US
moves to divide Taliban from
Pakistan By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The leaked reports over the
past two weeks of a series of meetings between
United States officials and a Taliban figure close
to leader Mullah Omar seemed to point to real
progress toward a negotiated settlement of the war
in Afghanistan. But in fact the talks are part
of a Barack Obama administration strategy aimed at
putting pressure on the Taliban leadership in part
by dividing it from Pakistan as well as bolstering
Obama's domestic support for the war.
Senior administration officials hope to
use the talks to sow suspicion between the Taliban
and their main ally, thus weakening the Taliban
resolve to negotiate on a peace settlement
only if the United States
offers a timetable for troop withdrawal.
Afghan and German officials have said that
US officials met three times in Qatar and Germany
in recent months with Tayyeb Agha, an aide of the
top Taliban leader Mullah Omar, according to
reports in the Washington Post and Der Spiegel.
Agha is about as close to Mullah Omar as
any official in the Taliban. He has long been
Omar's "head of office" and a "very close
confident", according to Thomas Ruttig of the
Afghanistan Analysts Network.
The Hamid
Karzai regime was fully briefed on those
"exploratory" meetings, but Pakistani officials
have been kept in the dark as part of a strategy
of sowing discord between Pakistan and the Taliban
leadership.
That strategy began to emerge
when United Kingdom special representative for
Afghanistan and Pakistan Mark Sedwill visited
Pakistan last week.
Sedwill told
journalists that the Taliban leadership was
engaged in talks with "various stakeholders with
full backing of the US with the sole aim of
finding a solution to Afghanistan from within,
without any involvement of foreign players".
He was clearly hoping to rattle the
Pakistani military leadership and civilian
government, who have complained in the past that
they have not been told about contacts with the
Taliban. Sedwill's carefully worded statement
hinted that talks with the Taliban were moving
toward an accord between the Taliban and the
Karzai government without Pakistan's
participation, thus playing into Pakistan's worst
fears.
He said various channels are now
open to the Taliban, and that no single entity is
fully aware of these talks. That was clearly
intended to imply that the Taliban are already
involved in secret talks with Karzai.
The
UK envoy said he had come with this "special
message" from the British government and hoped the
Pakistanis "fully grasped it". That unusually
harsh and even condescending language sought to
convey the US-British intention to freeze Pakistan
out of the diplomatic action, despite earlier
assurances that Pakistan would be fully involved
in the peace process.
That policy
obviously seeks to increase the tensions between
the Taliban and the Pakistani military. They share
an interest in an outcome in Afghanistan that
reflects greater Taliban influence over the
country's politics, but Taliban leaders and
commanders have long resented their dependence on
Pakistan.
The Pakistani military,
meanwhile, is believed to have worried that the
Taliban will reach an accord with Karzai at
Pakistan's expense.
It is well known that
the Taliban prefer to have an office outside
Pakistan that could be used as a venue for peace
talks, free from direct Pakistani interference.
But the reality of the US-Taliban talks
does not support the line being promoted so
aggressively by Washington through its British
ally. Nor are the Taliban likely to cut Pakistan
out of the loop on their talks with the United
States and Karzai.
For one thing, the
United States is still unwilling to offer the
Taliban an office in Turkey or elsewhere. Instead,
as Sedwill revealed in Islamabad last week, that
concession, as well as the removal of Taliban
leaders from the United Nations "blacklist", will
only be granted in return for
"confidence-building" measures by the Taliban
side.
Sedwill said the US and UK would
"need to see what concessions the Taliban would be
willing to first cede".
The most likely
concession demanded of the Taliban would be to
agree to negotiate formally with the Karzai
regime. As a US official told Karen DeYoung of the
Washington Post, the Taliban "is going to have to
talk with both the Afghans and Americans".
The Obama administration is still
demanding, moreover, that those talks must be
"Afghan-led".
But the idea that Taliban
will give up what would be one of the last
concessions in talks before the United States has
even begun to negotiate reflects an assessment of
the bargaining position of the two sides that is
not shared by those outside the Obama
administration.
Both the Taliban and the
Pakistani military appear to believe that the
Taliban has a stronger bargaining position at this
point than Obama.
Last month Pakistan's
foreign secretary Salman Bashir challenged the
premise of the Obama administration that US
military pressure is altering the balance of power
in Afghanistan in Washington's favor.
The
Taliban, meanwhile, have made it clear in private
contacts with representatives of the Karzai regime
that they won't negotiate with either the United
States or Karzai without a public indication from
the United States that it will negotiate the
withdrawal of US and North Atlantic Treaty
organization troops.
A member of the
executive board of Karzai's High Peace Council,
Mohamad Ismail Qasem Yar, told Inter Press Service
(IPS) that the Taliban had insisted in contacts
with Afghan officials on one precondition for
peace talks. "There is one thing that they want to
make clear and they want to be sure of, which is a
deadline for the withdrawal," he said.
In
their public statements, however, the Taliban
continue to insist that they won't negotiate as
long as foreign troops occupy the country. Michael
Semple, who was deputy to the European Union
special representative for Afghanistan from 2004
to 2007, observes that the idea of jihad against
foreign troops is important to the morale of the
Taliban fighters and their supporters.
The
public demand for withdrawal before negotiations
"may be an untenable position," Semple told IPS,
"but the process of shifting may be painful".
Even though Taliban officials may be
distrustful of Pakistan and may now feel more
vulnerable because of the killing of Osama bin
Laden by US special forces, they are not likely to
be panicked into making concessions to Washington.
Although it was widely believed that
Pakistan detained Mullah Baradar and other high
Taliban officials, including Tayyeb Agha, in early
2010 because of the suspicion that the Taliban
were talking with the Karzai regime behind their
backs, the real reasons for the arrests suggest a
different worry.
Baradar was picked up in
a joint Inter-Services Intelligence-Central
Intelligence Agency operation, but it was later
reported by US sources that neither intelligence
agency had known in advance that Baradar would be
at the site of the raid.
In any case,
Baradar, Agha and the other key Taliban officials
were later released, suggesting that the
Pakistanis were primarily concerned with averting
their capture and detention by the United States.
Pakistani warnings to the Taliban against contacts
with the Karzai regime that were not coordinated
with ISI could obviously be communicated without
temporary detention.
The widely-publicized
US talks with the Taliban also serve a domestic
political function for Obama. One US official told
the Washington Post that Obama would cite the
talks with the Taliban in his mid-year policy
announcement as evidence that he was making good
on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's promised
to produce negotiations.
(Walid Fazly
contributed reporting from Kabul.)
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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