US seeks to jump-start flagging Afghan peace process

KABUL: US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has arrived in Kabul to try to move forward a peace deal signed last month between America and the Taliban.

Pompeo’s trip comes despite the coronavirus pandemic, at a time when world leaders and statesmen are curtailing official travel.Since the signing of the deal with the US, the peace process has become stalled amid political turmoil in Afghanistan, with the country’s leaders squabbling over who was elected president.

President Ashraf Ghani and his main rival in last September’s presidential polls, Abdullah Abdullah, both declared themselves president in duelling inauguration ceremonies earlier this month.

During his visit, Pompeo is expected to try to help end the impasse, which has held up the start of intra-Afghan peace talks which include the Taliban. Those talks are seen as a critical next step in the peace deal, negotiated to allow the United States to bring home its troops and give Afghans the best chance at peace.

The US and Nato have already begun to withdraw some troops from Afghanistan.The final pullout of US forces is not dependent on the success of intra-Afghan negotiations but rather on promises made by the Taliban to deny space in Afghanistan to other terror groups, such as the insurgents’ rival, the so-called Islamic State group.

But within days of the US and the Taliban signing the peace deal in Qatar on February 29, Afghanistan sank into a political crisis with Ghani and Abdullah squaring off over election results and Ghani refusing to fulfil his part of a promise made in the deal to free up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

The insurgents were, for their part, to free 1,000 Afghan officials and soldiers they hold captive. The exchange was meant to be a goodwill gesture by both sides to start the negotiations.

On Saturday, just hours before he departed on his unannounced trip to Afghanistan, Pompeo was roundly attacked on social media for a photo he posted to his personal Twitter account of him and his wife, Susan, at home working on a jigsaw puzzle with a scene from the Tom Cruise film Top Gun on a TV screen.

The caption read: “Susan and I are staying in and doing a puzzle this afternoon. Pro tip: if you’re missing the beach, just throw on Top Gun!” Many of the critics took Pompeo to task for apparently not working while thousands of Americans are struggling to find transportation home from various countries.

Washington’s peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been trying to jump-start talks between Afghans on both sides of the conflict — the next critical step in the US-Taliban deal — tweeted that the two sides are talking about the prisoner exchange.

Pompeo’s visit is also extraordinary for the fact that the US, like the United Nations, had earlier said it would not again be drawn into mediating between feuding Afghan politicians. While the Afghan election committee this time gave the poll win to Ghani, Abdullah and the election complaints commission charged widespread irregularities to challenge Ghani’s win.

In Afghanistan’s previous presidential election in 2014, also marred by widespread fraud and deeply disputed results, Ghani and Abdullah emerged as leading contenders.

Then-US secretary of state John Kerry mediated between the two and eventually cobbled together a so-called unity government, with Ghani as president and Abdullah holding the newly created but equal in stature post of the country’s chief executive.However, the Ghani-Andullah partnership was a difficult one, and for much of its five years triggered a parliamentary paralysis leading up to the September ballot.