Afghan Journal

Slamming the door on reconciliation with Taliban

Afghanistan’s National Security Adviser Rangeen Dadfar Spanta has said that the Taliban would have to lay down arms, accept the constitution in its current form and run for elections if they wanted a share of power.  If the Taliban thought they could get cabinet berths for the asking in return for a peace deal, they have another thing coming, he told the McClatchy newspapers in an interview.

If that’s the Afghan government’s stand,  a deal with the insurgents seems to be a non-starter. Imagine the Taliban agreeing to take part in a Western-style election  campaign under a constitution they have long denounced as forced on the country following their ouster in 2001. The idea of the Taliban – more known for their brutal methods –  knocking on doors seeking votes seems a bit far fetched at the moment. Last week’s reports of the Taliban stoning a young couple to death in rather barbaric fashion in northern Afghanistan on charges of adultery have only reinforced the image of a group unyielding in its interpretation of sharia  law.

Not that the Taliban themselves have shown any willingness for talks.  They have made clear there is no question of any dialogue until all foreign forces leave their homeland, and the country is returned to them as it was pre-2001. Indeed all the talk about talks and the conditions that go with it have come from the Afghan government and some of  its backers in Europe, and not the Taliban. So you have a rather odd situation -  the Afghan government is repeatedly urging the Taliban to come for talks but in the same breath setting conditions that only a fatally weakened interlocutor would accept.

And the Taliban look far from a weakened enemy. Not only have they extended their reach into the north and west from their  southern and eastern strongholds, they are striking at Kabul again, breaching the Ring of Steel or the security cordon that was thrown around the capital during the elections last year.  Talks seem the farthest thing on their minds, although arguably you could be adopting tough postures in public while keeping the door open in private for some kind of engagement.

Indeed Spanta said there wasn’t any serious discussion going on with the Taliban contrary to reports that emerged last year. There might have been some contacts, but it wasn’t clear even these  tentative contacts had any kind of backing from the top Taliban.  It was possible, though, to bring out the ”simple countryside”  Taliban into the mainstream since they were driven by   the presence of foreign troops and bad governance. But the top leadership remained steadfast in their refusal for any kind of engagement..

Spanta is known to be a bit of hawk on political reconciliation with the Taliban, but he is a key aide of President Hamid Karzai. And if he’s setting the policy markers in such clear and non-negotiable terms,  this war doesn’t look like its ending anytime soon.

Buying out Taliban foot soldiers a long shot

If a shopkeeper from Quetta impersonating as a Taliban commander made a mockery of President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to seek reconciliation with the insurgent leadership, a parallel programme to lure away foot soldiers  too made little headway last year. A bottom-up reintegration of  low to mid-level fighters back into society was meant to complement the top-down approach of seeking a compromise with the leadership. In the event, while there is little sign of  any engagement, at least in the public domain  ( although it has to be said for a peace process to be meaningful it probably has to be conducted away from the public eye), only a handful of rebels have stepped forward to lay down their weapons.

A year into the reintegration programme, less than 800 insurgents agreed to end the fight, according to  Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman. That makes up for less than 3 percent of the estimated militant strength of 30,000. At this rate it will take a decade to peel away the rank-and file, assuming the overall strength remains constant.  More disappointingly, the men who signed up for the programme weren’t even hard core Taliban. They were mostly low-level community-defense forces, Ackerman quotes British Maj.Gen. Phil Jones, the NATO official in charge of enticing the insurgents, as saying.

Most of them were from the relatively peaceful west and north of the country, and not from the south and east where the insurgency is at its deadliest since the war began in 2001. Again, have to enter a caveat that the north has heated up in recent months as well, so the gains perahps shouldn’t be dismissed altogether.

The big problem in the reintegration process  is lack of trust, says Jones.  The rebels are looking to return to the mainstream with honour and dignity and protection from the Taliban who are sure to seek retribution.. Last year they killed a dozen men who had signed up for the process in the northern province of Baghlan. If the government  cannot guarantee protection, and that is not very easy especially in the south, then all its offers of jobs and education will be meaningless.

Some Afghan experts question the basic premise of the reintegration programme. The programme  rests on the belief that many of the Taliban “grunts” are driven to fight by economic necessity, and not by any ideological fervour.  So you buy them off by offering money and some form of employment backed up by security. Matt Waldman , a Fellow at Harvard University’s  Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, argued in a paper last year that there was a fundamental disconnect between what the insurgents were fighting for and what the government had to offer.

Poverty and unemployment were principle motivating factors for up to half the men fighting, Waldman said, on the basis of conversations with Afghan elders, tribal leaders and three of the seven insurgent commanders he interviewed for his study entitled Golden Surrender and published on the Afghan Analysts Network.  This was linked to the social deprivation and stigma associated with poverty, as opposed to the sense of purpose, status, and comradeship offered by the insurgency.

