The New Yorker: The TAPI Pipeline and Paths to Peace in Afghanistan

When, on December 10th, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani returned to Kabul from Islamabad, he was greeted by a Taliban attack that killed more than fifty people at the Kandahar airbase and the resignation of his intelligence chief, Rahmatullah Nabil, who cited a “lack of agreement on some policy matters.” The previous day, Nabil had published a Facebook post that made it clear what those disagreements were. In Islamabad, Ghani had attended the annual conference of the Heart of Asia Process, a regional platform to support Afghanistan, co-chaired by Ghani and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Sharif repeated a public assurance he had given before, that, far from supporting the Taliban, Pakistan considered that “the enemies of Afghanistan are the enemies of Pakistan.” Yet, at the same time, as Nabil pointed out in his post, Taliban operating with impunity from Pakistan were spilling “thousands of liters of our compatriots’ blood.”

At the October, 2014, Heart of Asia meeting, in Beijing, Ghani had agreed that Pakistan would be the next chair, in the hope that this would persuade Islamabad to coöperate with efforts to reduce the level of violence and press the Taliban into negotiations. When those efforts failed to curb the Taliban’s fierce 2015 offensive or to produce any effective peace process, confidence in the government plummeted. Spectacular bomb blasts in Kabul, in August, and the Taliban’s temporary capture of Kunduz, in late September, heightened tension further. Ghani’s attempted rapprochement with Pakistan had already earned him accusations of treason from former President Hamid Karzai. Popular hostility toward Pakistan ran so high in Afghanistan that Pakistani diplomats felt unable to leave their embassy in Kabul safely. Though the entire purpose of the Heart of Asia Process was to establish “a secure, stable and prosperous Afghanistan in a secure and stable region,” anti-Pakistan pressure on Ghani kept him from deciding to attend the Islamabad meeting until the last minute. A video conference with the Pakistani Chief of Army Staff, General Raheel Sharif, discussions with the United States, and appeals from Pakistani Pashtun nationalists sympathetic to Afghanistan finally offered him sufficient political cover. MORE