Lesson of Afghanistan? That you can, after all, bomb your way to the negotiating table

It’s not just soldiers who risk their lives in Afghanistan. Anyone who enters the country’s judicial service becomes an assassination target. Only last week, six Afghan judges were killed by a suicide bomb outside Kabul’s Supreme Court. A Taleban spokesman said they had been ‘sentenced to death’ for playing an ‘important role’ in ‘legalising the infidels’. Such attacks have killed over 3,000 civilians in Afghanistan so far this year, according to the United Nations. Of these, some 600 were children.

Barack Obama’s administration invites us this week to welcome the prospect of peace talks between the Taleban and Hamid Karzai’s government as a sign of progress. It is hard to be optimistic when you consider how the Taleban still operates. Its murder rate is soaring; assassinations by insurgents are up 40 per cent so far this year. It has seen off the Americans and British, whose troops handed over control security to the under-equipped Afghan military on Tuesday. Next year, Allied troops will withdraw. The Taleban has found that violence works; if you persist with it long enough, you may bomb your way to the negotiating table.

It is difficult to recall that the Taleban- were once regarded as ‘good rebels’ deserving of western arms and support. The Taleban’s lineage can be traced to the Mujahideen, who were armed by the US to fight a Soviet-backed leader. Certainly, the argument went at the time, their ideals were not the same as those of the West, but arming them was a cheap way of influencing a foreign war without losing western lives or putting boots on the ground. It was effective, too — but in arming the so-called ‘good rebels’, we created a monster.