Why it’s time to negotiate with the Taliban
This went up on theatlantic.com this morning:
By Daniel Serwer
Apr 7 2011, 7:00 AM ET
Peace talks won’t be easy, and may be likely to fail, but they’re worth the risk
Delegates of an Afghan peace jirga in Kabul discuss negotiating with the Taliban. By Ahmad Masood / Reuters
News that the U.S. may negotiate with the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan raises many questions, the most important of which is, should we, or shouldn’t we? That question has generated a small cyberspace library of its own in recent weeks, with the consensus so far in favor. It is widely believed that there are at least informal official talks about talks going on behind closed doors. But should we harbor any continuing doubts? And what can we expect from negotiations?
The arguments in favor are often based on the explicit proposition that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, with the implicit understanding that the U.S. will want to get out as soon after 2014 — the date fixed by NATO for turnover of security responsibilities to the Afghan government — as possible. If we really believe there is no military solution, why bother fighting to what conflict management experts call a “mutually hurting stalemate,” a condition in which neither side can improve its position by further military effort? If we want to get out, why not make the arrangements now rather than waiting for what we believe to be inevitable? Much blood and treasure can be saved and little of value lost.
This line of thinking has been bolstered recently by research suggesting that at least some of the Taliban can be divided from Al Qaeda. The Taliban is an Afghan movement with national ambitions to establish an Islamic state. Al Qaeda has much broader international goals that go far beyond Afghanistan, to recreating a supra-national caliphate encompassing the entire Muslim world, in some interpretations the entire globe. These two objectives are not only different; they are incompatible. Maybe we can keep Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, even if we agree to let the Taliban back in.
<blockquote> A skilled negotiator will discover more in two days of conversation with an adversary than all the intelligence we’ve collected so far in ten years of war</blockquote>
However, the Taliban have now been fighting for a generation without serious signs of fatigue, at least until recently, and may believe they can get what they want by fighting on. If the Taliban feel they are winning, they will have little incentive to negotiate. They may also doubt that the U.S. is really prepared to leave Afghanistan to the Afghans, at least with respect to Al Qaeda. President Karzai’s talk about permanent U.S. bases will have given them doubts as well.
There are other points of potentially irreducible contention. The Taliban, who are not experienced democrats and lack confidence in democratic processes, would naturally expect a guarantee of a share in political power, both at the local level and in Kabul. Many Afghan women, who were not even allowed to go to school under their rule, could suffer dearly under a strong Taliban role in governance. Nor would the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras, and other minorities who fought against and defeated the Taliban be likely to welcome their return.
Many advocates of negotiations therefore want to make the talks “inclusive” — bringing in not only top government officials but also civil society (especially women’s organizations) as well as local leaders. After all, the Karzai government has little real control of rural areas, and many of the more contentious issues involve local disputes that will need to be settled by local leaders if the Taliban are going to reintegrate peacefully. As one advocate put it, negotiations must be run “by, with and through the Afghan people” in order to work.
But is forging a peace deal “by, with and through” Afghan leaders really possible? A multi-faceted, multi-level peace process that includes women and minorities may be far more than the Karzai government is able to manage. Most Kabul officials lack the capability even to identify, much less understand or work to solve, local problems. If they did, they might have already won the war. And how much concern has Karzai shown for the plight of Afghan women? He has only appointed a sprinkling of women and civil society types in the High Peace Council, assigned to deal with the Taliban. Most of the members are male, with a heavy representation of warlords. If Karzai and company are beyond redemption, negotiations are unlikely to save them.
Even though a successful deal remains unlikely, negotiations may still be worthwhile. The Pentagon plans to spend about $120 billion on the war in 2011 alone. If there is only a tiny chance — let’s say one in a thousand — that negotiations would eliminate that expenditure, a rational gambler would say it is worth spending $120 million on negotiations. There is no way negotiations will cost a fraction of that sum. The largest possible expense would be the Afghan government providing housing and jobs for defected Taliban.
