A futile search for 'moderate' Taliban By Walid Phares
In an interview with the New York Times on March 7, United States President
Barack Obama said he "hopes US troops can identify moderate elements of the
Taliban and move them toward reconciliation". The proposition came as a
conclusion to a larger picture: the battlefield situation in Afghanistan.
According to the New York Times, he said the United States "was not winning the
war in that country" and thus the door must be opened to a "reconciliation
process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of
the Taliban much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq".
Following these statements, a flurry of comments exploded
throughout the international media: while most of the mainstream press and
networks in the West praised the "new daring turn" in US policy, that is, the
readiness to "engage the Taliban", most of the pan-Arabist and jihadi
sympathizer outlets in the region warned the move won't be successful. In a
panel discussion on BBC TV Arabic (in which this author participated), a noted
expert in Islamist affairs from Amman said, "There is no such thing as Taliban
independent from the high-ups like [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar."
Another panelist, a seasoned Afghan journalist from Kabul added: "In Iraq, you
have a bigger US force, and a totally different geopolitical context than in
Afghanistan. Besides, why would Washington want to engage a terror force which
is not accepted by the population?" This was a small sampling of the brouhaha
reigning in the debate about the real strategic intentions of the Obama
administration.
The good and the bad
The US administration is being advised that any change in strategy in
Afghanistan is better than the previous situation. It is being told that the
troop surge model as applied in Iraq may work, if modified to meet
Afghanistan's "complexities". The president must also be attracted to the idea
that an "engagement" with some quarters of the Taliban will fit perfectly with
the global idea of engagement and sitting down and listening that he seems to
have adopted for the entire region.
But many questions still need to be answered. Does the plan require a dialogue
with the Taliban organization as a whole or with elements "within" the
organization? Apparently, the US channel is to be established with "elements"
not with the leadership of the network. Then the next question is: if they
aren't part of the top leadership, are these elements able to sway the entire
organization towards engagement? Apparently not, according to experts on the
Taliban, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, the goal is to sway these
factions - called moderates - from the Taliban, not to steer the entire group
in another direction.
Here we have to pause and come to the first "complex" conclusion: while Afghan
President Hamid Karzai has extended an olive branch to Mullah Omar to join the
government, an invitation quickly rejected, Obama is announcing a more modest
goal that is to identify "moderate elements" from the Taliban and "strike a
deal with them". But the modest narrative of the goal doesn't make it
necessarily reachable. Here is why.
If the "moderate Taliban" we're looking to identify are "inside" the network,
when they engage with the US, they will be lethally ejected by the hard core of
the group, backed by al-Qaeda. Hence, the next question will be to know if
those "dissidents" would actually secede and form a "moderate Taliban"
organization working with the US and the Karzai government.
From the names available on such a list, including former "Taliban ambassadors"
to Pakistan and the international community and those who sought Saudi Arabia's
help in launching a dialogue, we can't see strong commanders willing to surge
militarily against the mother ship. As far as we can project, there are no
leaders and radical clerics who would carry that task of establishing an
all-out new "good Taliban", even with millions of dollars as incentive. A
Taliban civil war is not going to happen, for now.
But is there another more attainable goal? According to the Obama
administration and some experts, there may be other options.
Little 'talibans?'
In recent months, a new concept has been pushed via defense and
counter-terrorism circles arguing that instead of chipping off from the actual
"Taliban" militia on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, attention must
be focusing on harvesting the local "taliban" (little "t"). According to this
theory, the little "ts" are individuals and groups who have joined the large
umbrella under Mullah Omar but not the membership of the organization, or have
proclaimed themselves as "taliban affiliates".
Hence, in comparison with the Iraqi Sahwa (Awakening) movement backed by the
US-led coalition, these sub-militias of all walks of life would become the
target of American political charm and dollars. If identified and reached out
to - so believe the architects of the forthcoming Afghan "surge" - they will
become the Afghan parallel to the Sahwas of Mesopotamia. Note that Obama
specified that it would be the "American military who would reach out to these
moderate elements"; meaning they will be dealt with from a lower level rather
than from a full-fledged diplomatic perspective.
In that case, unlike what the media has been speculating about, this is not a
US dialogue with the party it is at war with, headed by Mullah Omar and his
emirs. It is not even an attempt to break the mother ship into two and
recuperate the more moderate branch. There are no takers for a massive retreat
from the Taliban into the arms of Kabul's government or Washington's "infidel"
generosity.
What the US move is about is much more pragmatic and realistic: nibbling off
from the wide pool of angry people and shifting them from frustration with
Karzai to enmity towards Mullah Omar. Indeed, there are tens of thousands of
armed males aggregating in villages, clans, tribes and neighborhoods, who wear
turbans and sometimes claim they are Taliban for a thousand reasons. These
sub-militias aren't particularly ideological or maybe do not even understand
much of the doctrine they claim to be following. A number of experts and some
strategists believe that these men of the Afghan underworld can become the "new
army" against the "bad Taliban". Can they?
