Sometimes the decision making process of the powers that be comes up with a problem so difficult it has to reach outside Washington to find solutions. In this case to a room full of very smart people in an old Victorian Opera House located in the heart of the CIA's retirement villages where the mountains meet the sea.
Founded in 1987, the Camden Conference is a nonprofit, non-partisan educational organization whose mission is to foster informed discourse on world affairs. The 23rd Annual Camden Conference, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India – Crossroads of Conflict, is taking place February 19-21, 2010.
This time the issue is Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and a broadening disatisfaction with government that is metastasizing rapidly across the Middle East and Southeast Asia to include Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somaia, Indonesia, Russia, China and now NATO and the US.
The first thing I learned was that the Karsai government, India, Pakistan, the US, NATO, Russia and China have been in talks with the Taliban for over a year and that the recently captured Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was the chief negotiator.
This the more interesting because before the war we were in talks with the Taliban attempting to set them up as a stable regional government.
Its pretty generally acknowledged that the Americans are leaving in 18 months, NATO is going with them and if the sort of Civil War that followed the Soviet withdrawl is to be avoided somebody has to be left in charge. Clearly that isn't going to be the corrupt Karsai regime.
The capture of Baradar was viewed by some as a mistake because it would taint him as an enemy who would then be seem by the Taliban as a traitor if he cooperated with the west rather than as a leader negotinating from strength.
On the other hand the CIA and the military see the Karsai government as weak and corrupt so they are reluctant to allow sucessful negotiations at that level to proceed rather than continuing in pursuit of a "soft power" solution to take place at the village level.
Most people in Afghanistan don't like the Taliban for a variety of reasons, but go to them because they provide the only uncorrupted source of law and order in the region.
The problems of an isolated landlocked mountainous ungoverned area chiefly inhabited by people making a per capita income of $40 per year might be of less concern if the region wasn't the meeting point of several major religions, the proposed location for a major oil pipline intended to bring oil and wealth and jobs from Russia through a place much in need of those things to China and surrounded by half a dozen nuclear powers with itchy trigger fingers wanting a piece of the action.
As Nicholas Burns the moderator at this years keynote address by Ahmad Rashid explained last year, when Obama had been in office only 30 days, we are at a point of transition from military power and political power to "soft power", the power of attractiveness which replaces the coercive sanctions of the past with the seductive sanctions of the future.
Soft power is all about the global social networking which makes some people, places, and things more desirable and thus more powerful than others. Obama and Sarah palin case in point.
With Soft power there isn't any one person you can go to to make deals, instead you are dealing with what amounts to a hive mind, billions of people and the necessity to attract rather than persuade or force agreement.
After the first world war we came to the realization that killing all the enemy and destroying everything that had value to them until they capitulated, the basic plan of war for the last 6000 years wasn't working.
Military power continued to be invested in and brandished but we also began to look at political power as the power to persuade. By the end of the second world war and the cold war which followed the US had managed to dominate both military and political power around the world but there was still more fighting going on than there had ever been before.
In some circles the UN and the World Bank and all international treaties and agreements were seen entirely as a weakness in what should be our manifest destiny of world domination. In others it was realized that it took infrastructure to govern and so a lot of investment was made in communication and control; roads, bridges, piplines, infrastructure and nation building with of course military and political organization in support of US business interests.
As with In-Q-Tel, Google and Facebook its now recognized that some things happen viraly and globally with nobody in charge and that well maybe those forces of consensus can be manipulated like stock prices.
The question arises as to wheether there is such a thing as a nation when it is divided into warring factions and talking secession...
Anyway, the conference is just starting so I'm off to see what they come up with today.