After a year in the making the Century Foundation International Task Force has released its final report on political negotiations in Afghanistan. The Task Force included many heavyweights in international diplomatic circles including Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN representative in Afghanistan and Thomas Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador to the UN who wrote in the New York Times yesterday:
The stalemate can be resolved only with a negotiated political settlement involving President Hamid Karzai’s government and its allies, the Taliban and its supporters in Pakistan, and other regional and international parties. The United States has been holding back from direct negotiations, hoping the ground war will shift decisively in its favor. But we believe the best moment to start the process toward reconciliation is now, while force levels are near their peak.
But, who exactly on the Taliban side is willing to negotiate?
I have a very hard time believing that Mullah Omar and his branch of the Taliban have any interest in negotiation. And if they did, what they would demand would crush the many gains made in Afghanistan, especially for women.
Martine van Bijlert wrote:
For a while now I have been feeling uneasy over the direction the debate on ‘talking to the Taleban’ is taking. The more I listen to conversation about reaching some kind of settlement, the more I feel as if I am wading into a morass of misunderstandings and abstractions, with a potentially dangerous level of superficiality and easy assumptions.
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For most Afghans it is obvious that the solution to the conflict ultimately lies in the cleaning up of their government and the establishment of a rule of law: the reining in of rampant corruption and abuse of power, the punishment of past and present brutality, the rolling-back of exaggerated favouritism and cronyism. And although talking to the Taleban leadership was not necessarily fully dismissed, it was never very clear what it might bring. It still isn’t.
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There needs to be much more clear-headed thinking: Who on earth is supposed to talk to whom and about what? What kind of guarantees will there be? Who are the parties? How will a possible peace deal hold, when those signing on to it do not represent the concerns of their constituencies and when the bulk of the population does not believe there is anything of substance going on?
Joshua Foust on Registan.net mentions that this report barely mentions the ISI, while they claim to have included them in talks in the past year.
The report indicates that Pakistan’s leadership has “affirmed its willingness to participate in a political resolution to the conflict and emphasized its ability to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table and influence their decision-making” (emphasis mine). While this point is interesting on its own, and their followup note that excluding Pakistan will guarantee failure is absolutely right, I was surprised to see something very important missing: Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Literally, the only mention of “intelligence” in reference to Pakistan is on page 21 in reference to covert ISI support to the Taliban after their defeat in 2001. That this support—and especially ISI’s flouting of the public statements of Pakistan’s political leadership over support for the Taliban—is neglected is a serious error in discussing the political and security contexts of any negotiations process. The Task Force report does not once mention the ISI, despite the sizable role the agency plays over Taliban operations—to include massively fatal bombings inside Afghanistan against Indian targets. To discuss a regional arrangement, and Pakistani influence on the Taliban, without discussing ISI’s activities and policies is bizarre and woefully incomplete—especially considering the current break in settlement talks over an errant drone strike.
What do the Afghans want? Any poll you see shows security is their main concern. The majority does not support the Taliban.
those having “no sympathy” for the insurgency rose to 55 percent in 2010, up from 36 percent in 2009, and 83 percent approve of the government’s negotiations with armed opponents, up significantly from 71 percent last year.
Does this mean they want to go back to the lives they had under the Taliban? Hell no, they just want peace, and many are willing to talk. And many if not most Afghans want war criminals, some now in office, face justice for decades of murder and other war atrocities. But the Afghan govt, Taliban nor the US seem interested in justice.
But how will this work? I have seen no evidence that the various Taliban and other insurgency groups have any interest in talking. How much will the Afghans be forced to give up?
It seems that the Obama administration does plan to reduce the troops, if not as soon as many here will I am sure desire. And thus any negotiation seems logical while we are at our peak of troops there as they co-chairs of this task force suggest.
I just wonder if this is all wishful thinking or if the insurgents really have the desire on the other side to talk at all, much less give up their rigid rules and form of 'justice' that allows the stoning of people.
I suppose we will find out soon enough.