Battle over Afghan peace talks intensifies
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The struggle within the Barack Obama administration over
Afghanistan policy entered a new phase when the president suggested at a
meeting of his "war cabinet" last Friday that it might be time to start
negotiations with the Taliban, according to a report in the New York Times on
Saturday.
Obama said the success of the recent operation to take control of the
"insurgent stronghold" of Marjah, combined with the killing of insurgent
leaders in Pakistan by drone attacks, might be sufficient to "justify an effort
to begin talks with the Taliban", two participants in the meeting told the
Times.
That proposal puts Obama directly at odds with key members of his national
security team, especially Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton. Both Gates
and Clinton have argued in recent months that attempting to negotiate with
Taliban leaders would be fruitless unless and until they had been convinced by
US military operations that they were losing.
In an indication that Gates and Clinton intended to resist Obama's proposal to
start talks soon the Times reported that two unnamed officials who attended the
meeting said any plans for "reaching out" to the leadership of the Taliban were
likely to be delayed until after US forces launched a major military offensive
in Kandahar province.
That is the Gates-Clinton position on the issue, which is also held by General
Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan.
By hinting that Obama's suggestion was not likely to prevail, the opponents of
early negotiations were expressing confidence that they would once again force
him to back away from a position that was unacceptable to the military
leadership and the field commander. They succeeded in getting Obama to retreat
from his timetable for withdrawal from Iraq in March 2009 and from his initial
resistance to a large troop increase in Afghanistan last November.
The argument that will now be made by Clinton, Gates and McChrystal that the
administration should wait until after the Kandahar operation is launched
before taking any negotiating initiative is evidently aimed at giving
McChrystal's command as much time as possible to show successful results
against the Taliban before negotiations begin.
The offensive in Kandahar is not expected to begin until this summer, according
to military officials, and it could take several months before US troops even
get into the city itself. The military and its allies in Obama's war cabinet
would certainly argue for delaying talks until the operation could demonstrate
clear success. That could mean waiting until well into 2011.
Obama identified mid-2011 as the trigger point for the beginning of a US troop
withdrawal from Afghanistan. But Obama will also need to show the US public
that he is making progress on an exit strategy by 2012 - the biggest single
prod for starting peace negotiations much earlier.
The question of when negotiations with the Taliban might begin has been hanging
over the administration's national security team for weeks. As one official
told the Times, starting negotiations "is now more a question of 'when' than a
question of 'if'."
McChrystal has been worried that Obama would agree to a negotiated settlement
with the Taliban involving a relatively short timetable for the withdrawal of
US forces.
Contrary to the public position voiced frequently by Gates that the Taliban
would not negotiate seriously under present conditions, McChrystal understands
that there are indications the Taliban leaders would try to use their present
strong territorial position as bargaining leverage on a settlement. That was
the gist of what an official of McChrystal's International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) told Inter Press Service (IPS) in late January.
The Taliban would presumably offer formal guarantees that they would sever all
ties with al-Qaeda in return for withdrawal of all foreign troops, based on the
signal conveyed in an article on the website of the Taliban's Islamic Caliphate
of Afghanistan website on December 5.
The Washington Post's military correspondents reported on February 22 that
"senior military officials" had decided to target Marjah mainly to convince US
public opinion that the US military could be successful in Afghanistan. That
shift in perception about military success, in turn, would be expected to
translate into a slower troop withdrawal, according to the Post report.
That reasoning implied that a shift in public opinion toward support for
military operations in Afghanistan would discourage Obama from agreeing to a
short timetable for withdrawal in any negotiations with the Taliban.
When Obama announced a compromise strategy in November, he hinted that the war
would have to end through negotiations, but left the question of how and when
the United States would participate in those negotiations unresolved. In
referring to the military objective in Afghanistan, Obama refused to talk about
defeating the Taliban in his December 2 speech. Instead, he referred to "a
strategy that will break the Taliban's momentum and increase Afghanistan's
capacity over the next 18 months".
That was in sharp contrast to his March 27 speech in which he referred to the
"uncompromising core of the Taliban" and said "they must be defeated". Obama
was clearly implying that negotiations would be a necessary part of the
strategy.
But Obama provided no explicit policy guidance on when and how negotiations
would begin. That allowed Clinton and Gates to continue to offer arguments
against such negotiations publicly.
On ABC News on December 5, Clinton suggested that there was no reason to
believe that the Taliban would agree to the main US demand for an end to all
ties with al-Qaeda, citing Taliban leader Mullah Omar's refusal to turn over
Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. And Gates repeated the argument that
the Taliban would only be ready to negotiate after their "momentum" had been
stopped.
Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had already begun asking the United
States to support him in starting negotiations with the Taliban - something
Clinton had publicly opposed. Karzai said on December 3 that he would invite
Mullah Omar himself to talks.
He let it be known that he would use the London conference of January 27-28 to
invite the Taliban to participate in a national loya jirga "grand
council" meeting on peace.
That intention heated up the debate in Washington and in McChrystal's ISAF
headquarters. In Kabul just four days before the conference, an ISAF official
told IPS the issue then under debate within the administration was whether
Mullah Omar would be an acceptable participant in a future Afghan government.
"If Mullah Omar were to turn around tomorrow and say he is ready to come back,"
he asked, "would we be comfortable with that?" The official suggested that the
London conference was an opportunity to achieve consensus on the issue.
Seeking clarification of the US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization stance on
the issue of Mullah Omar's acceptability now appears to have been aimed at
getting a decision against early negotiations with the Taliban leadership.
Barring Mullah Omar, the Taliban's spiritual as well as political leader, from
participation in any negotiations would have meant, in practical terms,
refusing to deal with the Taliban's leadership committee.
Back in Washington, however, Obama made no decision to support or oppose
Karzai's proposal and, by extension, left open the possible participation by
Mullah Omar in talks on a peace agreement.
An administration official recalled recently that the George W Bush
administration adopted a firm policy against reconciliation with the Taliban,
and that then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice once told Karzai in a phone
conversation to "shut up about reconciliation" with the Taliban. But the Obama
administration still hadn't adopted a new policy on the issue, the official
told IPS.
Obama's initiative in proposing to take advantage of even modest successes in
Afghanistan and Pakistan to start talks suggests that he is waiting for the
earliest possible favorable moment politically to make a move toward diplomacy.
It remains to be seen, however, whether he is willing to stand up to pressures
from opponents of such an initiative or will retreat once again to avoid any
confrontation with the military.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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