Peace in Afghanistan has often been portrayed as the product of international intervention. This article tells a different story, showing how Afghan mediators secured a landmark peace agreement by navigating complex domestic and international power relations and expanding the possibilities of local agency.
Key words: Afghanistan, peace agreement, international intervention, local agency
The September 2016 Peace Agreement between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and Hizb-I-Islami (Hizb) defies the familiar pattern of externally driven peace processes, representing an exceptional moment in the country’s struggle for peace.
It might be tempting to think of the Afghan conflict as a non-stop, over four-decades long armed conflict with only sporadic efforts at finding a durable and just peace. Conventional accounts tend to frame war as the norm and peace as the exception. The reality is far from it. Formal peace processes and bottom-up peace movements have almost always paralleled military operations. On at least three occasions, they have led to successfully negotiated and implemented peace agreements: The 1988 Geneva Accords, the 2001 Bonn Agreement and the 2020 Doha Agreement. These agreements, however, share one common, rather self-defeating feature: they wilfully exclude a key party to the conflict, either the Afghan government or the insurgency.
This article argues that the 2016 settlement foregrounds the agency of local actors within an internationally structured peace process. The analysis draws on original notes and documents as secondary data, together with an interview conducted in early 2025 with a senior High Peace Council mediator directly involved in the negotiations.
From armed conflict to peace talks
Hizb, led by its enigmatic founder Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (militant jihad leader, war crimes suspect and Prime Minister of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s) has long occupied a prominent place in the political imaginary of Afghanistan. Hizb’s rise mirrors the rise of ‘fundamentalist’ political Islam in Afghanistan: revolutionary, insurgent, state-centric and hegemonic.
Following the US-led invasion in October 2001 which removed the original Taliban Emirate from power, Hekmatyar, then based in Tehran, attempted to position his organisation as the primary vehicle for a renewed Afghan insurgency against the Western forces.
He dispatched envoys to the Taliban leadership in Kandahar, proposing that Hizb take over resistance leadership in anticipation of the Taliban’s collapse. This early attempt at unifying opposition forces failed, as the Taliban refused to concede authority. The dream of a united Hizb–Taliban front collapsed under the weight of divergent political agendas, ideological tensions, and sustained military pressure from the US and their local allies. This included Jamiat-i-Islami (Jamiat) which, now rebranded as ‘Northern Alliance’, included a cavalcade of former Hizb adversaries (and allies) who had decided to ally with the invading Americans. By late 2002, many Hizb commanders had been killed, arrested, or forced into hiding. Ghairat Baheer, the future Hizb peace envoy, spent six years in American captivity, including a long stint in the Salt Pit, a CIA clandestine black site.
While Hizb’s armed wing continued to carry out limited operations against the central government and Western forces, the organisation simultaneously pursued a political strategy from within Kabul. As early as 2003, state officials began engaging with self-declared ‘moderate’ Hizbis, many of whom operated under Hekmatyar’s tacit blessing. These figures established an office in Kabul in 2004 and publicly disavowed insurgent ties, claiming to represent a ‘breakaway faction’. Some Hizb members later ran in parliamentary elections and held senior administrative posts in government, including the Ministry of Education and other sectors.
In many ways, this bifurcation defined Hizb’s post-2001 posture. The organisation’s dual strategy allowed it to retain relevance across multiple political arenas. While the leadership remained in hiding, the political wing of the movement entrenched itself within Kabul’s governing apparatus. Although the initial attempt to forge a united front with the Taliban had failed, Hizb gradually rebuilt its armed networks during the first years of the American occupation. By 2006, as the Taliban were only beginning to reconstitute themselves as a significant insurgent force, Hizb had already established an insurgency of its own, operating in parallel to, rather than in concert with, the Taliban. By 2010, at the height of the ‘War on Terror’, this uneasy coexistence had given way to open hostility.
The US-backed administration led by Hamid Karzai was increasingly critical of the conduct of the war by US-led Western forces. Especially dismayed at the mounting civilian causalities, the Kabul administration began speaking of a bold new peace process centred around national reconciliation between the state, the Taliban and other insurgent groups.
Karzai’s campaign promise of convening a Loya Jirga—the country’s supreme consultative body— on peace, resulted in the 2010 Afghan Peace Jirga, which created the internationally-backed Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP). The High Peace Council was created to oversee the implementation of APRP. The 70-member advisory body included politicians, former insurgents, civil society leaders and women and was tasked with mediating between the government and its insurgent adversaries.
