THE CRITICAL assumption is that Afghanistan’s Taliban or more precisely that most of the very different forces that make up the Taliban are susceptible to dialogue and a reconciliation process; that, as some western sources estimate, up to 80 per cent of fighters and commanders can be enticed, cajoled or bribed into making a peace that could even see some of them entering government in Kabul. The brutal casualty toll notwithstanding, that optimistic assessment underpins the converging military and political/diplomatic strategies of the US, the UN and President Hamid Karzai reflected in initiatives and statements surrounding Thursday’s 65-nation conference in London.
The most difficult task now is to distinguish between “reconcilable” and “irreconcilable” members of the Taliban, Nato commander Gen Stanley MacChrystal said ahead of the conference. He is preparing a spring military push that will help consolidate what he believes is a growing conviction among Taliban reconcilables that the military option is a dead end in the long term and a recipe for strategic stalemate and endless, pointless war. It is the critical calculation which eventually the IRA made in the North and which laid the basis for the long circuitous talks road. “You just really don’t make progress, politically, during fighting,” MacChrystal says. “What I think we do is try to shape conditions which allow people to come to a truly equitable solution to how the Afghan people are governed.”
As news reports suggested the UN has secretly met Taliban commanders in Dubai, Mr Karzai set out plans for a loya jirga, an assembly of elders and influential Afghans, without foreign involvement, to initiate peace talks with the Taliban and called on the group to take part. It has indicated it will consider the offer, having until now rejected talks until after the complete withdrawal of foreign forces, and it will certainly demand the release of prisoners and the removal of Taliban leaders from international blacklists. This is something US officials have said is out of the question.
One non-Taliban opposition group, Hezb-e-Islami, under veteran anti-Soviet commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, says it would be willing to talk to the president once there is a clear timetable for withdrawing foreign troops. And Saudi Arabia has said it will act as a mediator with the Taliban but only when the latter ends its protection of al- Qaeda and specifically Osama bin Laden. Such conditionality does not bode well.
In parallel, the London conference saw pledges of €100 million to fund the reintegration of Taliban fighters by luring them away from the insurgency with jobs and cash. It also agreed the transfer of security responsibility for several tamer provinces to Afghan army control by the end of the year and throughout the country in some five years, a timeframe at odds with more optimistic US withdrawal plans. And Mr Karzai promised to press ahead with a crackdown on corruption. The general strategy is certainly the right one. But it will be uphill all the way.