michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: Over the weekend, the United States appeared to have finally reached an agreement with the Taliban that would begin to end America’s longest-running war in Afghanistan. That agreement followed months of private negotiations in Qatar between the two sides. We spoke to my colleague Mujib Mashal about what he learned from being there. It’s Tuesday, September 3.

archived recording (donald trump) After the extraordinary sacrifice of blood and treasure, the American people are weary of war without victory. archived recording U.S. military and diplomatic leaders are moving ahead on the Afghanistan strategy. archived recording (donald trump) We are a partner and a friend, but we will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live or how to govern their own complex society. archived recording Afghan security forces are battling a resurgent Taliban that’s launching attacks around the country. archived recording (donald trump) We are not nation-building again. archived recording The U.S. and the Taliban appear to be making progress toward a peace deal in Afghanistan. archived recording (donald trump) My administration is holding constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban. archived recording 1 News that was coming out of Doha, which is where these talks are taking place, is that the framework is in place. archived recording 2 Negotiators have agreed on a framework for a potential pact that could finally end — archived recording 3 Seventeen years after a coalition chased the Taliban out of Kabul, Washington’s envoy reaching a tentative deal on a road map — archived recording (donald trump) We do not know whether we’ll achieve an agreement, but we do know that after two decades of war, the hour has come to at least try for peace. And the other side would like to do the same thing. It’s time. [APPLAUSE]

michael barbaro

Mujib, you’ve been assigned to cover these landmark negotiations. I wonder if you could walk us through how you actually do that.

mujib mashal

So for the past few months, every few weeks I’ve been gone to Doha, this small Gulf state of Qatar, and it’s an excruciating trip because there are a lot of tensions in the region. In Saudi Arabia, there’s a big blockade against Qatar, so a trip that would take two, three hours takes me a full day of travel through Istanbul to get there. But once we get there, the routine is largely similar. The American diplomats stay in these sort of luxury hotels. The Taliban — a lot of them have houses there, because they’ve been based there for a long time. But then in the mornings, they all come to this small diplomatic club. Then what happens is as soon as you walk in, they take your phones away. And you walk through scanners and, you know, you put your notebooks, anything you have through the scanner. And it’s this beautiful, marble floor, small club. And members of the media were barely allowed access to the diplomatic club. It’s a lot of sort of cat-and-mouse. Sometimes we’re actually kicked out. Sometimes we make our way in, we negotiate, and then one of the American diplomats helps in and tells the Qatari guards it’s O.K. for us to be there as long as we stay in this corner cafe. They go upstairs to this more private space where the negotiations happen. So I usually just make my way to the cafe. Every time, I take the same seat at the cafe, which has a view of the lobby. So at least I have a view of when the sessions have ended, you know, who is walking around — I have a good view. And then most of my day is spent doing crossword puzzles, reading a book, ordering a lot of coffee after coffee, and then I have an eye for the negotiations routine as to when they’re going to take their break. And then I kind of try to plan my bathroom break around that. I may naturally run into one of them in the lobby. It’s a lot of reading faces, a lot of reading — what mood is the chief negotiator in as he walks out? Are they standing in a corner? Are the hands waving, and are they angry at each other? Is somebody walking out in anger? But both sides have been really, really disciplined during these eight, nine months. So it’s tricky work trying to understand what’s actually going on upstairs behind closed doors. On the American side, there’s a lot more interaction, and they engage with the media more. But on the Taliban side, these are insurgent leaders that we had only known names of for years. It’s the first time we’re seeing their faces. It’s the first time we’re in the same space with them. Some of them, it’s for the first time they’re using phones in years, because they were afraid of being tracked down and hit by a drone. So it’s in that context that one needs to rely on a lot of creative ways of creating comfort and creating trust. And sometimes that means lucky breaks also. For a couple of nights in one of the rounds, I happened to have a room just above the room of their chief negotiator. And one of the other negotiators was leaving session and I said, hey, it’d be great if we could have a conversation. And he said, where are you staying? And I told him the room number. He was like, oh, that’s just above from us. So maybe I’ll find you there. And it was late in the evening and I was typing an online version of the story, and there was a knock on the door. And I was in shorts, and I quickly put on a shirt and I buttoned up a few of the buttons, and I opened the door. It was one of the negotiators standing in the doorway with a plate of cookies and dried fruit.

