- guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 July 2010
The Obama administration is revising its Afghanistan strategy to embrace the idea of negotiating with senior members of the Taliban through third parties – a policy it had previously been lukewarm towards.
Negotiation with the Taliban has long been advocated by Hamid Karzai, the Afghanistan president, and the British and Pakistan governments, but resisted by the US.
The Guardian has learned that while the official position of the US government is still resistant to the idea of talks with Taliban leaders, behind the scenes a shift is under way, and Washington is now encouraging Karzai to take a lead in such negotiations.
"There is a change of mindset in DC," a senior official in Washington said. "There is no military solution. That means you have to find something else. There was something missing." The missing element is talks with the Taliban leadership, the official added.
The US rethink comes in the aftermath of the departure in June of General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan Barack Obama, apparently frustrated at the way the war is going, reminded his national security advisers that while he was on the election campaign trail in 2008, he had advocated talking to America's enemies.
A US review of Afghanistan policy is under way, and is due for completionin December, but officials in Washington, Kabul and Islamabad with knowledge of internal discussions said feelers have already been put out. Negotiations would be conducted largely in secret, through a web of contacts, involving governments such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or organisations with back-channel links to the Taliban.
"It will be messy and could take years," said a diplomatic source.
The change of heart by the US comes as Afghanistan hosts the biggest international gathering in the capital for 40 years, with representatives from 60 countries and dignitaries including the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
The dominant theme of the Kabul conference is 'reintegration', reaching out to low-level insurgents to encourage them to lay down their arms.
Earlier this year, outlining US policy, the state department special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, made a distinction between 'reintegration', which the US supported, and 'reconciliation', negotiation with senior members of the Taliban. "Let me be clear,"Holbrooke said, "there is no American involvement in any reconciliation process."
There is growing disenchantment with the war in the US and senators on the foreign relations committee last week grilled Holbrooke over what they described as lack of clarity on the part of the Obama administration on an exit strategy.
The US has no agreed position on who among the leaders of the insurgency should be wooed and who would be regarded as beyond the pale. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, would be a problem given he provided Osama bin Laden with bases in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks. The US would also find it problematic to deal with the Pakistan-based insurgents led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose group pioneered suicide attacks in Afghanistan. The third main element in the insurgency is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a jihaidst supporter who has hinted he is ready to break ranks.
A source with knowledge of the process said: "There is no agreed US position but there is agreement that Karzai should lead on this. They would expect the Pakistanis to deliver the Haqqani network in any internal settlement."
The US has laid down basic conditions for any group seeking negotiation: end any ties with al-Qaida; end violence; and accept the Afghanistan constitution.
A senior Pakistani diplomat said: "The US needs to be negotiating with the Taliban, those Taliban with no links to al-Qaida. We need a power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan and it will have to be negotiated with all the parties.
"The Afghan government is already talking to all the shareholders‚ the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Mullah Omar. The Americans have been setting ridiculous preconditions for talks. You can't lay down such preconditions when you are losing."
Some Afghan policy specialists are sceptical about whether negotiations will succeed. Peter Bergen, a specialist on Afghanistan and al-Qaida, speaking at a seminar in Washington last week organised by the United States Institute of Peace, listed a host of problems, not least why the Taliban should enter into negotiations "when they think they are winning".
Audrey Kurth Cronin, a member of the US National War College faculty in Washington and author of How Terrorism Ends, said talks with Mullah Omar and the Haqqani network were pointless because there would be no negotiable terms.
She said there could be talks with Hekmatyar, but these would be conducted through backchannels by a third party. "It would be unreasonable to expect the US and UK to do so," she said, given his support for jihad.
Asked how Obama's Afghan strategy was progressing, a senior former US government official familiar with the latest Pentagon thinking said: "In a word, poorly. We seriously need to be developing a revised plan of action that will allow us a chance to achieve sufficient security in a more sustainable manner."
Officials have mentioned possible roles in negotiation for the United Nations and figures such as the veteran UN negotiator, the Algerian Lahkdar Brahimi, who heads, along with the retired US ambassador Thomas Pickering, a New York-based international panel established this year that is looking at such a reconciliation.
Another name mentioned is Michael Semple, an Irishman based in Boston at Harvard's Kennedy School who has extensive ties with the Taliban. Really!!!