Leap year charm.

Byline: Fahd Humayun

IN just a few days, one of two things may happen. On Feb 29, the US may sign a historic peace deal with the Afghan Taliban, or maintain there has been no significant reduction in violence in which case all bets are off. If the Taliban hold up their end of the bargain, the deal will pave the way for intra-Afghan negotiations and provide a justificatory umbrella for the US to withdraw a quarter of its roughly 12,000 troops this summer.

But like most exit-agreements, the devil is in the detail, or in this case, the lack of it. For Pakistanis who have lived and died in the perennial shadow of a mismanaged war effort next door, there are still a host of unknowns to contend with. Most Pakistanis are either too pragmatic, or too disillusioned by years of operational shortcomings on the Afghan battlefield, to expect a sincere apology for being scapegoated, first for not doing enough to exterminate the Taliban/Haqqani leadership, and then, not doing enough to engage them.

Yet between Sirajuddin Haqqani's public sanitisation by The New York Times, America's attention deficit and Kabul's capacity deficit, it is incontestable that negotiations would not have reached this evolved stage without Pakistan's cooperation and diplomatic efforts to curate some semblance of regional stability.

If a peace deal is signed this week, what comes next? No amount of spin can gloss over the fact that the Americans will, for all practical purposes, be signing instruments of surrender on Feb 29. For the Taliban in the room, many of whom who have staked their legacies on getting the US to exit, a US-Taliban truce will be a resounding victory. Buoyed by having defeated not one but two superpowers, the Taliban will approach the second phase of negotiations from a position of conviction.

If a peace deal is signed this week, what comes next?

Maintaining the peace is going to be doubly difficult without an agreed upon definition of 'violence' and a broader Chinese, American, Russian, Iranian and Pakistani convergence on regional endgoals. Monitoring compliance without neutral observers in an environment as complex as Afghanistan will be difficult; the ground is littered with spoilers, including those outside the country who would rather not see the Taliban mainstreamed. India, which has seen its influence in the Afghan endgame diminish, stands to benefit from continued low-intensity conflict, and wants to delay the political mainstreaming of the Taliban...