Not only it is possible, it should have been the case eight years ago. However,
there are two fundamental mistakes not to make.
First, the Obama administration and US military strategists must not see these
new war constituents, nor announce them, as who they aren't. These sub-militias
sought to turn the tide against the real Taliban aren't your "moderate" guys.
In reality they have no firm ideological affiliation. With few exceptions, the
tribal and urban forces to be targeted for "integration" will simply shift
alliances or allegiance for money and power. The American, Western and
international public must not be led to believe that a piece of architecture
will be successful in transforming radicals into moderates or swaying away
bands of armed men from extremism, let alone jihadism.
The mutation to moderation happens not via cash deals but through years of
schooling, an efficient media and perseverant non-governmental organizations.
It happens from younger into older age. Hence, forget about the "identification
of moderate" part of the Obama strategy. Inducing civil societies into
liberalism, or even moderation, needs government crafting of a kind that
doesn't exist in Washington or Brussels for the time being.
In addition, these militias and militants to be swayed away from Waziristan's
exiles aren't going to produce a national reconciliation. They do not represent
the radical ideological web which is behind the war against the new Afghan
democracy. National reconciliation takes place between two or more large,
historical and strategic forces. Instead, we're talking about recuperation of
elements extracted from the Taliban, not reconciliation with the latter. Hence,
US stated goals should be even more modest in this regard.
The second fatal mistake not to commit is to call them Taliban, proto-Taliban
or crypto-Taliban. Even if for publicity purposes it suits the goal of soothing
the US and Western public, constructing a fictive identity to a plethora of
tribal-urban sub-militias will backfire on the whole campaign. Here is why.
Since they aren't a breakaway faction from the main organization, they can't
form another Taliban to challenge the Mullah Omar leadership. And since they
have no ideology of their own they won't be able to de-radicalize others.
Hence, if they are baptized as the other "taliban", instead of using the
credibility of the name to push back against the bad guys, the name will
ultimately transform them into what we don't want them to be: Taliban!
If we call them nice Taliban or "little ts", we would be throwing them back
into the arms of the forces we want to sway them from. Knowing what I know from
jihadi strategies, it won't take long before the two Talibans would eventually
sit down and strike a deal, and overwhelm the Kabul government.
Learn from Iraq
If the Iraq Sahwa model is the inspiration for an Afghan engagement with local
forces, we need to learn the right lessons from it. In Iraq, the US didn't
create good al-Qaeda versus bad al-Qaeda; it didn't identify moderate elements
from al-Qaeda to pit them against the mother force. The political dimension of
the "surge" relied heavily on recruiting tribes, social cadres and Sunni
elements regardless of their affiliations and empowering them via a "new"
organization, called Sahwa Councils. We gave these new local allies an identity
of their own, not the identity of the forces they fought against.
But more important, the greater dimension of the "surge" wasn't the mere rise
of the Sahwas, but the moving forward of the democratic political process with
its political parties, non-governmental organizations, movements and media.
Swaying Sunni militias against al-Qaeda was only one component of the strategy;
the larger strategy was to sustain pressures until Iraqi forces, legislators
and ministries are up and running.
By comparison, in Afghanistan, we should make the case of a similar, not
necessarily identical process: mobilizing popular militias, giving them an
identity of their own, not calling them Taliban, and not expecting them to be
the missing link to the future but a force helpful in pushing the political
process forward until it can resist, contain and reverse the Taliban.
How to measure victory and defeat
Obama, and before him president George W Bush, were always trying to measure
the success in the war in Afghanistan. While the latter spoke of victories, the
current president speaks of failures. The real issue is how to measure victory
or a defeat.
Is destroying al-Qaeda and Taliban bunkers a definitive indicator of victory?
Are the relentless terror attacks by the jihadis the other definitive
measurement of failures? I don't think either parameter gives us an answer.
Rather, it is the battle taking place over the conquest of the minds and hearts
of the school children and teens of the country that will make or break that
burgeoning democracy. Unfortunately, neither the past nor the current
administration seems to see the war of ideas with such urgency.
The Obama administration has to be relentlessly accurate in describing the
choices it intends to make in Afghanistan and in the confrontation with jihadis
worldwide. If its final intention is to cut a deal with the Taliban - in this
article I won't argue about the choice - it must faithfully inform the US
public of this choice, instead of developing a phased narrative of
disengagement.
But if it seriously intends to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda by isolating them
further inside Afghanistan and mobilizing the international community, the
administration also needs to prepare the American and Western public for that
choice. For in this age of hyper-globalization, the jihadi forces have an
astonishing capacity to outmaneuver the smartest strategies devised by their
enemies and, on the other hand, the public in the US has developed a surprising
ability to understand the intentions of both the terror forces and of its own
government. Transparency is everything in this age.
Dr Walid Phares is the director of the Future Terrorism Project at the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a visiting scholar at the European
Foundation for Democracy and the author of The Confrontation: Winning
the War against Future Jihad
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