Afghanistan Newsflash: US & Peace Talks Far from "Victory" (Exum)

Andrew Exum writes for Foreign Policy:

For the past two weeks, reputable U.S. and British newspapers have been filled with articles touting progress in negotiations between the government in Kabul and Afghanistan's major insurgent groups. On Oct. 20, for example, the New York Times reported that Afghan reconciliation talks "involve extensive, face-to-face discussions with Taliban commanders from the highest levels of the group's leadership." These articles have been accompanied by optimistic reports that the United States and its NATO allies have decimated the Taliban's leadership in southern Afghanistan.

As someone who has fought in Afghanistan on two occasions and served briefly as a civilian advisor to the NATO command group there in 2009, I hope the reports are true. The idea that an end to the fighting in Afghanistan and the involvement of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the country might be just around the corner is seductive. However, there is good reason to be skeptical of the reporting coming out of Kabul and Washington.

Civil wars and insurgencies such as the one in Afghanistan usually end through some kind of negotiated settlement between the antagonists. The United States' war-weary public is clearly eager to bring the majority of U.S. troops home, and the NATO command in Afghanistan has prioritized reconciliation just as much as fighting the Taliban and training the Afghan national security forces. Much time has been spent determining both the red lines of NATO and its Afghan partners and those areas in which they could compromise with the insurgent groups.

But Afghans are perfectly comfortable talking while still fighting. So too, at least in practice, are the United States and its allies: In insurgencies from Vietnam to Northern Ireland, we have negotiated with insurgents while combat operations were ongoing. In the American public's mind, however, wars take place sequentially: First, you fight; second, you negotiate a settlement. The word "negotiations" conjures up hopes for an end to the conflict in the minds of Americans and other Westerners -- when all that really might be occurring is another round of jockeying for position between Afghanistan's warring political forces.

U.S. President Barack Obama, who carried out an otherwise responsible review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan in the fall of 2009, blundered when he publicly announced that the United States would begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2011. Within the ranks of Afghanistan's insurgent groups and even among our allies and the civilians in the country, this date was interpreted to mean that a total withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces was imminent. No insurgent group, to paraphrase defense analyst Stephen Biddle, was about to accept a loaf of bread when the bakery was on offer. Why would the Taliban and other insurgent groups negotiate when the United States was on its way out already?

The problem of Afghanistan's varied insurgent groups also complicates reconciliation talks. Of the three principal insurgent groups, only Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) might be considered ripe for any kind of reconciliation with the government in Kabul. But the HIG is arguably the least significant of the major insurgent groups, and even then, Gulbuddin himself would not likely be allowed to play a role in an Afghan government.

Of the other two groups, the Haqqani network, under the leadership of Sirajuddin Siraj Haqqani, maintains strong ties to al Qaeda and is considered more or less irreconcilable, while the Quetta Shura Taliban is thought to be reconcilable only if Mullah Mohammed Omar himself approves of the reconciliation process. The insurgents in Afghanistan are no more unitary an actor than the Afghan government or the NATO coalition, further complicating negotiations.

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