Afghanistan Peace CampaignAfghanistan Analysts Network
There were, however, mutual recriminations over the Doha Agreement, signed by the Trump administration in February 2020. Harris accused Trump of having negotiated “one of the weakest deals you can imagine,” one that even his national security adviser had said was “a weak, terrible deal,” that “bypassed the Afghan government” and which “involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.” She recalled Trump’s invitation in September 2019 to “the Taliban to Camp David” as an example of how he had “consistently disparaged and demeaned members of our military, fallen soldiers.”
Trump hit back, saying it had been a “very good agreement,” before embarking on a number of untruths: it had stopped the Taleban killing lots of US soldiers with snipers, he claimed, and that he had negotiated directly with “Abdul … the head of the Taliban” (assumed to be head of the Taleban Political Commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar) and, most egregiously, that he had broken off the deal because the Taleban had not met various conditions: “The agreement said you have to do this, this, this, this, this, and they didn’t do it. They didn’t do it. The agreement was, was terminated by us because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.” In reality, Biden came into office with the agreement still in place and with just 2,500 US troops left on the ground: he extended the deadline for withdrawal from May to September, but kept his campaign promise to complete the pull-out.
It is an irony that as Trump returns to the White House, the general public views his record on the withdrawal as clean, even though his administration was its architect. Indeed, Trump had even promised ahead of the 2020 election to bring the final troops home by Christmas. Biden ultimately completed the withdrawal, with all that ensued: the shambles, mayhem and violence and, for the US, the humiliation of the Taleban driving into Kabul to retake power, all played out live on television. The withdrawal caused a fall in Biden’s public approval ratings from which he never recovered: “For the Bidens, Afghanistan was their [Iran] hostage crisis, which really hurt [Jimmy] Carter and his legacy. Afghanistan was the real hinge point for Biden’s approval ratings,” Barbara Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told the Washington-based news website Roll Call. In the public imagination, Biden is remembered as the sole author of the catastrophe.[2] Subsequently, he acted as if he would rather Afghanistan had just disappeared completely, although officials, including (now former) Special Representative on Afghanistan Tom West, have striven to engage with the Islamic Emirate.[3] By contrast, for Trump, Afghanistan is not linked to his failure, which means that, if he wanted to, he does have the political space to do something different. The question is: Will he?
Afghan responses to Trump’s Election and his coming inauguration
The Emirate responded positively to Trump’s election victory. On 6 November 2024, the day after the announcement of his win, foreign affairs ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi tweeted that his ministry:
In line with its balanced foreign policy, expresses hope that following the announcement of the U.S. election results, the incoming U.S. administration will adopt a pragmatic approach to ensure tangible advancement in bilateral relations, allowing both nations to open a new chapter of relations grounded in mutual engagement. The Doha Agreement signed between the Islamic Emirate and America under President Trump’s administration lead to the end of the twenty-year occupation.
More recently, reported ToloNews on 4 January 2025, acting Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Shir Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai said the Emirate had closed the door on enmity with the United States and was ready to engage with all countries, including the US. Hoping Washington would refrain from interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs and honour the Doha Agreement, Stanekzai said:
One or two weeks from now, he [Trump] will come to power. He should change his policy, abandon Biden’s policy, and create a new approach. From Afghanistan and the Islamic Emirate’s side, the path is open for them. If they intend friendship, we will extend a hand of friendship as well. An enemy does not remain an enemy forever, and a friend does not remain a friend forever.
The fact that the Doha Agreement was signed during Trump’s first term in office has encouraged some Emirate officials to believe he might change US policy to their advantage.
Meanwhile, the opposition was also delighted by Trump’s victory and Biden’s demise. Ali Maisam Nazary, head of foreign relations at the National Resistance Front (NRF),[4] tweeted his congratulations to Trump on 6 November, with hopes he would end Biden’s policy of ‘appeasing’ the Taleban. Nazary was confident, he wrote, that Trump would take “meaningful actions” to support and recognise the “people of Afghanistan’s resistance against global terrorism and their legitimate aspirations for a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic Afghanistan.” They were, he said, looking forward to “collaborating with you and your esteemed team in the months and years to come.”
