Could the US return to Afghanistan? Former ambassador to Kabul says yes

Five years after the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban wants Washington back — not with troops, but with diplomats and investment.

And former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald E. Neumann says a return is possible.

“Yes, I can imagine that,” Neumann told i24NEWS when asked whether Washington could realistically reopen its embassy in Kabul while the Taliban remains in power.

He said the Taliban would first have to make policy changes, particularly because of the political backlash Washington would face over the organization’s treatment of women.

“But there are reasons to reopen,” Neumann said. “And I can well imagine the United States doing it, but I can’t put any time on that.”

His comments come as the Taliban openly pushes for a new relationship with its former enemy.

In an interview with The New York Times ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power this year, acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi invited the United States to reopen its embassy, restore a diplomatic presence and invest in Afghanistan.

Muttaqi said the “chapter of war” was over and proposed American investment in Afghanistan’s mineral resources, dams and roads — while ruling out any return of US troops.

For Neumann, the outreach is less surprising than it may appear.

“The Taliban made clear even during the negotiations in Doha that they wanted a political relationship to remain,” he said. “They wanted the military to go.”

Neumann noted that until shortly before the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government in August 2021, Washington had itself expected to maintain an embassy in Kabul.

“There was a discussion about some sort of transition of power in Kabul,” he said. “That fell apart at the last minute when Ghani fled Kabul, the Taliban entered, everybody ran for the airport.”

“But it was always envisioned that the United States might remain,” he added, saying that possibility had been envisioned by the Taliban as well.

US already dealing with Taliban ‘pragmatically’

Formal diplomatic relations remain absent, but Neumann said Washington and the Taliban are already dealing with each other when their interests overlap.

“The United States is already dealing with Taliban pragmatically in certain areas,” he said.

US officials have traveled to Kabul for talks, particularly over Americans held in Afghanistan.

Neumann also pointed to counterterrorism as another area where limited cooperation may already be occurring, particularly against Islamic State, an enemy of both Washington and the Taliban.

But asked whether the Taliban itself has changed since taking power in 2021, Neumann gave a much more complicated answer.

“In some ways the answer is yes, and in other ways it is troublingly no,” he said.

He was particularly critical of the Taliban’s treatment of women, saying it had “gotten worse” and describing its policies as “an almost medieval view of Islam not shared by most Muslim states.”

Five years into Taliban rule, women and girls remain barred from secondary schools and universities and face sweeping restrictions on employment and public life.

Neumann also said questions remain over the Taliban’s relationships with terrorist organizations.

He said the Taliban appears to be controlling Al-Qaeda “as far as we know,” but stressed the uncertainty surrounding that assessment. He also pointed to its failure to control the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP.

“So on the support for terrorism, there is some control, not fully changed, and a lot of questions,” he said.

‘Whenever we turn our back on Afghanistan, we get bitten’

Despite those concerns, Neumann warned that simply ignoring Afghanistan carries risks of its own.

“We’ve stayed out of Afghanistan several times in the past,” he said. “And I would say whenever we turn our back on Afghanistan, we end up getting bitten in some sensitive place.”

Other powers are already filling some of the diplomatic space left by Washington.

Russia became the first country to formally recognize the Taliban government, while China and several regional states have deepened diplomatic and commercial ties without formally recognizing it.

Neumann said it was difficult to determine how much those relationships directly hurt US interests. The larger concern, he argued, is Afghanistan’s potential to fuel instability across Central and South Asia.

“As Afghanistan is a place that is radiating instability with support of the TTP and regional terrorist movements and question marks about Al-Qaeda, that is a serious issue which we are not able to pay much attention to,” he said.

Afghanistan’s minerals: ‘Potentially’ interesting — but years away

Part of the Taliban’s pitch to Washington is economic.

Muttaqi explicitly invited US companies to invest in Afghanistan’s vast mineral resources, an idea that could appear particularly attractive as global competition over critical minerals intensifies.

Neumann said the potential exists — but stressed the word “potentially.”

“It is potentially interesting if you understand that potentially is years away,” he said.

Afghanistan’s mineral resources have been known about for years, he noted, but extracting them requires far more than simply granting mining rights.

“Companies have to invest. That requires a certain amount of security. Companies have to believe the security will last. There has to be a certain amount of rule of law,” Neumann said.

“None of that exists now.”

“It could, in theory, all be created,” he added. “Until it is created, I don’t think this is a serious idea.”

What did America get wrong?

Asked what Washington fundamentally got wrong during its two decades in Afghanistan, Neumann rejected the idea that there was one simple explanation for the collapse.

“After 20 years, you can pick a lot of things,” he said.

And he stressed that the failures were not exclusively American.

Afghan leaders, he argued, ultimately failed to build a state that enough people believed was worth fighting for.

Some Afghan military units did fight effectively even as the country was collapsing, he noted, but “as a whole, there was not the belief that the state was worth fighting for.”

On the American side, Neumann identified one fundamental problem: Washington was never able to convince Afghan political leaders that US protection would eventually disappear.

“As long as Afghan leaders, warlords, others believed the United States would stay and provide a security umbrella, there was no real reason for them to build a cohesive state,” he said.

Instead, he argued, it was often easier for powerful figures to profit from foreign aid while relying on American military protection.

US spending was another major mistake, according to Neumann.

During the earlier, relatively more stable years, he said, too little money was available for reconstruction.

Neumann recalled asking for an additional $600 million in economic support while serving as ambassador and receiving just $43 million because the Iraq war was consuming US resources.

Later, Washington poured billions into Afghanistan — but often faster than the country could absorb it.

“When you put in more money than the country can absorb, it’s like pouring buckets of water into a sink with a limited drain,” he said. “It slops out over the sides because it can’t drain it fast enough.”

When Afghan institutions could not absorb the money, he said, much of it “bleeds off in corruption.”

Neumann also pointed to delays in building sufficiently large Afghan security forces and early US reluctance to become involved when then-president Hamid Karzai struggled against powerful warlords.

The result, he argued, was a series of problems that reinforced one another over two decades.

‘Real actions for real actions’

So what would a different American relationship with Afghanistan look like today?

Neumann said Washington still has interests in the country, including counterterrorism, securing the release of American hostages and, to some extent, how the Taliban treats Afghans.

But he argued that any normalization should proceed very differently from past US negotiations with the group.

“You should only trade real actions for real actions,” Neumann said.

If reopening the US embassy is something the Taliban wants, he said, Washington should identify something concrete it wants in return — and require the Taliban to deliver it at the same time.

“Not by promises, not by hopes that things will be better,” he said. “That has to be step by step because there is no confidence. There’s no reason for either side to have any confidence or trust.”

“If you do things like opening an embassy without getting anything in return, you simply leave the message that the Afghans don’t have to move,” Neumann said.

“They just stay put and the United States will bow and change its position.” That, he argued, was a pattern Washington had fallen into before.

“Our positions weakened over time and theirs didn’t,” Neumann said. “And that’s a pattern that we need to break if we’re gonna have a successful relationship.”