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OCTOBER 28, 2008
.U.S. Mulls Talks With Taliban in Bid to Quell Afghan Unrest
Gen. Petraeus Backs Effort to Win Over Some Elements of GroupBy YOCHI J. DREAZEN, SIOBHAN GORMAN and JAY SOLOMON
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. is actively considering talks with elements of the Taliban, the armed Islamist group that once ruled Afghanistan and sheltered al Qaeda, in a major policy shift that would have been unthinkable a few months ago.
Senior White House and military officials believe that engaging some levels of the Taliban -- while excluding top leaders -- could help reverse a pronounced downward spiral in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. Both countries have been destabilized by a recent wave of violence.
The outreach is a draft recommendation in a classified White House assessment of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, according to senior Bush administration officials. The officials said that the recommendation calls for the talks to be led by the Afghan central government, but with the active participation of the U.S.
The idea is supported by Gen. David Petraeus, who will assume responsibility this week for U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gen. Petraeus used a similar approach in Iraq, where a U.S. push to enlist Sunni tribes in the fight against al Qaeda in Iraq helped sharply reduce the country's violence. Gen. Petraeus earlier this month publicly endorsed talks with less extreme Taliban elements.
The final White House recommendations, which could differ from the draft, are not expected until after next month's elections. The next administration wouldn't be compelled to implement them. But the support of Gen. Petraeus, the highly regarded incoming head of the U.S. Central Command, could help ensure that the policy is put in place regardless of who wins next month's elections.
The proposed policy appears to strike rare common ground with both presidential candidates. Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama has said he thinks talks with the Taliban should be considered and has advocated shifting more military forces to Afghanistan. Republican contender Sen. John McCain supports, as part of his strategy, reaching out to tribal leaders in an effort to separate "the reconcilable elements of the insurgency from the irreconcilable elements of the insurgency," Randy Scheunemann, the campaign's top foreign-policy adviser, said Monday.
The U.S. policy review is taking place against the backdrop of ongoing talks between Taliban sympathizers and Afghan government officials. The negotiations, which have been held in recent weeks in Saudi Arabia and moderated by Saudi officials, have primarily involved former Taliban members who have since left the armed group. But a U.S. official said some of the discussions have included current Taliban members and others with close ties to the group's leadership.
Mutual Distrust
U.S. talks would have to overcome years of mutual distrust, a U.S. policy that has favored arrest rather than outreach, and some doubts over whether participants on the Taliban side would be credible. But the possibility of U.S. talks with Taliban officials comes amid a wholesale restructuring of American policy in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The U.S. has endorsed a Pakistani move to arm thousands of anti-Taliban fighters along the country's porous border with Afghanistan, and senior American officials say they are considering creating similar local militias in Afghanistan as well.
With violence worsening, the U.S. is also taking some harsher measures. The Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Command have stepped up a campaign of missile strikes against militant targets inside Pakistan, a source of mounting casualties and growing public anger there. The U.S. is planning to deploy at least 12,000 more troops to Afghanistan next year.
Few of the new measures would carry as much political and emotional weight as talking with members of the Taliban, an armed group that has been an American foe since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that followed the attacks was designed to oust the Taliban over its harboring of al Qaeda, and U.S. troops have spent the past seven years trying to capture or kill as many of its members as possible.
U.S. officials stress that they would play a supporting role in any future talks with the Taliban, which they say would be led by the Afghan central government and powerful Afghan tribal figures. The talks would primarily include lower-ranking and mid-level Taliban figures, not top officials from the group's ruling body.
"We'll never be at the table with Mullah Omar," one U.S. official said, referring to the fugitive leader of the Taliban.
The prospective talks would have two main goals, according to senior American officials: extending the Kabul government's authority across Afghanistan and persuading some Taliban figures to cease their attacks against U.S. and Afghan targets.
"We all agree on the need for the people of Afghanistan to come together if they are going to succeed in creating a lasting and viable state," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said by email. "It remains to be seen if some in the Taliban will really renounce violence and extremism and play a constructive role in Afghanistan."
