US Struggles to Reassure Karzai, But Are Taliban Talks Dead?Taliban Peace Talks and Karzai Troop Level Talks in Tatters
by Jason Ditz, June 19, 2013
Announced yesterday by the Taliban and hotly anticipated as the talks that might finally end the war, peace talks there were supposed to begin in Qatar on Thursday are in serious doubt now, with the Karzai government angrily withdrawing and the US being vague on whether they’re trying to save the talks or not.
 On the one hand, Secretary of State John Kerry is said to have called President Karzai to discuss his “concerns” related to the Taliban, but State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, when asked about the talks, appeared baffled and insisted that there had never been talks scheduled in the first, and that all of the US focus was on “consultations” with the Karzai government on whether or not to ever hold them.
Indeed, the peace talks with the Taliban may be an entirely secondary concern at this point for the US, as President Karzai’s office has also reported that they are suspending the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) talks, which were supposed to be the basis for keeping the US occupation forces in Afghanistan beyond 2014.
The BSA talks are also being suspended in response to Karzai’s anger over the Taliban flying the flag of pre-occupation Afghanistan at their office in Qatar, and Karzai followed up on that anger apparently by not only cancelling the peace talks which may or may not have been scheduled, but condemning the US and cancelling the talks on the continued occupation.
The US has repeatedly had falling outs with the Karzai government, and has in the past expressed a preference to “replace” him outright with a more cooperative ruler. Still, with Karzai’s last term in office nearing an end, the US seems stuck with him and will likely have to at least try to placate him enough to keep troops on the ground beyond his reign.
On-Again, Off-Again US Talks with Taliban in Doha; Kabul Furious
Posted on 06/20/2013 by Juan Cole
The attempt of the US State Department to open negotiations with the Taliban, who now have an office in Doha, Qatar, foundered on a series of SNAFUs on Wednesday.
First, the Taliban put up a sign at their office in Doha that implied it was the embassy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the pre-2001 government in Kabul.
President Hamid Karzai and the members of parliament in the current government in Kabul were furious.
Then, the US announced that it would begin negotiating with the Taliban directly, whereas Karzai thought he would be in the room right from the beginning.
So Karzai and the lower house of parliament condemned the planned talks and pulled out of further negotiations. They also canceled planned discussions with the US about a mutual security treaty that would legally allow US troops to remain in country after December 31, 2014.
Secretary of State John Kerry called Karzai to apologize for what he said was a misunderstanding and Kerry then put off talks with the Taliban several days.
The willingness of the Taliban to negotiate with the US is new and surprising. One member of the Taliban said in the Afghan press that they were tired of fighting. Some think that they are in Doha to negotiate from a position of strength. I don’t think so. I think the Taliban want a place at the national table and they hope to get it through these negotiations as well as via continued military operations.
The Taliban say that all US troops must leave the country and that the government must impose an ‘Islamic State.’
Karzai now has a combined military and police force of 350,000. They are fairly well equipped and trained. But they suffer from high illiteracy rates and a 30% desertion rate, and it is not clear that they can defeat the Taliban, though they might be able to maintain the status quo. Washington hopes that they will fight and stand their ground as the US and NATO draw down.
Afghanistan faces severe challenges. Some 90% of the money in the country comes in the form of nearly $16 billion in annual foreign aid from the international community. Afghanistan’s budget is about $2 billion annually and the country simply cannot afford to pay for the massive army and police force itself. If foreign aid slips, that army lack the resources to go on fighting the Taliban.
The negotiations with the Taliban are key. But if they aren’t handled better than they were this week, we can’t expect a breakthrough any time soon.
Pentagon Scrapping $7 Billion Worth of Gear in AfghanistanDrawdown Means Boom Times for Afghan Scrap Metal Dealers
by Jason Ditz, June 19, 2013
It’s a good time to be a scrap metal dealer in occupied Afghanistan.
As the Pentagon looks to draw down the size of their forces by the end of 2014, a major difficulty has been the massive amounts of gear and vehicles the US went to such great expense to ship there over the years.
 The law simply won’t allow them to give the gear to the Afghan government, and selling it to anyone else is next to impossible since they’d need to be able to get it out of Afghanistan to do anything with it. Instead, the US is “shredding” $7 billion worth of it.
That means hundreds of millions of pounds of gear, some of it brand new in the crates (so much that the Pentagon is considering a “surge” just to sort it all) or barely used, is being simply ripped to shreds or crushed into cubes and sold for tiny fractions of its cost to the junk metal dealers.
It’s a monumental amount of destruction for even the US military to try to pull off, with the working plan seemingly to destroy anything and everything that isn’t specifically needed for the occupation from 2015-2024, including bases. The fear is that anything not destroyed might eventually end up in the hands of insurgents.
Confusion over planned US-Taliban talksFirst direct negotiations may be on hold after Karzai announces boycott amid row over name of group's office in Doha.
