In Moscow, Afghan peace talks without the Afghan government

Thirty years after the last Soviet troops retreated from Afghanistan, Russia on Tuesday reasserted itself as a player in the region, hosting talks between the Taliban and senior Afghan politicians aimed at speeding the exit of another superpower — this time the United States.

The talks, held in Moscow’s President Hotel, which is owned by the Kremlin, offered a clearer view of how the Taliban see an end to the 18-year war. In a room dripping with chandeliers, more than 50 delegates — many in flowing robes, some in Western suits and ties, and nearly all old and sometimes violent rivals — faced each other across a large, circular conference table.

While the Afghan politicians, part of a delegation led by former President Hamid Karzai, spoke of protecting the hard gains of the past two decades, the Taliban denounced a new Afghan constitution that lays out a system of governance built at enormous cost.

The Taliban representatives also offered a rare look at how they now see the role of women. While they barred women from public life during their time in power, they said they now believed in women’s rights, including to education and work — a claim met with scepticism by some women in Afghanistan.

The Moscow gathering, which included a Taliban delegation led by their chief negotiator, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, represented the most significant contact between senior Afghan politicians and the Taliban since the United States toppled the hard-line Islamist group from power at the end of 2001.

Absent from the talks, however, was the American-backed Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, which has strongly criticised the meeting as an affront designed to undermine his office’s authority and the Afghan state.

Ghani is in an uncomfortable position, at odds not only with his American backers, whom he sees as moving too quickly to reach a deal, but also with others in the country’s political elite who are rallying around the US-led effort.

“What are they agreeing to, with whom? Where is their implementing power?” Ghani told the Afghan channel ToloNews on Tuesday, dismissing the talks. “They could hold a hundred such meetings, but until the Afghan government, the Afghan Parliament, the legal institutions of Afghanistan approve it, it is just agreements on paper.”

The delegation headed by Karzai consisted entirely of former officials, representatives of political parties — many of them involved in the country’s bloody civil war — and current members of Parliament. There were only two women in the group.

Afghans on social media were critical of the delegation, questioning whether they represented Afghanistan.

“Those who are in the meeting in Moscow, they have been pushed aside,” said Khaled Abedy, 31, who works at a private company in Kabul, the Afghan capital. “They just want to build their own business. The country isn’t important to them. I think this sort of meeting can’t help the peace process at all.”

But Atta Muhammad Nur, one of the Afghan politicians in the delegation in Moscow, said the representatives there considered themselves, rather than Ghani’s government in Kabul, the ultimate masters of Afghanistan.

“We have been fighting for 40 years and we are the people with influence, not Ghani,” said Muhammed Nur, a governor forced from office last year by Ghani.

Speaking on the sidelines of the event, he said that all foreign forces, including around 14,000 US troops, must leave Afghanistan. But he cautioned that they should be withdrawn gradually, to avoid a repeat of the chaos that engulfed Afghanistan after the abrupt Soviet pullout in 1989.

The talks, scheduled to last two days, opened just a week after American diplomats and Taliban representatives ended six days of negotiations in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Each side said those negotiations had made progress toward ending a conflict that began when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, not long after the terror attacks of Sept 11.

Both sides said they had agreed, in principle, to a framework on two issues: a Taliban guarantee that Afghan soil would never again be used by terrorist groups like al-Qaida, and a pledge from the United States to withdraw its troops. But many Afghans are concerned that the Americans might be too eager to strike a deal.

The organiser of the Moscow talks is ostensibly the Afghan diaspora in Russia, not the Russian government. But Afghan officials and Taliban members have said that the Kremlin is playing a major role orchestrating the meeting behind the scenes.

Russia, chastened by the damage done to the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan, has shown no interest in getting involved militarily again, at least not directly. But it has positioned itself as a force to be reckoned with, relishing Washington’s agonies at the hands of Taliban insurgents.

Russia designated the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, and at first strongly supported US efforts to purge Afghanistan of extremist Islamist groups, which President Vladimir Putin described as a threat to Russia’s security.

But amid a rising Cold War-style rivalry between Moscow and Washington, Russia has hedged its bets by opening channels with the Taliban. Moscow allowed a 10-member delegation from the Taliban, still officially barred as terrorists, to enter Russia for the Moscow talks.

On Tuesday in Afghanistan, the violence continued unabated. The Taliban attacked police and army outposts around the northern city of Kunduz before dawn, killing at least 23 members of the Afghan security forces. In Takhar Province, gunmen attacked a women’s radio station, killing two staff members.

Karzai made an appeal to end the bloodshed, saying Afghan soldiers and Taliban fighters were buried next to each other.

“All around them in these graveyards are the regular Afghans — their graves are plenty,” Karzai said. “The dream of every mother, the hope of every father is buried there.”

Karzai was first installed as Afghanistan’s leader by the United States in late 2001, but the relationship soured. He has visited Russia often since leaving office in 2014, and in meetings with Putin and other officials he has aligned himself with Moscow’s view that the United States must leave Afghanistan, as the Soviet Union did.

Stanekzai, the Taliban’s chief negotiator, said in a speech lasting more than half an hour that the group did not seek to monopolise power inside Afghanistan. He said that they were pursuing an Islamist government, “in consultation with all Afghans,” and that the group did not recognise the country’s current Constitution, calling it copied from the West.

Perhaps the most revealing part of his speech came when he described the Taliban’s view of a future role for Afghan women. When in power, the group sent its religious police to patrol the streets, giving out lashes to women for, among other things, showing their ankles.

“We are committed to all rights given to women by Islam,” Stanekzai said. “Islam has given women all fundamental rights — such as trade, ownership, inheritance, education, work and the choice of partner, security and education, and a good life.”

Considering the group’s history, some Afghan women immediately questioned the statement’s sincerity.

But Fawzia Koofi, a female member of the Afghan Parliament and one of the two women in attendance, said she was happy to have heard the Taliban promise that women would not be stripped of their rights and would be allowed to serve as prime minister — though not as president.

However, she cautioned, “We have gained so much in the last 18 years, whatever the problems, that we do not want to go back the Taliban period.”

c.2019 New York Times News Service