Last week, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American envoy in Afghanistan, told reporters that his negotiating team was on the cusp of an agreement with the Taliban, and outlined its terms. The U.S., according to Khalilzad, planned to remove its troops from the country in exchange for the Taliban’s promise not to allow it to be used by al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups. Soon thereafter, a series of attacks by the Taliban, which left an American soldier among the dead, drove Washington to suspend negotiations. Michael Rubin argues that no agreement along the proposed lines will bring peace:

President Donald Trump and Khalilzad [appeared] to have embraced the John Kerry school of diplomacy, in which desperation for a deal substitutes for bringing leverage to bear. . . . A more fundamental problem is Pakistan. The Taliban would not exist without Pakistani support. . . . [T]he Taliban negotiators were based in Qatar and answered to leadership in [the Pakistani city of] Quetta which in turn took direction from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence in Islamabad. . . . Most Afghans see the Taliban as foreign puppets . . . willing to rape and murder.

The Taliban [also] continue to embrace and incorporate al-Qaeda’s philosophy and personnel. . . . Nor does what happen in Afghanistan necessarily stay in Afghanistan. [During a discussion of U.S. foreign policy] at the University of Hargeisa in Somaliland earlier this year, students and faculty asked repeatedly whether negotiations with the Taliban would mean that negotiations with Al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, would be next. Even if that is not the plan, every militant group now understands that the way to advance its interests is not through the ballot box but through violence and terrorism. That is a legacy to the Taliban deal which will not be easy to overcome.

While roughly a third of Saudis are willing to cooperate with the Jewish state in matters of technology and commerce, far fewer are willing to allow Israeli teams to compete within the kingdom—let alone support diplomatic normalization. These are just a few results of a recent, detailed, and professional opinion survey—a rarity in Saudi Arabia—that has much bearing on current negotiations involving Washington, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. David Pollock notes some others:

When asked about possible factors “in considering whether or not Saudi Arabia should establish official relations with Israel,” the Saudi public opts first for an Islamic—rather than a specifically Saudi—agenda: almost half (46 percent) say it would be “important” to obtain “new Israeli guarantees of Muslim rights at al-Aqsa Mosque and al-Haram al-Sharif [i.e., the Temple Mount] in Jerusalem.” Prioritizing this issue is significantly more popular than any other option offered. . . .

This popular focus on religion is in line with responses to other controversial questions in the survey. Exactly the same percentage, for example, feel “strongly” that “our country should cut off all relations with any other country where anybody hurts the Quran.”

By comparison, Palestinian aspirations come in second place in Saudi popular perceptions of a deal with Israel. Thirty-six percent of the Saudi public say it would be “important” to obtain “new steps toward political rights and better economic opportunities for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.” Far behind these drivers in popular attitudes, surprisingly, are hypothetical American contributions to a Saudi-Israel deal—even though these have reportedly been under heavy discussion at the official level in recent months.

Therefore, based on this analysis of these new survey findings, all three governments involved in a possible trilateral U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal would be well advised to pay at least as much attention to its religious dimension as to its political, security, and economic ones.