CONFERENCE ON FUTURE OF AFGHANISTAN:The search for an exit strategy has become desperate, but the most thorny issue is sidelined, writes MARY FITZGERALDForeign Affairs Correspondent
THE DISCUSSIONS between some 70 delegates gathered around a table at the Afghan foreign ministry yesterday had an all too familiar ring to them.
During six hours of talks president Hamid Karzai raised the issue of what he once termed the “Afghanisation of the whole exercise” and voiced hope that Afghan forces would take full responsibility for the country’s security by 2014. There were refrains about more effective ways of funnelling foreign aid and platitudes about the need to tackle corruption. But remarkably little time was devoted to the thorny question exercising officials from Washington to London: how to bring insurgent leaders in from the cold and begin the process tentatively referred to as “reconciliation”.
There has been much speculation that the White House may be reworking its Afghanistan strategy with a view to opening negotiations, through mediators, with senior Taliban figures. Karzai claims his government has the political will to push forward with a plan which would involve offering incentives to ground-level insurgents while attempting to reach a political deal with the leadership dependent on their willingness to renounce al-Qaeda. The prospect has prompted widespread unease if not alarm among Afghan women’s activists and ethnic minorities who fear a reversal of the gains made since the Taliban regime was toppled in 2001. Hillary Clinton sought to assuage such concerns, insisting the rights of such groups “will not be sacrificed” in any deal.
Writing at the weekend, president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass echoed what has become an increasingly common view of an unpopular war. Arguing that it was “time to scale back” US objectives, Haass wrote: “The sooner we accept that Afghanistan is less a problem to be fixed than a situation to be managed, the better.”
Among recent suggestions on how Afghanistan could be “managed” was one drawn up by former US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, who proposed a de facto partition. Under this plan, the US would agree to Taliban control of the Pashtun-dominated south if the Taliban did not allow al-Qaeda return to its former redoubts and did not seek to destabilise non-Pashtun pockets of the country.
Another proposal, described by some proponents as “decentralisation”, would see the US providing weapons and training to local Afghan leaders who reject al-Qaeda’s advances. In such a scenario, which would require constitutional reform to decentralise power from Kabul, there would be less focus on building up robust national security services. Needless to say, there are several serious drawbacks to both suggestions, not least the very real risk that the decentralisation plan could tip Afghanistan into a vicious civil war.
Only a few years ago, talk of decentralisation or establishing what amounts to a self-governing Pashtunistan in the restive south would have been dismissed as at most outlandish or at least a betrayal of the lofty ambitions once held for Afghanistan. That such proposals are being aired, albeit in think tank and wider policy circles, indicates just how desperate the search for an exit strategy has become. Fighting has intensified in recent weeks. June proved the deadliest month in nine years for international forces in Afghanistan – more than 100 troops, including 60 Americans, were killed. And for all the talk of “reconciliation”, the difficult question remains: why would the Taliban agree to enter negotiations when they believe they are winning?