Editor’s note: Jeffrey Owens is a Jeffersonville native, a 1995 graduate of Miami Trace High School and 2000 graduate of Ohio University. As a lifelong history buff, Owens published “Victory In Europe; A People’s History of the Second World War”, a more than 700-page analysis of World War II in Europe in 2015. Since 2015, Owens has hosted more than a dozen educational symposiums on a variety of military history topics at the Grove City Library. He is a resident of New Holland.
Selling out a democratic ally to create an unenforceable “permanent and comprehensive ceasefire” resulted from the Trump administration’s negotiations with the Taliban to conclude the American involvement in Afghanistan. Now it is the Trump/Vance vision to end United States support to Ukraine in the same way.
The flawed strategies to “conclude” both wars each present a façade of peace, are eerily similar to one another, and are earmarked with the same lofty ‘quick fix’ solutions which rely on disreputable actors as their guarantors. Even entertaining not to mention advocating the idea of the Trump/Vance ‘negotiated settlement’ with Russia, is an endorsement of legitimizing the Taliban which destroyed a twenty-year U.S. investment in Afghanistan.
The Doha Accords were the beginning of the end of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the American backed democratic government established soon after the U.S. invaded following 9/11. Signed in February 2020 in Doha, Qatar, the Trump administration succeeded in simultaneously undermining a democratic ally while emboldening a terrorist adversary.
This occurred by the United States sidelining the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which American forces had been developing and fighting alongside for nearly twenty years and negotiating a U.S. withdrawal from the country solely with the Taliban.
Among goals of the Doha talks were to reduce violence, initiate a national peace dialogue between the Islamic Republic and the Taliban, and to obtain assurances that Afghanistan would never again play host to international terrorist organizations.
The foremost and openly declared objective, however was to coordinate the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Since the United States showed their hand from the beginning, the Taliban intentionally dragged out the process far longer than it needed to be, which resulted in a flimsy agreement with little if any ability to enforce it.
The Doha Accords yielded a ceasefire between the U.S. international forces and the Taliban. This was accompanied with an intricate timetable detailing a significant downsizing of U.S and international troop presence and the closure of 5 major bases. The remainder of the U.S. and international forces would then complete their withdrawal within fourteen months.
No conditions however were included regarding Taliban attacks on Afghan Security Forces. Once the U.S. ceasefire was in place, which included a cessation of American aerial strikes, Afghan casualties soared.
Possibly the most demoralizing aspect of the Doha talks for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was the mere fact that the U.S. legitimized the Taliban. We sat down at formal peace talks with an enemy which not only killed thousands of American soldiers, tens of thousands of Afghans, but also which had played host to Osama bin Laden when he carried out the 9/11 attacks.
The Accords reeked of naivety; a clear sign of exhaustion on the part of the U.S.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was compelled to release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, under the guise that they would no longer participate in the war. Predictably nearly all of whom immediately rejoined the ranks of the Taliban.
Al Qaeda, which never left and had perpetually for twenty years maintained a presence in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, began openly building training camps even though the Taliban had agreed to no longer host them.
Along with the impending departure of the U.S. the agreement specified that the Taliban would work with the Islamic Republic to establish a peaceful coexistence. Since the agreement was solely between the U.S. and the Taliban, only the Taliban was its guarantor, and the specified negotiations were never seriously attempted.
By the final weeks of the U.S. withdrawal in the summer of 2021 the Islamic Republic was under immense pressure and was hanging on by a thread.
Decisions certainly could have been made to indefinitely put off the U.S. departure and attempt to stabilize the situation. However, while the Taliban clearly was violating the Accords, the one line they never crossed was the ceasefire. By the summer of 2021, there had not been a single U.S. combat casualty in Afghanistan for over a year.
Going back on the Accords and redeploying forces to Afghanistan in those final months could have immediately nullified the ceasefire in the eyes of the Taliban. The sparse American forces still in country could have found themselves under siege and outnumbered. Casualties likely would have spiked to levels not seen since the “surge” under President Obama, and the ability to withdrawal at all might have been permanently lost.
Afghanistan is now a prison for its own people, brutally oppressed under a theocratic dictatorship which imposes massive human rights abuses and ruthless gender apartheid upon its population. The Taliban is now the largest non-state terrorist army in the world, complete with an undisputed territory of its own, hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers, 80 billion dollars worth of captured NATO war equipment and twenty years experience fighting the U.S.
