About That "Deal"

Max Boot, WaPo:

Taliban and U.S. representatives signed on Saturday what has been described as a peace deal. Beware the treachery of labels. Just as Magritte’s painted pipe was not really a pipe, so this vaunted “peace deal” is not really a peace deal.

It has been heartening to see a steep reduction in violence over the past week — a U.S. precondition for signing the deal — but there is no agreement on a permanent cease-fire, much less a resolution of all the issues that divide the democratically elected Afghan government from the Taliban. What was signed on Saturday is an agreement to try to reach an agreement. To get even this far, the United States had to drop its long-standing demand for intra-Afghan negotiations to precede a U.S. troop drawdown. Now the Taliban will enter the talks, scheduled to take place in Oslo, in a stronger position after having already achieved their chief demand — a timetable for U.S. withdrawal within 14 months.

I envision three potential scenarios for what happens next: good, bad and ugly.

The good scenario would look like Colombia. After more than 50 years of war and four years of peace talks, the government and the FARC insurgency signed a peace deal in 2016. The rebels agreed to lay down their arms and to be reintegrated into civilian society. There has been some fraying of the accords since then — with accusations of violations from both sides — but the deal has largely held. The civil war has not reignited. The murder rate reached an all-time low in 2017, and although it has increased slightly in the past two years, Colombia remains far more peaceful than in the past.

The bad scenario would look like Lebanon. That country’s ruinous civil war began in 1975 and ended in 1989 with the signing of the Taif Accord. This agreement modified power-sharing among the major sectarian groups — Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Druze — and its implementation was overseen by Syrian occupiers. The Syrian troops finally left in 2005, but the peace deal has largely held — albeit at a significant price. While Lebanon is technically a democracy, real power is held by Hezbollah, which is both a political movement and a radical Islamist militia. The Iranian-backed Hezbollah has not imposed its fundamentalist views on more secular Lebanese people: Women are free to walk around Beirut without head coverings and alcohol flows freely in restaurants. But Hezbollah dictates who rules, and it uses its Lebanese strongholds to project power into nearby countries and across the world.

The ugly scenario would look like South Vietnam. The 1973 Paris Peace Accords brought an end to the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam, but North Vietnam began violating its terms at once. Two years later, the weakened state of South Vietnam was overrun by a North Vietnamese blitzkrieg. America’s abandoned allies had to flee or be consigned to brutal “reeducation” camps.

Max rates the probabilities for success in reverse order:

1. Ugly
2. Bad
3. Good

I think the only thing we can be pretty sure of is that we'll see the whole thing return to a kind of Status Quo Ante - more or less the same as it was before we went in there and started fucking with it.

And that's pretty much always how it works out when we take on these enormously stupid projects.

The lesson we never seem to learn is that we shouldn't do this shit just because we can.

And Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule gets truer and truer: You break, you own it.