Former head of the NDS and former vice-president Amrullah Saleh, also part of the NRF, tweeting on 7 November, was more circumspect, warning compatriots not to get too emotional or place too much faith in the new American president, counselling that “change begins in our own villages.” More recently, though, he has appeared optimistic. On 15 January, he tweeted a question: “Is the era of hallucination ending in the White House?” Biden’s pursuit of a “pro-Taliban narrative,” he asserted, “played a significant role” in his defeat. In contrast, he claimed that “Trump’s unambiguous anti-Taliban stance” had been “crucial to his electoral success.” Saleh also said the “veteran community, highly influential and revered in America, appeared to significantly sway this narrative.”
The NRF has been buoyed up by two key Trump nominations: Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. The two men, who are among the most hawkish and most actively anti-Taleban American politicians, have also picked up some of the NRF’s talking points.
Two key Trump nominees
Marco Rubio, a Florida senator since 2011, has long pushed for the US to take a far harder stance against the Islamic Emirate. In November 2023, he reintroduced a Senate bill (first proposed in September 2021) to designate what he called “the illegitimate Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as a state sponsor of terrorism and the Taliban as a FTO [Foreign Terrorist Organisation],” saying:
A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan poses a direct threat to our national security interests as well as our allies and partners both in the Middle East and in Central Asia. The Biden Administration’s botched military withdrawal from Afghanistan has left the nation as a safe haven for anti-American terrorists. Designating the Taliban as an FTO is the next logical step.
Such designations would establish extra constraints on the US government, NGOs and American citizens, further to the sanctions already in place, as well as on other countries dealing with Afghanistan.[5] Currently, four countries are designated State Sponsors of Terrorism – Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria – while FTOs number in the dozens.
Trump’s nomination for National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, is a congressman from Florida, a decorated former colonel in the National Guard Special Forces, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan, worked as defence policy director at the Pentagon during the George Bush presidency and counterterrorism advisor to then Vice President Dick Cheney. “Following his time in the White House,” his biography reads, “Mike built a small business to over 400 employees, which was repeatedly listed in the Inc 500 index as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America” (further details here). This was Metis Solutions, which Waltz helped found in 2010. Described by one business media company as providing “strategic analysis, intelligence support, and training,” it had, according to The Intercept, offices in Arlington, Virginia, Tampa, Florida, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates and Kabul and “won coveted contracts US government contracts, including to train Afghan special forces, including a controversial program to develop artisanal mining operations in strategic villages.”
The company was sold in November 2020 for “approximately $92 million in cash,” according to the buyer, PAE, one of the largest US defence contractors, which described Metis Solutions as a “leading provider of intelligence analysis, operational and tactical training and program management” with a majority of its “more than 450 employees” having “top secret clearances with subject matter expertise across a broad range of critical national security issues.”
Waltz expressed strong concerns about the Doha Agreement and the withdrawal, fearing it would open the way for the Taleban to return to power and strengthen al-Qaeda’s position. See, for example, his interview from 1 February 2019 on WBUR radio:
My first thought is will you verify by keeping a counterterrorism presence on the ground so that if the Taliban can’t — or won’t — stop al-Qaida, ISIS and terrorist groups from launching, then we can take matters back in our own hands? We also have to continue to build the Afghan army’s capacity to eventually do this on their own. And … those missions are what we currently have forces there for now. So it’s the withdrawal that really has me concerned.
