This is likely to shake things up. Steve Coll, who tends to be pretty impeccably sourced, reports in the New Yorker that Washington has begun to talk to the Taliban:
Last year, however, as the U.S.-led Afghan ground war passed its ninth anniversary, and Mullah Omar remained in hiding, presumably in Pakistan, a small number of officials in the Obama Administration—among them the late Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—argued that it was time to try talking to the Taliban again.
Holbrooke’s final diplomatic achievement, it turns out, was to see this advice accepted. The Obama Administration has entered into direct, secret talks with senior Afghan Taliban leaders, several people briefed about the talks told me last week. The discussions are continuing; they are of an exploratory nature and do not yet amount to a peace negotiation. That may take some time: the first secret talks between the United States and representatives of North Vietnam took place in 1968; the Paris Peace Accords, intended to end direct U.S. military involvement in the war, were not agreed on until 1973.
Coll thinks this risky-but-unavoidable:
[T]he Obama Administration has understandably concluded that the status quo is untenable. The war has devolved into a strategic stalemate: urban Afghan populations enjoy reasonable security, millions of schoolgirls are back in class, Al Qaeda cannot operate, and the Taliban cannot return to power, yet in the provinces ethnic militias and criminal gangs still husband weapons, cadge international funds, and exploit the weak. Neither the United States nor the Taliban can achieve its stated aims by arms alone, and the Administration lacks a sure way to preserve the gains made while reducing its military presence, as it must, for fiscal, political, and many other reasons.
If giving peace talks a chance can decrease the violence and shrink the Afghan battlefield by twenty or even ten per cent, President Obama will have calculated correctly: even a partly successful negotiation might help create political conditions that favor the reduction of American forces to a more sustainable level. A Taliban-endorsed ceasefire, to build confidence around long-term talks supported by many international governments, might also be conceivable.
Do read the whole (short) thing. Might is always a pretty big word in Afghanistan but as Coll suggests there may be few better options. If the war can’t be “won” it has to be managed in such a way as to make it tough to “lose” either. But stalemate is a time-limited strategy too. Confronted by a strategic battlefield impasse and an unpersuaded, in fact increasingly sceptical, public you can understand why Barack Obama – and David Cameron too – would like to find some, but not quite any, way out. That’s still a long way ahead, of course, but it would seem to be the road we’re on.
Comments