WASHINGTON — President Trump’s headway in Afghan peace negotiations with the Taliban raises the same question that has bedeviled other presidents who extracted American troops from foreign wars: Will the departing Americans end up handing over the country to the same ruthless militants that the United States went to war to dislodge?
A hasty American withdrawal, experts said, would erode the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan government, raising the risk that the Taliban could recapture control of the country. Short of that, it could consign Afghanistan to a protracted, bloody civil war, with Taliban fighters besieging the capital, Kabul, as they did in the 1990s.
These scenarios now seem possible because of the progress in direct talks between the United States and the Taliban. The chief American negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, said Monday that American and Taliban officials had agreed in principle to the outlines of a deal in which the insurgents would guarantee that Afghan territory is never used by terrorists, setting the stage for a total pullout of American troops.
While current and former American diplomats and military officials voiced cautious optimism about the negotiations, they questioned whether the Taliban and the administration in Kabul would ever agree to a power-sharing arrangement, given that the Taliban still refuse even to speak to the government of President Ashraf Ghani. Some fear that the Taliban will seek to overthrow the government once the Americans are gone.
“It’s a pretty significant risk,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who ran President Barack Obama’s first Afghanistan policy review. “It won’t be the same people — they’re mostly dead. But you will find like-minded extremists taking advantage of the void.”
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to pull out troops only adds to that risk, he said. The talks with the Taliban accelerated after Mr. Trump ordered the Pentagon to cut the American troop presence — now 14,000 — in Afghanistan in half. Unlike Mr. Obama or President George W. Bush, Mr. Trump has not visited Afghanistan or built a relationship with Mr. Ghani.
Analysts also questioned whether the Taliban were unified enough to deliver on the agreement, and whether the Afghan National Army and police were strong enough to prevent the country from sliding back into chaos. Perhaps the greatest concern raised by the American officials, many with years of experience fighting the Taliban, is how the United States would enforce the deal and protect its counterterrorism priorities.
“It’s a good start,” said Gen. John F. Campbell, a former American commander in Afghanistan, “but if our primary strategic interest is that Afghanistan does not become another safe haven for terrorists, we need to put some measurements in place to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Such yardsticks, officials said, would include linking the drawdown of American troops over a period of months or a few years to the ability of Afghan security forces to combat any resurgent threat from Al Qaeda, the Islamic State or other violent extremist groups.
Senior national security aides have tried to use an intelligence assessment — which says a complete withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan would lead to an attack on the United States within two years — to convince Mr. Trump that a residual counterterrorism force must remain in the country.
The intelligence assessment, initially prepared in 2017 as part of Mr. Trump’s Afghanistan strategy review, was renewed late last year, according to Defense Department officials.
During internal discussions, Jim Mattis, who resigned as defense secretary last month, pointed to the estimate that some 20 terrorist groups, many of them offshoots of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, would quickly use the freedom afforded by an American troop pullout to try to launch operations against Western targets.
Concluding that Mr. Trump does not have a grasp of the internal politics and feuding that have vexed American policymakers in Afghanistan for the past 18 years, Defense Department officials have tried to put the consequences of a full American pullout in as stark terms as possible. If the troops are withdrawn, they argue, an attack on the United States could occur in two years and Mr. Trump would shoulder the blame.
Mr. Mattis’s successor, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan, told reporters on Monday that while he had been briefed on the negotiations with the Taliban, the Defense Department had not been asked yet to prepare for a complete withdrawal.
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