michael barbaro

Wow.

mujib mashal

He said, I’m away from home. You guys are away from home. And one of our friends dropped off some cookies and dried fruit, and I wanted to share. I was surprised. And I said, well, sir, come on in. And he came into the room, and he sat in one of the couches. And for a second, I thought, I can’t tell this guy, I’m sorry, sir, I have to file a story. New York is waiting on a story. Like, this is — when else do you get an opportunity for a midnight conversation with one of the most senior leaders of the Taliban?

michael barbaro

When do you, indeed?

mujib mashal

When do you, indeed? And so I just closed my laptop, and I sat down. And I noticed he was staring at the ceiling as we were having this conversation. And so we’re talking about the political reality of Afghanistan, what these negotiations could mean for ending the war, and he’s not making eye contact. A couple times I had talked to him before, he was totally fine. And now he’s not making eye contact. During this conversation, he slowly reached down for a pillow, and he put it on my knees — because I was wearing shorts.

michael barbaro

Why?

mujib mashal

Gently, he said, anything above the knees is private. What he meant was I was showing too much skin. So for the next 40 minutes or so, I’m holding this pillow on my lap covering my knees as we continue a serious conversation about the political future of Afghanistan. This is a shadowy movement. We don’t know a lot about the leaders of these groups, and here’s an opportunity to try to understand, what do they think? What are their feelings about this stuff? So it’s as much been an education in trying to understand what context they’re coming with to these talks and these negotiations.

michael barbaro

O.K., so let’s talk about what these negotiations that you’re trying so hard to understand are actually about. What exactly is being negotiated there in Qatar?

mujib mashal

So the most fundamental framework is this — there has to be an American troop withdrawal. There are about 14,000 American troops and a few thousand NATO allies in the country right now. The Taliban have said the cornerstone of a peace deal has to be the withdrawal of those foreign troops. In return for that withdrawal, the Americans are asking assurances from the Taliban that they will not harbor international terror groups like Al Qaeda again. The other thing that the Americans have gotten the Taliban to basically agree to is once a schedule for the withdrawal of American troops is announced, the Taliban will sit down with other Afghans, including the country’s government, to iron out the political future after the U.S. ends its military presence. The Taliban have all along said they would negotiate with the U.S. first about the foreign occupation, and then they will move into talking about the political questions of what happens to the future of Afghanistan. That means, you know, power-sharing, that means changes in the constitution, that means things like that. But what is important is all of those discussions will be happening under a ticking clock, because the U.S. withdrawal would have started. So when these negotiations started, the Taliban are saying, we want you out in months. And the U.S. are saying, no, no, no, we need a couple of years at least — three years or something like that. And then the Taliban are like, no, we want you out in months. And then the U.S. had to bring military experts to the negotiating table to actually explain to the Taliban how, logistically, ending an 18-year military presence simply cannot happen in a matter of months. So it’s been bargaining and negotiating. And the timeline we think they’ve reached is about 16 or 15 months, something like that. The U.S. is willing to kind of give in to a shorter timeline, because U.S. has domestic calculations also. President Trump wants out as fast as the Taliban. Before these negotiations even started.

archived recording (donald trump) Afghanistan is a total and complete disaster. What are we doing?

mujib mashal

President Trump was very open about his desire to leave.

archived recording (donald trump) Get out of Afghanistan. We’ve wasted billions and billions of dollars, and more importantly, thousands and thousands of lives.

mujib mashal

So when you’re coming to that table, you’ve already telegraphed giving what the other side would be demanding before you’ve even negotiated anything.

