Afghanistan

                       Growing contacts With the Taliban

The Western governments involved in Afghanistan have taken a lesson from the deal Pakistan made with the Taliban-backed tribal elders in its North Waziristan region in September 2006 and are following in its footsteps, comments Vishal Chandra

  A recent report in the British media that agents of the British secret service, MI6, held secret talks with the Taliban insurgents should not come as a surprise. There have been various instances of international interactions with the Taliban, both prior to and after 2001. Although publicly criticised and later ostracised via international sanctions for their anomalous interpretation of Islam and codes of social norms, Taliban rulers still had foreign delegations visiting them and maintained offices outside of Afghanistan, especially in the US. Even after 9/11, the US tried to convince the Taliban that there would be no invasion of Afghanistan if they handed over senior Al-Qaeda figures like Osama bin Laden.
   The campaigners of the ‘war on terror’ were also more focused on tackling the al-Qaeda leadership than obliterating the Taliban.
   Although the Taliban were not part of the UN-brokered negotiations among disparate Afghan groups at Bonn in early December 2001, the thesis of ‘moderate’ Taliban being included in the political process soon began to be heard. Pakistan, despite having officially reversed its Afghan policy soon after 9/11, simultaneously argued in favour of their inclusion in the new setup at Kabul. There were even reports in 2002 of attempts being made to carve out a faction of moderates from within the Taliban possibly headed by mujahideen commander Jalal-ud Din Haqqani. This could not have been possible without the knowledge and consent of the US Administration.
   Subsequently, the national peace and reconciliation commission was formed to wean away sections of the Taliban through offers of amnesty and rehabilitation. As part of his ongoing efforts to absorb some of the surrendered Taliban elements, President Hamid Karzai nominated some of them to the upper house or the Meshrano Jirga of the newly formed Afghan Parliament in 2005. In fact Karzai remained persistent in his appeal to the Taliban and other anti-government groups like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami to participate in the ongoing peace process.
   The potential threat to Kabul from the Taliban recuperating along and across the Durand Line in the tribal areas of Pakistan in the wake of the Iraq War in 2003 continued to be deliberately trivialised until the West began to acknowledge, in 2006, the reinvigoration of this fundamentalist Islamic group.

  It was only towards the end of 2005 and in 2006 that US Coalition and the NATO forces launched a series of operations to check a strengthened Taliban. At the same time ISAF British commanders entered into a pact or a deal with local leaders in the Taliban-infested Musa Qala district of the Helmand Province in October 2006.
   One month before the Musa Qala deal, Pakistan had made a somewhat similar deal with the Taliban-backed tribal elders in its North Waziristan region on 5 September 2006. The British Minister of State for Foreign and             Commonwealth Affairs, Kim Howells, had termed the deal as ‘a good example for Afghanistan’ during his visit to Islamabad in September 2006. However, the policy was clearly of military action against the Taliban guerrillas combined with reconciliatory moves towards lower and middle level Taliban elements.
   Terms such as ‘reconciliation’, ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘co-option’ are not clearly defined and keep changing. The Afghan government tries to maintain a distinction between ‘moderate’ Taliban and pro-Al-Qaeda Taliban hardliners, but that has not prevented invitations to Mullah Omar and other top Taliban leaders for peace talks. This sends a very conflicting message to the average Afghan, but certainly not to the Taliban cadre.
   The Taliban insurgency feeds on certain factors and conditions prevailing in Afghanistan and its immediate neighbourhood. It will take more than a decade of sustained commitment to eliminate or moderate these factors. Wrecked by decades long civil war, with rudimentary political and economic institutions, and depending on an externally sponsored security apparatus that may be withdrawn or scaled down any time soon, Afghanistan feels pressurised to negotiate with the Taliban.
   Since 2001 the level of violence and opium production has been consistently growing in Afghanistan. A determined effort to break the nexus between insurgent groups and drug lords would not only complicate the delicate peace process but would also require additional resources and greater support from the people. In Pakistan, which is supposedly the United States’ main regional ally in its ‘war on terror’, the influence of the Taliban has been swelling in the tribal agencies of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and in the country’s domestic politics. The recent killing of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is a sinister pointer to this.
   In this given scenario, the agents and commanders of certain Western forces engaged in southern Afghanistan are more likely to negotiate with the local tribal leaders, often Taliban-backed or themselves Taliban, to secure some semblance of peace. They have already been using tribal networks to keep the Taliban guerrillas at bay and minimise collateral damage. The priority now is to infuse a sense of urgency to containing the Taliban insurgency lest the Afghan people are thoroughly disillusioned with their government and the Western forces supporting it. For Western governments, growing casualties of their troops in Afghanistan will make it that much more difficult to justify to their peoples the importance of the United States’ ‘war on terror’. They have a tough balancing act to play, between rising domestic pressure to withdraw the troops and the international and organisational pressure as NATO member-states for a greater commitment to the Afghan mission.

Vishal Chandra is Associate Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. The views expressed are his own.

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