Tag: Afghanistan
What is Afghanistan good for?
Americans, weary of the war in Afghanistan, are doubting that anything good can come of it, and wondering if it will ever be over. Two recent reports reminded me of what Afghanistan is good for.
The first is “Afghanistan’s Drug Career: Evolution from a War Economy to a Drug Economy” from the Afghanistan Analysts’ Network (AAN). The second, “Afghanistan Beyond the Fog of Nation Building” from the Silk Road Studies Program here at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, is about the importance of transit routes across Afghanistan and their potential to contribute to building peace there.
Like it or not, Afghanistan is remarkably good for the production of opium poppy. The AAN report is interesting on the political economy of the drug trade, which implicates President Karzai and other “political upperworld” figures in protecting and profiting from it. But it is remarkably tame in its recommendations. Twenty or thirty years will be required, it says, for its “holistic” approach to work. The initial steps recommended are modest adjustments of current policies: eradication should be applied to all poppy fields in a given district, interdiction should target bigger traders, and alternative livelihoods should encompass rural development in general and not just crop substitution. I suppose any long journey starts with just a few steps, but it is hard for me to picture that these recommendations will really carry us through several decades.
More interesting is S. Frederick Starr’s enthusiastic endorsement of transportation as the key to economic development in Afghanistan:
The reopening [of] all these age-old transit routes across Afghanistan is the single greatest achievement of U.S. foreign policy in the new millenium. It was unintended, unrecognized, and, by most Americans, unacknowledged, even thought they paid for it with the lives of loved ones and with hard-earned tax money. Nonetheless, this development offers the most promising solution to the U.S.’ present strategic dilemma and the key to possible success in Afghanistan and the region….Whatever its larger geopolitical significance, the reopening of continental transport and trade to, from, and across Afghanistan is the single most important determinant of the future of Afghanistan itself….This is not a scheme devised by GS-12 bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom for some generic distant land. It is the logic of Afghanistan itself and has been validated by the experience of 3000 years.
So who stands in opposition to 3000 years of experience? According to Starr,
At a series of meetings held throughout the autumn of 2010 representatives of the State Department were, to say the least, reserved about a strategy based on the opening of transport corridors, presumably out of concern that it might be taken as an alternative to the development of agriculture or the exploitation of mineral resources rather than the essential and unavoidable measure for achieving them.
Starr goes on to suggest that resistance is softening, and there is enthusiasm in military and some other circles. But the high-level support he sought has not yet emerged. That is what is needed to drive what Starr suggests: a regional Coordinating Council on Continental Transport and Trade to pursue the strategy of reopening the corridors of transport and trade that war has done much to clog in recent decades.
Of course when it comes to cross-border trade, nothing moves more expeditiously than drugs. That is the trick here: helping the Afghans to create a border regime that will allow legitimate trade and block the illegitimate version. It will not be easy–in fact, it requires just the kind of state Afghanistan lacks, and that the AAN report suggests will be difficult to construct because of the interaction of the drug economy with top levels of the Karzai government. We’d all like to avoid the daunting task of state-building in Afghanistan, but few good things can happen if we don’t embrace the requirement.
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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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Barbarities
It doesn’t get much more senseless than this: a pastor in Florida conducts a mock trial of the Koran, then burns it. No one notices, until Afghan President Karzai denounces the Koran burning and arouses the sensibilities of Muslims almost half a world away. A group of them compounds the evil by attacking a local UN office and killing twelve, none of whom have any connection to the Koran burning (and at least four of whom were Afghans). Another nine people died today in Taliban-inspired protests in Kandahar, where the Americans have made an enormous effort to win over the local population.
This isn’t a clash of civilizations; this is a clash of barbarities.
They are not the only barbarities in today’s world. The Red Cross says 800 were killed in fighting over a town in western Ivory Coast between the forces of president-elect Alassane Ouattara and incumbent Laurent Gbagbo. An American testified at trial that he and his U.S. Army comrades wantonly killed innocent Afghans, for the sake of entertainment.
Apart from the obvious, several of these incidents have in common something surprising: the passion to do something “good.” The pastor thinks the Koran is evil–that’s the avowed reason for the mock trial and Koran burning. Those who attacked the UN compound in Mazar-i-Sharif were led by imams seeking to punish the evil that had been done to Islam. Outtara and Gbagbo are both fighting for what they claim was the legitimate outcome of an election.
What about those Americans? Entertainment is I guess a “good” of sorts, but it really doesn’t match up with the other good causes implicated in these barbarities. What makes it possible for Americans to kill for entertainment?
They can do this only if they view the Afghans as the “other,” a group that does not merit respect for human life. This is likely to be the case in the other instances of barbarity as well. The “othering” of individuals or groups is at the root of much interethnic and sectarian violence. Americans are not immune, especially if they have reason to fear, or want to instil fear in adversaries (two sides of the same coin).
How to respond to such senselessness? Prosecutions in Afghanistan are clearly in order. The UN, desperately needed in Afghanistan to help with everything from negotiations with the Taliban to feeding and sheltering the poor, will not be able to stay if its staff can be murdered with impunity. The incitement in Florida is truly irrelevant to the need for accountability in Mazar-i-Sharif, and Kandahar.
