US ‘not ready to throw in the towel’ on Afghan talks even as Taliban violence grows

However, experts and former diplomats say that the Taliban want full control of Afghanistan and will continue to seek leverage for that goal on the battlefield. The top US envoy himself has acknowledged that the Taliban feel “emboldened” by their recent military gains in the country.Taliban political leadership remains engaged in discussions with US officials from their perch in Doha, and regularly fly to capitals all over the world to discuss the future of Afghanistan, but the intra-Afghan negotiations in the Qatari capital have continued on and off for nearly a year with no tangible result. Now, the talks are taking place against a backdrop of escalating Taliban violence, including Tuesday’s bombings in Kabul “The idea that the Taliban want a negotiated political solution and will cooperate with the Afghan government is a fantasy,” Bill Roggio of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish DC-based think tank, told CNN.”The Taliban has stated from the beginning that it will only accept a reestablishment of the Islamic emirate and has used negotiations to achieve its objective to get the US to leave Afghanistan,” Roggio said. “The Taliban is just using diplomacy to hoodwink the US.”Former US Ambassador to Afghanistan P. Michael McKinley said that “the idea that the Taliban are negotiating in Doha in good faith, or were, is just not true.””Anyone who’s suggesting that these were meaningful negotiations leading to a peace process was engaging in aspirational thinking and we’re seeing now that the Taliban have seized the opportunity on the military front but there’s no signs of any concessions anywhere,” he said at the Aspen Security Forum event this week.’Lion’s share’Taliban militants have Neumann told CNN that the talks should continue, “but we should stop talking about the talks.””We should remain at the table, but we need to make it clear that the Taliban can have a negotiated peace but not a negotiated surrender,” he said.Annie Pforzheimer, who was deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Kabul from 2017-2018, told CNN, “I stand by the principle of negotiations, but the way that the Taliban have been essentially using them as a way to continue to have legitimacy despite their troops committing atrocities on the ground, that can’t continue.”State Department officials have warned that the Taliban will become “an international pariah” if they seize power through force. Pforzheimer, who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNN that “given the actions on the ground, it is high time for the State Department to test their own theory.””If the Taliban want to be legitimate, then why not suspend the sanctions relief and list more of them under the sanctions in order to show the Taliban what illegitimate actions will get them?” she said. The United Nations Security Council has granted temporary sanctions exemptions for sanctioned Taliban negotiators in Doha.Neumann, who is the President of the American Academy of Diplomacy, disagreed with the idea of reimposing sanctions, arguing that “the way to apply pressure on the negotiations is keep up airstrikes and kill more Taliban in the field.””I’m sorry that’s brutal, but that’s what a war is. The idea that we can apply some kind of diplomatic pressure while we lose the war is absurd,” he said.