THE landmark international conference in Kabul, attended by 40 foreign ministers and international delegates from more than 70 countries, ended on Tuesday with the official endorsement of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s reconciliation program with armed insurgent groups, including the Taliban.
Karzai presented the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program, an ambitious effort that aims to reintegrate up to 36,000 former Taliban fighters into mainstream Afghan society. In it, low-level Taliban fighters are to be offered jobs, land and protection in a bid to persuade them to change sides.
But attempts at reconciliation with the Taliban have so far failed. Karzai’s recent peace jirga was boycotted by the Taliban. Instead, the Taliban has escalated attacks against the Afghan National Army and international forces.
So far this month, 45 foreign troops have died in Afghanistan. Two weeks ago, Private Nathan Bewes, a member of the Australian First Mentoring Task Force, died in an improvised explosive blast in Oruzgan. The 23-year-old was the sixth Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan in just over a month.
Meanwhile, the US, the main foreign player in Afghanistan, is preparing an operation in Kandahar that will be the biggest military offensive of the war to date. The strategy, endorsed by the majority of the international community at the London Conference earlier this year, was driven by two presumptions. The first was that the Taliban is a well-grounded, grassroots, popular insurgency. It assumed the Taliban was ingrained in the social and political fabric of Afghanistan and could not be defeated militarily. The second was that the Taliban could be successfully integrated into mainstream Afghan politics.
But a deeper look not only challenges both assumptions but also questions the strategy of negotiating with the Taliban.
The idea of many Western policymakers that the Taliban has grassroots support in Afghanistan is driven by the fact that the majority of the Taliban are Afghans, coming predominantly from the Pashtun ethnic group. Moreover, the majority of the Taliban operate and are stationed in the Pashtun-dominated areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But, in reality, the Taliban has little support from local Afghans, who see their fundamentalist Islamic beliefs and system of governance as alien and backward. Rather, the Taliban’s success and grip on power in the south and east of Afghanistan is due to three other factors.
The first is the drug trade in Afghanistan, which the Taliban uses to finance its insurgency. Counter-terrorism officials claim that the group has a taxation system that generates money from the production, processing and transport of opium from Afghanistan. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that between 2003 and 2008, the Taliban made an estimated $18 billion from drug production and trafficking.
The second factor is Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, which continues to support the Taliban, providing it with arms and safe havens.
For Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban continues to be a strategic asset in achieving strategic depth in Afghanistan, as a tool against the regional influence of arch-rivals India, and most importantly to defuse separatist Pashtun nationalism in Pakistan.
The third factor is popular anger at corrupt warlords, who continue to rule as governors and key officials outside the capital. Their draconian rule and their inability to provide justice and law and order have created a power vacuum in large parts of Afghanistan, which the Taliban has successfully filled. The Taliban continues to feed off the dissatisfaction caused by the widespread corruption and inefficiency apparent at every level of government in Afghanistan.
The second presumption policymakers have made in devising the new Afghan strategy is that the Taliban can be integrated into mainstream Afghan politics. That idea seems unrealistic, since Taliban ideology rejects any modern institution of government. The Taliban regards the Koran as the only source of political advice, rejecting ideas of democracy and fundamental human rights, including women’s rights. During its reign, the Taliban did not rule as a modern state apparatus. It did away with all forms of administration, with laws coming not from parliament or any other institution but from fatwas, religious decrees.
The second issue is the lack of expertise in the Taliban ranks. Many Taliban leaders have only studied in madrassas, religious Islamic schools, and at best have a primary school education. This is in contrast to government ministers, most of whom have received tertiary education or higher in the West. The question is, owing to its lack of expertise, what kind of power would the Taliban enjoy in a power-sharing deal with the government? Importantly, the Taliban has never made an alliance with another political group since its emergence in 1994.
If the Taliban was to become part of the national government, its political survival would be severely restrained by the little public support it enjoys on the fringes of society. People would simply not vote for it. Adding to this is the fact that the Taliban would become the largest and most powerful political party in Afghanistan, albeit being one of the most unpopular. This in itself would undermine Afghanistan’s young democratic system and sow the seeds for future conflict.
With Western policymakers proposing ideas on when and how to negotiate with the Taliban, the more immediate questions of if and why talks with the Taliban should begin still remain unanswered.
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