That said, the church in Florida–I don’t want to name it or give its pastor any more of the publicity he so obviously craves–is abusive. Symbolic acts like the burning of the Koran (or of the New Testament) are constitutionally protected in the U.S. The church folk know this and are using that protection as a shield while they attack Islam. I have no idea how the American justice system will handle this–there is precedent for restraining people from symbolic acts that incite violence. But it seems to me that those ideologically close this pastor have a clear responsibility to stop him from further provocations. This includes his own parishioners as well as much of what is known today as the “Christian right,” which has been quick to ask that American Muslims restrain their own from extremism. Good for the goose, good for the gander.
Accountability in Ivory Coast seems far off, but if Ouattara wants to avoid Gbagbo’s fate he’ll tend to it even before the fighting is over. The appeal for Gbagbo’s people to come over to his side that I’ve published in the previous post is not enough. He needs to restrain his own people and prevent harm to civilians, no matter whom they support. Starting his regime with a massacre will do him no good at all.
The Americans have already tried and convicted one of the U.S. Army perpetrators. He got off with a relatively light sentence, apparently in exchange for testimony against his buddies. I find that disgraceful, but I suppose also unavoidable. Let’s hope the others get what they merit, as a clear signal to the rest of our soldiers and marines that the institution they work for will hold them accountable.
My personal inclination would be to put all these perpetrators in the same prison cell together and let them sort it out. I suppose it is better that what will happen is that the respective justice systems will slowly sort out which punishments are merited. Let’s hope they do it quicker and better than usual. Preventing future barbarities requires ending impunity for past ones.
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It takes a region
The Pickering/Brahimi report on negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan is on less than firm ground in claiming that its publication happens to coincide with the perfect moment to launch negotiations to end the insurgency in Afghanistan (see my previous post), but its discussion of the regional interests in Afghanistan is better framed. They do not limit themselves to Pakistan, as so many reports seem inclined to do, but look farther to Iran, India, China and Russia.
Still, they leave me with a lot of question marks. They don’t deal with Pakistan’s ISI, which seems rather more wedded to the Taliban than the rest of the Pakistani government. In fact, they treat “Pakistan” as a unified actor, which is certainly not the way it has acted in the past, and I don’t know many analysts who expect it to act that way in the future.
They cite Iran’s interests in controlling drugs, protecting Shia, preventing the Taliban from returning to power and maintaining influence in Herat. But they don’t deal with Tehran’s apparent willingness to provide some military support to Taliban insurgents inside Afghanistan.
The report counts China as a possible influence in the right direction on Pakistan. Beijing might certainly wish it so, as Afghanistan’s minerals are appetizingly close by. But I wonder whether the Pakistan that would have to be influenced is all that interested in what the Chinese have to say on Afghanistan. Again there is that unified actor question.
The treatment of “Central Asian states,” (aka the Stans, I think) and Russia is rather cursory, with a reference to their interests in a stable Afghanistan, their worries about U.S. presence and the possibility of jihadis breaching their borders. It seems to me that they have been surprisingly non-meddling, even helpful. How do we account for that, and is there something more they can do?
The discussion of how the proposed international “facilitator” would deal with the various layers of neighborly and other international interest is well done. The idea would be a series of bilateral consultations, to precede any multilateral meeting (one coming up in Istanbul).
The suggestion that international peacekeepers may be needed post-settlement I find mind-stretching. It’s a bit difficult to imagine Afghanistan safe for peacekeepers, Muslim or not, rather than peace enforcers. But of course that is just the point: if there is a broad political settlement, most of the insurgency would presumably go away.
All of this may be wishful thinking. But it is more realistic wishful thinking–maybe even “visionary” thinking–than believing we are going to be able to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014 without a negotiated political settlement.
I have feared the terms of that settlement inside Afghanistan for human rights, in particular for women. I’ve too often sat in State Department meetings where assistant secretaries promised not to sell out human rights, only to discover a week later that is precisely what was done. And what real leverage do we have over how women are treated in a Helmand governed by Taliban? The best of intentions somehow go astray when faced with the need for a power-sharing agreement with people who have been violating human rights for years, if not decades. That conflict of interests and values, again.
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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.
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Doom and gloom
A world that was looking hopeful two weeks ago has taken a sharp turn southwards:
- The earthquake in Japan has not only caused upwards of 10,000 deaths and untold destruction, it has also put in doubt nuclear programs worldwide, not to mention what the prospect of further radiation leaks will do to stock markets today and the economic recovery in the future.
- Counter revolution is on the march in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen–in all three countries repression is winning the day, with the help of hesitation in Europe and the U.S. and Saudi and UAE security forces in Manama.
- Egypt votes in a constitutional referendum Saturday to either approve amendments prepared behind closed doors that would leave its regime largely intact, or disapprove, sending the country into uncertainty once again.
- Violence in Sudan is rising, with local south/south conflicts and tension in Abyei overshadowed for the moment by the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement claim that the north is planning a coup intended to prevent independence in July.
- Iran is succeeding in repressing its Green Movement opposition and in neutering anyone else who might dare to challenge President Ahmedinejad.
- Kurdish and Arab leaders in Iraq are competing to see who can claim Kirkuk is their Jerusalem most convincingly, while their respective military forces face off in the contested town.
It is telling that today’s testimony in Congress by General Petraeus on the situation in Afghanistan, which is expected to be relatively upbeat, is the only good news, though experienced wags will see it as just the latest in a long string of turning points in a war that has never turned.
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