The Current Discussion: The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. Rather than sending more troops, is it time to negotiate a truce there?
The situation in Afghanistan has several variables and unstable elements that yearn for reassessment. It is not possible to formulate a simple answer without having to completely rethink of the most obvious variables.
It is time to reassess the present state and structure of the Taliban as they are likely to have revamped their structure. They started as a group of extremists with intolerant and violent practice of Sunni Wahhabism, which eventually served as a cover for criminal deeds. The Taliban, originally grouped in northern Pakistan, mostly recruited from southern Afghan Pashtun tribes. They eventually took over Afghanistan in 1990s in a civil war against tribes from the north and the Mujahideen that fought the soviet occupiers. Over the course of the civil war, Afghanistan transformed from a poor and shambolic country into a ruin and a failed state that eventually hosted al-Qaeda—a loose affiliation of Arab Sunni extremists and a criminal enterprise that aimed to change the Saudi regime. So the answer to the first question, some seven years later, is whether the Taliban are set in their religious cult or if they are now purely a pack of criminal opportunists.
In turn, the murky role of Pakistani connections and underworld structures must be better understood to help trace the insurgency and its roots. The Taliban frequently cross the border into Northern Pakistan and tribal regions. It is a seasonal refuge and a convenient corridor to supply drugs from Afghanistan to world markets and return guns and ammunitions in payment (and funds for a long chain of intermediaries). Much of these small arms and ammunition are reportedly made in Pakistan or obtained there. The cash from the drug trade is estimated to be in the billions of dollars per year – more than all aid money to Afghanistan. It is tangled with the “our backyard” attitude of behind-the-scenes players in the Pakistani army and intelligence forces. Thus a comfortable cross-feeding of purposes complicate matters that cannot be easily isolated. The public airing of grievances between Pakistani politicians and President Karzai of Afghanistan (now practically a semi-effective mayor of Kabul) tend to tilt towards the corrupt twins of guns and drugs.
Against this undercurrent, NATO forces are fighting with presumptions and tactics that are 50 years old. Although the bulk of demand is from rich, member states, NATO forces have no experience, or strategic doctrine to fight the “war against drugs” which is the essence of the post-9/11 power grab and ambitions in Afghanistan. The paltry return on the Pakistan bet has further confused the path to the point that NATO (and especially America, the political leader of NATO) must now choose between appeasing the Pakistan of today, and nursing the decades old policy of presumed leverage against India, or lose face in Afghanistan in a fight with drug lords. To avoid self-defeat in projecting military power, NATO must now serve up plans for the post-conflict era and blend in measured elements of soft power. It can remain as a guarantor of peace culture. But it must cultivate and match guns and blunt cash handouts in poorly planned aid programs with a political solution. A conditional amnesty, in gradual and confidence building steps should be traded with Taliban promises to regroup as a non-violent, unarmed political party in Afghanistan with a clear abandonment of violence. That could lead to a fragile truce and a calm atmosphere.
The Taliban were, and remain, an instrument of shadowy structures connected to the underworld. As such, the situation in Afghanistan is not the nationalist insurgencies experienced in Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya, Yemen, Algeria or Vietnam. Some parallels can be drawn from Northern Ireland where, in due course, The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland was essentially after a realization by Irish militants that they could not win and had to settle for a deal. If the umbilical cord of the Taliban to the Pakistani underworld is cut, the Taliban are bound to reach the same conclusion.
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