michael barbaro

So the U.S. actually gave up a good deal of its leverage at the very beginning of these negotiations because President Trump said he wanted to get out.

mujib mashal

Yeah.

michael barbaro

So perhaps my assumption here is wrong that the United States has that much more leverage than the Taliban does. You’re saying, in fact, these are kind of co-equals in Doha inside these rooms.

mujib mashal

Pretty much. The U.S. actually might be even more desperate for this deal than the Taliban.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. So what is the tension in these negotiations, Mujib, if both sides really want a deal?

mujib mashal

I think the most fundamental thing is that there’s a deep level of mistrust from both sides. So one of the reasons why these negotiations have dragged on for so long is, partially, when you look at the history of the 18 years, there are a bunch of other opportunities when the Taliban reached out and wanted a negotiated settlement to the war. And the U.S. basically said, no. And it kept growing more complicated. So now that the U.S. is initiating these talks and the Taliban are sitting down, that history’s in the back of the Taliban’s mind — saying, how could we trust that you’re serious about a deal and that you’re not using talks to undermine us? And the same on the other hand — for the American negotiators, the question is, well, these are militants. These are people who are allied with Al Qaeda. These are people who are still carrying out suicide bombings. These are the same people. So that creates a lot of mistrust for the Americans also. So the most fundamental thing is there is mistrust from both sides. And that means every word, they’re negotiating over. Everything is negotiated and parsed and discussed and reviewed. And the way it happens is that they have the text of the agreement on the screen, right? And every time they go through a sentence and they agree to it, the color of that text changes, I think, from red to black. But then if somebody says something else the next day, that sentence that they had agreed to changes color again — it goes back red. And so it’s that kind of environment of mistrust that makes this process so complicated. And then there are issues like when the U.S. asked the Taliban to break away from terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, the Taliban turned that into an emotional discussion — say, what do you mean by terrorists? Because for you, we could be terrorists. For us, you could be terrorists. Let’s discuss the definition of what is terrorism. So you’re sitting around this table going at things like that for days, for hours. And sometimes these negotiations go to, like, 2, 2:30 in the morning.

michael barbaro

The scene you’re laying out is pretty stunning — the dynamics. Because when you think of the military power represented in that room — the United States, what its military is — and this kind of ragtag group of Taliban fighters, and what you’re saying is for all intents and purposes, the power dynamics here over the question of Afghanistan’s future is equalized.

mujib mashal

Absolutely. It’s kind of emotional on both sides also. When they walk into that room, on the one hand, you’ve got these Taliban leaders — about half of the delegation across from them spent at least a decade in prison. The chief negotiator spent 10 years in Pakistani prison. He was tortured. He was in bad shape. Then another five or six of them spent about a decade in U.S. detention in Guantánamo. Across from them, you’ve got the chief American envoy — 30, 40 years of diplomatic experience. He’s a former ambassador to the U.N., to Iraq, to Afghanistan. Next to him, you know, military generals in uniform, who, a lot of them rose through the ranks in this war — got their stars, who’ve lost friends, who’ve lost colleagues in this war. Each one of them has served several tours of Afghanistan, now sitting to negotiate the end of a war they couldn’t win. It is very clear they couldn’t win. And in the past few weeks, it’s kind of become clear that the military is dragging its feet. It’s partially concerned about what threats might remain in Afghanistan after a deal with Taliban. But it’s actually partially emotional also, that a deal would mean they’d lost this war.

michael barbaro

Mujib, you said earlier that this deal is just the first step — that the U.S. and the Taliban have to reach an agreement to end this war before Afghanistan as a country can start to figure out what it’s going to look like moving forward. How have the two sides been talking about that next step in these negotiations? How has the Taliban been talking about it?

mujib mashal

They’re very vague, and I think deliberately vague. They say, we want basic rights for women, according to Islam. We want freedom of press, as long as it’s aligned with Islamic values. But the people contrast their statements to the way they actually exercise power — a Taliban that, when it ruled, it was a fundamentalist theocracy that did not allow women to go to school, that did not allow women to work, that banned music, that banned television, that banned free media. And that’s why they’re skeptical.

