All roads lead to Islamabad

The commentariat is rarely as unanimous as it has been on the assassination of Barhanuddin Rabbani:  Dexter Filkins, Marvin Weinbaum, Anand Gopal, Alissa Rubin and others (including Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network) all agree that it will set back hopes for a negotiated agreement with the Taliban.

This despite the fact that the Taliban have not rushed to take credit for the assassination. Jihad Watch terms them “oddly quiet.”  While no one seems to know why, the guessing focuses on differences of opinion within the Taliban, some of whom may want to pursue negotiations.

That suggests to me that the gloom about negotiations may be overdone.  In a study published before the assassination, James Shinn and James Dobbins come an interesting conclusion in their primer on Afghan Peace Talks:

Close examination reveals that the priorities of all the potential parties to an Afghan peace process overlap to a considerable degree. For instance, each desires a withdrawal of Western armed forces—a situation especially desired by the publics in all of the Western countries. All Afghans want foreigners to stop interfering in their affairs. All foreign governments want assurances that Afghan territory will not be used to their disadvantage, whether by third parties or the Afghans themselves, and thus want to ensure that terrorists hostile to their countries cannot use Afghanistan as a sanctuary.

The problem of course is that it is not clear what the Taliban are prepared to do about terrorists, with whom at least some of them are allied. The killing of Rabbani is likely to come from sectors of the Taliban most tightly linked to international terrorists, who will want to do everything they can to prevent a negotiated settlement.

I would certainly expect a moment of hesitation in pursuing peace talks.  Who is going to be brave enough to replace Rabbani, or meet the next time with a delegation that supposedly comes from the Taliban?  Who among the Taliban would want to take the risk?  Violence of this sort has consequences.

But they need not be permanent.  The Americans clearly need a negotiated settlement as they begin to head for the exits.  President Karzai wants one too, especially after the spectacular attacks on his allies and half brother in recent weeks.  The remnants of Al Qaeda will want to continue fighting, as will some of the Taliban.  But the prospects of civil war, so obvious to the American commentators, should be obvious to the Taliban too.  Are they willing to test their mettle again in a war with the Tajiks, Uzbeks and others who once constituted the Northern Alliance, this time heavily armed and supported from the air by the Americans?

Taliban decisions on this question will depend heavily on whether they can continue to rely on their Pakistan safe haven.  As Admiral Mullen at long last made clear in testimony yesterday, Islamabad is very much part of the problem.   We are clearly going to have to figure out how to diminish Pakistani support for Haqqani network operations inside Afghanistan if a negotiation with the Taliban is going to succeed.

PS:  For a well-informed view of splits in the Taliban, see Michael Semple’s  piece on the Haqqanis in Foreign Affairs.