MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th March, 2020) Despite the short-lived overtures about peace and the Afghan people, the deal signed between the United States and Taliban has never been about peace outright but rather about shrewd political calculations on both sides, experts told Sputnik.
The peace deal, inked in Doha on February 29 after months of on-again-off-again negotiations and conflicting reports seemed as fickle as it was labor intensive.
Nevertheless, despite the Afghan government's objection to some pointers in the agreement, both the US-led coalition and the Taliban movement seem eager to go through with the deal's main objective: the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
US President Donald Trump's end goal is to present himself as the president who ended the longest war in US history for the upcoming 2020 election, according to Marvin G. Weinbaum, director of Afghanistan and Pakistan Studies at the Washington-based middle East Institute think tank.
"The US will find every reason to leave. The Trump reelection campaign is counting on ending the Afghan war for the US as a major talking point," Weinbaum told Sputnik in a correspondence.
As for the Taliban, the prospect of fighting one enemy, the Afghan government, is more attractive than two, especially when the other enemy is the world's weightiest military behemoth.
According to Lancaster University senior lecturer on politics, Amalendu Misra, the Taliban just wants to see the back of the US-led coalition so they can get on with warring against the Afghan government and perhaps reclaim governorship of the country which they had before the 2001 US-led invasion.
"The peace plan is not even worth the paper it is written on for the Taliban. They just had to sign the deal on the dotted lines in order to allow the US a legitimate ground for troops withdrawal. Once the process is underway the Taliban purge will become mainstream," Misra told Sptunik.
Misra believes that the US drawdown of troops in Afghanistan is now inevitable, as Trump or any forthcoming commander-in-chief will need a good reason to keep US soldiers in a violent and expensive quagmire that Afghanistan proved to be.
"Afghanistan had proved to be a dead end for the US for a very long time. President Trump has recognized it publicly and now undertaking the most strategically viable initiative - that is phased troops withdrawal. Mr Trump and the next administration has no choice but to follow that through," Misra posited.
The political culture such as it is currently in Washington, and in the Trump administration particularly, it seems unlikely that the US will be too eager to come to the Afghan government's aid should Kabul be overwhelmed by Taliban violence.