What you find out about the enemy can be well worth whatever commitment is required in negotiations. In my experience, there is nothing like staring a military commander in the face, asking him what his war objective is, and discussing alternative means to achieve it.
I asked the commander of the Bosnian Army that question in 1995, having been told by both the State Department and the U.S. intelligence community that his objective was to conquer 100 percent of the country’s territory, at the time two-thirds occupied by the Bosnian Serb Army. He responded that his president had told him to fight until all the refugees and displaced people could go home. This was significantly different from the consensus understanding in Washington. His objective was achieved in principle at the Dayton peace talks later the same year by negotiation.
A skilled negotiator will discover more in two days of conversation with an adversary than all the intelligence we’ve collected so far in ten years of war. Of course the effect is mutual: the enemy will also discover how committed and unified the Afghan government and the coalition are or are not, and what we might be willing to trade off to achieve early withdrawal.
Such mutual discovery does not always improve matters. I once asked a presidential advisor in Kabul whether it would help relations with Pakistan if Afghanistan were to recognize the de facto border — the Durand Line — as the legal boundary between the two countries. He responded that he would not want to close off options for future generations. I can’t imagine that people in Islamabad react positively when they hear this suggestion that Afghanistan may have designs on Pakistani territory.
Bottom line, negotiations are a good bet even if they don’t end in a deal. But Afghan political leaders are unlikely to be able to lead a complicated process and may be more likely to cut a deal behind closed doors, without the involvement of women or anything resembling civil society. Such a deal would not resolve underlying drivers of conflict and would require — like the deals Washington cut behind closed doors on Bosnia and Kosovo — a massive international implementation effort. Even though peace talks are certainly worthwhile, there are no easy solutions to these dilemmas. Negotiations may be a good idea, but they are not a short cut out of Afghanistan.
PS: Peter Bergen comes to similar conclusions, six weeks later.
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The problem with wikileaks is they don’t lie
I am the first to admit that I read wikileaks cables (and advise my students to do so, provided they don’t mind the risk of never getting a job with the US government). But anyone who doubts the damage leaking them will do need only contemplate the recent spate of minor revelations, which have caused the American ambassador in Mexico City to leave and the one in Ecuador to be declared persona non grata (that’s PNG in diplomatese). Both were guilty of essentially the same sin: telling the truth about criminality and corruption in their host governments.
Then today there are the non-revelations about the former Prime Minister, now President, of Republika Srpska, the Serb 49 per cent of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The cables from the US embassy in Sarajevo illustrate clearly that Milorad Dodik is serious about secession of his genocidally created fiefdom from Bosnia, a move that could precipitate another war there. This will not surprise readers of www.peacefare.net, where we have regularly noted that Dodik is serious.
So what’s wrong with our ambassadors reporting criminality, corruption and threats to peace and security? Nothing of course. But they won’t be able to do it much longer if confidentiality cannot be maintained. I am comforted to know that Chuck English, our ambassador in Sarajevo during the period the cables were sent, clearly understood the seriousness of Dodik’s threat to Bosnia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. But how free will his successor feel to report the truth if he runs the risk of being PNGed for it?
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The devil in the details is named Saif
Former Republican Congressman Curt Weldon says in the New York Times this morning that he is in Libya to get Muammar Gaddafi to step aside. He also argues that the United States should have developed a much deeper relationship with the Libyan people and civil society since the Colonel gave up his nuclear ambitions in 2004, a perspective I can certainly share.
Reading more carefully, it appears that “step aside” does not mean “leave Libya,” and Weldon also says
Colonel Qaddafi’s son Saif, a powerful businessman and politician, could play a constructive role as a member of the committee to devise a new government structure or Constitution. The younger Mr. Qaddafi, who has made belligerent comments about the rebels, has his detractors. But he also pushed his government to accept responsibility for the bombings of a Pan Am flight over Scotland and a disco in Germany, and to provide compensation for victims’ families. He also led the effort to free a group of Bulgarian nurses in Libya who had twice been sentenced to death.
