Negotiations: On, Off, Never Happened, Doomed, Only Hope

The story of US/Karzai government negotiations with members of the Taliban have already taken so many twists (mostly rhetorical rather than substantive) that one should not feel ashamed to be confused as to what exactly is going on between the two warring parties. One second the Obama administration admits (Gates) to ongoing negotiations and the next second it denies (Holbrooke) that anything close to ‘negotiations’ is happening. I’m afraid whether or not the Obama and Karzai administrations have a coherent negotiation strategy in place, we in the public will largely be held in the dark or at best, able make educated guesses.

Anyhoo, there can still be worthwhile efforts to analyze the possible prospects for success or failure in these possibly ongoing negotiations and FPA’s own Rob Grace uses the Soviet Union’s efforts in the 1980s to paint a pessimistic picture:

The effort to reach a political accommodation with the Taliban is underway.  Unfortunately, though, signs indicate that the endeavor will fail.  We can learn some valuable lessons from the Soviet effort of the 1908’s.  In 1987, Soviet Colonel Dmitry Timofeevich Yazov wrote a letter to the USSR’s Defense Minister criticizing, among other things, Afghanistan’s “national reconciliation” effort (you can download the letter here).  Yazov enumerated seven factors that led to the failure of the national reconciliation effort, and many of them apply to the current situation.

1. The masses didn’t support national reconciliation because they didn’t support the central government.  Similarly, today, according to a Pentagon report released earlier this year, the majority of Afghanistan’s population is either neutral toward or supports the insurgency.

2. No decisive actions were taken. It’s too early to tell whether this point applies, as the current reconciliation effort is merely months old, if we consider as its official beginning Karzai’s peace jirga last June.  However, it seems likely that Karzai is not actually taking the steps necessary to make progress.  As Caroline Wadhams of Afpak wrote earlier this year, “The plan avoids tackling the political grievances that drive the insurgency… This flies in the face of numerous assessments of the insurgency that indicate that fighters join the insurgency for more complex reasons than job opportunities.  Many have joined due to their anger with the Afghan government, which they perceive as corrupt, illegitimate, and predatory.”

Read the rest of Rob’s 7 reasons these modern day Afghanistan reconciliation attempts will likely fail just as the Soviet’s did three decades ago.

Rob pessimism is soundly based and the likelihood of a lasting, meaningful settlement between the Karzai government and influential leaders of the Taliban-led insurgency is thin. However, as hard as it may be to imagine, I think it possible that a substantive military victories  by the US alliance in the Taliban’s stronghold in the south and east along with a stabilization of the security in the country’s north (both challenging endeavors to say the least) might force enough insurgent leaders to come to the negotiating table ready to deal. Of course, if these insurgents and the Afghan people they hold sway over (voluntarily and forcefully) believe that the US and their European allies are jumping ship (caravaning out?) starting in 2011 (i.e. July 2011 announced time line by the Obama administration) than this positive outcome looks even less likely.