As U.S. President Donald Trump stepped into office for the second time, most of the attention on foreign policy seemed to revolve around China, Ukraine, and the crisis in the Middle East. Afghanistan seems to have been de-prioritized yet again, but for behind-the-scenes dealings that largely went unnoticed.
On January 21, two Americans freed by the Taliban landed on United States soil the day after an Afghan convicted of drug smuggling and extremism charges in the state of California reached Kabul. The swap had been brokered by the Biden administration in its final days in office, but the Taliban delayed the exchange until Donald Trump took power. The apparent goal was to create a bonhomie that could lead to a “normalization” of ties between the United States and Afghanistan. Not only is it a tall task, but the Islamic Emirate found out that the vision of the new Trump administration is strikingly different.
New U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to X threatening to put a “big bounty” on top Taliban leaders unless “more Americans” apparently held hostage by the Taliban are released. The bounty “maybe even bigger than the one we had on Bin Laden,” he added, referencing the former head of al-Qaida.
While this may be in sync with the new U.S. administration’s America First foreign policy announcements, deeply colored by MAGA fervor, the first indirect interaction between the new Trump administration and the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate didn’t go well. The latter has rebuffed the U.S. president’s January 20 demand to return $7 billion worth of U.S. military equipment left in Afghanistan. Trump previously threatened to cut financial aid unless the equipment, including aircraft, munitions, and high-tech gear, was returned.
While the Taliban are yet to respond to the demand officially, unnamed Taliban officials maintained that this equipment is required to fight the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch (ISKP), implying that Trump’s demand would be cold-shouldered by the Islamic Emirate. Trump’s maverick foreign policy, in the coming years, is likely to find a match in the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
While Trump can claim credit for scripting the Doha Agreement in 2020 that ultimately brought thousands of American soldiers home from Afghanistan, he has criticized the implementation by the Biden administration in 2021. Although the Biden administration delayed the U.S. withdrawal by several months from the deadline detailed in the Doha deal, the ensuing swift collapse of the Afghan Republic and the swifter and bloodless Taliban takeover has drawn considerable criticism. However, these claims are made in hindsight. There are many in the region who put the onus on the Trump administration for signing the agreement with the Taliban in Doha that could have had only one end: the exit of U.S. forces and the consequent return of the Taliban to the seat of power.
Such blame games apart, it is still early days for the Trump administration, which already has revised its campaign stance on tariffs on Chinese products. Sooner rather than later, it is bound to discover that the Afghanistan and the region Trump left behind in 2021 and the realities he is interacting with now are dramatically different.
The Taliban are firmly seated in power with no existential challenges. The Chinese have dug themselves deep into Afghanistan with the consent of the Taliban to be a part of the Belt Road Initiative (BRI). For the Islamic Emirate, Pakistan is now an enemy and India is a friend. The hold of the “Axis of Evil” — China, Russia, and Iran — over the Taliban is greater than ever. Sans international recognition, the list of countries willing to engage with the Taliban is still growing and includes some of the U.S. allies and friends. The strategic void created by Trump’s Doha agreement has been duly filled.
While none expect the Trump administration to bother much about the diminished rights of women, girls, and minorities in Afghanistan, its refugee embargo policy and the decision to stall visa processing of thousands of Afghans awaiting resettlement in the U.S. has put Afghans in a quandary. Common Afghans — especially those who feel threatened by the Taliban regime — have a feeling of being betrayed twice over.
Trump seems to believe that the humanitarian aid money that the U.S. provides Afghanistan through the United Nations and other organizations is a point of leverage to be exploited. However, the benefits sought to be extracted from the Taliban in exchange for continued aid flows are blatantly limited and American-centric. As a result, if Rubio and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz — the latter being an Afghan war veteran — are ever to visit Kabul, they are bound to find themselves without friends or benefactors. Moreover, any attempt to reopen and implement the Doha agreement as a pressure tactic could lead to an unraveling.
In the weeks and months to come, the Trump administration is bound to discover that Afghanistan is no longer a conflict begging to be solved, not certainly by threats and intimidation. Rather, it is a challenge that needs a nuanced approach through broad-based consensus and cooperation among global and regional powers. For the moment, that is possibly a little too much to ask from the present U.S. administration, one that seems unilateralist, transactional and disconnected from what is happening in the region.