Waltz agreed with the WBUR interviewer that the Taleban would rush into power if US troops withdrew and would then “repress the people,” saying:
We’ve made huge gains in the last 15 years in girls’ education and women’s empowerment and sowing the seeds of democracy, but it’s going to take a long time and I think the investment — look, we can debate this all day long. I really don’t think we have a choice. The United States must lead and we must keep our foot on the neck of these terrorist groups. There is a reason we haven’t had any major attacks in the last few years and that’s because these groups are on the run. They can’t plot, plan, and train and attack the United States. So we need to stay on offense, and we can fight these wars in Kabul and in places like Damascus, or we can fight them in places like Kansas City. I prefer the former.
In the last days of the US military presence in Afghanistan, on 16 August 2021, Waltz told CNBC: “I think at the end of the day you have two choices in Afghanistan, you have a small presence focused on counterterrorism and supporting the Afghan military, or you face what we’re facing now, which will be a cesspool of terrorism.” Waltz also predicted the resurgence of al-Qaeda, “working closely with the Taliban” and asserted that it does “intend to attack America again.”
Days after the fall of the Islamic Republic, Waltz, along with fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, publicly backed the anti-Taleban ‘resistance’, which at that time, on 27 August 2021, was still holding out in Panjshir, as reported by Politico:
After speaking with Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh and representatives of Ahmad Massoud, we are calling on the Biden Administration to recognize these leaders as the legitimate government representatives of Afghanistan. … We ask the Biden Administration to recognize that the Afghan Constitution is still intact, and the Afghan Taliban takeover is illegal.
The question of the UN cash shipments
It is easy to see why Saleh and others in the NRF have become more optimistic since these two nominations were made, especially after one NRF talking point in particular was picked up, via friendly US Republican politicians, by Donald Trump himself – the shipments of US dollars sent by the United Nations to Afghanistan to fund humanitarian aid. Saleh has described the transport as “the Biden administration’s shipment of billions of dollars was a misguided endeavor to buy and bribe a semblance of calm under the Taliban, only serving to veil the pervasive corruption in the process.”
On 7 January 2025, Trump decried the Biden administration for giving “[b]illions of dollars, not millions – billions … to essentially the Taliban Afghanistan.” The US is currently the biggest donor to Afghanistan, spending approximately three billion dollars since August 2021, largely on humanitarian aid, channelled via the United Nations, the World Bank and NGOs. (For details, see the October 2024 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) report.) However, Trump’s reference appeared most likely to be to those shipments by the United Nations of cash, in the form of US dollars. Getting money into Afghanistan via the banking system is so difficult – despite waivers to US sanctions, banks are reluctant to transfer money, even when it is legal under US law – and the shipments were the workaround to keep aid work going.
Trump’s remarks came after an intervention by US congressman Tim Burchett, a supporter of the National Resistance Front – on 2 December 2024, he tweeted he had invited Saleh to Washington to “discuss the future of Afghanistan and its people.” Burchett had written to Trump on 2 January 2025 about the cash shipments and introduced a bill, the ‘No Tax Dollars for Terrorists Act’, that would have specifically stopped “financial and material support from going to the Taliban.”[6] He launched the bill, he said in a 10 January press release, after:
It was brought to our attention that weekly cash shipments of around $40 million USD were being sent to the Afghanistan Central Bank. Additionally, after a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in December of 2024 Secretary Blinken admitted that around $10 million had been paid to the Taliban in the form of taxes.
UNAMA strongly refutes this evergreen claim that the shipments fund the Taleban. In a 9 January 2025 statement, it said the cash (amounting to USD 1.8 billion to date) was “essential in the provision of life-saving assistance to more than 25 million Afghans” and was:
placed in designated UN accounts in a private bank for use by the United Nations … distributed directly to the United Nations entities, as well as to a small number of approved and vetted humanitarian partners in Afghanistan … [and] is carefully monitored, audited, inspected and vetted in strict accordance with the UN financial rules and processes.
None of the money, it said, was “deposited in the Central Bank of Afghanistan nor provided to the Taliban de facto authorities by the UN.” Spokesperson for the US National Security Council, John Kirby, also stressed that the humanitarian aid was being sent to the Afghan people, not the Taleban (reported here).
