The Doha Agreement, A Primer

And Why It Sucks

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

Sure thing, Mr. President.  Except that we do.

Take, for example, the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan (also known as the Doha Agreement or the Doha Accord).  Never heard of it?  Let me help you out.

In early 2020, delegates from the United States government met with representatives of the Taliban to negotiate the terms of an alleged peace treaty.  The final agreement was signed in February 2020 in Doha, Qatar – hence the nickname.  Broadly, the agreement was meant to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan.

More specifically, the Doha Agreement was meant to support four interrelated objectives:

• To prevent any members of international terrorist organizations (including the Taliban) from using Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States (for example, by recruiting and training individuals, raising funds, or planning and executing attacks against the U.S.); 

•  To provide a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. military and its coalition forces from Afghanistan;

• To promote peace discussions between the Taliban and Afghan government; and 

• To achieve a permanent ceasefire between the U.S. and Afghan governments and the Taliban.

Cue the death knell for Afghanistan.

Though admirable in its purported intent, the practical application of the agreement’s terms served to enable the Taliban’s swift and violent takeover of Afghanistan and the fractured nation we now see today.

So how did we get here?

For starters, you may note one glaring omission from the parties to the agreement: the former Afghan government, meaning that the U.S. was treating the Taliban as an equal negotiating power with the authority and intent to comply with the agreed-upon terms.  It’s hard to argue that this didn’t undermine our integrity on the world stage, and it certainly emboldened the Taliban’s advance into Afghanistan by knowing that their good ol’ buddies in the U.S. of A. were reluctant (and contractually forbidden) to intervene.  

But we didn’t only tie our own hands, because we’re overachievers in America!  No, we also tied the hands of our Afghan brothers- and sisters-in-arms, the decent and courageous people fighting for the future of their country.  Given the terms of the treaty, they were prohibited from conducting offensive missions and found themselves without adequate ammunition and support.  There can be no question that this led to the deaths of countless Afghans, including General Surab Azimi, who was murdered—on camera—by the Taliban after he unsuccessfully called for American air support more than 100 times.

According to President Biden, the agreement also required the U.S. military to withdraw from Afghanistan by a rapid and impossible deadline.  It didn’t—in fact, the Agreement contained an escape clause allowing the U.S. to withdraw if Afghan peace talks failed (and they did)—but the man was committed and what he lacks in foresight he makes up for in follow-through.  And so we left Afghanistan without a comprehensive plan of action, contributing to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and an unknown number of Afghans.  The nature of the withdrawal equally contributed to the collapse of the Afghan government and the Afghan military and in effect created the current Taliban “government” which now falls just shy of international legitimacy.  

Beyond this, the Agreement also inflated the Taliban’s numbers, in part by calling for the release of some 5,000 prisoners in exchange for 1,000 government soldiers.  Did we try to use protection?  Of course we did.  But sometimes protection fails, as in the case of said 5,000 released prisoners who promptly resumed their jihad against the United States, thereby demonstrating perhaps the most egregious of our errors in this process: we took the Taliban at their word and not their actions. In fact, to make matters worse (is that possible), the Abbey Gate bomber was released from prison by the Taliban. 

A peace treaty sounds good in theory, but in practice?  The Doha Agreement was little more than an instrument of surrender.  The surrender of our morals, our military allies, and Afghanistan’s future—which was never really ours to give away.

(If you’re interested, a far more eloquent and detailed assessment of the Doha Agreement can be found here.)