WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th March, 2021) The Biden administration's new diplomatic push to create a compromise interim regime in Afghanistan is almost certain to fail due to the irreconcilable differences between the US government and its allies and regional stakeholders on one hand and the Taliban movement on the other, analysts told Sputnik.
"Although we have not yet completed our review of the way ahead, we have reached an initial conclusion that the best way to advance our shared interests is to do all we can to accelerate peace talks and to bring all parties into compliance with their commitments," Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote in a letter last week to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani released on Tuesday.
However, this approach looks likely to fail amid stakeholders' irreconcilable differences, prominent US political figures are already pointing out.
On Tuesday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Robert Menendez called on the Biden administration to "reconsider" the May 1 deadline for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan that former President Donald Trump promised last year. Menendez claimed the Taliban were not fulfilling the commitments they made in 2020.
Blinken's proposals show no indication that they can bridge the conflicting goals of the United States, Ghani's current Afghan government in Kabul and the Taliban movement, University of Pittsburgh Professor of International Affairs Michael Brenner observed.
"Neither the proposed arrangements or any others along the same lines can reconcile the irreducible goals of the three parties," Brenner said. He assessed the likelihood of a lasting peace coming out of the new US diplomatic initiative as "slim."
Ghani and his Kabul government allies wanted to prevent a possible Taliban restoration while the Taliban was determined to retain its military advantage and have a fair chance at gaining power, Brenner explained.
The US government remained obsessed with "avoiding anything that smacks of defeat" that includes a Taliban-led government in Kabul, he said.
However the new Biden peace push in Afghanistan would have negligible impact on US standing elsewhere in the world, Brenner stated.
Its impact would be "Insignificant; Afghanistan accounts for next to nothing strategically," he said.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American diplomat who has been Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at the State Department since September 2018 was already pushing for power-sharing with the Taliban during the Trump administration, but his influence on the Biden team would likely be negligible, Brenner said.
"I suspect that the new guys want him out of the way for reasons of status and the regaining of flexibility to make policy changes without regard to former informal understandings," Brenner said.
Surveys showed that Afghans do not support the Taliban in general, but they appear to support any deal that ends the war and no political movement has majority support in the country, Brenner noted.
"So, it's either some form of power-sharing or fragmentation, or the former masking the latter, or low-grade civil war as in the 1990s," he said.
US TO CONTINUING IN-COUNTRY PRESENCE
The new Biden administration initiative was trying to preserve a continuing US presence in Afghanistan than Trump had been, middle East Institute Afghanistan and Pakistan Studies Director Professor Marvin Weinbaum noted.
"It is not the Trump Plan, that was to leave Afghanistan, they wanted out. ...The Biden administration team is in the process of deciding whether they want to leave behind a counter-terrorism force and some Air Force [elements]. They are setting down their own plan," he said.
Weinbaum agreed that the chances of the new proposals being developed in Washington leading to a lasting agreement and peace deal remained minimal.
"Chances of success of the initial Biden proposal leading to a lasting peace: I give it 5 percent. There ingredients for a lasting peace are not here," he said.
The US and the Kabul governments wanted to return to a democratic system with elections but their opponents were not going to accept that, Weinbaum explained.
"The Taliban has made crystal-clear that it wants a very different kind of polity," he said.
For the Taliban, legitimacy comes not from popular sovereignty but from a divine mandate. The two sides are so far apart I don't believe that either side can satisfy the other," he said.
Weinbaum advised that regional governments, including Pakistan, wanted a compromise solution under which Afghanistan would return to its status in the 1990s, before the US invasion of November 2001, with the support of regional neighboring nations or stakeholders.
"All of them would benefit from a stable, peaceful Afghanistan but getting there remains a very distant prospect," he said.
The United States too was still looking "very much" for an international regional consensus to finally end the almost-two-decades-long conflict, Weinbaum added.
