False negotiations and the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban

Abstract

This paper examines the dark side of Afghanistan’s peace negotiations that started under Donald Trump’s South Asia policy in Doha, Qatar, in September 2018 and ended, without a meaningful success, in December 2020. The paper examines both the United States–Taliban and the intra-Afghan negotiations and discusses the impact of the false negotiation behaviour by the Taliban and the Afghan government on the peace talks. It also explains how, in the absence of conditions for a political settlement, parties to the conflict acted as false negotiators, which resulted in the failure of efforts to launch a genuine peace process and in the Taliban’s military domination of Afghanistan.