Reckoning with Taliban
irreconcilables By Derek Henry
Flood
Though the concept of Afghan and
Western reconciliation with the Mullah Omar-led
Taliban has gained much momentum, the consequences
of some kind of ad hoc settlement between the
Islamists and the government of President Hamid
Karzai have not been clearly defined.
Opposition is growing within some quarters
in Afghanistan to a settlement that would give the
Taliban access to power. Much of this opposition
is being led by heirs to the late anti-Taliban
leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, particularly former
foreign minister Dr Abdullah Abdullah and the
former head of the Afghan National Directorate of
Security, Amrullah Saleh.
As Saleh
recently told a rally in Kabul: "We have not
forgotten the
burning of our homeland and
the humiliation of the men and women of
Afghanistan ... But you [Karzai] are still calling
these people [the Taliban] 'brother'."
A bitter legacy Since the
Taliban were ejected from central Kabul in
November 2001 in the face of the United States-led
invasion, the movement has transformed itself from
a mostly unrecognized government to a Pashtun
ethno-nationalist insurgency with its roots in the
anti-Soviet jihad that consumed the country
throughout the 1980s.
In Abdullah's recent
open letter to Karzai, he states emphatically, "In
the reconciliation process, one of the clear red
lines for any negotiated settlement has been that
the reconcilable Taliban must accept the
constitution." [1] Abdullah, by drawing such a red
line, has been interpreted by many as rejecting
the very notion of reconciling with a movement
whose raison d'etre is the implementation of a
brutal interpretation of Islamic law at any cost.
Abdullah's colleague, Amrullah Saleh, is
one of the most ardent anti-Taliban figures in
Afghanistan and is outraged by Karzai's overtures
to senior Taliban leaders, making no effort to
hide his disdain after serving alongside the
president for years.
Saleh, now in
opposition to Karzai after an abrupt departure
from his post in June 2010, has formed a nascent
movement based on his Panjshiri Tajik power base
calling itself the Basij-e-Melli (BeM). Saleh is
keen to insist that his movement is not solely a
Tajik one as it also contains a number of Shi'ite
Hazaras and anti-Taliban Pashtuns from eastern
Afghanistan.
The bedrock belief of BeM,
according to Saleh, is that the Taliban are not
simply misguided Afghan "brothers" (as Karzai has
been known to term them), but a nefarious group
directly controlled by the Pakistani state, with
which it seeks to control Afghanistan by proxy
when foreign forces finally depart.
Together, Adbullah and Saleh represent a
sector of the Afghan population that does not want
to see a decline in the gains made by women and
ethnic and religious minorities since the
Taliban's ouster.
While much has been made
of the idea of bringing Taliban leaders in from
the cold, Afghans directly affected by the former
regime's vengeful ethnic cleansing of Tajiks in
the Shomali plain and Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif
have no desire to see these men brought back to
power in even the most modest fashion.
In
a June 2011 op-ed, Amrullah Saleh countered
Karzai's dubious overtures to the Taliban's Quetta
shura (consultative council), stating that
Karzai risked creating a "Hezbollah-type entity"
out of the Taliban if they were not entirely
disarmed in southern Afghanistan.
Skeptics
of American and British intentions for the future
of Afghanistan suggest that the delayed drawdown
of a large-scale foreign troop presence coupled
with the co-opting of certain amenable Taliban
elements is part of a convoluted ruse to establish
permanent military installations in Afghanistan.
With the killing of Osama bin Laden and
the decoupling of the United Nations' al-Qaeda and
Taliban sanctions list, some in Afghanistan
believe the Western powers want to get out of the
business of war-fighting and into the business of
energy, using a rump occupation force as a
hammer-like guarantor of their interests.
The role of energy in reconciliation
The Taliban have once again become an
important player in the seemingly unending
regional competition between two large-scale
natural gas pipeline proposals.
The
competing projects, known as the
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline
(TAPI) and the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline (IPI),
have been the topic of much speculation in this
fitfully integrating mega-region for years.
Both proposals are fraught with inherent
security dilemmas. TAPI has been affected by a
resurgent Taliban throughout much of its planned
route in Afghanistan while IPI is plagued by the
unending Balochi nationalist rebellion in the
Pakistan section of its route.