U.S. opposition to talks with the Taliban has been dissolving as the security situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to deteriorate. The number of attacks across Afghanistan has skyrocketed, and more U.S. troops are dying there than in Iraq. Pakistan has been rocked by a wave of attacks, including a massive bombing at a Marriott hotel in the capital of Islamabad and the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
War Negotiations
"Most wars don't end on the basis of complete capitulation," said Kara Bue, a former State Department official who recently was co-chairwoman of an outside working group on Pakistan policy. "They're ended in many cases on the basis of negotiations."
It's far from clear that Taliban members with real control over the group's operations will want to take part in talks with the U.S. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has long supported reconciling with Taliban leaders who are willing to accept Kabul's authority and cut any links to al Qaeda, but U.S. and Afghan officials acknowledge that few Taliban figures were willing to make those commitments.
The two sides would also have to bridge a turbulent history of efforts at contact. Former Taliban Foreign Minister Maulvi Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil approached U.S. officials in early 2002 about working together, but the U.S. responded by arresting him. He was held at Guantanamo Bay for four years and has since returned in Kabul.
In subsequent years, some U.S. officials quietly conducted informal outreach to Taliban leaders, but the military was more interested in taking them into custody, said a former senior U.S. intelligence official. "There were instances where Taliban [leaders] were willing to work with us, and we didn't want to deal with them at all," the former official said.
Talking to the Taliban has been a sensitive issue for the Afghan government as well. Last year, Mr. Karzai expelled a United Nations diplomat, plus a second who worked for the European Union, for conducting negotiations with Taliban leaders without Kabul's specific consent.
Senior U.S. officials who are working on the White House review said the recommendations may not explicitly call for joining the Afghan government's talks with the Taliban, but may instead refer to greater interaction with local Afghan leaders in unstable parts of the country. In restive eastern and southeastern Afghanistan, where many Pashtun tribal leaders are Taliban or Taliban sympathizers, this strategy would effectively amount to dealing with the Taliban, these U.S. officials said.
"We and the Afghans negotiate with the tribes every day on the district level," said a senior State Department official working on the review. "Sometimes they're Taliban or their supporters. Often they say: 'If we get what we want, we'll lay down our arms.'"
Another senior American official said that talks with the Taliban will force the U.S. to make hard decisions about how much to offer the armed group for its support.
The U.S. would certainly be willing to pay moderate Taliban members to lay down their weapons and join the political process, these official said. But Taliban demands for amnesty and formal political authority over remote parts of the country might be harder to stomach, he said.
"The question always comes down to price," he said. "How much should be willing to offer guys like this?"
Current and former officials attributed the White House's policy shift to the influence of Gen. Petraeus. "I do think you have to talk to enemies," he said Oct. 8 during a speech to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "You want to try to reconcile with as many of those as possible while then identifying those who truly are irreconcilable."
Not everything that worked in Iraq will work in Afghanistan, Gen. Petraeus cautioned. Still, he said that engaging some members of the Taliban would be "a positive step."
Ms. Bue, the former State Department official, said U.S. officials would at a minimum want Afghan militants to help U.S. and Afghan forces root out the foreign fighters who have been responsible for most of the bloodiest attacks in Afghanistan.
Mapping Tribal Areas
U.S. officials from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. military's Special Operations Command have been mapping the key tribal areas of Afghanistan, said one person familiar with the planning. The goal is to look at the tribes, sub-tribes and clans in each province and understand whom they're aligned with. Targeting lower-level leaders is likely to be more fruitful than focusing on senior figures, said Seth Jones, a Middle Eastern analyst at the Rand Corp. think tank who travels regularly to Afghanistan.
The leadership of the Taliban may have no incentive to negotiate because they view themselves as winning the conflict and because "their vision of the country is so diametrically opposed" to that of the central Afghan government, he said.