Around this time, with the Taliban having rejected repeated attempts at rapprochement from the Kabul government, a new Hizb delegation arrived in Kabul carrying a 15-point peace proposal calling for a phased foreign troop withdrawal, constitutional reforms, and disarmament. Though the plan was ultimately sidelined by US and Afghan officials, it indicated the organisation’s readiness to re-enter mainstream politics under favourable conditions.
Mediation under hybrid sovereignty
There was some momentum, but challenges persisted. These included an enduring dissonance on interpretations of peace (i.e. reintegration of foot soldiers or actual political reconciliation) and the Western-backed Afghan state’s exclusionary national narratives. High Peace Council mediators needed to navigate this complex environment, even if they could not quite address the entrenched challenges and contradictions of operating within Western conceptions of peace, governance, and development; an historically specific and universalising logic that erases or marginalises other modes of political existence. This context also points to what may be understood as a form of hybrid sovereignty, in which formal state authority coexisted with other, often competing, sources of political legitimacy and authority.
The first major challenge was American insistence on ‘reintegration’ rather than ‘reconciliation’. APRP’s core mandate was to reintegrate insurgents in return for security, jobs and other incentives (e.g. a $US170 monthly salary for three months). The US administration, in many ways, remained beholden to a stark conclusion drawn in a strategic Afghanistan 2010 policy assessment, commissioned by the administration of then US President Barack Obama: that the Taliban leadership were irreconcilable, rejecting the viability of a settlement or power sharing-agreement between them and the Afghan state. Bruce Riedel, the author of the White Paper, maintained that the task was ‘not to try to make a grand deal with the Taliban,’ but to see if the US could ‘expose fissures and contradictions with it.’
Yet, the Afghan state harboured a broader vision that eclipsed this reductionist view, seeing peace in reconciliation with the Taliban. Reconciliation presumes that all parties possess political agency and that peace is forged through mutual recognition and compromise. Reintegration, by contrast, renders one side politically illegitimate and treats its members as subjects to be neutralised, re-educated, or bought off. Unlike reintegration in post-conflict peacebuilding, this securitised ‘reintegration’ primarily aimed to fragment and defang armed opposition.
The Americans were not keen on changing their stance on reintegration. Reconciliation veered too far from established American policy and military doctrine. Yet High Peace Council mediators managed to bring about a change of heart. The arguments they advanced were twofold, both pragmatic and both spoke directly to the anxieties and logic of the liberal order. In Afghanistan, the liberal order centred on the construction of a sovereign, democratic state, constitutional governance, and the integration of former combatants into state institutions. Peace was consequently understood largely through the consolidation of state authority and the incorporation of armed actors into a rules-based political system.
First, the American embassy was informed by mediators that Hizb members could contribute positively to the state building project. They were not outsiders to the post-2001 order. Many were already embedded within state institutions and possessed valuable political, administrative, and military experience. Bringing Hizb fully into the fold would therefore strengthen, rather than undermine, the state. It should be encouraged to deepen, rather than withdraw, its commitment to it.
Second, mediators presented the agreement as a pathway to Taliban negotiations. The real antagonist was not Hizb but the Taliban. While the concessions offered to Hizb appeared significant, they served a larger strategic purpose. Hizb could help persuade the Taliban to come to the negotiating table. Since the 2010 Peace Jirga, the Taliban had boycotted peace talks, insisting on the withdrawal of international forces before any meaningful engagement. Hizb had held a similar position but was now willing to compromise. The hope was that a successful agreement between the Afghan state and Hizb would demonstrate the value of negotiation and indirectly encourage the Taliban to soften their hardline demands.
Then there was the issue of sanctions. Since the early years of the ‘War on Terror’, the US, followed by the UN, had placed Hizb and its senior leadership on international lists of terrorists. Any meaningful agreement required movement on this front. Afghan mediators therefore engaged in tense shuttle diplomacy across Kabul, moving between the Arg (the historical presidential palace in Kabul), the US embassy, and meeting rooms with Hizb delegates. Their aim was to secure American support for lifting sanctions and paving the way for the return of Hizb’s leadership. Afghan mediators repeatedly stressed the symbolic importance of Hekmatyar’s return. The image of a former insurgent leader laying down arms and re-entering political life, they argued, would provide a much-needed morale boost to a population exhausted by decades of war.
Mediating entrenched rivalries
The second major challenge was decades of enmity between Hizb and Jamiat (Northern Alliance), which allied itself with the invading Western forces in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Jamiat’s significance lay in its position at the heart of the post-2001 Afghan political order. Its leaders were deeply entrenched within the new state and retained considerable influence in its political and security institutions, while its wartime alliance with the US and other Western powers gave it particular leverage.
