Taliban talks could be close | Jonathan Steele | Comment is free | The Guardian

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    Jonathan Steele
  • The Guardian,

     

    Monday 28 March 2011

  • Article history

 

Barack Obama and General David Petraeus: Washington is divided over whether to start talks with the Taliban. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP

Slowly and unsurely the Obama administration is coming round to the need for talks with the Taliban. It has taken a long time to accept a policy that most Afghans, many foreign analysts, several thinktanks and a few diplomats have been recommending for the last two or three years.

Almost unnoticed, thanks to the crises in Egypt and Libya, Hillary Clinton was the first to go public with the shift last month. "I know that reconciling with an adversary that can be as brutal as the Taliban sounds distasteful, even unimaginable. And diplomacy would be easy if we only had to talk to our friends. But that is not how one makes peace," she told the Asia Society in New York. The time had come "to get serious about a responsible reconciliation process, led by Afghans and supported by intense regional diplomacy and strong US backing". Crucially, she dropped the preconditions that the Taliban must first renounce violence, sever links with al-Qaida and accept the Afghan constitution. She described these issues as "necessary outcomes of any negotiation".

Her new line was given fresh momentum last week by an international panel chaired by Thomas Pickering, one of Washington's most experienced former diplomats, and Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran United Nations negotiator who has met Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, more often than any other foreigner. Their report gives powerful reasons why the war is a stalemate that the US military will not be able to break.

They pour cold water on the US and UK policy of "re-integration" that tries to get Taliban leaders and commanders to defect. They suggest the Taliban are becoming more willing to talk as they realise they cannot regain total control over Afghanistan. They argue that the complexity of the issues and the need to get Afghanistan's neighbours to agree to any deal that includes a withdrawal of US forces mean that talks would benefit from a UN-appointed "facilitator". It sounds like a replay of the process that ended the Soviet occupation in 1989.

In an important departure from the usual top-down approach, the Brahimi/ Pickering report recommends local ceasefires as part of a confidence building process that could start before talks get under way. They suggest a trade-off in which the US ends its assassination of Taliban commanders and the Taliban ends its placing of roadside bombs and assassination of government officials.

Convincing the Pentagon will not be easy. In her Asia Society speech Clinton paid lip service to the military surge which General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan, is vigorously pursuing. In London last week, Petraeus was still heavily focused on the advances he claims to have made on the battlefield. He showed a Royal United Services Institute audience slides of this year's military plans, and talked of "clearing remaining Taliban strongholds" in northern Helmand; "connecting security bubbles in Kandahar" and "moving to the 'build' phase" in other parts of Helmand.

Discussing "reconciliation", he talked of individuals coming over to the government side or creeping back to their villages as they felt momentum slip away on the battlefield. Although the Afghan context is completely different, he went back to his last war and pointed out there had been no negotiations with insurgents in Iraq. But under questioning even Petraeus said he did not want to be seen as a man who believed in military victory rather than political compromise, and he praised the Northern Ireland model. He also recognised the rising sense of nationalism among Afghans, saying: "There's a point beyond which people get impatient about large numbers of foreign forces on their soil."

Afghanistan's next few months will be bloody, as Petraeus seeks a maximum kill rate before the long-promised drawdown of some troops in July. The Taliban will no doubt conduct another spring offensive and continue their bomb attacks on civilians like those that shocked Kabul and Jalalabad this winter.

But the good news is that a political war has erupted in Washington in place of the old unity behind a failed strategy of continually adding more troops. Backed by some members of the national security council, the state department has taken the lead in calling for talks, and the generals are on the defensive for the first time. What is needed now is for Obama to get off the fence. He should come out in favour of negotiations and back the idea of a UN facilitator to get them started. Most Americans have lost faith in the war, and it will cost the White House little to tell the generals the time has come to ebb, not surge.