Here is where I part company with Mr. Weldon. I don’t think we owe Saif anything for his past efforts, all of which were amply rewarded at the time. Keeping him–or any other member of the Gaddafi family–in the process now will only complicate the post-war arrangements and make it difficult to satisfy the 98 per cent of the Libyan population that has not benefited from the last 42 years of the Colonel’s idiosyncratic and impovershing rule.
Weldon will be serving a useful purpose on his visit to Tripoli if he convinces the Gaddafis that they all need to depart, post haste. Anything less than that will prolong Libya’s pain, and U.S. involvement.
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Bad model, so limit the damage
Matthew Parish, continuing the conversation about Bosnia that started yesterday, writes (tune in tomorrow for Kurt’s response):
Kurt and I agree on many things, in particular the point at which international attention in Bosnia finally faded and what has happened since. But there is an important point on which I think we disagree, namely the value of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and what commentators sometimes call “hard power” in state-building.
On one view, sometimes known as “post-liberalism”, post-conflict societies are not ready for immediate democracy. Their institutions are so weak that they cannot engender the political compromises necessary for a multi-ethnic society to function effectively. The solution proffered is to suspend democratic institutions, and/or provide supervision and oversight by an international organisation pending emergence of domestic institutions from a period of fragility. This is the model OHR followed in Bosnia, and it was the first time it was tried after the end of the Cold War.
This model suffers from three problems. First, it neglects the risk of the international supervisor going awry. OHR became a tyrant, disregarding the most basic standards of human rights and political dialogue. In fact the organisation adopted the pre-existing political habits of the former Yugoslavia, acting like a petty local communist party official. It is difficult to see how an organisation susceptible to such frailties can serve as a role model to guide domestic institutions in the right direction. It is at risk of acting as badly as the institutions it is trying to reform.
Second, reliance on an international overseer may inhibit rather than promote domestic political maturity. If politicians believe difficult decisions will be made by foreigners, the tough compromises necessary for the country to make progress may be forsaken because the international supervisors will make the hard decisions instead.
But most fundamentally, heavy-handed international intervention assumes a time scale of international interest which western democracies, working to short electoral cycles, are not prepared to commit to. Intervention was fashionable in Bosnia for a few years after the war, when there was still significant media coverage. But then memories began to fade, and there was ever less political capital in the intervening nations to continuing to engage with Bosnia. And in this lay the seeds of OHR’s collapse. Thus everything OHR built up was destined to dissolve once the west lost interest because it had been imposed without inter-ethnic consensus and the dissenting national groups elected to withdraw at the first available opportunity. I do not see how western interest can now be revived. Silajdzic’s strategy was to try to renew American interest, by creating crises and confrontations; but the international community shunned him for his efforts.
If international attention is doomed never to last long enough to make a difference, then query whether such a project should be ever started. OHR’s fate was to build up the unsustainable. Once international interest in Bosnia faded, Dodik tore down all that OHR had constructed. It is a cruel irony that Dodik was once OHR’s protégé in its struggle with SDS; when OHR fell, Dodik adopted the same agenda as that OHR had been fighting against.
OHR’s work made Bosnia’s fall far harder than it need have been, and on balance I suspect that Bosnia would be a better place now if the “Bonn powers” had never been created. But the OHR model has been copied widely elsewhere. The Bosnian model has been widely cited as a success; yet it was not really so. These are some of the themes I explore in my book “A Free City in the Balkans”.
Kurt thinks we are in big trouble if OHR is not rejuvenated. I think the organisation should never have started work, and now we are left picking up the pieces of a failed theory of international intervention. If Bosnia collapses completely, as I unfortunately think it will, the international community will be in large part to blame for foisting an unsustainable model of state-building upon the country. In light of the mess we are now in, the immediate policy goal should be damage limitation.