An address for the Taliban in Turkey ?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has supported a proposal to open an office for the Taliban in a third country such as Turkey.  Such a move could help facilitate talks with the  insurgent group on reconciliation and reintegration of members back into society, and Kabul was happy for Turkey to be a venue for such a process, he said last week, following a trilateral summit involving the presidents of Turkey and Pakistan.

The question is while a legitimate calling card for the Taliban would be a step forward, the insurgent group itself shows no signs yet of stepping out of the shadows, despite the best entreaties of  and some of his European backers. The Taliban remain steadfast in their stand that they won’t talk to the Afghan government unless foreign troops leave the country. More so at the present time when U.S. commander General David Petraeus has intensified the battle against them and the Taliban have responded in equal measure.

Perhaps some elements of the Taliban may not be averse to the idea of a parallel engagement to the battlefield but then so amorphous and diffused is the nature of the group that it only complicates the picture further, as The Nation wrote in an editorial.

 Nevertheless, the idea of a representative office for the Taliban is a major step forward in efforts to seek a negotiated settlement of the Afghan conflict, says Strafor’s Kamran Bokhari. First, it gives the Taliban the political legitimacy they have been demanding for years, he says. Second with Turkey jumping into the fray, the idea may not be that far fetched. While Pakistan may not be most credible partner in seeking a settlement given its close ties to the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups, Turkey carries enough weight both in the United States and the Islamic world to be able to nudge the different players along.

It has already played a similar role with respect to Iran.

 But of course there is a lot of ground to cover before any of this can materialise including the act of setting up an office for the Taliban. They do not represent an organisation in the classic sense of the word and you can’t really tell who speaks for them.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Taliban talks: “an iffy, high-level treaty”

In Obama's Wars, Rob Woodward attributes the following thoughts to U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke on the prospects for a peaceful settlement to the Afghan war:

"He saw reconciliation and reintegration as distinct.  Reconciliation was esoteric, an iffy high-level treaty with Taliban leaders. Reintegration occurred down at the local level in villages and towns..."

It's a good place to start to frame the current wave of interest in the prospects for a deal with the Taliban.  As we wrote in this analysis, for the first time in the nine-year war all the main parties involved -- from the Afghan government to insurgents, from the United States to Pakistan are seriously considering ways of trying to reach a peace deal.

Official sources in different countries interviewed by Reuters said all the main insurgent groups -- the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Omar, the Haqqani network and the Hizb-ul-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar -- were involved in informal talks on how to open a more structured peace process. 

They also said the United States had given a far higher level of endorsement to these talks than before, while Pakistan was showing a slight shift in its approach to Afghanistan as it worries about increasing instability at home.

However, the whole thing came with a huge health warning - the current "talks about talks" are fragile, preliminary and liable to break down at any time.  Analysts and official sources caution that no one should expect an early result in a country which has seen more than three decades of war and many broken promises on all sides. And the whole process -- if indeed "process" is the right word for it -- is bedevilled by contradictions which could bring the whole thing tumbling down.

Here are just a few of them:

Saving Afghanistan from its neighbours

Walking into a giant tent at the foothills of Kabul, you are conscious of the importance of jirgas throughout Afghanistan’s troubled history.  These assemblies of tribal elders have been called at key moments in the country’s history  from whether it should participate in the two World Wars to a call for a national uprising against an Iranian invasion in the 18th century.

Next week’s jirga is aimed at building  a national consensus behind Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s effort to seek a negotiated settlement of the nine year conflict now that the Taliban have fought U.S. and NATO forces to a virtual stalemate and the clock on a U.S. military withdrawal has begun.

But the question is how much of an influence Afghanistan’s half a dozen direct neighbours including Pakistan and Iran  and near ones such as India, Saudi Arabia and Russia will exert on any possible settlement of the conflict. At one level Afghanistan  has become a battleground for India and Pakistan  on the one hand, and the United States and Iran on the other.  At another level there is also China’s deepening economic engagement and  Russis’s concerns of the arc of instability radiating from Afghanistan into the Central Asia republics.

Here’s how some of the big regional players are approaching a  U.S. military withdrawal stated to begin from mid-2011 and  Karzai’sbid to seek reconciliation with the Taliban who have  fought U.S. and NATO forces to a virtual stalemate.

PAKISTAN Of all of Afghanistan’s six direct neighbours, Pakistan  arguably has the highest stake in the country. The insurgency is  largely driven by the Pasthun Taliban and there are Pasthuns on  both sides of the Durand Line, the border between the two  countries. Many of the early Taliban, who swept through southern  Afghanistan in the 1990s after years of civil war, grew up in  refugee camps in Pakistan which hosts the largest number.

Above all, Pakistan considers Afghanistan its sphere of  influence, offering it strategic depth against its much bigger  traditional enemy India. It built close ties with the Taliban as they brought the fractious nation under their control and along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was one of the  three countries that recognised the Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001.

