FP: The New York Times report indicated that the United States is still requesting that the Afghan government be made party to the talks, and that issue was left hanging. Do you think the Trump administration will stand firm?
RC: That’s a great point. Zal Khalilzad I think is making a huge effort, but I would guess he’s very constrained by the current administration. I have no access to sensitive information from the administration. That’s a surmise on my part, but the president has made it pretty clear publicly he wants out. So I don’t think we’re going to see the time and focus on longer-term consequences.
We’ve seen this before, at the Paris peace talks with Vietnam. But I think what makes this particularly grave is, for example, what’s going to happen to Afghan women? The women we encouraged to step forward, the ones that we made a major effort to get back into schools. What about them? And there is no assurance or guarantee that the Taliban would make that I would trust. Who’s going to enforce it?
FP: You are speaking as if the Taliban will certainly take over the Afghan government. That’s your assumption?
RC: It is, sooner or later. Negotiation 101: Do not negotiate from a position of weakness. As we’ve seen in the last year-plus, the Taliban are gaining ground. They are not the juggernaut that some accounts seem to make of them, but they control more and more and the government less and less. So to think they would now stop and say, OK, we’ll respect the constitution and seek legal changes, that isn’t going to happen.
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