Washington Extra – Tactical, not terminal
The predominant media narrative was pretty straightforward: U.S. soldier kills 16 Afghan civilians, the Taliban respond by suspending participation in U.S.-sponsored Afghan peace talks. Game over.
Or maybe not. As Missy Ryan reports today, efforts by the Obama administration to cajole the Taliban into peace talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, while not exactly roaring forward, are not dead. U.S. officials see the Taliban move as tactical, not terminal, and more of a reflection of internal divisions within the movement than anything else. “Deep breaths, and not hyperventilation, are required here,” said one of the many U.S. officials Reuters interviewed.
The Taliban also appear put out that President Obama has not yet transferred senior Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to kick-start the talks. That’s a problem for Obama, who faces intense resistance to sending the Talibs to detention in Qatar. That Qatar has yet to agree to U.S. demands they be held under strict conditions further complicates matters.
Still, the massacre of the Afghan innocents may not have been the game-changer it was assumed to be. Karzai immediately demanded U.S. troops leave Afghan villages, but has not followed through. Further proof that things in Afghanistan are rarely what they seem, and that it pays to watch what the players do, not what they say.
Warren Strobel
Editor in Charge, U.S. Foreign Policy & National Security
Washington Extra – Peace by piece
Not since Vietnam has the United States sat down with an enemy it was fighting on the battlefield and negotiated an exit from war. That long-standing policy might end this year if a carefully choreographed diplomatic dance takes U.S. and Afghan officials to a negotiating table with the Taliban.
As Reuters Washington correspondent Missy Ryan explains, President Obama’s peace gambit has the potential to be a significant development for U.S. foreign policy. But it turns out it is a policy borne out of necessity: two years ago, the Pentagon thought the Taliban could be defeated militarily, and today, it’s all too clear they aren’t going away.
There are many hurdles and not insignificant push back here at home to overcome. And Obama may want to don a helmet for the incoming fire… from Capitol Hill. As soon as he notifies Congress of plans to move Taliban detainees from Guantanamo to get the ball rolling, he is sure to face a torrent of attacks.
If the idea of talking with a fundamentalist group known for its brutality and repression is just too hard to conceive, consider this: it could have well happened a decade ago and possibly ended the war in Afghanistan.
As a former U.N. official and advocate of peace talks told Ryan: “When people start to add up cost of war in Afghanistan over the last decade, they will ask how on earth the new Afghan leadership and U.S. officials failed to take advantage of these early overtures by the Taliban.”
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Washington Extra – Talking with the Taliban
For most Americans and for many here in Washington, the idea that the United States could broker successful talks with the Taliban that lead to the end of the Afghan war is mind-bending. And yet, that is what senior U.S. officials have allowed themselves to entertain as 10 months of secret dialogue reach the point of breakthrough or collapse. It’s a small glimmer of hope where there once was none.
In our exclusive “Secret U.S., Taliban talks reach turning point,” we reveal that the United States is considering the transfer of Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo to the Afghan government. The Taliban will have to correspond with its own confidence-building measures like denouncing international terrorism and entering formal talks with President Karzai’s government.
Judging from initial reactions, a reconciliation process will be no easy sell here at home (not to mention in Afghanistan, where a senior Taliban commander said talks had not even started).
Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss issued a statement today saying: “It sounds as if the administration has decided to negotiate with terrorists, something the United States does not do.” Prisoner transfers, he said, should only be done once hostilities have ceased and that Americans should know who the detainees are and what acts they have committed.
There will undoubtedly be much American soul-searching about dealing with an insurgent group that has not only killed U.S. soldiers but also advocates a strict Islamic form of government.
U.S. officials, however, believe the war can only end with negotiations. “The challenges are enormous,” one of them said. “But if you’re where we are … you can’t not try. You have to find out what’s out there.”
Here are our top stories from Washington…
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:
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
With Karzai off to Washington, Taliban talks back in focus
"The effort required to bring about a compromise was indistinguishable from the requirements of victory—as the administration in which I served had to learn from bitter experience."
The quote is from Henry Kissinger on Vietnam but you could just as easily apply it to the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan of aiming to weaken the Taliban enough to bring them to the negotiating table. And unfashionable as it is to compare Vietnam to Afghanistan (it was hopelessly overdone last year), it does encapsulate one of the many paradoxes of the American approach to the Taliban.
If, so the argument goes, the United States is willing to reach an eventual political settlement with the Taliban, why does it keep launching fresh military offensives? Or alternatively, if it has no intention of making a deal, why has President Barack Obama promised to start drawing down troops in 2011, signalling to the Taliban that all they need to do is wait it out until the Americans leave?