Fast forward to 2024 when the Trump/Vance ticket seeks a replay of the Doha Accords, but with Ukraine. First and foremost, there is the disrespectful rhetoric referring to the war as “stupid” to lashing out about “kiss my ass” for additional U.S. aid, to directly stating either that “I don’t really care what happens” or that Ukraine had it coming due to “corruption issues.”
For Trump/Vance, Ukrainian resistance is a liability. By continuing to defend themselves, it is Ukraine which is prolonging the war, not Russian aggression. Practically before the war had even begun, they were already exhausted of it and approached it with the same naivety which drove the Americans to Doha. Ending the war on favorable terms to Putin therefore is a serious campaign objective for them.
In the Trump/Vance world, just like with Doha, Ukraine would be sidelined in the “negotiations.” They see Putin as the more reasonable actor with Ukraine filling the role of the defiant side “refusing to budge.” This is exactly why the Vance plan for ending the war, as revealed during his recent interview on the Shawn Ryan show, mirrors Putin’s nearly to the detail.
As with Doha, the United States under Trump/Vance would sell out their democratic ally of Ukraine by beholding them to a disingenuous Russian “peace” offer and refusing further aid if rejected. The Trump/Vance plan would include freezing the war, fortifying the current line of contact, Russia keeping its illegally held territories behind the line, with likely no discussions of Russia returning hundreds of thousands of kidnapped children or turning wanted war criminals over to The Hague. All Ukraine would receive out of the deal would be a cessation of hostilities and the retention of sovereignty over their preserved territories.
The Trump/Vance administration would want no part of turning unoccupied Ukraine into another South Korea by permanently stationing military personnel to enforce the ceasefire. Since the U.S. negotiated the “peace” with Russia, and promptly ended its support to Ukraine, Russia would be left as the deal’s guarantor; free to intimidate, threaten and turn any conceivable Ukrainian response as a provocation for a resumption of war.
Assumptions abound with the Trump/Vance plan.
They presume that Russia wants to end the war, when the Russians have never in nearly three years of full-scale invasion given the slightest hint that they do. In the west we tend to project out worldview onto others, and presume that all sides want and or need peace. For Russia and the Taliban however, war is the routine while peace is the abnormal.
They take for granted that Russia is a good faith actor which honors its treaties, when it never has. The reality is that no meeting, conference, or agreement can make Russia stop attacking Ukraine, any more than the signed Doha Accords could force the Taliban to negotiate with the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Russia like the Taliban can only be stopped with force.
Trump/Vance believes that Ukraine can be coerced into ending their defense and ceding territory. In Afghanistan, the United States was a belligerent in that war, and therefore was able to negotiate its own withdrawal, albeit it was a bad agreement. Not so in Ukraine.
Just as no meeting or conference can force Russia to stop attacking, no externally contrived “peace deal” can make Ukrainians lay down their arms. Ukraine was defending itself against Russia for eight years prior to February 2022, and would continue to do so with or without U.S. assistance. Without it however only makes the war longer, bloodier, and more destabilizing.
If Ukraine falls, Russia will not only inherit all the human and natural resources of Ukraine but also share a significant border with NATO from which they will endlessly attempt to harass, intimidate, and breakup the alliance. The population that remains in Ukraine will be subjected to brutal genocide, while all bordering free nations will seriously wonder if they will be Russia’s next victim.
As we look back at the three years since the fall of Afghanistan, let us remember its lessons and not fall into the same trap again. Former Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley in a recent interview unequivocally attributed the loss of Afghanistan to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’s attack on Israel and China’s aggressive posturing toward Taiwan.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as she greatly overexaggerates American influence over individual actors around the globe. Russia would have invaded Ukraine regardless while Hamas literally has the annihilation of Israel in their charter. What entices dictators and extremists about Afghanistan is not the chaotic final days at the Kabul Airport, but rather that the United States negotiated with an enemy and abandoned an ally to get out of a war.
As global instability spreads via aggressor nations challenging the world order, while the free world spirals in an endless debate of escalation management, let us remember Afghanistan. Simply put, our allies security is our security; one reinforces the other. In a violent and unpredictable time, nothing is more important than your friends. Churchill’s “without victory there is no survival” means more now to the free world than it has in eighty years; and possibly most of all to Afghans.
