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Monday
Apr132009

Afghanistan Exclusive: US Talking to Insurgent Leader Hektamayar

hekmatayarLast November, Barack Obama's election as President overshadowed another story in The Washington Post:
As U.S. and NATO officials revamp their strategy in Afghanistan, a renegade Afghan commander could prove central to U.S. plans to rein in the insurgency through negotiations.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is a 61-year-old veteran of Afghanistan's three decades of war who gained infamy for rocketing his own capital during a brief stint as prime minister in the 1990s. More recently, his supporters have carried out several devastating attacks on the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

But with casualties among foreign forces at record highs, and domestic and international confidence in Karzai's government at an all-time low, U.S. and Afghan officials may have little choice but to grant Hekmatyar a choice seat at the bargaining table.

Five months later, those talks are happening.

US officials have been in discussions with a key Hekmatayar assistant, Daoud Abedi, an Afghan-American businessman based in California. Abedi told the Asia Times:
I was approached by the US government here and we did speak....I spoke to some people here and al-Hamdullilah [thank God] the results of the talks were positive....The purpose of those meetings was to see how we can bring peace Afghanistan and to make sure foreign troops leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.

Saying that this is a shift in US policy is a bit of an understatement. In the first years after the overthrow of the Taliban, the US military was intent on destroying Hekmatayar's group. Indeed, it tried to assassinate Hekmatayar was a "test case" for the US missile warfare now being carried out in northwest Pakistan: the Americans tried to assassinate him with a strike from an unmanned drone planes.

Now, however, Washington is prepared to overlook Hekmatayar's bloody period in power in the early 1990s. (The Washington Post reference to "rocketing his own capital" is another understatement, not mentioning the thousands who died during the fighting.) Put bluntly, the US can't find his group and the Taliban and other insurgents at the same time.

Whether or not Hekmatayar is "the great hope of all parties as the only Pashtun strongman untainted by al-Qaeda and possibly capable of taking on the Taliban", the US is trying to bring him inside the camp rather than fighting him outside it.

That, however, poses an immediate question and a tricker one down the road. Immediately, is the US hoping really hoping that Hekmatayar will "take on the Taliban"? Daoud Abedi is making clear that Hekmatayar wants the Taliban around the negotiating table:
Taliban are also the sons of Afghanistan. They are sacrificing for Afghanistan and for the freedom of Afghanistan so we are hopeful that they will give a positive answer to our request [to join talks] as well.

And beyond those talks, what would a US relationship with Hekmatayar mean for the Karzai Government or indeed any central government in Afghanistan? The current Afghan President is no friend of Hekmatayar; while Karzai has openly called for discussions with the Taliban, he has not included Hekmatayar's group in those statements.

This, however, may be a trivial enquiry compared to the pointedly immediate: the US military "surge" cannot face down all the insurgents that it faces. So Hekmatayar, formerly one of the most wanted US targets, has once again become an acceptable political leader.

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