Furthermore, Jamiat’s political narratives would over time be internalised as the foundational myths of the new state. Persons and histories associated with Jamiat would be visibly carved onto the cityscapes and terrain, each re-presented as national figures and nationally relevant narratives. Hekmatyar, accused of terrorist attacks and war crimes, was cast as the ‘Butcher of Kabul’ and made a scapegoat for the failures of insurgent opposition to the Soviet occupation and ensuing civil war. Hizb’s revisionist counternarrative directly challenged this emerging national history, making rapprochement with Jamiat not simply a political negotiation, but a confrontation between competing claims to historical legitimacy.
Despite an entrenched adversarial past, Jamiat was eventually persuaded to come onboard. It gave its blessing to both the peace agreement and the return of its long-time rival. Jamiat executive member and Minister of Economy, Abdul Satar Murad, described reconciliation with Hizb: ‘Jamiat-i-Islami welcomes the return of Hekmatyar and order into the country and looks forward to his return.’
What explains this change of heart? Here too, pragmatism appears to have prevailed. By this stage, the so-called ‘Obama surge’ had already wound down and the prospect of a reduced international military presence after 2014 was a reality. High Peace Council mediators argued that the peace agreement would increase the likelihood of future Taliban negotiations, but if the Taliban ultimately refused negotiations and confrontation became inevitable, it was better to have Hizb on ‘our side’. Hizb’s organisational capacity, networks, and experienced cadre could prove valuable in any future struggle. Better, therefore, to have them as partners in Kabul than as another adversary in the countryside.
Yet pragmatism alone does not fully explain Jamiat’s position. There was also a deeper discomfort with the liberal order and the political hierarchies it had produced. Like many of the state’s illiberal allies, Jamiat participated in the post-2001 order without ever fully internalising its liberal assumptions. Its relationship with the state was one of accommodation rather than complete identification. The peace agreement offered an opportunity to reposition itself politically. Supporting reconciliation with Hizb allowed Jamiat to distance itself from the image of a faction merely defending a foreign-backed order against its opponents. It signalled a willingness to prioritise an Afghan political settlement over factional rivalries and, in doing so, partially mitigated accusations that it had become a co-opted agent of an externally imposed project. The concession to Hizb thus carried not only strategic value but also symbolic and political significance.
Conclusion
The High Peace Council mediators managed to produce a peace agreement that, though entangled with the liberal state, could also escape the trappings of previous exclusionary processes imposed by external forces.
The Geneva Accords, while securing agreements on Soviet withdrawal, excluded the Islamist adversaries of the state. The Bonn Agreement, while constituting the legal framework for post-Taliban Afghanistan and giving the invasion a visage of legality, excluded the Taliban. The Doha Agreement, while securing agreements on American withdrawal and Taliban commitment to counterterrorism, excluded the Afghan government. The Peshawar peace process failed in the early 1990s, as did the PDPA national reconciliation program; the Taliban roared back as an insurgency in the post-9/11 world; and the intra-Afghan peace talks never made much progress until a complete military takeover by the Taliban on 15 August 2021.
The 2016 peace agreement, although asymmetrical, with most concessions flowing from the government to Hizb, secured several significant outcomes. Hizb committed to a permanent ceasefire, disband its military structures, sever ties with insurgent groups, accept the 2004 Constitution, and transform into a political party. In return, the government lifted sanctions, facilitated the return of Hizb leadership, released prisoners, and extended political recognition to Hekmatyar. Subsequent presidential decrees established mechanisms for implementation, including a Joint Executive Commission and coordination between Afghan security institutions and international forces, making the agreement one of the most comprehensive, locally negotiated peace settlements in Afghanistan’s modern history.
The 2016 peace settlement is significant because it radically recasts the roles in an Afghan peace process. Instead of experiencing yet another deliberate exclusion, here, in an accident of history, Afghans were empowered to lead the negotiations. The High Peace Council was an eclectic body, representing diverse Afghan political views, which was mediated between Afghan adversaries while getting the international actors onboard. The mediators, despite the liberal state and its narrow definition of peace, would use discretionary power to redefine what it could mean in a specific situation. They went beyond, to secure concessions from the Americans and local detractors, while widening the definition of peace.
Main image: The aftermath of a devastating Taliban suicide attack on the Green Village, Kabul, a compound that housed aid agencies and international organisations. Sixteen people were killed and over a 100 wounded. The attack was coordinated to take place at the same time as the US Special Envoy was being interviewed on Tolo Tv about the Doha peace process. Credit: Used with permission from the author.
