistance for its existence that it had no leverage over the process. To all those Afghans, Americans, and other international actors who had devoted themselves to building the new Afghanistan, this was a terrible and tragic failure. But ultimately the United States got the guarantees it had always wanted at a cost it was willing to bear. Those guarantees might not be worth much in practice, but while they held, Washington could pursue other priorities.
By now, the United States has long since relegated Afghanistan to oblivion, setting it aside in order to focus on great power competition and the new axis—China, Russia, and Iran—which Biden treated as an axis of evil but that Trump seems to view as fellow members of the strongman club. Pretending Afghanistan does not exist, though, does not mean the problem has vanished. The new axis—not to mention Pakistan and India—considers Afghanistan vital to their national interests. Various militant groups threatening Afghanistan’s neighbors survive in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which so far seems more interested in using them for blackmail than global jihad. Afghanistan’s location in the heart of inland Asia makes its territory a potential asset to Eurasian powers who see Asia as more than the maritime “Indo-Pacific,” as the United States now calls it.
The Trump administration includes senior figures who support a number of possible policies, from financing armed revolt to trying to seize control of Afghanistan’s potential mineral wealth. Whoever might eventually win Trump over, most likely to seeking a deal with the Taliban at China’s expense, the people of Afghanistan are likely to figure in such a plan as a blank space, like those on a medieval map marked “Here be monsters”—with no recognition that the monsters are largely our own creation.
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