A secret US summit with the Taliban and Afghanistan’s leader, abruptly cancelled by President Donald Trump on Saturday, was not the first time Washington has sought a deal with the Islamists.
Since well before the US invasion Washington has tried to obtain promises from the Taliban, resulting in a tragic series of missed opportunities and all but guaranteeing suspicion around any new deal.
Before 9/11: empty promises
According to declassified documents, the Clinton administration secretly made contact many times with the Taliban in the years before the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda.
Washington feared the Taliban were allowing Afghanistan to be used as a safe haven for jihadists, particularly Al-Qaeda supremo Osama bin Laden.
They secured nothing but empty promises from the Islamists right up until 9/11.
After 9/11: missed opportunities
After the US invasion the Taliban agreed to lay down their arms in exchange for an amnesty. The US declined the offer, vowing to destroy the regime, and Taliban fighters streamed across the porous border to neighbouring Pakistan.
They launched a bloody insurgency, inflicting colossal losses on Afghan security forces and bogging the US down in a grinding fight.
Further attempts at dialogue were made in 2004 and again in 2011, but to no avail.
In 2013, the Taliban opened an office in Qatar. But an attempt at dialogue with the US from Doha was scuttled when they declared it an unofficial embassy for a government in waiting — an unacceptable position for the US-backed government in Kabul.
Perhaps the best opportunity came when the Afghan government held its first face-to-face talks with the Taliban in 2015 in Pakistan.
It collapsed after news broke that Taliban founder Mullah Omar had died two years earlier, a fact the insurgents had kept secret.
Elusive ceasefires
In 2015, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani offered to recognise the Taliban as a political party in a bid to jump start peace talks. They ignored him. In 2018, he renewed his offer and proposed a ceasefire marking Eid-al-Fitr, the festival celebrating the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The Taliban did not reply, but announced their own unilateral ceasefire for the first three days of Eid. It was the first three days of peace since 2001, and invoked moving scenes such as Afghans sharing ice cream with Taliban fighters. But afterwards, the violence resumed.
