ANALYSIS:A host of challenges face efforts to bring insurgents into the political process, writes MICHAEL SEMPLE.
SUDDENLY EVERYONE wants talks with the Taliban. British foreign secretary David Miliband led the way with a speech at the July 27th Nato meeting in Brussels. He issued a carefully worded and much publicised call for political engagement with amenable elements of the Taliban.
Key figures related to the international intervention in Afghanistan have followed suit, including Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the new Nato secretary general; Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister; Kai Eide, the UN special representative; and President Hamid Karzai himself.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton is already on record with an earlier statement favouring some form of engagement. There is a shift in western approaches to the Afghanistan problem. But will reconciliation work?
Western leaders have already concluded that the current strategy for security in Afghanistan is not delivering fast enough. Nato says that it is defending a legitimate government to ensure stability in Afghanistan and reduce the risk of future al-Qaeda attacks. Insurgents say they are fighting foreign occupation of Muslim land but are none too specific about what they would do if international troops ever did leave. Both sides are locked in a catch-22 conflict.
The western “exit strategy” was meant to be that Afghan security forces would take over on the frontlines. But despite eight years of assistance the Afghan forces are apparently still not ready.
Reconciliation is meant to be a way out of this impasse. The specific proposals on how to pursue reconciliation vary. The US White Paper in March already proposed a new mechanism to allow foot soldiers tired of the insurgency to cross over to the government side. This is a minimalist approach – essential but not enough.
Miliband and the others envisage something more ambitious, reviving the idea of the “moderate Taliban”. The idea is to find pragmatic ways of selectively accommodating Taliban who have local grievances and their followers in the current political setup.
The latest western announcements have not yet indicated widespread appetite for the ultimate model of reconciliation, the “grand bargain”. This would entail pursuit of a comprehensive peace deal, through negotiations with the insurgent leadership in a sort of re-run of the Bonn Conference. It does have its Afghan and international supporters. Kai Eide has been quoted as saying that effective dialogue must reach the insurgent leadership rather than just marginalised moderates.
Afghans have plenty to say about the possibility of reconciliation. Official comments from the Taliban have been predictably dismissive. But in private, insurgent leaders are much more nuanced and there is far more internal debate about how to respond to political overtures than any spokesman is authorised to acknowledge.
Some Taliban have concluded that armed struggle will never deliver more than a stalemate. The wiser Taliban know that withdrawal as a precondition for negotiations is a rhetorical position. Others even acknowledge that if they were part of government they too might feel the need for international troops to provide a guarantee against internal conflict or regional interference.
This is one of the reasons that any serious effort on reconciliation must be grounded in a good understanding of what the various groups now fighting under the guise of the Taliban actually want. Afghan wars are never simple. Meanwhile, multiple surveys have shown that Afghans who are not part of the insurgency would be supportive of the government pursuing accommodation with the Taliban.
A host of challenges face anyone charged with proceeding on the three types of reconciliation approaches – wooing foot soldiers, selective accommodation or the grand bargain.
For starters, will reconciliation be pursued as counter-insurgency or as politics? Counter-insurgency, pacifying the enemy, is all the rage. But the Bonn Agreement, however flawed, was the nearest anyone got to establishing a framework for stability. Bonn was politics. Whether you think counter-insurgency or politics, the hawks on both sides still have to be tamed. I have listened to Nato officials argue passionately that any overture by the Taliban is a trap intended to undermine western willingness to fight. Insurgent hawks make extravagant claims about how much of the country they already control and say they are happy to continue fighting.
Even if the original leadership of the Taliban can be convinced to pursue politics, the insurgency is now based on a complex assemblage of groups and networks only nominally affiliated to Mullah Omar and the Taliban.
If the Taliban and Kabul leaderships ever managed to agree, their toughest challenge would be to extricate the Taliban movement from the host of global or Pakistani jihadi groups which now provide money and fighters and to deal with the mess that is Waziristan. Commanders in the “Jihadi Industrial Park” of Waziristan, are unlikely to be deterred from fighting by a mere peace process.
For now Nato analysts think of Waziristan as their problem. But if the Taliban old guard tries to strike a political deal with Kabul, it is not hard to imagine a time when Waziristan becomes the Taliban’s biggest headache because the networks there decide to sabotage the Kandaharis’ deal.
There will also be government spoilers – pro-government commanders who benefit from continued conflict. But a potentially fatal missing ingredient is political leadership within the insurgency – commanders prepared to do the politics which is now required if they want an outcome better than civil war. Ireland offers the obvious model on how things can come right.
Co-ordinating efforts on the Kabul side will be a challenge in itself. The Kabul government will always be the key actor. But other members of the Kabul-based elite, western allies, the United Nations and regional powers all have stakes in any settlement, a role in obtaining it and the potential to thwart it.
Reconciliation in Afghanistan deserves to be given a chance. Barack Obama’s Cairo speech has significantly altered the context by reaffirming that the US wants to reconstruct Afghanistan, not to occupy it.
Strangely there is a convergence of aspiration between the major players. The United States, the insurgent leadership and Kabul all want an end to the combat role for western forces in Afghanistan. They differ markedly in how they hope to reach this point. But there is at least a hint of a possible win-win situation. Only a renewal of political engagement will tell how much is attainable.
Whoever emerges as leader in Kabul after the presidential elections will make new political overtures to the Taliban. This will be backed up by supportive international diplomacy. At the same time there will be another round of investment in the counter-insurgency version of reconciliation, with the government and Nato putting in place new wooing schemes.
Any comprehensive settlement might require the insurgent leadership to be on board. But it makes sense to break up such a complex task into smaller pieces – peace step by step.
Handled correctly, local peace deals might be doable and might help create conditions which make a broader settlement possible.
In the best-case scenario, after some confidence-building the insurgent leadership offers a ceasefire and moves into talks about how they could join the Afghan system in a way which offers stability and everyone claims victory.
In the gloomier scenarios, there are no grand moves, the conflict drags on and the United States is left working out how to prop up the Kabul regime to fight a permanent insurgency after most western troop contingents are drawn down.
Michael Semple is a regional specialist on Afghanistan and Pakistan, with more than 20 years’ experience in the two countries. He has served as political officer with the UN mission in Afghanistan and as deputy to the EU special representative. The US Institute of Peace recently published his book Reconciliation in Afghanistan