Of Course the UAE Wanted a Taliban Embassy

The New York Times has obtained a series of apparently hacked emails from the United Arab Emirate’s Ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, showing that the UAE competed with Qatar for the “honor” of hosting the Taliban’s sole foreign diplomatic mission. The source of the emails is unknown—this is only the most recent batch of Otaiba’s emails to be released since an initial HuffingtonPost article in June revealed that they were being shopped around to U.S. media outlets. But the content and timing of the email releases is suspiciously beneficial to Qatar.

The Taliban embassy emails are intended to scandalize the American people, if not the Trump Administration itself, over the UAE’s eagerness to host the Taliban. After all, if the Taliban are the enemy of the U.S. in Afghanistan, and the Qataris are Bad Guys for hosting the Taliban embassy in Doha, then how dare the UAE try to host the Taliban embassy as well? The fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE cite the Taliban embassy in Doha as evidence of Qatar’s collusion with extremists may now have been revealed as hypocrisy, but the Times downplays the key to understanding this story. The UAE and Qatar competed to open this embassy because that’s what the Obama Administration wanted:

“There is an article in the London Times that mentions US is backing setting up a Taliban embassy in Doha,” the diplomat, Mohamed Mahmoud al-Khaja, wrote to Jeffrey Feltman, then Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. He used the shorthand “HH,” presumably to refer to his boss, the foreign minister, His Highness Abdullah bin Zayed. “HH says that we were under the impression that Abu Dhabi was your first choice and this is what we were informed” [emphasis added] by the United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, Mr. Khaja said.

“I got an angry call from [Abdullah bin Zayed] saying how come we weren’t told,” Mr. Otaiba wrote. “They want to be in the middle of everything those guys,” he added, referring to the Qataris. “So let them, it will eventually come back to bite them in the _____.”

Let’s go back to 2009-2012. Richard Holbrooke, appointed by then-President Obama as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was tasked with initiating peace talks with the Taliban. Though Holbrooke died at the end of 2010, his successor Marc Grossman succeeded in holding exploratory talks with the Taliban in 2011, and in 2012 the Taliban to agreed to open its embassy in Qatar. The Obama administration succeeded in bringing the Afghan government and the Taliban together for peace talks in Qatar despite serious objections from Afghanistan’s former President Hamid Karzai, not to mention the logistical challenge of getting the Taliban to the table. In other words, the Obama Administration wanted this office opened, they helped get it open, and it would not have opened were it not for U.S. pressure.

In that context, of course the Emiratis wanted the Taliban embassy in Abu Dhabi. Of course they were miffed that the Obama administration put the Embassy in Qatar. Diplomatically neutral sites for dealmaking and backchanneling carry great prestige. Think of Reagan and Gorbachev’s Reykjavik summit, or the reputation that Switzerland enjoys from all the treaties negotiated in Geneva.

Of all of the failings of the Obama Administration’s diplomatic efforts in the greater Middle East, their use of back channels is not one of them. In all of President Obama’s most notable uses of back channels—the Omani back channel to Iran, the Qatari back channel to the Taliban, and the Canadian back channel to Cuba—these were efforts by a sitting administration to establish a secret line of diplomacy to governments with which the United States has no formal relations. Of those three efforts, the talks with the Taliban, while arguably the least “successful,” might also have been the least problematic given how badly the Iran Nuclear deal and the Cuba deal were negotiated.

Failing to understand the purpose of back channels has consequences. The Trump Administration appears to have been taken in by the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s claims about Qatar. President Trump virtually admitted as much in his own self-serving way when he declared that he, personally, had decided to take action against Qatar after regional “leaders” (i.e. the Saudis and the Emiratis) pointed to Qatar as a funder of terrorism. That’s not to say that some of those claims aren’t true: Qatar does play a double game; and they do host and support Hamas and plenty of other bad actors. But if Qatar is so uniquely responsible for Taliban funding, one is left to wonder why the former leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mansour, travelled to Dubai 19 times before meeting his demise at the business end of a Hellfire missile.

After initially seeming to back the UAE and Saudi Arabia in their dispute with Qatar, President Trump in recent weeks seems to have deferred to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in seeking a mediated solution to the crisis. That’s probably for the best. It’s certainly possible that Qatar is America’s most odious partner in the region; given the caliber of America’s “friends” in that part of the world, the Qataris face some stiff competition on that front. But as the Qatar crisis has drawn to a stalemate, it increasingly involves arguments between the two sides over whose hands are dirtier. That argument seems directed at an American audience, playing out in expensive TV ads and in email leaks to American media. Americans would do well to recognize it for the backbiting propaganda that it is.

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