There's more to peace than
Taliban By M K Bhadrakumar
The hype over "secret discussions" between
the United States and Taliban officials has
subsided; the hot topic is vanishing from public
view once again.
Nevertheless, Iranian
media insist that three high-ranking Taliban
leaders have been released - Mullah Khairkhawa,
former interior minister; Mullah Noorullah Noori,
a former governor; and Mullah Fazl Akhund, the
Taliban's chief of army staff - in exchange for an
American soldier held by the Taliban.
United States diplomats might have put the
cart before the horse in their hurry to get a
peace process going before North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) leaders gather for their
summit in Chicago in May. They may have made two
cardinal mistakes. One, they underestimated Afghan
President Hamid Karzai's
political compulsions.
Two, the US took it for granted that the
anti-Taliban Northern Alliance groups would fall
in line since many of them have been co-opted
through the 10-year period of the war and their
capacity to unite is in doubt.
Karzai has
sprung a surprise by insisting that peace talks
should be "Afghan-led" - meaning, he expects a
"hands-on" role for himself. He has said this
before, but this time he means it. He knows that
regional opinion strongly disfavors a US-led peace
process, and he also anticipates the danger of
being left behind as road kill unless he is in
driver's seat.
Besides, Karzai is
demanding that the US should transfer any Taliban
prisoners from the US detention facility at
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to his custody rather than
to Qatar (as apparently sought by the Taliban). He
is also raking up a related issue questioning US
control of Bagram airbase near Kabul as a
detention center.
On Monday, Karzai raised
the stakes much higher by demanding that the
Taliban must agree to a ceasefire before formal
peace negotiations could begin. His spokesman,
Emal Faizi, said, "When the talks start, there
should be a ceasefire and the violence against the
Afghan people should stop." Faizi also said it was
too soon to send a delegation from Kabul to Qatar
for talks. "The government has no immediate plans
for such a trip."
The hardening of
Karzai's stance also needs to be understood
against the backdrop of growing restiveness on the
part of the erstwhile Northern Alliance groups.
On Monday, the alliance stalwarts came out
against the Barack Obama administration's secret
discussions with the Taliban. These leaders -
Ahmed Zia Massoud, brother of late Ahmad Shah
Massoud and formerly vice president under Karzai;
General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek leader who
leads the Jumbish in northern Afghanistan; Haji
Mohammad Mohaqiq, the Hazara Shi'ite leader from
Mazar-i-Sharif who heads the Hezb-e-Wahdat;
Amrullah Saleh, former head of Afghan intelligence
- held talks with a group of four US congressmen -
Dona Rohrabacher, Loretta Sanchez, Louie Gohmert
and Steve King (all except Sanchez are
Republicans) - in Berlin over the weekend and
issued a joint statement on Monday.
This
is the first time that the leadership of the
Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities has come to a
common line of thinking to oppose the US's peace
strategy and to present an alternate blueprint of
pan-Afghan settlement. In essence, the Northern
Alliance is being resuscitated as a political
entity.
Their statement attacked the power
structure headed by Karzai as dysfunctional, far
too centralized and rampantly corrupt and demanded
that in the first instance what Afghanistan needed
was an inclusive parliamentary form of government
"instead of a personality-oriented presidential
system", which could optimally represent all
ethnic and regional interests.
They also
sought a thorough revamping of the country's
electoral system from the present single
non-transferrable voting system to a
"national-accepted variant of the proportional
representative system" and the direct election of
governors and provincial council leaderships with
delegation of powers to create budgets, collect
revenue and oversee local policing and administer
social sectors.
But, most important, they
frontally questioned the US's locus standi
to initiate peace talks with the Taliban. Their
statement said:
We firmly believe that any
negotiation with the Taliban can be acceptable,
and therefore effective, [only] if all parties
to the conflict are involved in the process. The
present form of discussions with the Taliban is
flawed, as it excludes anti-Taliban Afghans. It
must be recalled that the Taliban extremists and
their al-Qaeda supporters were defeated [in
2011] by Afghans resisting extremism with
minimal human-embedded support from the United
States and international community. The
present negotiations with the Taliban fail to
take into account the risks, sacrifices and
legitimate interests of the Afghans who ended
the brutal oppression of all Afghans.
