President Trump has promised a bold new American approach to the world. Nowhere is that more urgently needed than in Afghanistan. Not only have its Taliban rulers crushed dissent and stripped away the rights of the country’s women and girls; they have also taken Americans hostage and are allowing Afghanistan to serve as a nerve center of violent jihadist networks such as Al Qaeda. We all know what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, the last time this state of affairs existed.
The Trump administration faces a stark choice: Let Afghanistan spiral further into jihadism or engage pragmatically with the Taliban. Engagement is of course a tough case to make, given the regime’s brutal nature and America’s painful history in Afghanistan. But dealing directly with the Taliban may be the only way to gain enough leverage to minimize serious potential threats to U.S. national security and interests.
The Biden administration’s approach — neither toppling the regime nor normalizing relations — has allowed the Taliban to entrench its rule without hope of the United States exerting any positive influence over it. Afghanistan requires realpolitik — putting results over ideals. The hard-nosed deal-making aspects of Mr. Trump’s “America first” outlook may offer the right framework.
The Trump administration should establish at least a limited diplomatic presence in Afghanistan or even reopen America’s embassy in Kabul to facilitate regular contact with Taliban leaders toward the ultimate goal of deploying specialized intelligence teams in the country to track and respond to potential threats.
The administration’s policy toward the Taliban remains unclear, but there is reason to believe that Mr. Trump would embrace a new approach. He has criticized past U.S. policy in Afghanistan for overreach and unrealistic goals. And he has taken bold action toward Afghanistan before. In 2020, his first administration negotiated the U.S.-Taliban agreement — later executed by President Joe Biden — that ended America’s longest war.
More recently, Mr. Trump has made clear his interest in recovering the military equipment, valued at $7 billion, left behind by the United States. He has also said the huge Bagram Air Base should have been kept under U.S. control as a check on China’s power in the region. These objectives are impossible without direct contact with the Taliban.
Mr. Trump is right to worry about China’s influence in Afghanistan. After the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, China kept its diplomatic mission open in Kabul and has expanded ties with the Taliban. It welcomed a Taliban ambassador to Beijing, forged relationships with Taliban security forces and Chinese companies have secured commercial contracts in industries like oil and minerals extraction. Beijing sees Afghanistan as important for its plan to increase Chinese influence in the region through economic ties. But the Taliban still see the United States as a preferred partner, and a proactive U.S. policy could help keep China’s influence in check.
Purely from the terrorism standpoint, Afghanistan demands U.S. attention. The country is home to militant groups that, with the Taliban in control, now have freer rein. The Taliban have opened thousands of madrassas, religious schools where young men may be exposed to notions of jihad and potential breeding grounds for future generations of extremists. The taking of foreign hostages has resulted in prisoner swaps with the United States that have freed Taliban terrorists and drug traffickers.
A particularly potent threat exists in the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, the group’s regional affiliate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. ISIS-K, which is at odds with the Taliban, has been expanding external operations and recruitment, especially in Pakistan and Central Asia, and has carried out targeted assassinations in Afghanistan. The Department of Homeland Security warned in October of the growing risk of attacks outside Afghanistan from groups like ISIS-K, and various plots and threats already have come to light. Jihadist groups are just a text message away from radicalizing recruits in the West, including in diaspora communities. This means that any counterterrorism efforts directed at Afghanistan must also include more robust intelligence-gathering in the United States itself, as well as outreach to trusted diaspora leaders to help identify and disrupt threats.
The Taliban also retain longstanding ties to Al Qaeda, offering the group sanctuary in exchange for its promise not to plot attacks from Afghan soil. This arrangement is dependent on the Taliban remaining isolated, which helps shield Al Qaeda from foreign pressure. The Taliban thus hold significant potential leverage over the jihadist network, which could be employed to serve U.S. interests.
Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s new national security adviser, has said the administration needs to re-examine American intelligence and counterterrorism measures regarding Afghanistan to make sure the United States is not again caught off guard as it was in 2001. Ultimately, effective counterterrorism hinges on establishing communication with Taliban clerics. The United States lacks this, leaving Washington blind to the group’s internal power structure and potential factional rifts that might otherwise present opportunities to achieve its objectives.
The Taliban may appear monolithic, but they are not. Reflecting the group’s ethnic diversity, its hard-line emir, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, leads an uneasy coalition of factions and tribes with different priorities and levels of extremism. As with any governing organization, there are the usual internal tensions over personnel issues and policy, including the emir’s rigid stance on denying women and girls access to education, his tight control over government resources, how forcefully to suppress dissent and the expansion of madrassas at the expense of regular schooling. More pragmatic factions favor rapprochement with the United States to give the regime more global legitimacy and improve Afghanistan’s dire economic situation. The Taliban’s deputy foreign minister last month praised Mr. Trump as “decisive” and “courageous,” called for the reopening of the U.S. embassy and said that if the United States extended the hand of friendship, the Taliban would reciprocate.
The Taliban will be difficult to deal with. But Afghanistan is an important piece in the broader jihadist puzzle. To continue standing by and waiting for the Taliban to collapse is unrealistic and risky. Direct engagement, on the other hand, may open pathways for tracking and disrupting terrorist plots. In the longer term, it may even give the United States enough influence to help improve Afghanistan’s overall direction, including on human rights.
Engaging with the Taliban would be a bitter pill for America to swallow, but as Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently pointed out, U.S. foreign policy is often about choosing the “least bad” option.
