Even if Afghanistan is not ripe, negotiations should start

The Century Foundation’s report on Afghanistan:  Negotiating Peace, out today, is an eminently reasonable exploration of the issues for resolution and processes required for a broad political agreement that would end the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and lead to the withdrawal of NATO and U.S. forces.  The kind of agreement the report advocates is one that meets the stated American war objective:  “An accord must include a verifiable severing of Taliban ties with al Qaeda and guarantees that Afghanistan will never again shelter transnational terrorists, with possible UN Security Council measures to support counterterrorism capability during a transition period.”

The question is this:  is now the time?  Are the conditions “ripe” for negotiation?

Lakhdar Brahimi and Thomas Pickering, co-chairs of the task force that wrote this report, argue that the answer is “yes” to both these questions.  Afghanistan, they say, is “settling in to stalemate.”

In the conflict management world, “ripeness” is associated with a “mutually hurting stalemate.”  But is this a mutually hurting stalemate?  Not I think in the description Brahimi and Pickering provide:

While some counsel holding back from negotiations until military momentum is clearly and decisively in their favor, we believe the best moment to start a political process toward reconciliation is now. For the government’s allies, the optimal window would seem to be before their capacities peak, not when force levels have commenced a downward trajectory. For the insurgency, the prospects for negotiating a share of national power are not likely to become appreciably brighter by waiting until 2014. On the contrary, the prospect that the Americans could find a way to reduce the size of their force deployment and yet maintain force lethality for years to come suggests that perhaps the only way they can get the Americans truly out is with a negotiated settlement. For the United States, a negotiating process allows it to shape the ultimate political outcomes with more confidence than by betting on a prolonged and inconclusive war.

The situation they are describing is not a stalemate. It is more like mutual anticipation of declining military power, something adversaries find it difficult to do (and which is unlikely to happen on both sides at the same time).  Only once the situation is hurting both sides, and waiting will not relieve the hurt on either side, does “ripeness” theory suggest that negotiations will be fruitful.  With General Petraeus vaunting progress and the Taliban expanding their operations, it is hard for me to see where the stalemate is.

I think the argument for negotiations at the moment in Afghanistan would be better made on other grounds, some of which are referred to in the Century Foundation report.  We need not wait for ripeness.  We often don’t:  witness Bosnia and Kosovo, for example.  The Dayton agreements and the end of the NATO/Yugoslavia war over Kosovo were not negotiated at a time of mutually hurting stalemate, but rather in moments of rapidly shifting military circumstances. Neither was a perfect agreement, and both have been difficult to implement, but the peace has held.

In Afghanistan, we think we know that there is no military solution and that there will have to be a political resolution.  We also know that continued fighting will kill lots of people, including a lot of innocent people.  While we are reasonably certain we can sustain the NATO effort until 2014, we are not certain that it can be sustained thereafter by the Afghans, even with ample U.S. assistance.  This provides the rationale for negotiations:  not a mutually hurting stalemate, but rather a desire to limit risks to human beings and to the sustainability of the Afghan state.

In other words, this may not be the best moment for negotiations, but it is the moment we find ourselves in as we begin to develop a real appetite for getting out of Afghanistan.  If there is even a small probability of successfully negotiating an early end to the war, that could easily justify the risks and expense involved.  The U.S. is today spending on the order of $8 billion per month in Afghanistan; it is hard to picture that negotiations will cost more than one-one thousandth of that number ($8 million per month).  Surely there is a one in a thousand chance of success.  Negotiating is worth the gamble.

At the very least, negotiations–which Brahimi and Pickering argue should be led by a third party, likely the UN–will teach us a good deal more about the enemy than we seem to know today.  Or negotiations may split off at least part of the insurgency and ease the military task. They could also settle some issues and not others, reducing the intensity of the conflict without eliminating it entirely.

In the end, the Century Foundation report may be remembered less for its advocacy of negotiations based on a mistaken assessment of “ripeness” and more for its analysis of regional interests, including but not limited to those of Pakistan and Iran.  More on that in a later post.

PS:  For a skeptical, on-the-ground perspective about prospects for negotiations, see Martine van Biljert’s piece.