In order to speed the withdrawal of
international forces, the participants
believe it is essential to strengthen regional
and national institutions that are inclusive and
represent the concerns of all the communities of
Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]
A
challenge to Obama The Northern Alliance
statement challenges the US's monopoly of conflict
resolution and Washington's unilateralist
estimation that the Taliban are the only group
that matters as protagonists on the Afghan
chessboard in a peace process.
Its entire
approach is to take the "Afghan settlement" from
the narrow path of a secretive US-Taliban-Pakistan
compromise formula to a transparent, inclusive,
broadly-participatory inclusive approach that
would not ignore any Afghan interest group, which
has genuine mass support, from participation, with
strong, elected local leaderships that enjoy
delegated powers of local governance. In sum,
it offers a vision for returning Afghanistan to
its historical character of a federated system of
government that allows a plural society to thrive,
but with a representative form of government as a
modern-day democracy. Indeed, the Northern
Alliance statement implies readiness to reconcile
politically with the Taliban, provided they
"seize" power through the ballot box rather than
the guns supplied from the Pakistani military
inventory, among other places.
It is a
bold challenge to the United States and Pakistan
to live up to their pious homilies.
The
alliance's strategy puts enormous pressure on
Karzai. He is caught between two contending
constituencies. The Northern Alliance leaders are
critical of Karzai, but he finds no acceptability
with the Taliban, too. Karzai's position becomes
precarious if he antagonizes the Northern Alliance
groups and turns them hostile. He won't want to
put all his eggs in the American basket, either,
since the US may find him expendable at some
point. Karzai needs time to maneuver and create a
new coalition that strengthens his standing.
What may have incensed the Northern
Alliance groups partly at least is that, despite
the chill in US-Pakistan relations, Washington has
kept the Pakistani military and Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) in the loop on the Qatar talks,
while blithely ignoring them as protagonists.
Nonetheless, interestingly, they made no critical
reference to Pakistan.
Unsurprisingly,
Islamabad is sitting tight. It refrains from
taking open stance on the proposed talks with the
Taliban in Qatar. At the same time, the ISI is on
the ball and its chief, Lieutenant General Ahmed
Shuja Pasha, even paid an overnight visit to
Qatar.
Pakistan would draw satisfaction
that Washington finally dropped its pre-conditions
for talks with the Taliban. Equally, Pakistan
would welcome any release of top Taliban figures
from Guantanamo. And Pakistan didn't put roadblock
when former mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
(who lives in Peshawar in Pakistan) deputed envoys
to Kabul to sound out the US and NATO officials
whether he too could be provided a seat at the
conference table in Qatar.
However,
Pakistan won't proffer an opinion on the prospects
of the talks, rather pretending it is all a matter
between Taliban leader Mullah Omar who is
quartered in Quetta in Pakistan and American
officials.
All this is being played
against the backdrop of the troubled US-Pakistani
relationship. Besides, the Taliban comprise
hopelessly fragmented factions and neither Mullah
Omar nor the Haqqani clan has yet commented on the
proposed talks in Qatar.
Pakistan can rest
on its oars that the ISI would be the only party
capable of shepherding the Taliban factions to
come on a united platform for talks, and the US
ultimately has no choice but to knock on its
doorstep seeking help.
As the Northern
Alliance groups see it, Pakistani strategy is to
wait out the period between now and 2014 - the
date set for the US troop withdrawal - and then
regroup the Taliban and make a bid to capture
power in Kabul. Their strong show of unity in
Berlin suggests that they will not roll over and
give way to an exclusive US-Taliban-Pakistan
settlement being imposed on their nation.
Their challenge to Barack Obama is to
concede for the Afghan people the very minimum
privilege of an Arab Spring so that Islamism can
reconcile with democracy - quintessentially,
expecting the US to be on the "right side of
history". It is not too much to ask for, really.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His
assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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