By Steve Hynd
There's something not quite right going on when Afghan President Hamid Karzai is heavily quoted by Joshua Partlow of the Washington Post calling for a reduction in NATO's military footprint that everyone paying attention has known was on the cards anyway since at least January. You have to wonder who his words are aimed at.
"The time has come to reduce military operations," Karzai said. "The time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan . . . to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life."
..."It's not desirable for the Afghan people either to have 100,000 or more foreign troops going around the country endlessly," he said.
"We'd like to have a long-term relationship with America, a substantial relationship with America, that's what the Afghan people want. But we'd like the Afghan countryside - villages, homes, towns - not to be so overwhelmed with the military presence. Life has to be seen [as] more normal," he added.
Partlow writes that such a position "placed him at odds with U.S. commander Gen. David H. Petraeus" and seem to be at odds with the Obama administration's new 2014 date for an end to combat operations. But that just isn't true and Partlow should know that.
Back in January, at the London Conference on Afghanistan, a strategy was agreed; "a phased process to take over responsibility for security at provincial level" which would begin in 2011 and take a few years to complete. That's exactly what Karzai is asking for - and is exactly what NATO's Lisbon conference next week is expected to endorse. Partlow's WaPo colleague Karen DeYoung writes:
The Obama administration and its NATO allies will declare late this week that the war in Afghanistan has made sufficient progress to begin turning security control over to its government by spring, months before the administration's July deadline to start withdrawing U.S. troops, according to U.S. and European officials.
Even as it announces the "transition" process, which will not immediately include troop withdrawals, NATO will also state its intention to keep combat troops in Afghanistan until 2014, a date originally set by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Your mileage on whether that strategy is a good one may vary wildly - from thinking the US should plan to stay the course right through to advocating immediate withdrawal - but there's no question but the plan was already to give Karzai what he's now asking for.
Ditto on Karzai's call, in Partlow's piece, for negotiations with the Taliban.
On the issue of negotiations with the Taliban, Karzai said that he met with Taliban leaders in "one or two" meetings about three months ago, but that the talks were in a nascent stage and amounted to little more than "the exchange of desires for peace."
He would not name the insurgents he has met but described them as "very high" level, and said that he believed that Taliban leader Mohammad Omar has been informed of the discussions.
"They feel the same way as we do here. That too many people are suffering for no reason. Their own families are suffering," he said, and it is this "national suffering they'd like to address with us.
The London Conference in January urged the Afghan government "to hold dialogue with insurgent leaders who are prepared to accept Afghanistan�s constitution and who have no ties to terror networks such as al-Qaeda. In return, Afghanistan�s allies will provide funds to support the initiative." There's been no indication that the Lisbon summit will do other than endorse that process and even call for "faster, please".
Even the Taliban recognise that everything's going according to the London plan.
Among the most important of recent political messages was one attributed to the Afghan Taliban's reclusive, one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, in September.
It assures Afghans of good governance, a Taliban government run by a consultative body based on "talent and honesty" and spoke of unity and the rights of tribes and women.
During their austere five years in power, the Taliban denied women the right to work outside the home and made them wear the all-enveloping burqa, drawing wide international criticism.
Omar's message even spoke of the need to address pollution and to combat the trade in illegal drugs. Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world's opium used to produce heroin, an illicit trade that helps fund the insurgency.
Much of this isn't about the actual reality on the ground - where despite Petraeus' staff's pronouncements about areas cleared and commanders captured the Taliban continue to operate and the killed/captured numbers just don't add up. Instead, it's about manufacturing a perceived reality where everyone can at least claim not to have lost. The deep divisions in Afghan society will be papered over, just as in Iraq, and when the cracks finally widen again and Afghan society explodes into a new cycle of violence it will be the pesky Afghan peoples' fault for disregarding the opportunities given by the West invading and upsetting the apple cart.
Still, to claim Karzai is "at odds" with the Western plan is highly misleading. At worst, he's getting ready to claim some of the short-term political credit for a papering over the cracks that has been planned for the best part of a year.
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