--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Jennifer Williams: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about the US and the Taliban working out a deal to end America's longest war. Jennifer Williams is a foreign editor at Vox. She's been following this story closely. Jennifer, can you explain what's happening?
--:-- Jennifer Williams: So, the US and the Taliban have tentatively agreed to a framework for a peace deal, which is a really big deal and could potentially lead to the end of US involvement in this almost two-decade-long war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, this news feels sort of abrupt out of the blue, but I'm guessing it's probably less out of the blue than we think it is. How did we get here?
--:-- Jennifer Williams: I mean, it's a bit surprising, but we have this special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, who's basically been working on these negotiations since July in Doha, Qatar. It's like this neutral third party where we tend to meet with the Taliban. They have offices there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Previous talks have broken down, including one time when they flew a Taliban flag there and the leader of Afghanistan saw that and got really pissed off and ended talks.
--:-- Jennifer Williams: Yeah. A lot of Americans probably think of the Taliban as this super crazy militant group that's like evil and bad and does really bad things. And yeah, they do. But they also have political offices, right? Like they do have negotiators that sit down and at a table and talk about, let's work out a peace framework.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, negotiations have been ongoing since July. Who's been involved?
--:-- Jennifer Williams: So, there are three main players here in the actual negotiations and peace talks: the US, the Taliban, and the Afghan government, which the US supports. The Taliban doesn't recognize it as a legitimate government and has been fighting against it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, what's changed between these three primary parties recently that's making this possible?
--:-- Jennifer Williams: Let's start with the US. On the US side, you have Donald Trump, who really wants to bring US troops home like right this second. He has a very clear incentive to want to figure out how to work with the Taliban, come up with some kind of deal that basically gives him an excuse to pull out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the other side, you have the Taliban. They happen to control something like 40 percent of the country now. They've had a resurgence of power and reach basically since all foreign combat troops pulled out around 2014.
--:-- Jennifer Williams: So, we still have like a lot of troops there, us, the US and NATO countries. But they're in like these advise and assist role. And so they are basically at their peak of their power now. They're really powerful and they want to use that leverage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which brings us to the third party, which is the Afghan government. They also would very much like to finish this and not have to continue fighting. Afghan forces are bearing the brunt of the casualties.
--:-- Jennifer Williams: They're the ones who are fighting the Taliban. They're the ones dying in large numbers. They have an incentive to want to finish this. They also know that the US really wants to pull out, so they're like, OK, the US is about to leave, which means we're going to lose a lot of the support and backing. We better figure out a way to sit down with the Taliban and solve this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we know any of the details about what might be agreed upon yet?
--:-- Jennifer Williams: So, it's not like an official deal yet. It's just like the framework for maybe eventually having a peace deal, right? So, like we're kind of sketching out like the first part of it. A draft. Yeah, basically. The Taliban has agreed to this thing that we've been asking them forever, which is to promise that they won't let groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS operate from their territory safely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, let's talk about the Taliban. They're a Sunni Afghan insurgency that's been fighting the US since 2001. Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She's an expert on international conflicts and security. Vanda, can you tell us a bit about the Taliban's background and origins?
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: The Taliban is a Sunni Afghan insurgency that has been fighting the US since 2001. It has its background and origins in the 1980s Afghan insurgency against the Soviet invasion of the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Taliban were some of the Mujahideen who were fighting the Soviets. They shared a common enemy with the US.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: And both the Carter and Reagan administrations gave the Mujahideen $3 billion in military aid to fight the Soviets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the 1990s, after the Soviets withdrew, the country fell into civil war with various parts of the country controlled by various Afghan warlords.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: The most militant extremist faction of the Mujahideen turned into the Taliban. And from 1994, they started fighting against the warlords, against the various clans and tribes and factions, and gradually took over the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what did they do once they took control of the country?
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: The Taliban did deliver on its promise of bringing stability and peace to large portions of the country. By 2001, the Taliban really ruled most of Afghanistan, with the exception of a small space in the country's north.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they also unleashed their own serious human rights violations and abuses.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: They really wanted to turn Afghanistan into a 9th-century backward place. So women were tremendously restricted in their freedoms. They could not get jobs. They could not access healthcare. Women were stoned for adultery as were men. Many men were executed, beheaded.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And apart from that, the Taliban were also very inadequate in their administrative capacity.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: And not just inadequate, they really wanted to turn Afghanistan into a very backward place. And they actively went ahead and destroyed any vestiges of economic activity and social government administration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how and when does al-Qaeda show up?