The transit
countries that would be involved are experiencing
constant energy shortages in their major urban
centers and both TAPI and IPI have promised to
relieve these fuel gaps.
Recently, a
rapprochement of sorts has taken place between
Kabul and Islamabad with the signing of the
Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement,
which one commentary described as holding "great
promise for the prosperity of the whole region".
Though enthusiasm for TAPI has appeared to
be outpacing that for IPI concurrently with the
talk of Taliban reconciliation, Tehran is far from
leaving the playing field. Iranian officials told
their Indian counterparts that their plan only ran
into one insurgency; that of Pakistan's restive
Balochis, and that TAPI, beginning in
Turkmenistan's Dauletabad gas fields and
terminating in the Indian state of Punjab, is much
more vulnerable to attacks by non-state actors.
Iranian government officials have tried to
sell IPI as the less dangerous of the two
projects, stating that Balochistan will, over
time, reap the benefits of transit fees that will
eventually calm the insurrection there as the
local inhabitants see improvements in their
quality of life.
The role of Pakistan as
the swing state between the two proposals is both
critical and complex. The government of President
Asif Ali Zardari is viewed domestically as being
under immense pressure to implement TAPI and
abandon IPI, thereby further isolating their
neighbors on the Iranian plateau. Taut bilateral
relations already exist between Pakistan and Iran
from years of sectarian Sunni-Shi'ite proxy
conflict and the anti-Shi'ite pogroms conducted by
the Sunni-chauvinist Taliban during their five
years in power in Afghanistan.
A retired
Pakistani army brigadier suggested that for TAPI
to leave the drawing board and become a ground
reality, the project's planners would require the
"cooperation and support of the Afghan Taliban" to
secure a route through the volatile provinces of
Helmand and Kandahar.
Though Islamabad is
officially supportive of TAPI, it has not entirely
abandoned IPI as an option should the former
project collapse. At times, Islamabad's precise
position can appear ambiguous; Prime Minister Syed
Yusuf Raza Gillani said that both TAPI and "joint
gas and electricity projects with Iran were in
[the] pipeline".
The elusive notion of
Afghanistan becoming an energy corridor began in
the mid-1990s, as interest in Turkmenistan's
natural gas reserves set off a largely unrealistic
competition among Western companies to court the
Taliban led by the reclusive Mullah Omar in
Kandahar. Today, the natural gas dream has been
set alight once again by a host of indigenous
political actors across the region.
Deep divisions over the US military
presence In a joint March press conference
with former interior minister Mohammed Hanif
Atmar, Amrullah Saleh stated that the Taliban were
an unrepentant organization that, if given the
chance, would renew a scorched earth policy
without hesitation.
Saleh said that if the
West were to pull out of Afghanistan entirely
following some kind of settlement with the
Taliban, Afghanistan would once again suffer in
the throes of a proxy war. Saleh's rhetoric is
seen as increasingly divisive by the pro-talks
camp in Kabul that views his opposition to all
things Taliban as a stumbling block on the road to
a cessation of hostilities.
Those allies
of Karzai who are pushing for increased contacts
with the Taliban leadership believe that former
Afghan government officials now embittered with
the president are purposefully sabotaging the very
concept of peace talks because they are
unfavorable to their personal agendas.
Saleh and Atmar stressed the need for a
continued US military mission in Afghanistan
beyond the scope of Operation Enduring Freedom,
likely as a means of keeping meddling neighbors at
bay. Atmar believes that Kabul would do better to
keep the US military in the country guiding it
towards an Afghans-first policy rather than have
them abandon the country altogether, thereby
turning it into a regional battleground.
There has been intense debate in recent
months in the Afghan media over the future role of
the United States inside Afghanistan contrasted
against what some see as the overwhelming leverage
of the Pakistani state among both the Afghan
polity and the Afghan Taliban.
The
Saleh-Atmar narrative paints the continued US
presence, if carried out with increasing
sensitivity to local desires, as a means of
emancipating Afghanistan from the influence of
neighboring states that seek to dominate it while
delicately avoiding being subsumed by an American
agenda.
If Afghans can get Washington to
commit to certain obligations that will guarantee
a balance between sovereignty and security in
their country, then many believe that the benefits
of an entrenched US presence there would far
outweigh its potential negative impact
domestically.