A day after Trump’s remarks, on 8 January, IEA deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat denied that his government had received “a single penny” from the US. “Instead,” he said, “it [the US] has confiscated and frozen billions of dollars that rightfully belong to the people of Afghanistan.” The Islamic Emirate “neither anticipates any assistance from the United States nor has it ever sought such aid,” he said, while also asserting that a “thorough analysis shows that the U.S. directed all of this money under the guise of supporting Afghanistan, primarily to serve its own interests, and is now exploiting it as a means of propaganda against the Islamic Emirate.”
The following day, acting Deputy Minister of Economy Abdul Latif Nazari also spoke, more mildly, about the cash shipments: the aid was “not handed over to the Islamic Emirate but is used to improve the economic and livelihood conditions of the Afghan people.” The quote was carried by ToloNews, whose evening news bulletin also reported Nazari saying that political and economic matters should be kept separate, and that aid should continue as the international community had the responsibility to assist the Afghan people.
Those dollars are important, not only for funding aid but also supporting the macro-economy. Similar to remittances, the money helps keep people in jobs, helps cover Afghanistan’s trade deficit and supports the afghani. Because NGOs, like private sector companies, are taxed by the IEA, they do contribute to government revenues.[7] Any disruption to the shipments – in the absence of an easing of international banking transactions – would be disastrous for beneficiaries, the aid sector, the Afghan economy and the Islamic Emirate’s government. Whether or not that happens under Trump, aid allocations seem likely to drop further than they have already over the last two years. The decline in aid flows is seen in most donor countries, a trend that also threatens the Afghan economy.
Looking ahead
Donald Trump has given few indications of how, or indeed whether, he would change America’s stance towards Afghanistan. In general, he is against the US getting involved in foreign wars and is also likely to push for cuts in foreign aid globally. As to Afghanistan, he might be the pragmatic president who can do deals with the enemy and normalise the Islamic Emirate’s relations with the world – the Emirate’s hope. Or he could be the leader who will renew the fight against the Taleban by supporting the armed opposition or at least by undermining the Afghan economy – the NRF’s hope. Or, US policy could just muddle along, as it has done until now, with the superpower’s attention focussed elsewhere.
… but what about Guantanamo?
In our look at the presidential hopefuls ahead of the election, we wrote that the policy most likely to be affected by the outcome of this year’s US elections was on Guantanamo, the prison camp set up by George Bush in January 2002 to house ‘War on Terror’ detainees outside the rule either of US criminal law or the Laws of War. Afghans were the largest national contingent to be held there, numbering 225 out of the 780 men and boys detained.
Today, just one Afghan remains, Muhammad Rahim from Nangrahar, who was rendered to Guantanamo in 2007, the last man to be taken there and also the last to go through a CIA black site. The account of his torture and interrogation by the CIA after he was rendered from Pakistan to Afghanistan is detailed in a Senate 2014 investigation.[8] Rahim has acknowledged that he translated for and worked with ‘the Arabs’, as al-Qaeda was called in Afghanistan before 9/11: he denies dealings with them much beyond the fall of the first Islamic Emirate. The CIA asserted that he continued to be one of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden’s most trusted associates, although the Senate report revealed that its accusations were probably based only on information passed on by Pakistani intelligence, the ISI (see AAN’s most recent reporting on Rahim here).
Rahim is one of three detainees who are neither cleared for transfer nor among the seven slated for trial at Guantanamo’s military court, nor has he been convicted by that court. Rather, he is in indefinite detention: the US continues to claim that his repatriation would pose a threat to its national security despite not having had forces on the ground in Afghanistan for more than three years.
During Trump’s first term, just one detainee left Guantanamo, a Saudi, who was repatriated to a Saudi jail.[9] All other cases were effectively on hold. In AAN’s pre-election report, the author wrote: “If Trump wins, transfers out of the camp would likely dry up again. If Harris is victorious, Rahim might be freed.” That might have been the case if the panel which reviews cases, the Periodic Review Board, had considered him safe to transfer.