Last Modified: 19 Jun 2013 22:44
     Tensions over the Taliban's new political office in Qatar have thrown planned talks between the Afghan anti-government group and the US into disarray. | The meeting was expected to take place in Doha on Thursday but the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has said he will not be attending it. Wednesday's developments came one day after the US announced it would engage in direct negotiations with the armed group.
"Reports of a meeting scheduled are inaccurate," Jen Psaki, State Department spokeswoman, said on Wednesday, saying that the US had "never confirmed" any specific meeting. "We are now in consultations with the Afghan leadership and the High Peace Council on how to move forward." Mohammad Suhail Shaheen, a member of the Taliban's new political office in Doha, told Al Jazeera that the only purpose of the office is to find lasting peace in Afghanistan. "This office was opened in order to bring about peace and to find a peaceful solution [...] which is the main thing and all parties should try to make that happen," said Shaheen, adding that noone should try and disrupt the peace process "as we see from the Kabul administration". "We enter this with good intentions and seek to a peaceful solution to the Afghan issues, and we want all sides to have the same intention". No travel plans Psaki confirmed that James Dobbins, US special envoy, had not left Washington on Tuesday as planned for the talks. "Right now, Ambassador Dobbins is in Washington. I don't have any planned travel for you to announce," she said.
In another decision on Wednesday, he broke off ongoing Afghan-US talks on an agreement to allow the US to maintain soldiers in Afghanistan after a NATO combat mission ends next year over what it called the US' "inconsistent statement and action" over the peace process. A dispute over the name of the Taliban's Doha office has raised new concerns among the Americans too. The row centres on the Taliban office calling itself the "Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan" - the formal name of its 1996-2001 government - and portraying itself as a state in exile, officials said. Psaki insisted that "we do not recognise the name Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan", adding that John Kerry, the secretary of state, had made that clear in two phone calls in the past 24 hours with Karzai. Kerry also "noted that the government of Qatar has taken steps today to ensure that the political office is in compliance with the conditions established by the government of Qatar for its operations". Afghan threat to boycott Taliban talks | ||||||||
President Karzai says his officials will not take part in negotiations in Doha, unless process is led by Afghanistan.
Last Modified: 19 Jun 2013 12:37
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Al Jazeera speaks to Shukria Barakzai, an Afghan MP, about the suspension of talks with the United States
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| The Afghan government says it will boycott talks with the Taliban in the Qatari capital, Doha, until the "process is Afghan-led". "As long as the peace process is not Afghan-led, the High Peace Council will not participate in the talks in Qatar," President Hamid Karzai said in a statement on Wednesday, referring to a body he set up in 2010 to seek a negotiated peace with the Taliban. The announcement came hours after Afghanistan, upset over what it called the US' "inconsistent statement and action" over the Taliban peace process, said it was suspending security negotiations with Washington. Wednesday's developments came a day after the US said that it would engage in direct negotiations with the Taliban, who officially opened a political office in Doha a day earlier. "The president suspended the BSA [Bilateral Security Agreement] talks with the US this morning," Aimal Faizi, President Karzai's spokesman, said. "There is a contradiction between what the US government says and what it does regarding Afghanistan peace talks," Faizi told AFP. The BSA is meant to provide a strategic framework for US troops to remain in the country after its troops formally exit Afghanistan by the end of 2014. It will finalise issues such as the number of troops to remain, where they will be based and under what terms they will operate. Faizi said that Karzai particularly objected to "the name of the [Taliban's] office" in the Qatari capital.
"The president is not happy with the name of the office. We oppose the title the 'Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan' because such a thing doesn't exist," Faizi said. "The US was aware of the president's stance."
Meanwhile, the Taliban said it would continue to target the US military in Afghanistan, undeterred by US moves to hold direct negotiations with it .Speaking to Al Jazeera, Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, said his group will not change their tactics or objectives. The Taliban threat rang true as the armed group claimed responsibility for an attack on the Bagram air base, that killed four US soldiers on Tuesday. The air base, a sprawling centre about 47km north of Kabul, serves as a major hub for US aircraft. 'Two-pronged approach' Al Jazeera's Jane Feguson said the Taliban threat to continue with its attacks reflected that the armed group had been emboldened by its perceived successes on the battlefield. "Zabihullah said it was those attacks in the first place that forced parties on the ground to the negotiation table. It shows a real confidence on the side of the Taliban when they say that," she said. "They see themselves in the driving seat of these peace negotiations rather than having to make any military concessions on the ground," she said. The US military presence in Afghanistan is roughly 66,000 troops, after having reached a peak of about 100,000 forces. US officials cautioned that the peace process would likely be messy and has no guarantee of success. "It's going to be a long, hard process if indeed it advances significantly at all," a senior US official said. Meanwhile, the NATO command in Kabul on Tuesday completed handing over lead security responsibility to Afghan government forces across the country. NATO plans to end all combat operations in Afghanistan by December 2014. | |||||||||
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