The US-Taliban peace talks, hosted in Doha from 2018 to 2020, laid the basis for the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. There is broad agreement that the sidelining of Afghanistan’s legitimate government was a serious weakness of the process. Another significant weakness was the lack of any strategy for engaging
Afghanistan’s neighbours, all of which had been involved in Afghan conflicts. This weakness has received much less attention. This paper analyses the reasons for the absence of a regional strategy to complement the US-Taliban talks and discusses what this meant for the process and outcome.
The Mediation in Regionalized Intra-State Conflict project focuses on international mediation in intra-state conflicts that have significant regional conflict dimensions. The problem of conflict regionalization arises most acutely where neighbouring states provide military support to domestic conflict parties and may even be involved in hostilities. These dynamics constitute a worrying trend because they tend to make the conflicts more protracted and less amenable to resolution through mediation.
The project is led by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. It is supported by the Cross-border Conflict, Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research program, funded by UK International Development.