The Taliban’s rapid advance is stripping the peace negotiators of influence

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Qatar had been trying to persuade the Taliban to halt its offensive as the group’s forces advanced at the gates of Kabul after seizing the eastern city of Jalalabad on Sunday.

A person familiar with the mediation efforts said a high-level delegation of officials from the Taliban and the Afghan government is expected to travel to Doha for talks on Monday.

Mediators have struggled to gain influence over the Taliban as the Afghan army thaws, the United States begins to evacuate its embassy, ​​and regional powers partner with the Taliban, giving the group some of the international recognition it wants.

“The biggest issue Qatar has had to put pressure on the Taliban is international recognition,” said a person familiar with the mediation efforts in Doha. You do this and you get recognition from the international community.

But now many countries in the region are meeting with them without doing so – Russia, China, Pakistanis, Iranians. . . And you have nothing to put pressure on them to sit at the table.”

Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who has been mediating between rival Afghan parties, met the head of the Taliban’s political office, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, on Saturday and urged the movement to “retreat from the escalation and cease-fire.”

Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday at a meeting of international partners last week that it was agreed not to recognize any government in Afghanistan that was imposed by force.

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“What the mediators are trying to do now is to bring the decision makers to the negotiating table, not the VIPs, but like number two, from the government and the Taliban,” said the person familiar with the Doha talks.

That person said, “The problem with the Taliban is that you talk to them and half of the group agree with something and the other half don’t.”

“Now the men are at the table [in Doha] Brilliant, but they clearly don’t make the final decisions on either side.”

Qatar, which hosts an office for the Taliban, has long facilitated talks between the US and Afghan parties and took over the role of mediator in June.

But negotiations made little progress, as the Taliban encouraged the Biden administration’s decision to move forward with former President Donald Trump’s planned withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, ending the 20-year US war in the country.

After President Joe Biden won the US election in November, the Afghan government paused in peace talks, assuming the new administration in Washington would keep US forces in the country. “When they saw that Biden would honor the deal and leave, they started moving quickly and the Taliban started to stall because they knew they had the upper hand,” the source said.

He added that mediators were trying to pressure the Taliban, who wanted Ghani to step down, to stop the fighting, but “the issue is that they know the Americans won’t come back.”

“The only leverage is sanctions or economic support – it’s the same thing as Iran, stick or carrot,” he said. “The Taliban knows if they’ve taken control of them, they don’t need to at least be anti-American.”

Video: How 20 Years of War Changed Afghanistan | FT . movie

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