Zalmay Khalilzad, US special envoy for Afghanistan, and Donald Rumsfeld attend Hamid Karzai's inauguration ceremony in 2004. Wikicommons/US airforce James M. Bowman. Some rights reserved.
A week containing escalation of India-Pakistan crisis over Kashmir and the hollow spectacle of a second Donald Trump-Kim Jong-un meeting in Vietnam shows four nuclear-weapons states conducting diplomacy in an atmosphere of brinkmanship. The risks of greater conflict, and the lack of coherence in United States policy under Trump, are plain. The same vacuum is on display in Afghanistan, where the current interplay of political and military action offers only a sliver of confidence that a war now in its eighteenth year will end any time soon (see "US decline: a military calculus", 3 January 2019).
On the surface there are signs of cautious progress. A limited US-Taliban engagement, via meetings brokered in Qatar, has been under way for months. This creates a framework for possible substantive dialogue between the parties. The latest three-day encounter on 25-27 February brought together the experienced Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, the US's special envoy for Afghanistan, and the Taliban's newly appointed political chief, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