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A dialogue on Bosnia: why not lighten up?
Colleagues Matthew Parish and Kurt Bassuener, both long-term observers of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), clashed recently over at Balkans Insight in ways that I thought shed light on the situation, so I’ve invited them to continue the conversation here at peacefare.net I get to pose the questions and post their answers, a privilege for which I thank them.
Here is the first question:
International attention is no longer focused, as it was in the early 1990s, on Bosnia-Herzegovina. Why can’t the international community lighten its presence in the country and move from the current High Representative, who has American and Russian as well as European Union backing and unusual powers to impose legislation and remove officials, to a European Union representative, who would no longer be expected to intervene but merely to encourage Bosnia’s preparations for European Union membership?
Matthew responds:
I think this question misstates the extent to which the international community is really involved at the current time. The principal step change was in January 2006, when the assertive and politically astute High Representative Paddy Ashdown retired and was replaced by Christian Schwarz-Schilling. Schwarz-Schilling is remembered as ineffective; but it is forgotten that by Ashdown’s departure the international community had already tired of Bosnia, in my view irreversibly. His explicit mandate – to close OHR – was supported by all members of the PIC at the time. That agenda triggered Dodik’s assertiveness, which rendered some western powers nervous. The policy since then has been to drag OHR out indefinitely in a half-hearted way, always suggesting it would be closed in the next six months but then finding another reason why it should continue for just a little longer.
In the mean time Bosnian politicians have mostly grown to ignore the Office, which is a shadow of its former self. Division between the European powers about the desirability of a heavy-handed presence in the country has enabled the Serbs, and to a lesser extent the Croats, to divide the PIC. The net result is that the organisation is now ignored. Dodik has publicly stated that High Representatives’ decisions will not have force in the RS. He could hardly more explicit.
Thus the notion that the international presence in Bosnia should become lightened assumes that it currently has extraordinary powers. It does not. OHR is a dead letter. The European Union mission cannot emerge from its shadow until the organisation formally closes; but the continued existence of OHR is only symbolic. No High Representative wishes to admit as much, lest they become the scapegoat for Bosnia’s future problems; they would rather pass the poisoned chalice onto the next incumbent. But the international community has ceased to be a significant political actor in Bosnia’s politics. We no longer make a difference.
Some have argued for rejuvenating OHR or some other kind of hard international power in Bosnia, urging that if this does not happen then the country’s existence and maybe even peace are in peril. Those warnings may or may not be auspicious; but I do not think it is realistic to revert to a stronger role. OHR’s authority was supported by recent memories of an atrocious war; significant numbers of foreign peacekeeping troops; and large quantities of aid money. All those things have gone. Moreover many in the EU remain deeply ambivalent about the anti-democratic nature of OHR’s authority and the way in which it exercised its authorities without regarded to fundamental legal standards. There is no appetite for returning to the old days of peremptory dismissals and unilaterally imposed legislation, drafted within the hallways of OHR and imposed upon Bosnian politicians in disregard of the ordinary legislative procedures. The international community created a constitutional structure in Dayton, and ultimately we will have to let that structure run its course.
I think the Dayton structure was inherently unsustainable and we are now in the midst of watching it fly apart. But the opportunity for the international community unilaterally to rewrite the Dayton constitution is long past; and OHR was just a sticking plaster.
And Kurt says:
The short answer to your question, Dan, would be that’s been the practical effect of international policy since 2006 – and look at where it got us.
The PIC Steering Board came to the conclusion that peace implementation was basically finished in 2005, aside from unfinished business like police restructuring and constitutional reform. The dominant view was that Bosnia was functional enough to propel itself into the Euro-Atlantic mainstream; it was just a question of time. So the EU would take on the pre-eminent international role, without need of any executive instruments. So the PIC could also choose someone like Christian Schwarz-Schilling to be a closer. “Ownership” and “partnership” – as well as the still undefined term “transition” – were the buzzwords. I think the assumption in Brussels was that, like the handover of military matters from NATO to the EU, this would be another low-risk way for the EU to build a track record for its Common Foreign and Security Policy with no risk. It was a sure thing.
