Afghanistan: The Prospects for a Real Peace

June 3, 2020

The Burke Chair at CSIS has completed a new analysis entitled Afghanistan: TheProspects for a Real Peace, which provides a comprehensive analysis of the course of the fighting; the role U.S. forces play in Afghanistan’s security; and how developments in Afghan politics, governance, military forces, and economics affect the prospects for a real peace.

It provides a detailed historical and quantitative examination on the course of the fighting, the divisions within Afghan politics, the critical problems in Afghan governance, and the economic issues that in many ways make Afghanistan a “failed state.”

The report provides a wide range of charts showing key trends, maps of the current situation, and how sources like SIGAR, LIG, UN, IMF, CIA, World Bank and various NGOs assess the situation. It ties these trends to recent studies covering the fighting before and after the peace process as well as to other studies on political issues within both the central government and the Taliban that affect the prospects for peace.

The analysis goes beyond the peace process, per se, and highlights the real-world issues that now shape Afghanistan’s future. It examines how factors – such as limits to the U.S. effort to develop Afghan forces, indefinite dependence on outside military and civil aid, extraordinary levels of corruption, and major failures in economic policy – complicate any effort to reach a stable and secure peace. It also ties these analyses to the results of recent public opinions by the Asia Foundation, the compromises between the Ghani and Abdullah faction in Afghanistan, and the evolving threats posed by both the Taliban and ISIS-K.

The analysis highlights the mixed success of efforts to develop Afghan National Defense Security Forces (ANDSF) and their uncertain capability to defend – once U.S. and allied forces are gone. It also highlights the limited information available, such as the ongoing classification of data that show trends favoring the Taliban, and the exaggeration of the positive impacts from past and current aid efforts. It warns that efforts to “spin” the situation in Afghanistan – by avoiding key challenges in reaching a real and lasting peace – bear a grim resemblance to similar efforts during Vietnam’s peace attempts, which could lead Afghanistan to the same result.

The analysis then addresses a range of critical failures in effective governance and a decline in the economy’s ability to meet popular needs and create job opportunities. These problems raise major issues about the ability to create a stable peace, and they emphasize the dependence of any peace settlement on massive U.S. and Allied financial support for whatever new Afghan government that will emerge out of the final peace accord.

These broader problems illustrate the severe limits to the value of the current peace agreements and the ability to accomplish a meaningful peace within the time limits they set. They also provide a grimly realistic picture of an Afghan central government whose failures at every level may well make a successful peace impossible.

The conclusion addresses the critical question of a strategic triage. If the barriers to peace are as great as the analysis indicates, should the U.S. withdraw even if a real peace proves impossible?

The analysis has the following Table of Contents: