Afghan Journal

WikiLeaks : Talks with the Taliban a non-starter

Afghan President Hamid Karzai may be pushing for talks with the Taliban in public as the only way to end the nine-year war, but in private he is as determined as the United States in opposing any place for top Taliban leaders  in a future government , the latest set of WikiLeaks documents show.  Those repeated calls for talks  are more aimed at sowing dissensions in the insurgent group than  any serious attempt for a negotiated settlement of the war. Indeed as The Guardian reports on the leaked comments on its website, so far as Karzai and the Obama administration are concerned, the only option open to the Taliban is surrender.

Which pretty much is a deal-maker, given that the Taliban having fought the world’s most advanced military formation to a virtual stalemate, have shown few signs of a compromise, much less  surrender.

“We have no illusion that Mullah Omar could ever join the government,” General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan, is quoted as saying in a cable to Washington on 20 January 2009.  The general made the remarks during a conversation with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev who said he was concerned by Karzai’s bid to involve the Taliban in a post-war settlement.  Petraeus says Karzai’s position is more nuanced than that, and that the Afghan leader ‘s goal was to break up the Taliban, and reconcile some.

A year later another cable makes clear that the United States is remains fundamentally opposed to any deal with the Taliban. “There will be no power-sharing with elements of the Taliban,” Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan tells Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao citing the Taliban’s “unpalatable social programmes”and links with Al Qaeda.

Holbrooke said reconciliation should not be confused with reintegration of Taliban foot soldiers.  The reintegration programme is not a political negotiation designed to give Taliban elements a share of power, he said. The United States could not support any such deal.

In any case, he said, the Taliban themselves have shown no willingness to engage in talks.

Denuclearising Pakistan

At about the time WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, including one related to a secret attempt to remove enriched uranium from a Pakistani research reactor, a top Pakistani military official held a briefing for journalists that focused on U.S.-Pakistan ties.

Dawn’s Cyril Almeida has written a piece based on the officer’s comments made on the condition of anonymity, and they offer the closest glimpse you can possibly get of the troubled ties between the allies.

First off, as the officer says, Pakistan has gone from being the “most sanctioned ally” to the “most bullied ally” of the United States. Presumably the sanctions that the officer is referring to relate to those imposed  on Pakistan following its nuclear tests in 1998. And as for the most bullied ally the other comments offer a clue: 

These include and I quote from Almeida’s piece:

“The U.S. still has a transactional relationship with Pakistan; the U.S. is interested in perpetuating a state of controlled chaos; and perhaps most explosively given the WikiLeaks revelations, the “real aim of U.S. strategy is to de-nuclearise Pakistan.”

U.S. and Pakistani security interests aren’t the same including over Afghanistan and India, the military officer says. And while Islamabad understood America’s growing focus on North Waziristan, it had to first settle South Waziristan and also factor in the blowback any operation in the area would stoke. The officer intriguingly also talks about indications that parties in the conflict in Afghanistan can renounce al Qaeda and even ask it to leave Afghanistan. In other words he is suggesting  that the Taliban are  ready to break ties with al Qaeda  and if so that removes a big obstacle to peace talks.

from Russell Boyce:

“Allah-u-Akbar! God is Great!”

Some pictures still shock me. Some make me laugh; many provide an insight or window into a new idea but only a few haunt me with my mind's eye returning to them again and again.

On Wednesday 28th July an Airblue plane crashed  just outside Islamabad in the beauty spot of the Margalla Hills killing all 152 on board. The cause of the crash, as yet unconfirmed, is thought to have been the driving monsoon rain. I edited the pictures shot by Reuters photographers who reached the scene. Images ranging from smoke drifting through the hills, men scrambling in the charred rocky, woodlands, picking through twisted metal and rocks looking for signs of life; tied cloth bags, dripping with the blood  that contained the remains of the passengers, to a severed arm and hand, the fingers still perfectly formed, just lying on the ground. There were no survivors.

Policemen and soldiers raise their hands while shouting "God is great," to lift their spirits as the team worked through heavy rain to search for bodies and a flight data recorder at the site of the Airblue plane crash in Islamabad's Margalla Hills July 29, 2010. Heavy monsoon rains in Islamabad on Thursday hampered recovery efforts at the site of a Pakistani plane crash that killed all 152 people on board a day earlier, a senior police officer said. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

The next day, as relatives identified and claimed the broken bodies of their loved ones, the search continued for the black box and for more human remains. Pakistan Chief Photographer Adrees Latif returned to the miserable scene. Police, ill dressed for the appalling weather, soaked to the skin and cold, were carrying out the thankless task of the fingertip search in the charred and soaked scene. Suddenly a shout "Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-u-Akbar!" God is Great, the officer in charge both recognising fate and trying to raise the spirits of his men. The moment captured by Adrees, their belief in God transcending the misery and seemingly hopelessness of their task, the image and their unfaltering faith, left forever in my mind.

