Talk, and the Taliban could fall apart

This looks set to be the most violent year in Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted in 2001. The number of ‘insurgent’ attacks during the first quarter was two-thirds higher than in the same period last year— 704 compared to 424 — and the number of casualties is up 75 per cent. In the first half of this year 24 British servicemen had been killed— 13 of those in June alone — compared with one each in 2004 and 2005.

Attacks have not only become more frequent but also increasingly deadly. The number of civilian casualties resulting from each attack has risen by nearly a third since 2005, reflecting the increasing technical proficiency of the armed opposition.

These sorts of statistics paint a grim picture and have raised questions regarding the efficacy of international efforts to build the Afghan government, to ensure security and to facilitate social and economic reconstruction.

A number of reports have, accordingly, hailed a ‘breaking point’ and pondered the point at which calamity leads to collapse. If current interventions continue as is, we may very soon learn the answer to that question.

Yet, behind the alarms, a central question hitherto deemed reproachable in the post-9/11 global war on terror has risen to prominence: is it time to start negotiating with the Taliban?

While unimaginable three years ago, this is the right questions to be asking. Negotiation can work. Afghan history has shown that, in most cases, the only alternative is defeat at the hands of a native insurgency. Conditions in Afghanistan, particularly among the seemingly monolithic but highly fragmented ‘insurgency’, make such a route both attractive and plausible.

Simply put, the contemporary insurgency involves a wide variety of individuals and factions with highly divergent and somewhat more movable motives. The fragmented motives of these new fighters provides an opportunity to turn the rising tide of violence before an ideology hardens and part-time insurgents solidify their commitment to the Taliban.

The Taliban’s development from a widely-disliked and enfeebled group in 2002 to its present strength has been built upon recent recruits — young, frustrated and unemployed men — and through partnership with militant organisations. As a result of its rapid growth and the broad net it has cast in its recruitment, the Taliban is a different organisation, albeit guided at its highest level by many of the same individuals, than it was seven years ago.

In addition to a core group of full-time fundamentalist fighters, many recent recruits are driven by ideals similar to those of the Mujahideen who successfully impelled the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989. They are concerned with the territorial and cultural sovereignty of Afghanistan and of their local communities, or qawm.

Their interest in fighting may be mitigated, at least in part, through greater Afghan control of security and reconstruction. They want to feel respected as a capable and sovereign nation rather than as an intervention testing ground for NATO, the United States and other international stakeholders.

Other fighters, particularly young men, are seeking a way of earning honour (and potentially a small amount of money) through armed resistance in the same manner as had their fathers’ generation. Without income, they cannot adequately enter adulthood and are devoid of marital prospects.

Armed resistance, in this case, becomes the sole manner of seeking pride in a context which has closed off all other routes to a valued social identity.

An appropriate level of attention to community-level economic development, particularly agriculture, as well as to vocational training — and, intriguingly, some form of national service — could leave them unwilling to continue fighting. Among such individuals, the motivations are serious but far from entrenched. As a result, the level of mobilisation has paled in comparison to that of the anti-Soviet jihad.

Entire communities are not, as they were 30 years ago, mobilising in spontaneous resistance to international forces and their Afghan allies. Structured recruitment and marketing of their cause has, in fact, been necessary for the Taliban to achieve its current strength, estimated at a maximum of 20,000 primarily part-time fighters, not a promising sign for Mullah Omar’s group despite its apparent growth.

One of the contributing factors for the sometimes exaggerated perception of the Taliban’s growth and strength has been the misattribution of responsibility for attacks. An unknown number (some informed individuals indicate up to half) of attacks are provoked by inequitable power arrangements at the local level.

In these cases, local, in some cases tribal, groups which perceive themselves as being excluded from the local administration attack state institutions — whether themselves or by contracting the task to insurgents — and allow the Taliban to receive or take the blame. Such attacks result in casualties but do not pose a threat to the stability of the government or reflect broader discontentment.

Preventing additional such attacks demands improved governance and non-violent means of contesting discrimination, not military intervention. Yet, many threats, particularly from the remobilisation of members of former Mujahideen groups, are even more troubling than commonly believed.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e Islami, a former Mujahideen group which fought against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, has received materials and, likely, financing from the Taliban. This militia has greatly increased, by up to 250 per cent according to certain reports, its involvement in the insurgency over the past two years.

However, its unofficial political faction of the same name gives it a stake in the maintenance of the current government system. It may seek greater political power, and abandon the Taliban in the process, if it appears that the insurgency will not prove victorious or that the political establishment can better support Hekmatyar’s ambitions. This latter interest would well be served by the international community de-classifying him as a terrorist, a symbolic gesture with potentially significant implications.

Jamiat-e Islami, another former Mujahideen faction, has witnessed the defection of its members to the Taliban and broader insurgency. Given that such members are primarily concerned with the removal of foreign troops implies, at least, that these defectors’ motivation will wane if the international influence upon Afghanistan is reduced and if a seemingly more independent president is elected to replace Hamid Karzai in the 2009 elections.