This prevailing assumption was proven wrong within a span of four months in 2006, in a perfect storm that began with the departure of Ashdown at the end of January. Milorad Dodik became RS Premier in March and all cooperation on making the state more functional stopped. Then the “April package” of modest but constructive constitutional changes was shot-down in the BiH House of Representatives. The election campaign began in earnest that spring, with the Montenegrin independence referendum giving Dodik a talking point and returning “referendum” back into the political lexicon. It took some months for it to sink in that the reality didn’t fit the script. The international community has been consistently behind events ever since, begetting what amounts to a rules-free environment in Bosnia.
I disagree that the international executive tools of the OHR (and EUFOR) are irretrievably broken. They’ve just been allowed to become moribund because of a lack of collective will to employ them.
There is a larger philosophical – even theological – issue at play here when it comes to the EU role. The whole EU approach is based on assumptions of what incentives should be working, since BiH has an enlargement perspective. According to this framework, BiH politicians are representative of (and accountable to) the citizens and their interests, recognize the benefits of joining the EU, and are willing to do the heavy lifting of reform to join the club. Clearly this isn’t happening, but for the EU it doesn’t compute. Why not? Because their “partners” are those who benefit from the current system, and this gives them a better deal than what the EU is offering. These are the “owners” of the system over which the EU wants them to take “ownership.” The current drift toward violent dissolution into ethnocratic (and surely autocratic) fiefdoms is what happens when there is no external corrective to that incentive structure.
Instead of adjusting its approach and employing policy instruments outside the enlargement framework, the EU has instead opted to try to “restore momentum” by simply declaring progress in the vain hope that reality will follow. The grant of the SAA in 2008, despite police reform not being realized, is the most visible example of this dynamic. The rest of the PIC has essentially gone along for the ride on this. Though there is increasing disquiet at the lack of clear thinking of how to match the EU’s means to the situation at hand on the part of the US, Britain, Turkey, Japan, and Canada, there has not been an active counterproposal to the prevailing approach.
I guess the official version from Brussels would be that the EU can’t perform its alchemy because the big bad OHR and its wicked Bonn Powers get in the way, but the reality for five years just doesn’t bear that out.
Sounds to me as if Kurt and Matthew basically agree on the diagnosis, but they look in different directions for the cure. To be continued tomorrow. Tune in then!
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Syria: not now but not never
Describing the Syrian protests as less than widespread and deep-rooted, Joshua Landis, who knows more about Syria than 10 of me will ever know, nevertheless writes over at Syria Comment:
But in…four or five years, the next generation of Syrian youth will not remember the turmoil in either Lebanon or Iraq. Palestine will be a cause remembered only by grandfathers. Instead of defeat and hopelessness, invoked by Iraq and Palestine, young Arabs may well have the examples of Egypt and Tunisia. They may well be on the road to becoming the Arab World’s first democracies.
This begs the question of how long the Assad regime can last. Syria’s youth are no longer apathetic. They have tasted revolution and their own power. Many commentators have remarked on Bashar al-Assad’s stubbornness. He may be a “modernizer,” but not a “reformer,” is how Volker Pertes recently explained it. This is a polite way to say that he is not preparing the way for a handover of power from Alawites to Sunnis. Assad’s refusal to prepare the present regime for a soft landing spells bad news for Syria. The day that regime-change will come to Syria seems closer today than it did only a short time ago.
So not now, but not never. A lot depends on how effectively the protesters can unify across the country. Keeping it nonviolent, and funny, will help. Professor Landis might prefer a Bashar-engineered soft landing, but wouldn’t a serious transition like the one occurring in Tunisia be better?
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