Writing for Foreign Policy, Gilles Dorronsoro looks over the political and military strategy discussed at last week’s London Conference between Afghan leaders and “Western” powers and comes away unimpressed:
Washington, Paris and Berlin made their best efforts to keep up appearances during last week’s Afghanistan conference here, but the gap between official rhetoric and reality could not have been wider. Participants called for reintegrating members of the Taliban who accept the Afghan constitution, enacting measures against government corruption, and building more regional cooperation.
Yet the coalition is systematically undermining what’s left of the Afghan state. The New York Times reports that the Shinwari tribes have agreed to fight the Taliban — in exchange for about $1 million. What’s lesser known and less understood is that Washington didn’t even feel obligated to notify the Karzai government of this decision.
One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.
On the surface, it would seem unlikely that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who presides over a politically feeble government and is highly dependent on the U.S. military presence and economic assistance, would defy the United States on the issue of peace negotiations with the leadership of the Taliban insurgency.
But a long-simmering conflict between Karzai and key officials of the Barack Obama administration over that issue came to a head at last week’s London Conference, when the Afghan president refused to heed U.S. signals to back off his proposal to invite the Taliban leaders to participate in a nationwide peace conference.
The peace negotiations issue is imbedded in a deeper conflict over U.S. war strategy, which has provoked broad anger and increasing suspicions of U.S. motives among Afghans, including Karzai himself.
The current source of tension is Karzai’s proposal, first made last November, to invite Taliban leaders – including Mullah Omar – to a national “Loya Jirga” or “Grand Council” meeting aimed at achieving a peace agreement.
Radio Azadi reports in Dari Persian that center-right Pakistani politician and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif says that the Pakistani government should initiate the reconciliation talks with the Taliban.
As the London Conference convened on Pakistan and Afghanistan on Thursday, Turkish officials Pakiistani and Afghan counterparts. That was the fourth tripartite meeting for a regional initiative for Afghanistan since Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu took office.
In an interview with the Turkish channel NTV, Davutoglu set out Turkey’s approach toward Afghanistan’s future. He defined explained Afghanistan’s importance for Turkey: stability and political balance in Asia, Turkey’s mission in the country as part of a NATO force, and the historical friendship between Ankara and Kabul. Turkey has pursued a “safety zone” in Afghanistan, providing $200 million in economic aid.
Asked about an opportunity to the Taliban to play a role in Afghanistan’s future, Davutoglu supported a political arrangement that covers all groups and minorities, even if they are armed militants. He asserteded that such a strategy will engage the Afghan people, who have a say in the defence, stability, and security of their country.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s very cautiously-worded support for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban leadership, in an interview published Monday, is only the first public signal of a policy decision by the Barack Obama administration to support a political settlement between the Hamid Karzai regime and the Taliban, an official of McChrystal’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has revealed in an interview with IPS.
Speaking to the Financial Times, McChrystal couched his position on negotiations in terms of an abstract support for negotiated settlements of wars, saying, “I believe that a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome.” The ISAF commander avoided a direct answer to the question of whether the Taliban could play a role in a future Afghan government.
When pressed by the interviewer on the issue, McChrystal would only say that “any Afghan can play a role if they focus on the future and not the past”.
The ISAF official, who spoke with IPS on condition that he would not be named, was much more candid about the centrality of peace negotiations with the Taliban leadership in the Obama administration’s strategy in Afghanistan and about the understanding of the ISAF command that the Taliban leadership is independent of al Qaeda and is already positioning itself for a political settlement.
Then in the latter half of last year detailed studies of the drones began to appear. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann first looked at the growth in the number of drone strikes in Pakistan. Then they analyzed the casualties from drone attacks in an effort to determine how many civilians were being killed in the strikes. They concluded that of the 750 to 1050 killed by drones between 2006 and October 2009, one third were civilians. Chiming in the same month was journalist Jane Mayer who in a lengthy and thoughtful piece in The New Yorker examined the expansion of drone attacks by the Obama administration, including their effectiveness, and legality.
The statistics related to the drones are startling. Since Barack Obama took office, there have been 58 drone strikes in Pakistan. This is 32 more strikes than occurred in the entire second term of the Bush Administration and represents nearly 70 percent of all drone attacks that have occurred in Pakistan since 2004. Below are statistics drawn from an effort to map out the location of the strikes using Google Earth.
Writing for Foreign Policy, Gilles Dorronsoro looks over the political and military strategy discussed at last week’s London Conference between Afghan leaders and “Western” powers and comes away unimpressed:
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