It had to cut its ties to the group following the U.S.  invasion but if any of the regional players has any degree of  influence over the hardline Islamists, it is Pakistan. It wants  to be main channel of any peace negotiation withthem; it doesn’t  even want Afghanistan to conduct separate negotiations with them,  says Kamran Bokhari, regional director Middle East and South Asis for global intelligence consulting company STRATFOR.

Guest Column: Getting Obama’s Afghan policy back on track

(C. Uday Bhaskar is a New Delhi-based strategic analyst. The views expressed in the column are his own).

By C. Uday Bhaskar

The May 12 summit meeting in the White House between visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his host, U.S. President Barack Obama comes against the backdrop of the mercifully aborted May 1 terrorist bombing incident in New York’s Times Square.

From the barrage of news and commentary that floods various media outlets here in Washington DC, it is evident that the Obama Af-Pak policy unveiled with considerable fanfare last year will be in for detailed and contested policy review.

Immediate U.S. interests apart – including the Obama second term, the stakes for the long-term stability of the entire southern Asian region and the troubled Muslim populace in the scattered diaspora ranging from North America to west Europe are immense and complex.

Afghanistan came into global focus with the tragic enormity of September 11, 2001 when it was under the control of the Taliban and the obscurantist, anti-liberal ideology espoused by this group had earlier impacted India’s security interests in the December 1999 aircraft hijacking episode.

B-minus for war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan ?

Gallup has a new poll out testing the mood inside Afghanistan and Pakistan and it remains downbeat.  Roughly half of those surveyed in both countries said their governments were not doing enough to fight terrorism, despite the infusion of troops in Afghanistan and military offensives in Pakistan.

The dissatisfaction is  even more pronounced the closer you are to the trouble spots.  Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed in Pakistan’s northwest, which is really the ground zero of the war against militant groups, were unhappy with the government’s efforts.  Afghans were even more impatient, with some 67 percent in the east which faces Pakistan’s troubled  northwest, registering their disappointment.

 So for all the missile strikes by unmanned drones  on leaders of al Qaeda and the Taliban, and successful  ground operations in difficult places such as Pakistan’s south Waziristan, the people’s perceptions about their government’s efforts to fight terrorism haven’t changed much. Gallup says these findings reinforce the view that what happens after a battle is almost as important as the battle itself.   Winning a battle doesn’t necessarily mean people start feeling fully secure. Also as  this Reuters analysis points out, the Pakistani Taliban may be down, but they are not out by any means.  

The poll conducted in November-December 2009 also threw up another key finding: people on either side of the Afghan-Pakistan border have no love lost for the Taliban.  Eight in 10 Afghans, on an average,  said the Taliban had a negative influence. Even in Kandahar, the spiritual centre of the Taliban, the majority of those polled said they had a negative influence although the number of people seeing them in a favourable light increased from a June 2009 poll. 

They are just as unpopular in Pakistan. Only four percent thought the Taliban presence had a positive effect, down from 15 percent in June.

So if the Taliban are getting such a clear thumbs-down from  members of the public, can you really seek reconciliation with them as a way to end the eight-year war in Afghanistan ?

Engaging the Afghan Taliban: a short history

For those pushing for high-level political negotiations with the Afghan Taliban to bring to an end to the eight-year war,  two U.S. scholars  in separate pieces are suggesting a walk through recent history  The United States has gone down the path of dialogue with the group before and suffered for it, believing against its own better judgement in the Taliban’s promises until it ended up with the September 11, 2001 attacks, says  Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute in this article in Commentary.

Rubin, who is completing a history of U.S. engagement with rogue regimes, says unclassified U.S. State Department documents show that America opened talks with the Taliban soon after the group  emerged as a powerful force in Kandahar in 1994 and well over a year before they took over Kabul. From then on it was a story of   diplomats doing everything possible to remain engaged with the Taliban in the hope it would modify their  behaviour, and that they would be persuaded to expel Osama bin Laden who had  by then relocated from Sudan.  The Taliban, on the other hand, in their meetings with U.S. diplomats, would stonewall on terrorism  but would also dangle just enough hope to keep the officials calling and forestall punitive strategies.

Over a five year period of engagement, the United States gained little while the Taliban grew even more radicalised and the threat from al Qaeda more serious. Rubin details how State Department officials were repeatedly misled by Taliban officials harbouring bin Laden even after two U.S. embassies were attacked in Africa in  1998.  They even told them they would protect the Buddha statues in Bamiyan which were subsequently destroyed.

“The Taliban had like many rogue regimes, acted in bad faith.  They had engaged not to compromise, but to buy time. They had made many promises, but did not keep a single one. The Taliban refused to isolate, let alone, expel Bin Laden , and al Qaeda metastasized,” says Rubin. The Sept 11 attacks were plotted at a time when U.S. engagement with the Taliban was in full swing.  (more…)