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: Al-Qaeda emerged out of some of the same fighters, in this case, foreign non-Afghan fighters who were fighting the Soviets. Bin Laden was one of the foreign fighters fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it is in Afghanistan where he got to know the future leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: So Mullah Omar, in particular, and the core group of fighters around him had lots of connections and personal relationships with bin Laden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When al-Qaeda under bin Laden's leadership was looking for a place to have as a safe haven for its operations, they shopped for a number of countries.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: For a while, they were in Sudan. Ultimately, they got pushed out of Sudan. It's at that point in the mid-1990s where they set up camp in Afghanistan with the welcome and protection of Mullah Omar.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it is out of Afghanistan where al-Qaeda planned major attacks, major international terrorist attacks against US coal, against the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and ultimately, of course, 9-11.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: After 9-11, the US requested that the Taliban hands over al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and other al-Qaeda members for prosecution in the US.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Taliban has been given the opportunity to surrender all the terrorists in Afghanistan and to close down their camps and operations.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: Full warning has been given, and time is running out. The Taliban, of course, refused to do it, and the US invaded Afghanistan within metro peaks, toppling the Afghan Taliban regime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And by about late 2001, early 2002, the Taliban is really eliminated as a regime entity in Afghanistan.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: The US then subsequently tries to build a functioning government in Afghanistan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the beginning, there is significant hope among the Afghan population that a much better government and much better governance will follow.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: There is tremendous enthusiasm early on, but the governance that then follows is troubled. The governance is pervaded by corruption, abuses, lack of government capacity, and this provides fertile ground for the Taliban to entrench its pack among the population.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So now the Taliban is back in this position of influence. How has it changed now over the past few decades, especially after 2005?
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: The Taliban has been steadily gaining military power, so much so that it precipitated the surge during the Obama administration, where some 100,000 US forces and another 50,000 international coalition forces were fighting the Taliban.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the Taliban managed to hunker down and survive it.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: And today, it is more powerful on the battlefield than it has been at any point since they were defeated by the US at that point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it controls large parts of Afghanistan.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: It doesn't have formal recognized control, but it de facto controls large parts of the south and east.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the rule that it's instituting is still a very brutal rule, but it's often more predictable than the capricious brutality and corruption of the Afghan government and power brokers associated with it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How could this deal change that status quo? What could the country look like if the US is able to broker some kind of peace?
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: Well, it's very important to understand that the deal that's been announced this weekend, the core contours of the deal, is really only a deal between the Taliban and the US.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there is expectation that the Taliban will then negotiate the deal with the Afghan government.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: The details of the deal yet remain to be seen. If that is a deal, the Taliban will clearly be asking for substantial power at the national level in the national government in Kabul.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It will be asking for substantial subnational level power and it will be asking for changes to the political order in Afghanistan.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: That might mean revising the Afghan constitution, or if the constitution is not revised, at least not early on in the deal, the Taliban will nonetheless want much more religious, much more conservative rule with many fewer freedoms for people, no guaranteed freedoms in the constitution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Under kind of the best circumstances, think of the political social life in Iran.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: As one model. Iran is a Shia country, the Taliban are Sunnis. But think of a very religiously-ruled place or Saudi Arabia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Many Afghans are frightened of that possibility.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: It might still mean tremendous religious oppression without basic economic livelihoods being satisfied.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's really what will determine whether peace brings relief and stability and prosperity to Afghanistan, or whether the peace reduces the violence and deaths, but still leaves behind very difficult conditions for people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jennifer, thanks for explaining all of this to us.
--:-- Jennifer Williams: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Vanda, thanks for your expertise on this.
--:-- Vanda Felbab-Brown: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up on Today Explained, a peace deal might bring some peace of mind to the US, but not necessarily to Afghanistan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Josie and Johnny have a podcast, and it's called Josie and Johnny are having a baby with you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Josie and Johnny are two clueless comedians who are just learning as they go, and the show follows them through their not-totally-planned pregnancy as they try to prepare for the birth of their first child.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They cover the funny questions, they cover the serious questions, and they have their more experienced friends come on to help them with both.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The first episode of the show is already live, and it features John Hodgman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find Josie and Johnny on Stitcher, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Overcast, on Pocket Casts, on Google Podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I just looked up a bunch of other podcast places. There's a bunch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained.
