<![CDATA[Peace deal is a leap of faith for the US, but one day the Taliban may win a Nobel Peace Prize]>
This weekend, the world will be treated to the grand spectacle of US and Taliban representatives signing a peace deal in Doha. With it, the war between the West and the militant Islamist group sparked by the September 11 terror attacks will be all but over, and the Taliban will have taken a major step towards being accepted as a mainstream political entity.
Not so long ago, it was unthinkable that the Taliban could be accepted, much less welcomed, as a peacemaker by world powers. For global audiences conditioned by black-or-white media coverage of the "war on terror", it is a lot to swallow.
As far as members of the public are concerned, the Taliban and al-Qaeda remain synonymous, although it is a well-established fact that the 2001 attacks on the US were not planned in Afghanistan, and that the Taliban was deceived at the time by Osama bin Laden and its other "guests".
It will take a big leap of faith for people to come to terms with the Taliban's forthcoming role as a front-line ally against the so-called Islamic State's regional affiliate, or that it has committed to verifiably preventing foreign terrorists from operating from the half of Afghanistan that it either controls or contests with government forces.
A US Marine in Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Photo: AFP
The Taliban's leaders have subtly shifted their policy stances on key issues over the past few years in their quest to achieve political legitimacy.
A negotiated settlement was inconceivable until the insurgent group dropped its claim to be the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan, and defined its objectives as strictly domestic.
To curry further favour with the international community, the Taliban has vouched to safeguard commercial infrastructure such as an envisaged gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan.
It has also softened its infamous restrictions on women's access to education and employment, the brutal enforcement of which helped to shape global perceptions of the group as ignorant brutes.
Nonetheless, The New York Times' recent decision to publish an op-ed article by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban, shocked even the most seasoned Afghanistan analysts. Haqqani is one of the few Taliban faction leaders to have been declared a global terrorist, and with good cause.
Throughout his contentious stay in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal district, he provided safe havens to foreign terrorist groups like the Turkestan Islamic Party, marshalling them to fight against security forces on both sides of the border with Afghanistan.
When it best suited his interests, Haqqani would support state-sponsored tribal militia uprisings. Even then, such was his duplicity that my sources in the Taliban and associated Pakistani militant groups were convinced for years that he continued to play host to Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's successor as al-Qaeda chief " possibly until Pakistan's military mounted a decisive counteroffensive in North Waziristan in 2015.
In that sense, US President Donald Trump's administration will be striking a deal with the devil and hoping that Lucifer's broader personal ambitions will be sufficient motivation to bring his extraordinary skill sets to bear against common enemies like the Islamic State-Khorasan.
Haqqani would not be the only "most wanted" Taliban operative who stands to emerge from Afghanistan's 40-year state of conflict smelling of roses.
His late father Jalaluddin Haqqani and several living Taliban leaders have had complex relationships with the West that date back to the jihad against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Both the Taliban's political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and Khairullah Khairkhwa, another member of the current Doha-based negotiating team, rose through the ranks of the CIA-sponsored mujahideen.
To veteran Afghanistan watchers, this represents the cyclical historical nature of the country's politics, wherein alliances have tended to be short-term transactions that last only as long as shared enmities.
To that extent, Haqqani's declaration of peaceful intent towards the US, and his encouraging remarks that it would be welcome to help rebuild Afghanistan after its forces leave, rings true.
Peace deals between secular governments and Islamist insurgents have been struck before and worked: the agreement between the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front granting more autonomy to Muslim-majority Mindanao province has stuck, depriving budding Islamic State affiliates of space in Southeast Asia.
However, mainstreaming an entity as notorious in the world's collective consciousness as the Taliban will have much wider reverberations, because it wants to be an international political player.
Before Haqqani's op-ed article, the Taliban issued what was tantamount to its first foreign policy statement, calling on Muslim governments to unite politically in opposition to the Trump administration's proposed "deal of the century" for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Rather than calling for a jihad, it spoke in relatively moderate terms about the deal's endorsement of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories as being in violation of international law, placing the Taliban on the same page as nearly all Muslim states.
Assuming its peace deal with the US stays on track, Taliban representatives should be expected to work hard towards building its image in such Muslim-majority states.
Soon enough, we may see members of the Doha negotiating team finally accept invitations to events hosted by Muslim clergy in Indonesia, having previously rebuffed them when it was not ready to negotiate. In time, we may even see mainstreamed Taliban politicians participate in think-tank talks in the US, and even be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tom Hussain is an Islamabad-based journalist and Pakistan affairs analyst
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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