Petraeus & McChrystal Pick Brit As Taliban Negotiator

By Steve Hynd

General Petraeus today announced a retired British officer as the Coalition's chief negotiator with moderate Taliban elements who could be reconciled with the Afghan government.

Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb, who retired recently from the British Army, was personally requested by General Stanley McChrystal, the US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, to take on the role, which is considered crucial to reduce the impact of the insurgency.

General Lamb would work at “local level reconciliation and reintegration”, General Petraeus said at a briefing at the US Embassy in London.

General Petraeus, the commander of US Central Command, which embraces Iraq and Afghanistan, was full of praise for General Lamb, a former Director Special Forces, when he worked with him in Baghdad. He played a similar role there, persuading Sunni insurgent leaders to give up fighting.

Whether it will work or not is anyone's guess. Many Taliban commanders have indicated that they are willing to down arms - after the occupaiers have left the country. Others have wondered why Taliban militants would reconcile right now, when they're winning the insurgency.

Petraeus himself was unwilling to commit on how long a people-centric COIN operation, reconciliation and all, might last.

“I wouldn’t hazard the number of years this will take. But the coalition was facing an industrial-strength insurgency.

“We can pursue local reconciliation, this has already been done, but we have to kill, capture or run off the irreconcilables [the top tier of Taleban leaders],” General Petraeus said.

Meanwhile, it's becoming more and more apparent that all the effort in Iraq simply papered over cracks that are now showing through again. The FT's editorial today:

The appalling carnage that has returned to the streets of Baghdad should cause shock, but little surprise. Most fingers of blame are pointing at the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq’s towns and cities at the end of June, now widely judged as premature. But, in truth, the black hole from which these savage killers keep crawling out is more about politics than security.

It was always going to be the case that Iraqi security forces would be tested to the limit and beyond, six years after an invasion and occupation that destroyed the state and disbanded the only significant national institution that predated Ba’ath party rule: the army. After the descent into a morass of insurgencies, rule by militia and vicious sectarian bloodletting, creating dozens of Saddam Husseins in place of one, how could it have been otherwise?

But there is no mechanical link between the end of urban patrolling by US forces and resurgent and rising violence. Some of the worst atrocities in Iraq took place during the “surge” of US troops in 2007-08. This July, by contrast, the first month after US troops largely disappeared from the streets, the number of violent deaths fell by more than a third compared with June, from 437 to 275. So what lies behind this new spasm of violence?

There are far too many chinks in the thin armour of Iraq’s partially restored sovereignty. Much of Iraq’s security forces is little more than rebadged militia, responding to clan and sect rather than co-ordinating or taking a national lead. The foreign ministry, the worst hit target on Wednesday, is, for example, protected inside by Kurdish peshmerga but outside by forces loyal to the Shia-led government.

Although Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Islamist prime minister, is trying to reinvent himself as a nationalist, he has failed to pursue the national reconciliation – above all with a Sunni minority dispossessed of power by the invasion – for which the “surge” was meant to create space. Instead, ahead of elections in January, he has vaingloriously taken credit for reduced violence and for the US troop pullback he hails as a “liberation”.

Meddling by Iraq’s neighbours, particularly Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, is a further barrier to rediscovered national purpose.

Saudi meddling, by funding militants and by smuggling arms, is a major factor in Iraq's perennial violence - almost certainly more so than Iran's, since Iran already owns the Iraqi central government in the form of the pension payments it makes to all the former IRGC members who now run Iraq. But we always hear about the latter more than the former, somehow.

But whatever the root causes, the Iraqi false peace is falling apart. I expect it to accelerate as we head towards the Iraqi referendum on the SOFA, and for the Very Serious people in the D.C. village to ally with the Petraeus/Odierno military axis to use that violence as an excuse to demand that the U.S. walk back it's agreements with the Iraqi government.

In Afghanistan, the ethnic, tribal and political divides are even more pronounced, central authority even weaker. It doesn't bode well for the reconciliation mission, but Petraeus and McChrystal are obviously trying to work the same rinky-dink again: bribe everyone into a temporary lull of hostilities, take the credit, then blame the natives when the bribery doesn't lead to a lasting resolution so that their own careers aren't muddied.