michael barbaro

And what about the U.S. representatives that you talked to there? Does it seem like they’re prioritizing the interests of Afghans and the preservation of democracy there?

mujib mashal

They’re being as vague. They are saying a lot of these issues of what the future society will look like, what the power sharing will look like, what the values will look like are discussions between Afghans. They are basically trying to prioritize an end to their costly military presence here. But they’re hoping to do it in a way where it could be linked to maintaining some of the current freedoms and liberties — girls’ education, women’s rights to basic freedoms, free press. All of that is fragile and all of that is new and all of that has been, to a large extent, dependent on support from the U.S. But they’re leaving the discussions on all of those basic freedoms and liberties to the next stage of the process, when it’s only Afghans negotiating with Afghans. And the fear is that once those discussions arrive, the U.S. leverage — and by extension, the leverage of the Afghan democratic system it has supported — would have been reduced in the face of a Taliban that will see the U.S. withdrawal as a victory. So when we get to the next stage of negotiations, one side that is supported by the U.S. will be weakened. The other side that has fought off the U.S., that has forced the U.S. into a withdrawal, will be in this sort of rush of victory. It will not be an equal negotiation. In this debate between two clashing visions of society, of governance, the side that is so dependent on the U.S. feels like the U.S. is caving in to Taliban demands. And they don’t know what the limits of the U.S. compromise with the Taliban is. Their partners in this new way of life might be abandoning them.

michael barbaro

Thank you, Mujib.

mujib mashal

Thanks, Michael.

michael barbaro

On Monday afternoon, the chief U.S. envoy to Afghanistan said that the U.S. had “in principle” finalized an agreement with the Taliban. Under the plan, 5,400 troops would pull out of Afghanistan within 135 days, marking the start of a gradual withdrawal of all 14,000 U.S. troops that could end the war. President Trump must still sign off on the agreement. We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (hubert minnis) This is probably the most sad and worst day of my life to address the Bahamian people. We’re facing a hurricane — Hurricane Dorian — one that we’ve never seen in the history of Bahamas.

michael barbaro

On Monday, Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Bahamas as a devastating Category 4 storm, with winds and storm surge that killed at least five people, flooded neighborhoods, ripped roofs off buildings, and turned homes into piles of debris.

archived recording This is the water behind my back door in glass. That came from the canal. That height has to be about 20 to 25 feet above sea level. So this is what I’m facing at the moment. And I have neighbors that are in a far worse position than me and my family.

michael barbaro

The storm proved unusually destructive because of its slow movement across the islands, where it lingered for nearly 24 hours, and because many in the Bahamas stayed in their homes.

archived recording (speaker 1) Oh my God, Angie, the window. archived recording (speaker 2) I know. [INAUDIBLE] Hello? archived recording (speaker 1) The baby car seat — we need help. Please someone — please come help us.

michael barbaro

In the U.S., where the storm is expected to arrive later today, evacuation orders affecting more than a million people have been issued in at least three states, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, as forecasters try to predict precisely where it will make landfall. And —

archived recording (michael gerke) Let’s start at the beginning. The situation started about 3:17 this afternoon. A D.P.S. trooper attempted to stop a gold Honda.

michael barbaro

Police say that the Texas gunman who used an AR-15-style assault rifle to kill at least seven people and injure 22 others over the weekend had just been fired from his job as a trucker.

archived recording (michael gerke) When the D.P.S. troopers got the car stopped, he was then shot by the occupant in the car. The vehicle continued westbound into the city of Odessa, and shot an individual at I-20 —

michael barbaro

The man seemed to fire indiscriminately at pedestrians, motorists and police officers throughout two towns — Midland and Odessa — before he was killed by authorities.

archived recording (michael gerke) Apparently, the subject then drove on our East Loop to 42nd Street, where there are multiple scenes and multiple victims.

michael barbaro