Will Target and Talk Work? On the Possibility of Bringing Back Mid-Level Talib to the Negotiating Table

NATO’s Afghanistan force ISAF has been strategically bombing rushedly discovered Taliban and Al Qaeda locations for some time now.  This scaled up move is designed to get the Taliban leadership to the negotiating table.  No doubt, apart from major disruptive turns away from the chosen path, the strategy is understood to be working.  ISAF is targeting mid-level Taliban leadership, its operations arm–more than 300 Taliban have been killed, it is claimed– in order to create a vacuum that cuts off direct coordination between both handlers and armed foot-soldiers and the Quetta based leadership, comfortably ensconced in Pakistan, and the battle ready, tactile operational commanders.  The question is: will this work?

Since the foot soldiers know next to nothing about their overlords in Pakistan, cutting off the middle-men, so it is hoped, cuts off any working relationship between the Taliban leaders who broadly direct the war in Pakistan and those who fight in Afghanistan.  Moreover, taking out the lower rung, forces the higher ups to reconsider their chances of survival the next time they crawl inside an armored vehicle, the middle car in a caravan to nowhere.

Furthermore those Taliban middle-managers who have not been killed are being invited to come out and reconcile with the Kabul government as long as they renounce arms, renounce Al Qaeda and swear fealty to the Constitution of Afghanistan. This moment in time is a both a precarious one and one pregnant with the possibility of the start of a negotiated solution to this ongoing war.  The governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan seem ready to discuss whatever terms are in play with the Taliban. No doubt, behind the scenes, a dizzyingly varied set of terms are on the table.  Again: will this work?

Consider the following passage lifted directly from yesterday’s (October 16, 2010) online edition of the New York Times.  “As part of the militants’ unusual, though often convincing strategy, Awakening members that Al Qaeda (in Mesopotamia) fails to kill are then sought out to rejoin the insurgency. They are offered larger paychecks than their $300 a month government pay and told that they would be far safer.”

This does not seem at all different than what the ISAF has been doing to break the insurgency in Afghanistan.  However, Al Qaeda’s move is much more convincing than any planned move in Afghanistan.  In both cases, the idea is to compel cooperation through violence; a strong showing of fire-power to point to a counterfactual that lies just beyond laying down arms.  However there is a push, pull effect in Iraq.  The Shia government is pushing out the members of the Sunni Awakening and, through more than casual argument, into the arms of the Sunni insurgency.

There is no such viable push/pull effect in Afghanistan.  The Kabul government has yet to figure out a way to pull Taliban fighters out of the sunni insurgency, a nationalist affair than an ethnic one.  Certainly, there is no push away from the Taliban itself since, until recently, the Taliban paid better wages than the Afghan military– although news reports suggest that there is a natural cleavage between more globalist Al Qaeda and the more locally grounded Taliban.  So barring a massive natural break from the Taliban co-op and its Al Qaeda friends, ISAF forces seems ready to kill any recalcitrant Talib. Happily killing as many Talib happens to be a fairly well-accepted strategy in the War in any case.

Reconciliation will take time. Years.  A few years to hash out the possibility of talks.  A few years of talks to hash out a power sharing agreement.  A few years of hashing out that agreement during which time, each partisan to teh debate will try to cower the other with violence.  The move today, now, is to bring about the conditions that Kabul, Islamabad and the Taliban meet and actually conduct a meaningful dialogue.  At this point, even with a stepped up bombing campaign, it seems unlikely that targeted killings will move Talib to come down from the mountains and to a seat at a bargaining table in Kabul.

At this point it is too costly for most Taliban to renounce violence–social concentration in the Talib community and a regular paycheck provide sufficient incentive to go on fighting.  For now there is little reason to suppose the current will turn into anything but another fight.

(I’ll soon have some thoughts on a plausible mechanism that might be employed to marshal the argument that bombing will only strengthen the Taliban resolve to continue fighting.)