In the last few weeks of the Biden administration, it has undertaken mass transfers: twelve men have left the camp in recent weeks. Unlike Rahim, all had been cleared for release. It repatriated a Tunisian detainee – Ridah Bin Saleh al-Yazidi, who had been cleared for transfer in 2007 – and sent eleven Yemenis, including one cleared for release in 2010, to Oman (see Department of Defense statements here and here and news reports here and here). We saw a similar rush to clear as many detainees as possible from Guantanamo at the end of President Barak Obama’s second term. They included six Afghans sent to the Gulf, in what proved to be yet more indefinite detention and alleged torture for four in the United Arab Emirates, and happier circumstances for the other two in Oman. All were eventually allowed to go home, where one has subsequently died (for more details, see here and here). Another Afghan, affiliated to Hezb-e Islami, Harun Gul, was repatriated in June 2022 after a US court upheld his petition for habeas corpus, ruling that the US state was detaining him unlawfully (reporting here).
Trump has been strongly pro-Guantanamo, but even he may now be baulking at the cost. According to Carol Rosenberg, the last comprehensive study of the costs of running the prison, carried out by The New York Times in 2019, put the cost at more than USD 13 million per year for each prisoner. Most of that, she wrote, was spent on prison staff and the court. At the time, there were 40 prisoners and a Pentagon staff of 1,800 US forces. There are now just 15 men left. “By that measure,” she wrote on 9 January 2025, it would cost $36 million to hold each prisoner there in 2025.”
A possible prisoner exchange
In recent days, negotiations have come to light concerning the possible exchange of Rahim for three Americans, Ryan Corbett, George Glezmann and Mahmood Habibi. The Wall Street Journal reported the talks on 3 January. It is behind a pay wall, but the story was picked up, among others, by Reuters.
George Glezmann, an airline mechanic, writes the Foley Foundation, was visiting Afghanistan lawfully, as a tourist, when he was seized by the Emirate’s intelligence service, the GDI, on 5 December 2022.[10] It said he is being held without just cause or formal charge.
Corbett and Habibi were both detained in Kabul on 10 August 2022. Corbett had been in Kabul on a 12-month business visa when he was detained, says a website dedicated to getting him released, which said he had long worked with NGOs in Afghanistan and had been there to train staff working at his social enterprise, Bloom Afghanistan. The website says he was detained along with a German colleague (released in December 2022) and is held without charge in a basement cell. It alleges that “the only suspected reasons being their value as political leverage.”
Habibi’s case is more difficult. The Taleban deny holding him and the FBI speaks not of his detention, but his disappearance. In a request for information, it said Habibi was working as a contractor for Asia Consultancy Group, a Kabul-based telecommunications company, and that he was taken from his vehicle, along with his driver, near his home in Kabul. “It is believed that Mr. Habibi was taken by Taliban military or security forces,” it said. He has “not been heard from since his disappearance.” 29 other employees, also detained at the time, have since been freed, but not Habibi or “one other.” The FBI gave no information about that other missing person.
Corbett and Habibi were detained in the aftermath of the US assassination of then al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, by drone on 31 July, in the middle of Kabul (AAN reporting here). The Foley Foundation has explicitly linked Habibi’s detention to that strike. That the Taleban deny holding Habibi suggests he may no longer be alive.
It appears that the negotiations have been ongoing for a long time. Emirate spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid spoke publicly about Emirate demands at a press conference held on 3 July 2024, saying the US must accept its conditions for the release of two American prisoners, which were the freeing of Afghans held in US prisons and Guantanamo: “When American citizens are important to them, Afghans are important to us.”
Rahim’s lawyer, James Connell, told Reuters that neither the Biden administration nor the Taleban had informed him or Rahim of the negotiations. “It does seem important to include Rahim or his representative in the conversation,” said Connell. “As it happens, he is willing to be traded or exchanged.”
Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for national security adviser met Corbett’s family and warned, in a 14 January tweet: “We will do everything we can for these families and to stop this madness.” The next president, he wrote, “will not look kindly upon groups and countries holding Americans hostage.”
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
| ↑1 | One line picked up by the Afghan media was an apparent threat by Trump, made in September 2024, to recapture Bagram airbase. ToloNews reported his rambling comments:
Speaking to his supporters, Trump said: “You take a look at the kind of things that we’ve given up, uh, we should be, we should have that air base we should have that oil, we should have, we would have had a whole different country, but to give up … to give up the biggest airbase military airbase in the world, and they left it — behind but we would have been, we would have been, we would have been a much different country right now but we’re going to get it back and I promise you we’re going to get it back.” In another part of his speech, Trump mentioned that if he had been the US president, he would not have abandoned Bagram Airbase. Earlier in the campaign, Trump claimed China controlled the airbase (media report here). |
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| ↑2 | For a longer look at why the Islamic Republic, in the end, fell so easily, including the US’s role, analysis of weaknesses and disastrous decision-making in the Republic and strengths in the insurgency, see the author’s December 2021 report, ‘Afghanistan’s Conflict in 2021 (2): Republic collapse and Taleban victory in the long-view of history’. |
| ↑3 | After three years in post, West left his role as Special Representative on 1 October 2024. West was a key figure in getting waivers to US sanctions and pushing for what the State Department called a “robust humanitarian effort that prevented a wider famine and met the urgent needs of millions of Afghans.” Engagement was difficult: moves towards an easing of the relationship in the days before girls’ secondary schools were due to re-open in March 2022 were stymied by their being almost immediately re-closed; moves were stymied once again when al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri was discovered living in the middle of Kabul and assassinated by US drone on 31 July 2022. West has not been replaced. Instead, chief of mission at the US embassy (located in Doha), Karen Decker now “leads on Afghan diplomacy.” |
| ↑4 | The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF) Resistance is a coalition of former Northern Alliance members and other anti-Taleban factions. It was founded by the son of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, Ahmad Massoud, former first Vice President Amrullah Saleh and former Defence Minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi. |
| ↑5 | According to the US State Department website, a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) designation makes it unlawful to knowingly provide “material support or resources” to a designated group, while any US financial institution that becomes aware that it has possession of or control over funds in which a designated FTO or its agent has an interest “must retain possession of or control over the funds and report” it to the government. The designation also supports efforts to “curb terrorism financing and to encourage other nations to do the same, stigmatizes and isolates designated terrorist organizations internationally, deters donations or contributions to and economic transactions with named organizations” and “signals to other governments our concern about named organizations.”
Being designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism puts a country under “four main categories of sanctions,” including “restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.” It also “implicates other sanctions laws that penalize persons and countries engaging in certain trade with state sponsors.” |
| ↑6 | Bill HR 6586 passed unanimously through both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House of Representatives, but said Burchett, “unfortunately then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.” |
| ↑7 | For a sober assessment of accusations that aid is diverted to the Taleban or indirectly benefits them, see Ashley Jackson’s 2023 report for AAN, ‘Aid Diversion in Afghanistan: Is it time for a candid conversation?’ |
| ↑8 | See pages 163-169 of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, ‘Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program’, 9 December 2014. |
| ↑9 | Ahmed al-Darbi was transferred after a plea agreement which saw him plead guilty to charges relating to an attack on a French oil tanker in 2002 to serve out the balance of a 13-year prison sentence in his home country. See ‘Detainee Transfer Announced’, US Department of Defence press release, 2 May 2018. |
| ↑10 | The Foley Foundation advocates for American hostages and wrongful detainees held abroad and promotes journalist safety. In order to try to prevent future hostage-taking, it develops and shares tools that help journalists, aid workers and all Americans to stay safe abroad. It was established after the kidnap and murder of the journalist, James W Foley, by ISIS while he was reporting in Syria. |