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This is almost exactly what the CT honchos at the Israel conference in early Sept were saying should happen, and that the Afghan Taliban looked pretty ripe for what they saw as the Indians' Kashmir approach. But carefully, and above all, cleanly -- since we have, after all, engaged with the Taliban before to our detriment. (Perhaps it's logical that the CIA, wanting to be clandestine or 'off the books,' always does such things with an eye to money-laundering and therefore involving criminal activity that then escalates in an already corrupt climate.)
This time it needs to be open, military, and emphasize public works supervised by the military -- and NOT by CIA or contractors.
__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
U.S. officials from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. military's Special Operations Command have been mapping the key tribal areas of Afghanistan, said one person familiar with the planning. The goal is to look at the tribes, sub-tribes and clans in each province and understand whom they're aligned with.
NOW THEY'RE DOING THIS??!!
The CT guys said many of the younger Taliban mid-level leaders in Afghanistan (and again this does not hold for Pakistan) are much less ideological and even regard the older hard-core islamists as tiresome. They are less organized, more like loose-knit criminal cartels for want of any other work options, and it is believed will generally be more pragmatic.
__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
Are you comparing the situation in Afghanistan - specifically the Taliban, to Iraq?
Seems like you might be better off looking in the mirror to indentify the picture of naivity...
Are you comparing the situation in Afghanistan - specifically the Taliban, to Iraq?
Seems like you might be better off looking in the mirror to indentify the picture of naivity...
Yeah, so your post has no logical sense to it because the original idea was to draw a contrast to the conceptual ideas of diplomacy - even with enemies - to McCain's BS rhetoric and saber rattling....
Yeah, so your post has no logical sense to it because the original idea was to draw a contrast to the conceptual ideas of diplomacy - even with enemies - to McCain's BS rhetoric and saber rattling....
Oh, and it's 'naiivete'....
You crack me up DEI... Who's better than you dude???
So, Obama is the one who talks about unilateral bombing of Pakistan while McCain speaks of the importance of diplomacy... Interesting...
I know you intellectual types like to paint McCain as another "saber-rattling" neo-con, however the truth is quite the converse (no DEI - not the sneakers...)!!
McCain preaches petulance. Obama preaches diplomacy, but not at the sake of national security gains. How in the world could you be against that?
Look - contrary to what you and so many other Monday morning experts like to believe, the issue of foreign policy is so incredibly complex, that whatever move Bush, Obama, McCain or anyone else makes - there will always be those who passionately agree and disagree...
I am for diplomacy by the way. I therefore agree with McCain regarding Pakistan and disagree with Obama...
Look - contrary to what you and so many other Monday morning experts like to believe, the issue of foreign policy is so incredibly complex, that whatever move Bush, Obama, McCain or anyone else makes - there will always be those who passionately agree and disagree...
I am for diplomacy by the way. I therefore agree with McCain regarding Pakistan and disagree with Obama...
So, if we have real time, actionable intelligence on Osama's whereabouts right over Pakistan's borders and Pakistan is unwilling to act or refuses to act, you would just let Osama thumb his nose at us? Seriously?
So, if we have real time, actionable intelligence on Osama's whereabouts right over Pakistan's borders and Pakistan is unwilling to act or refuses to act, you would just let Osama thumb his nose at us? Seriously?
As if this hasn't already occured...
You don't fool me DEI with your sudden, "let's toss bilateral/multilateralism out the window" bravado... Had Bush launched a few missiles into Pakistan because he had "actionable intelligence", and Pakistan reacted adversely to the event, you would be the first one on this board to attack Bush for his neocon-ism...
But because Obama makes this claim, suddenly you're ok with tossing bombs into a country that did not first give us the ok??
Why turn this debate into one about me? I have - since DAY ONE - been all about the war in Afghanistan. I have also - since DAY ONE - been about us going after OBL wherever he may be regardless of permission from other countries. Our national interests and our national security trump all others strictly in regards to this. To insinuate otherwise is ludicrous.
Back to the relevant discussion, are you seriously saying that you would allow another country to dictate whether or not we could strike against OBL within their borders (or other high value terrorist targets)? Can you even answer that question straight up?
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