The Taliban has also received help from other armed opposition groups, particularly the Haqqani Network, which was widely credited with the brazen and well co-ordinated attack on the Serena Hotel, a focal point for much of Kabul’s expatriate community, in January 2008. Al-Qaeda, while itself a relatively small fighting force, has been crucial in channelling funds, tactics and ideology to the Taliban and other insurgent groups in the region.

Seemingly as a result of its influence, suicide bombings, not previously seen in the earlier phases of Afghanistan’s 30-year string of conflicts, have increased from two in 2003 to 137 last year. An ideology not only of martyrdom but also of pan-Islamist jihad against the West has accompanied al-Qaeda’s Arab, Chechen, Uzbek and other foreign fighters in Afghanistan.

Such a development, while intangible, could counter-productively modify the causes of conflict and the motives of the armed opposition. It is easier to demotivate someone driven by economic concerns rather than extremist religious ideology.

Many of the remaining groups, particularly those from neighbouring countries, are motivated primarily by more tangible, material and political concerns even if they share al-Qaeda’s ideology to varying degrees. Based in Waziristan alongside the Afghan-Pakistani border, the Islamic Movement of Turkestan (former the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) seeks to overthrow the Uzbek government of Islam Karimov in Tashkent. Like many groups in south-central Asia, it perceives an unstable Afghanistan as having the potential to destabilise the region and allow opposition groups to grasp power.

The Pakistani Taliban, officially called Tereek-e Taliban, a group supportive of but separate from Mullah Omar’s Taliban in Afghanistan, has carried out insurgent attacks in Afghanistan. In May 2008, the Pakistani government agreed to grant the group, led by Baitullah Mehsud, autonomy in the Swat Valley of the Pakistani Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) which borders Afghanistan.

While the Pakistani Taliban are officially required, by virtue of this agreement, to cease support for Afghan insurgents, many read the agreement as a sign that the government in Islamabad has ceded control over the territory (and its willingness to stop Pakistani insurgent attacks against Afghanistan launched from there).

It may, indeed, be seen as a self-interested ploy to discourage attacks against the government in Islamabad by selling out the Afghan government and its international protectors.

Indeed, the example of the Pakistani Taliban is both an encouraging and a deeply troubling one. Negotiations between governments and insurgents are to be applauded when they improve security without sacrificing essential rights and values. That said, negotiations which include only a portion of the stakeholders and which sacrifice a third party for the sake of the others are destined to be short-lived.

Indeed, that same lesson is evident in the Bonn Agreement of December 2001 which officially laid the groundwork for the post-Taliban era in Afghanistan. By excluding the Taliban from these discussions based on the mistaken conclusion that it had been destroyed, the resulting peace was tenuous and quickly lost. The challenge now will be to re-visit the post-Bonn dispensation and find a way to turn the ongoing violent conflict into a political one with the Taliban as arecognised political stakeholder.

From a global standpoint, the situation is ripe given the presidential elections in the US in November. A new presidential administration will take over the White House, likely a Democrat if one trusts the polls. Even more significant is the degree of latitude the new president will be granted by the American people if he decides to take advantage of it.

With an economy in decline and mounting financial and human costs of two unpopular and seemingly unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public is calling for ‘change’ in a ferocious if not wholly unfamiliar manner.

Bold steps are expected and will, as is the tradition of the first 100 days in office, receive broad praise and hushed criticism. Such a situation will be an ideal one for a new president to reconceptualise the ‘global war on terror’ and to seek a political rather than military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Britain, as the United States’ most supportive military partner in Iraq and Afghanistan, will be able to take advantage of its ‘special relationship’ and advocate in favour of a new direction.

Gordon Brown would be well-advised, therefore, to co-ordinate a strategy for exploiting the internal divisions of the Taliban-led insurgency in preparation for political talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

More specifically, the British government would be wise to ‘win over’ certain fighters with a deluge of quick-impact economic development assistance and information operations to remind an increasingly Taliban-approving population of the living conditions that existed prior to 2001.

That said, it will not be possible or necessary to de-motivate all Taliban-affiliated insurgents. It is only necessary to make the Taliban perceive a tide change, to erode their current sense of confidence.

The remaining insurgents should be convinced, through an increasingly targeted (rather than simply destructive) counter-insurgency strategy and a solidified international commitment to the Afghan government, that their bargaining position is currently stronger than it ever will be in the future.

Most importantly, it should be made clear that any future negotiations or, to begin with, dialogue must be initiated and led completely by the Afghan government. International involvement, other than the tacit approval conveyed by silence, in this process will taint it and potentially lead to its collapse.

Given the military’s inability to contain the spread of violence, diplomacy may be the last resort and one which we cannot afford to fumble.