One of his deputies is Mullah Muhammad Yaqoub, the son of deceased Taliban founder Mullah Muhammad Omar. Now 30 years old, Mullah Yaqoub ostensibly leads the Taliban’s Quetta-based shura, or council, overseeing Taliban activities in the country’s more predominantly Pashtun south and west. But he lacks battlefield experience and his bloodline provides little guarantee that his father’s loyal followers will consistently support him.

The Taliban leader with the most battlefield credibility is another deputy, Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the shadowy Haqqani network that controls the Taliban’s Peshawar-based shura, with operations in northern, eastern and central Afghanistan. Separated by mountains from the southern Pashtuns as well as Afghanistan’s northern Tajiks and Uzbeks, the Haqqani network’s manpower, financial resources and battlefield skills, particularly suicide bombings and kidnapping operations learned through cooperation with Al Qaeda, have been crucial to Taliban success.

It is telling that Mr. Haqqani was the author of a Times Op-Ed last week asserting that the Taliban was prepared to accept a peace accord. The Haqqani network is the Taliban’s most independent and militarily effective fighting force. In having the reclusive Mr. Haqqani be author of the piece, the Taliban leadership might have been trying to send a message of unity to both the West and to Taliban commanders in the field.

Even so, there’s another impediment to securing a real peace deal: Members of the Taliban’s Qatar-based negotiating team are largely disconnected from and disrespected by the Taliban’s senior leadership. The lead negotiator, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, is a career Taliban politician, not a warrior, who was replaced as deputy Taliban foreign minister in the late 1990s after his own falling out with Taliban leadership. The team’s ostensible chief is Mullah Omar’s former deputy, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was wasting away in a Pakistani prison until the United States pushed for his release in late 2018, probably because he has long supported negotiations.

So what is really driving these peace talks? The answer seems to be President Trump, who has promised to end America’s involvement in Afghanistan and made the release of American hostages a priority. The president’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, a Trump loyalist, is determined to secure a deal that need only survive until the fall election. Mr. Khalilzad, who appears to be interested in becoming secretary of state in a second Trump term, pressured President Ashraf Ghani last November to release Anas Haqqani, Sirajuddin Haqqani’s younger brother, along with two other prominent Haqqani network officials, in exchange for two Westerners held by the group. The exchange was viewed as a crucial first step toward revitalizing the negotiations. But in a bad omen for the impending deal, a cease-fire in Zabul province that was promised as part of the prisoner exchange never materialized.

All of this means that the Taliban will have little to lose from signing a deal that they can walk away from, and much to gain when the United States draws down its forces. Significantly, among the American troops that will depart are those who train the most effective government fighters, the Afghan special operations forces. Those commandos have had an outsize impact in relieving besieged Afghan cities. Neutralizing them is a key goal of Taliban and Haqqani field commanders.

I am not arguing that the United States should keep troops in Afghanistan forever. But there are better ways to seek a true, lasting peace — such as by treating Afghanistan as the fractured nation it is and negotiating separate deals with regional Taliban leaders and warlords.