In this 2008 Newsweek article which carries remarkable resonance today, Kissinger, a former National Security Adviser, sets out the risks of a strategy that is somewhere between war and peace.
"When the United States goes to war, it should be able to describe to itself how it defines victory and how it proposes to achieve it. Or else how it proposes to end its military engagement and by what diplomacy. In Vietnam, America sent combat forces on behalf of a general notion of credibility and in pursuit of a negotiation whose content was never defined," he writes.
He then faults previous administrations for assuming that once the U.S. military thwarted the North Vietnamese, "an undefined compromise would emerge through diplomacy—in effect, a strategy seeking stalemate, not victory. But stalemate violates the maxim that the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. "
"The purpose of war is victory. Stalemate is a last resort, not a desirable strategic objective." (my italics)
from Afghan Journal:
Engaging the Afghan Taliban: a short history
(The niche that once held a giant Buddha, in Bamiyan. Picture by Omar Sobhani)
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.
Some of the logic and even the language used at the time is eerily similar to the current push for a political settlement with senior Taliban figures. There was a difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban and it was possible that the latter could be peeled away, U.S. officials and political commentators said at the time. Second, Pakistan with its close ties to the Taliban was a key player offering advice to Washington, as it seeks to at the present time.
India needs to accept that Pakistan did the right thing in helping US to throw the communists out of Afghanistan. Communism and socialism are more evil than all the fanatics of the world put together. We also need to accept that the US did the wrong thing in abandoning the Mujahideen fighters once the communists had been defeated.
Any normally moral and grateful country would have granted a life long pension to these honest brave fighters who had gone through a period of lot of personal sacrifices during the 10 year war.
Since the Afghan youth had learnt no other skills than fighting gorilla wars, and they had to do something for a living, they got transformed into the Taliban….
Pakistan of course cheated all the way. First it cheated the US by stealing a lot of supplies meant for the Afghan communist war to instigate insurgency in India, then it cheated by helping the Taliban to take over Afghanistan and now is again cheating by helping the US to fight the Taliban….I doubt if even Pakistan knows whose side it is on any particular day….
from Global News Journal:
Afghanistan’s protracted election sours the mood
An atmosphere of stale defensiveness has sunk over Kabul. The mood has been lowered by the protracted saga of the Afghan election count, almost two months on from the first round August 20 vote. It's a drama veering towards farce more often than post-modern play, as we wait endlessly for a result, that like Godot, does not want to come.
Winter has not yet arrived in Kabul, though the evenings are cold, quickly taking the heat of the sun out of the day. Afghan politicians are frustrated and twitchy, second-guessing the reasons for the U.N.-backed election watchdog's plodding. We are being solidly methodological to retain the confidence of all, says the Electoral Complaints Commission, as it examines thousands of dodgy votes. A thankless task, most likely. The ECC officials will be puzzling over whether a box of votes has been mass-endorsed for one candidate, and should not stand, or if the suspiciously similar ticks on the ballot paper are attributable to only one man in the village knowing how to write. Many of the rural voters will never have held a pen in their hand, argued one official. It is natural in such a tribal society for the village to establish a consensus on who to support. Do such ballot papers count? Remember Florida, and how 'hanging chads' and the U.S. Supreme Court gave George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore? It's that kind of agony.
Behind the scenes the whispers are that hesitation and delay are because the outcome is excruciatingly close, too close to call. President Hamid Karzai, once set clear for victory, may find first round success ripped from his grasp by the disqualification of votes stuffed into ballot boxes by his supporters. He'll likely win a second round, if it happens, against his former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah; but there will have been a loss of dignity, of self-confidence and of an opportunity to stabilise Afghanistan and get on with fighting the Taliban.
Other more fraught scenarios are possible, as outlined by my colleague. Would Karzai gamble that the West has no alternative to him in Afghanistan? And that he can therefore afford to ignore the opprobrium that would follow if he rejected an outcome he did not like? Or are the suspicions of chicanery, back-room pressure on election officials and string-pulling by all involved just a proliferation of nonsense to fill the void left by the lack of a clear outcome?
Eventually the result will be out, perhaps by the time some of you get round to reading this. Most likely I will be back in London, watching from afar. Optimists would have it that clarity will clear the air, the Afghan political mood will lighten and spoils to all will come from the haggling over the shape of the next government.
Meanwhile Afghanistan is Limbo-stan. Obama won't decide his strategy on Afghanistan until he sees what kind of Afghan partner he has to deal with. At least until then, and possibly longer, he won't say yes or no to the extra troops that General Stanley McChrystal says he needs to carry out the counter-insurgency strategy that he has prepared. (Though he'll carry out a different strategy, with no or fewer extra troops, if that's what he's ordered to do by his commander-in-chief). So in this limbo - the Washington policy void is filled with echo-chamber exhortations across the political divides; the Taliban is emboldened; Afghanistan's neighbours are positioning themselves to benefit or at least guard against strategic loss should Washington fold its tent; and Western publics are wondering if there is a real purpose to their boys getting their limbs blown off while trudging through the fields of southern Helmand.
Reasoning with the Taliban
In the past few weeks, as President Barack Obama closes in on a decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan, a couple of alluring ideas have resurfaced in Washington.
The first is that talks with the Taliban, or with members of the fundamentalist Islamist movement, might be worth pursuing more agressively, to advance the day that U.S. troops could begin to leave.
The second is the suggestion the Taliban in Afghanistan might be willing to sever its ties to al Qaeda, or that growing Taliban influence there may not directly threaten the United States.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said there was a clear distinction between “a global transnational jihadist network that seeks to strike the United States” and a Taliban movement whose capability is “somewhat different.”
Enticing ideas they may be for a White House seeking an easy way out of an almost impossible situation, but regional experts have been quick to point out some serious flaws.
Right now, even the U.S. military admits the Taliban has the initiative in Afghanistan.
The movement has little interest in talks, still less in ceding anything meaningful, when it believes it only has to stick around for the day that the United States finally wearies of the war and leaves the region.
The reason Obama has procrastinated as to the finalizing of his policy in Afghanistan,was he hoped that all the appeasing and apologizing to the different players would have gained him support, allowing him have leverage with Iran and consequently with the Taliban.The press release from the Whitehouse on the optimism of an agreement with Russia as to sanctions against Iran has been rejected by the Russians ,like many have said ,they have just playing Obama. RUSSIA HAS RELEASED A STATEMENT THAT THEY AGREE THAT THERE MIGHT HAVE TO, AT SOME TIME IMPOSE SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAN ,BUT THIS MIGHT NOT BE THAT TIME!So inconclusion it looks like the only reward that Obama has received from all his servitude at the UN conference has been his nobel peace prize.
Plan B for Afghanistan: cut and run?
In Monday’s blog, I looked at McChrystal’s recommendation for a significantly stepped up effort to stabilize Afghanistan, and a major shift in strategy to win over the Afghan people.
But many people, including influential actors within the administration and several readers who left comments on Monday, are advocating a different approach: pull out, and leave Afghans to their own devices. This blog looks at Plan B.
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“The Russians were in Afghanistan for 10 years. The Americans have been here for seven, and we will send them home in just three more years”.
That was how Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, the Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan, described the movement’s message to the Afghan people when I met him in a drafty and bare Kabul room in March.
Zaeef, who was imprisoned for years in Bagram and Guantanamo, says he is no longer a member of the Taliban but is now acting as a mediator between its leadership and the Afghan government.
But his comments underline one of the West’s biggest problems in trying to regain the momentum in Afghanistan.
It’s not a question of ‘cutting and running’, it’s a question of quickly withdrawing like gentle-people from something that is very far removed from most realities known to the rest of the World, while negotiating optimum oil prices for the future. Shock and awe simply fuels more hatred.
Coincidence? April spy meeting, Taliban leader (probably) killed
A top level U.S.-Pakistani spy meeting in April.
A top Taliban official killed (90 percent certain) in August.
Coincidence?
CIA Director Leon Panetta and Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, held a hush-hush meeting in the Washington area in April.
The New York Times said the accuracy of American drone strikes against the network of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud improved soon afterward.
Pakistani and U.S. officials believe Mehsud was killed last week, with White House national security adviser Jim Jones putting the likelihood at 90 percent, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
A U.S. counterterrorism official told Reuters on Monday: “There are strong indications he’s dead. No one is expecting him home for dinner tonight.”
eric h do you seriously think that obama is going to escalate the commitment in afghanistan? he is looking for an easy with drawl. The statements other wise during the campaign were only a smoke screen.Clinton,s war effort over there was 2 cruise missiles,fortunately Obama has drones , and they will help him to eclipse Bill. The much expected report from the generals and Gates as to a possible “surge”is stuck on somebodies desk, are they trying to minimize the report before it floats to the surface. The allies in europe that were going to flock to Obama,s call are reviewing their support for the war,and as their nationals are increasingly being killed are anxious about political fallout.So in conclusion eric h. If there had been a democratic government in office at the time of 911 there would have been a lot of postulating but nothing would have been done,so cut out the bravado.
