Dr Farkhondeh Akbari, Professor William Maley
Abstract:
One of the more important developments in international relations scholarship has been an expanded focus on how actors are perceived or framed for the purposes of diplomatic engagement. This goes beyond mere taxonomic categorisation, and involves an appreciation of the consequences of cognitive processes for political outcomes. ‘Knowing the enemy’ really matters, and this is especially the case if one’s approach to an ‘enemy’ is premised on the supposition that that enemy will be bound by the same rules as one is oneself. Should this prove to be a false assumption, the consequences can be grave indeed. This has long been understood where state actors are concerned, with a classic example being British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s poor framing of Hitler during the 1938 Czechoslovak crisis. But the problem can arise with non-state actors as well, and a striking recent example is provided by the Taliban in Afghanistan. This paper shows how framing of the Taliban by the United States reflected a failure to appreciate some of the lessons that the 1930s case of Nazi Germany had to offer, and highlights two areas of erroneous framing that had dire consequences: the framing of the Taliban as primarily a local player in a civil war, which neglected the transnational character of the Afghanistan conflict; and the framing of the Taliban as a standard guerrilla force interested in the sharing of power, something that led to both the disastrous failure of the 2020 Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban; and to a grave misunderstanding of what kind of regime the Taliban might establish should they recover power. The paper concludes with some observations on the dangers of treating the Taliban in 2025 as a player capable of being socialised into the requirements of a rule-based international order.