As the week continued driving monsoon rains led to rising flood waters, the worse seen in a generation, taking the lives of an estimated 1100 people with a million displaced from their homes. The "death mask" of cream worn a boy sitting in the flood waters shot by Akhtar Soomro in Karachi seemed to me to herald the coming deaths.

from Tales from the Trail:

Backlash over WikiLeaks release of Afghan war documents

There may be more shoes to drop from WikiLeaks if it releases another 15,000 documents on the Afghanistan war that the whistleblower website is reviewing. It is already seeing some backlash after releasing 75,000-plus documents on the Internet.

The Times of London reported Wednesday that the leaked documents expose informers helping U.S. forces and have put hundreds of Afghan lives at risk.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange responded in an interview from London with NBC's "Today" show. "We are checking to see whether this is in fact credible. It is probably unlikely. We have taken care to in fact hold back 15,000 for review that should it have this type of material in it. If there are those names in there and they are at risk, this would be because of a misclassification by the U.S. military."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The group has designed a computer system especially for reviewing the remaining documents, Assange said. "They have not been published and will not be published until they are significantly reviewed."

The fallout over the documents is far from over.

from Tales from the Trail:

Washington Extra

In many ways the documents released by WikiLeaks last night merely underscored the bleak assessment of the Afghan war which General Stanley McChrystal issued last August.

At the time McChrystal warned the overall situation was “deteriorating”, complained of “under-resourcing” and called for not just more resources but a “fundamentally new approach” from NATO forces if failure were to be avoided.

McChrystal, who had access to a whole lot more information than WikiLeaks, said the Taliban were aided by “elements of some intelligence agencies” -- meaning the Pakistanis -- something US officials have been saying for years. He talked of a popular “crisis of confidence” with the government of Afghanistan and warned that the steady stream of civilian casualties had to be stemmed.

The administration is arguing these documents, which date until December 2009, are merely an account of the failures of former President George W. Bush’s policy, and in many ways they have a point.

There is nothing in here remotely as explosive as the Pentagon Papers, which documented systematic lying about the conduct of the Vietnam war. But the Kabul War Diary catalogues the failures and problems of the Afghan conflict in huge detail, often from the perspective of ordinary troops. The documents record a constant stream of engagements in which civilians were killed, and help substantiate the allegations against Pakistan.

All this only serves to reinforce the popular perception that this war is unwinnable.

What is more: many of the problems highlighted in these reports still exist today – especially the allegations the Pakistanis are playing a double game, and the issue of Afghan government and police corruption. Pessimists say there is very little sign of progress on these fronts, or even a coherent strategy to address these problems. Here are our top stories from today:

WikiLeaks: shaking the foundations of U.S. policy toward Pakistan

A Pakistani security official stands near a burning vehicle after it was attacked in Chaman in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, along the Afghan border on May 19, 2010.

On the face of it, you could ask what’s new about the latest disclosures of Pakistani involvement in the Taliban insurgency while accepting massive U.S. aid to fight Islamic militancy of all hues. Hasn’t this been known all along — something that a succession of top U.S. officials and military leaders have often said, sometimes  couched in diplomatic speech and sometimes rather clearly?

It was only last week that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there must be somebody in the Pakistani government who knew Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Coming from America’s top diplomat, it couldn’t be more blunt.

Then why is a trove of over 90,000 classified military documents released by WikiLeaks on the war in Afghanistan causing so much consternation? Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, says  it is now much more difficult to deny or dodge the truths that everyone has been aware of:

Government officials can always deflect news stories simply by crossing their fingers and waiting for the story to sink in a haze of oil spills and Lindsay Lohan extravaganzas. Now, however, “proof” is there in the black-and-white of secret U.S. documents, compliments of anti-war WikiLeaks. Even if one does not believe that the information contained in every one of these reports is accurate (some do sound rather bizarre), and even if little in the reports can be corroborated independently, the very volume of the “secret” material is overwhelming and plausible—and yes, seductively “secret.”

The White House condemned the leak, saying it could threaten national security and endanger the lives of Americans. Islamabad said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible and added that Pakistan had paid in blood fighting militants.