Talking Your Way To An Afghan Exit

By Cernig

As both I and my Newshoggers colleague Ron have written already,the latest NIE on Afghanistan reportedly describes the situation there as "grim" and doesn't hold out much hope of anything that could conventionally be described as success.  Over at VetVoice my friend Brandon Friedman, who served in Afghanistan, has some dark musings on the situation:

This is how they beat you: They allow you in.  Then they withdraw.  They wage an insurgency from the shadows on their own terrain, but they never fight you in the open.  They bleed you through a thousand tiny cuts.  They sap your resources.  They bank on the fact that you'll lose your resolve.  They leave you swinging like a blind-folded boxer, exhausted from never connecting with your opponent.  They wait for you to plead for negotiations.  Then, when you do, they decline--not-so-politely.  Then they wait for you to leave.  Finally, fatigued, confused, and apparently directionless, you do.

Of course, it didn't have to be this way in Afghanistan.  When you use overwhelming military force first, before shifting to a sound counterinsurgency strategy with integrated, international reconstruction efforts, you have a shot at success.  In the case of American and NATO efforts in Afghanistan, however, there never was any strategy.  All we got was clumsy blustering from a Bush administration that spoke of never negotiating with the Taliban.  And once the administration grew bored with the fighting there, they moved on to Iraq--a decision that would ultimately sow disaster for Afghanistan.

I don't agree with Brandon that a clean victory, no matter how good the COIN doctrine or the reconstruction efforts of occupation had been, could ever have been delivered in Afghanistan or Iraq. The situations are too messy, there are too many actors with contradictory wants and the moral high ground was never there in a way that it was in post WW2 nation building - especially in the case of Iraq. But be that as it may, it's somewhat of a moot point when discussing what to do next, as we are where we are and cannot go back to change events.

Brandon goes on to compare Bush administration rhetoric from 2001, of ther "we'll never negotiate with terrorists" type, to Bush administration and allied statements recently which talk up negotiating with at least some Taliban and with the tribes which have supported them with manpower, money and arms. He writes:

In 2001, negotiating with the Taliban wasn't an option.  Now, seven years later, it's viewed as "a way to reduce violence."  This is classic.  Unfortunately, we may not have many choices left.  While turning Afghanistan back over to the Taliban is not an option, to defeat them militarily in a proper counterinsurgency operation, we'd essentially have to start over--with forces we don't have, with friends who are no longer around.   

Turning Afghanistan over to local powers, including at least some Taliban, is the only viable option - just as turning Iraq over to a local powers which include at least some of the insurgents who used to blow up and shoot US troops in Iraq (we call them the Awakening, Badr party and Sadrists now) is the only viable option there. As I wrote back in 2004, in one of my very first blog posts, you have to talk to those who are labelled terrorists eventually, or to at least some of them, to defuse an insurgency and bring peace. Every experience of such wars shows that a hard-nosed refusal to negotiate only leads to perpetual war.

That's not to say that such accomodations can't be problemmatic, or that you'll get what you want. Indeed, the settlements that result are often deeply flawed. We've seen that in Iraq with the Awakenings and their mutual distrust with the Shiite led central government, with the Kurds and just about everyone else, between Shiite factions such as ISCI and Sadrists.

The same will be true in Afghanistan. Government corruption there is as rampant as in Iraq, for example -as my colleague Jay explained on Sunday, President Karzai's brother, who has been meeting with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia, is reportedly deeply involved in the opium industry. The local tribes, which John McCain has vocally hoped would form their own Awakening even though General Petraeus has been far more sceptical, have their own agendas (and note the 2001 negotiations, at exactly the time Brandon quotes Bush administration officials taking a far tougher line):

After the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, [ Taliban Interior Minister] Mullah Abdul Razaq was arrested by the Americans. Insiders say he was given conditional immunity when he agreed to play a role in talks between the CIA, Pakistan's ISI intelligence service and the Taliban. The talks were reportedly over a truce and a proposal for the Taliban's participation in the political process in Afghanistan. The Taliban, however, rejected the US offer which aimed to remove Mullah Omar from the Taliban leadership and Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. 

After the collapse of the talks in 2003, Mullah Abdul Razaq left for Dubai where the tribes of Chaman and neighbouring Kandahar in southern Afghanistan maintain offices. Within the Afghan tribal system, the pro-Taliban Noorzai and Achakzai tribes dominate trade in the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The tribes' region spans the southwest of Pakistan and the southern areas of Afghanistan. On the Pakistani side of the border, they control the Chaman markets and on the Afghan side, the Spin Boldak markets. Both tribes dominate the business of salvaging and reconditioning cars and the distribution of the 555-brand of cigarettes throughout Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan through the markets of Dubai and Chaman.

... When Mullah Abdul Razaq returned to the Taliban's fold in 2005, he convinced businesses in Chaman to support the Taliban financially in order to spare their businesses from attacks when they transported goods through Afghanistan. Over 3,500 importers and exporters in the Chaman market who transport their goods to the UAE were threatened with a wave of violence. The Chaman businesses had faced the same problem from warlords in the mid-1990s and supported the Taliban to drive them out. After 2005, the stakes were higher as the Noorzai and Ackzai tribes became involved in the construction of expensive hotels in Kandahar and needed protection from the Taliban.

But  a lot depends on which Taliban you negotiate with:

The Taliban are no longer a monolithic force; with whom do you negotiate if you want to talk with the Taliban?" asked Eric Rosenbach, executive director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School. Rather than high-level, high-profile negotiations, "the Afghan government should pursue talks with individual commanders and warlords" who have renounced violence, he said. "This approach is much more likely to succeed, will further fracture the opposition, and will place the Afghan government in a position of strength for future negotiations."

Charles Heyman, editor of Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, said there is widespread agreement that the original U.S. and British goal of building a liberal, Western-style democracy in Afghanistan in not attainable because the Taliban never were routed or forced to disband. "There is going to be an accommodation with the Taliban whether people like it or not," he said. "Everyone knows this is going to be very, very difficult." He said the West's long-term interest would be served by ensuring that al-Qaida doesn't have a presence in Afghanistan. That would mean making sure any future Afghan leadership, even if it includes Taliban elements, understands that it will come under sustained attack if it allows al-Qaida to set up training camps there.

Ayesha Khan, an associate fellow at the Chatham House research group in London, said it is possible that clerics close to fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar could meet with Afghan government representatives. "This desire to engage the Taliban started last year and has gained momentum," she said. "The British government is involved in strategizing it. They are trying to separate the more moderate Taliban from the more extremist ones."

You might not get what you want, but in both Iraq and Afghanistan right now the U.S. might just get what it needs - a window of opportunity to extract itself less messily from a pair of grinding COIN conflicts-without-end which are soaking up US blood, treasure and prestige at a time when the nation is less able to afford any of those than at any time since WW2. The locals won't entirely get what they want either - and as I've said what the various factions want conflict in any case. But they might just get what they need too - removal of the occupying troops of alien armies which are resented by the vast majorities of their peoples even as the elites in charge like the way their own power is propped up by foreign troops. That ability of self-determination, to make a mess of it or not under your own steam, is what America was originally all about.