U.S. "Choosing to get" Afghanistan "fundamentally wrong"

By Steve Hynd

Derrick and Robert have already written about the new report today from resident Afghanistan analysts Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Keuhn (PDF here) which says that the Taliban insurgency there didn't have to happen but that US dismissiveness in 2002 prevented reconciliation then and that Petraeus' current tactics are preventing reconcilliation now. The report's conclusion, as Carlotta Gall puts it in the New York Times, is that "the Afghan Taliban have been wrongly perceived as close ideological allies of Al Qaeda, and they could be persuaded to renounce the global terrorist group."

Our Newshoggers colleague Gareth Porter has a fine piece today for his main gig at IPS looking at the 2002 Bush administration failure to accept offers of reconcilliation, and noting that veteran journalist Anand Gopal had reported exactly the same story from his own sources last year.

Citing an unidentified former Taliban official who participated in the decision, they report that the entire senior Taliban political leadership met in Pakistan in November 2002 to consider an offer of reconciliation with the new Afghan government in which they would "join the political process" in Afghanistan.

"We discussed whether to join the political process in Afghanistan or not and we took a decision that, yes, we should go and join the process," the former Taliban leader told the co-authors.

They cite an interlocutor who was then in contact with the Taliban leadership as recalling that they would have returned to Afghanistan to participate in the political system if they had been given an assurance they would not be arrested.

...The entire senior Taliban leadership, meeting in Karachi, "agreed in principle to find a way for them to return to Afghanistan and abandon the fight", Gopal wrote, but the initiative was frustrated by the unwillingness of the United States and the Afghan government to provide any assurance that they would not arrested and detained.

The Taliban continued to pursue the possibility of reconciliation in subsequent years, with apparent interest on the part of the Karzai government, according to Gopal. Delegations "representing large sections of the Taliban leadership" traveled to Kabul in both 2003 and 2004 to meet with senior government officials, according to his account.

But the George W. Bush administration remained uninterested in offering assurances of security to the Taliban.

Robert Grenier, then the CIA station chief in Islamabad, revealed in an article in al Jazeera Jan. 31, 2010 that former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil had been serving as an intermediary with the Taliban on their possible return to Afghanistan in 2002 when he was "arrested and imprisoned for his pains".

That the war and occupation of a country on the far fringe of American interests could have been over seven years ago, with the concommitant saving of thousands of US and Afghan lives, as well as enough money to make an actual dent in the budget deficit, is a shocking realization. But even more shocking is the realization that the US military is actively working to prepetuate the conflict for purely self-serving ends.

Joshua Foust notes this passage from the Strick van Linschoten/ Felix Keuhn report:

The campaign to target the mid and high-ranking leadership appears to be a key part of the U.S. strategy against the Taliban at the moment.19 Its impact has been felt. As the older generation decreases in size, the vacant positions and power vacuum are filled by two groups from younger generations: the clerics and bureaucrats involved in the Taliban�s government during the 1990s and an even younger set of commanders. These newer generations are potentially a more serious threat. With little or no memory of Afghan society prior to the Soviet war in the 1980s, this new generation of commanders is more ideologically motivated and less nationalistic than previous generations, and therefore less pragmatic. It is not interested in negotiations or compromise with foreigners.

And writes (emphasis mine):

Sadly, this is precisely what ISAF wants to do. By fracturing the movement, by decapitating it or nearly doing so, ISAF leadership hopes to force the Taliban to relent to their demands. Alex and Felix�s concerns are very real, and they should be troubling, but they also implicitly highlight one of the fundamental flaws in ISAF�s strategy: it is not a political one. What little strategy there is is purely militaristic: focused on grabbing territory and killing baddies. The very conceit behind the HVT targeting campaign is a rejection of politics and compromise�and the idea that ISAF will have to give anything for the sake of peace.

Which is why, no matter how well argued the report, it just won�t change any minds. The issues of evil, of America deciding who is best for Afghanistan, and of long-term risk management are wrapped up in so many emotions simple logic won�t unravel them. Entire careers ride on the casual assumption that all Taliban are therefore al Qaeda; that all militancy in Afghanistan is the same. Soldiers and Marines who come back from the field know this is not the case�that most of the people they fight are locals fighting for local reasons. But that basic truth, that our own leadership is choosing to get the war fundamentally wrong, just isn�t filtering upward.

It was only last month that Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network created a small storm in Afghan discussion circles by charging that the happy-talk from Petraeus' camp about success there was simply a "media and communication strategy" focussed on international preceptions rather than honest reporting about reality on the ground, and that "the gap between what policymakers believe privately and what they propagate in public is so vast that it must hurt their brains (not to mention their conscience)". Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Keuhn have done a valuable service by not only pointing out that a political deal is possible but showing that US generals are determined to stymie any such deal for reasons having to do with careerist ambitions, with Washington policymakers willing co-conspirators for their own selfish domestic political ends.

But as Joshua writes, unless we make a stink about such stuff it will not impact upon US policymaking. Be they politicians or pundits, think-tankers or journalists, the "serious people" inside the Beltway cannot accept any variation on the word "defeat". The loss of worldview, of prestige and personal pride - and most importantly for many the loss of votes from the American people they've been selling the Washington Rules to for too many years - make that a non-starter. And so we're treated to a non-sensical policy of escalation and prolongment that might be subtitled "desperately seeking every which way but lose" which even so ends up as an intensely negative result. It's cowardice of the most venal and self-serving sort. Still, as long as it can be labelled a draw or a win, that's ok by them.