Conclusion As the
ill-defined concept of Taliban reconciliation
moves forward in fits and starts, those who were
once part of a comparatively hopeful, if
ineffective, unity government in Kabul are now
disaffected with one another in a vastly
unproductive fashion. All the elements of the web
of interlocking and competing interests at work in
Afghanistan today will be impossible to satisfy
simultaneously.
Domestic political and
economic pressures within the US are making a
never-ending military commitment in Afghanistan
unsustainable while a host of coalition allies are
looking for the exit, such as Canada, which
formally declared an end to its combat mission on
July 7.
Pakistan seeks to hold a tether on
the Afghan Taliban even as the Tehrik-e-Taliban
Pakistan (Pakistan Taliban - TTP) and other
domestic insurgent groups are shredding the social
fabric of Pakistani society with each suicide
attack.
Iran is loath to see the
re-emergence of the Deobandi Sunni Taliban in any
form that may threaten its Shi'ite and
Persian-speaking Afghan clients even though it has
been asserted Tehran provides military assistance
to some Taliban elements along its border in
southwestern Afghanistan to act as an irritant to
foreign troops there.
The Taliban continue
to vigorously deny claims that they have entered
into direct talks with either the US or the United
Kingdom as doing so would contravene their
oft-stated condition that negotiations may only
take place once all foreign troops have departed.
As a Taliban spokesman said, "It is clear
as the broad daylight that we consider negotiation
in [the] presence of foreign forces as a war
stratagem of the Americans and their futile
efforts.".
Karzai has created a series of
initiatives aimed at courting or co-opting the
"reconcilable" Afghan Taliban. Karzai, along with
former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, has
established a Joint Peace Commission with the
Pakistani government. Premier Gilani stated, "I
fully endorse that statement [in which Zardari]
said that a war in Afghanistan can destabilize
Pakistan and it is vice versa so the war on
terrorism is directly affecting Pakistan not only
in [the] form of casualties but in [the] form of
economy as well."
Karzai has also formed
the High Council of Peace as a multi-ethnic
mechanism to facilitate talks with his
adversaries. The council has become a
controversial effort for including several
notorious Taliban figures, including Maulvi
Mohammed Qalamuddin, the former head of the
Islamic Emirates religious police.
Other
reviled officials in the Taliban regime have been
included in the peace-building body by Karzai to
lend credibility to those still following Mullah
Omar and the original shura leaders.
Over the course of the past several years,
talks between the Karzai government and the Afghan
Taliban have been reported in various locales,
including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and somewhat
incongruously a stunning holiday resort in the
Maldives.
In each instance, Taliban
spokesmen consistently deny they have made such
contacts, perhaps for fear of losing the
confidence of active guerillas engaging in contact
with Afghan security forces and foreign troops.
When former finance minister Ashraf Ghani
confirmed that talks were indeed taking place with
certain Taliban factions, Taliban commander Doran
Safi shot back, "I confirm that none of us will
lay down arms even if he is paid mountains of
money; none of us would abandon the right path."
The earlier strategy of a hammer-and-anvil
approach of defeating the Taliban - with the US
military and the Afghan National Army as the
hammer and the Pakistani army on the other side of
the Durand Line as the anvil - was a failure.
Pakistani village-flattening military
incursions in the tribal regions led to the
further Talibanization of large swathes of the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Khyber
Pakhtoonkhwa province, resulting in a series of
suicide attacks in many of Pakistan's major urban
centers.
The current strategy of
assassinating mid-level Taliban field commanders
while reaching out to those willing to talk to
Kabul and Washington was promulgated by now former
defense secretary Robert Gates as the only means
of ending the war.
However, defining the
"end of the war" as the withdrawal of Western
troops ignores the fact several very prominent
Karzai opponents do not appear ready to accept the
return of the Taliban in any form.
This
may take the war in a new direction, one in which
ethnic and religious factions are reconstituted
along barely dormant fault lines, leaving no end
in sight to this decades-long power struggle in
the heart of Asia.
Note 1. Dr Abdullah Abdullah, "Upholding
Constitutional Principles and Rule of Law in
Afghanistan," Open Letter to President Hamid
Karzai, July 5, 2011.
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