OPINION:Afghans and the Taliban know if an adequate deal is not cut before Nato leaves, the likely result will be civil war
ONE MONTH ago a suicide bomber masquerading as a courier from the Taliban leadership assassinated Burhanuddin Rabbani, chairperson of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council. Today the council’s door is firmly closed and the future of the Afghan government’s strategy for dealing with the Taliban is in doubt. The assassination undermined confidence in the reconciliation process. But there is a danger of drawing the wrong conclusions.
President Karzai quickly blamed the Taliban leadership for the plot and his officials followed up with allegations that Pakistan’s intelligence agency had organised it. In reality, investigations to identify the mastermind have so far proved inconclusive.
In Kabul, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claims the “Haqani Network” was responsible. In Washington, analysts say the “Quetta Shura” was. My own inquiries have indicated that the actual leadership of the Taliban is as clueless about the author of the plot as is everyone else.
The Taliban rapidly retracted an initial claim of responsibility, and this matters. A party which uses deception to kill peace envoys forfeits any claim to participate in a political process. On the other hand, it is predictable that violence escalates in the run-up to a political process, as spoilers try to nurture the conflict.
In September the Taliban released a communiqué suggesting workable principles for an intra-Afghan political settlement. The momentum in the peace process means it is important not to rush to judgment. The plot may yet turn out to have been directed against the Taliban leadership (a spoiling action), rather than by them. Rather than concluding that reconciliation is impossible, parties interested in reconciliation should conclude that they need to speed the process up to avert the risk of more spoiling attacks.
One of the more perplexing issues is how the Afghan government fell for the ruse. President Karzai takes a personal interest in contacts with the Taliban, or “channels”, as they are known. Head of the council secretariat, Masoom Stanakzai, who was injured in the blast, takes his orders from the president. This “channel” ran for several months, with Stanakzai and a council member tasking a Kandahari man, Hamidullah, to carry messages to the Taliban leadership.
Karzai made the fatal decision to call Rabbani back from a trip to Dubai, ostensibly to meet a Taliban courier who had arrived bearing an audio message from the leadership. The ruse should never have worked. The rather feckless Hamidullah had no particular credentials as a conduit. The audio message was not from any of the top leaders. It was so full of flattery that it should have rung alarm bells.
One explanation is the presidential team was genuinely taken in, deluding themselves that the Taliban had chosen Hamidullah as the man through whom to open up political negotiations. This strains credulity, as Karzai knows the key leaders in the Taliban, and is aware of previous fake channels.
Alternatively, did President Karzai and his aides deliberately exaggerate their confidence in the channel to create the impression of a breakthrough and distract attention from other attempts at reconciliation? It would have been no more theatrical than previous responses by the government to reconciliation moves they thought were going too far.
The bombers’ success in duping the Afghan government is a reminder that peace cannot be achieved through game-play and competitive cloak-and-dagger initiatives.
Despite the widespread post-Rabbani pessimism, pursuit of peace still has an underlying logic, and there is some progress. The logic is simply that the majority of Afghans, including even the Taliban, aspire to peace. Both the Taliban and those Afghans who have stood against them know that if there is not an intra-Afghan deal to end the Taliban’s insurgency before North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) troops draw down in 2014, civil war is the likely alternative.
Getting the Taliban into the political system and decisively splitting them from groups which want open-ended conflict and jihad could contribute to Afghan stability.
The first part of the confidence-building process has already been completed in the holding of talks earlier this year between Taliban envoy Tayyab Agha and US officials. This initiative may ultimately result in the opening of a Taliban representative office in Qatar, a move calculated to show concretely that the Taliban have an alternative to armed struggle. There are still some grounds for optimism about a deal.
I was recently asked: “Where are the peace-makers?” The recent breakdown in Pakistan-US-Afghan co-operation makes answering this harder. Pakistan, which stands to gain from Afghan peace and which hosts the Taliban leadership, should be at the heart of peace-making. But the Pakistan security establishment has not done anything concrete to bring the Taliban to the negotiation table, and if the Qatar office goes ahead it will look very much like an effort to sideline Pakistan as payment for intransigence.
No one really has the right mandate to pursue peace. The current “Afghan-led” architecture of the High Peace Commission and the presidential office has by now proved woefully inadequate. It is time for the international community to put in place an envoy who enjoys the confidence of the parties to the conflict, who is properly mandated and supported to pursue peace.
The envoy should engage the parties, seeking agreement to a ceasefire and an intra-Afghan political accord to end the war. Rather than more cumbersome conferences or game-play, such an initiative requires persistent peace diplomacy. It should be backed up by international commitment to support Afghanistan at peace, which should hopefully be much cheaper than the war.
The envoy will need answers to questions such as how would Nato respond if the Taliban called a ceasefire before the 2012 fighting season.
In December, on the tenth anniversary of the Bonn Agreement, the Bonn II Conference will be held. A real decision to pursue peace would be the best thing that could come out of this key event.
Mike Semple is an Irish regional specialist on Afghanistan and Pakistan, formerly with the UN and EU. He is the Anna Lindh research fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government