rssPetraeus on Karzai-Taliban Talks: Just Don’t Say the ‘T’ Word
Monday, February 09, 2009 at 2:01 pm
- 3 Comments
In Afghanistan, you’ve got a war of unclear goals that everyone agrees has no military solution. But it’s also not clear if the alternative to open-ended conflict is to cut some kind of deal with Taliban elements — as increasingly-out-of-American-favor President Hamid Karzai has proposed — because it’s unclear whether elements of the Taliban would be interested in such a deal. Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar, for instance, says the only deal he’s interested in is one for a unilateral U.S. withdrawal. So where does that leave us?
One alternative is to drill down on definitions of who is and who isn’t the Taliban. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, has started to draw distinctions between those who fight the United States for ideological or religious reasons and those who fight for more transactional reasons, like money or fear or inter-tribal concerns. I don’t mean to imply that McKiernan is doing anything at all illegitimate. It’s important to have a taxonomy of what enemies you face, and why they fight you.
Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, seems to be going a step further. In October, Petraeus embraced Karzai’s Taliban outreach. But last month, at a big security confab in Washington, he left such outreach out of a presentation of what direction he thinks Afghanistan strategy needs to move in. Yesterday, though, Petraeus addressed the Munich Security Conference, and a version of the original outreach strategy was part of his remarks:
We also, in support of and in coordination with our Afghan partners, need to help promote local reconciliation, although this has to be done very carefully and in accordance with the principles established in the Afghan Constitution. In concert with and in support of our Afghan partners, we need to identify and separate the “irreconcilables” from the “reconcilables, striving to create the conditions that can make the reconcilables part of the solution, even as we kill, capture, or drive out the irreconcilables. In fact, programs already exist in this area and careful application of them will be essential in the effort to fracture and break off elements of the insurgency in order to get various groups to put down their weapons and support the legitimate constitution of Afghanistan.
Having said that, we must pursue the enemy relentlessly and tenaciously. True irreconcilables, again, must be killed, captured, or driven out of the area. And we cannot shrink from that any more than we can shrink from being willing to support Afghan reconciliation with those elements that show a willingness to reject the insurgents and help Afghan and ISAF forces.
There are some Iraq overtones here, though the parallel is inexact. In Iraq, the so-called “bottom-up reconciliation” strategy sought to give Sunni insurgents a stake in the Shiite-run government by hiring them as auxiliary security forces and trying to get the government to, eventually, foot the bill. That’s not, at least, explicit in this iteration of Petraeus’ proposal, but what does remain is the idea that you should fracture the insurgency by, basically, seeing if there are insurgent elements who can be placated or co-opted. And why not? That’s, most often, how insurgencies usually end.
Now, if it turns out no insurgent elements can be co-opted — or, at least, not at reasonable cost — then you’re in unwinnable-conflict territory. But you can’t know until you really make such a push — combined, as Petraeus notes, with tenacious military attacks on the irreconcilable to underscore the starkness of insurgent options — and none of your interests are materially harmed by doing so. Whether you call them “Taliban” or not is less important. And if not using the word helps you achieve the objective, so be it.
Now to find out what Richard Holbrooke and General-turned-Ambassador Karl Eikenberry think.
Follow Spencer Ackerman on Twitter
3 Comments
Comment posted February 10, 2009 @ 10:47 am
Please read our articles and the Article below to see what we are saying for over one years now:
Munich and the Continuity Between the Bush and Obama Foreign Policies
February 9, 2009 | 2004 GMT
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090209_munich_…
By George Friedman
While the Munich Security Conference brought together senior leaders from most major countries and many minor ones last weekend, none was more significant than U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. This is because Biden provided the first glimpse of U.S. foreign policy under President Barack Obama. Most conference attendees were looking forward to a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration. What was interesting about Biden’s speech was how little change there has been in the U.S. position and how much the attendees and the media were cheered by it.
After Biden’s speech, there was much talk about a change in the tone of U.S. policy. But it is not clear to us whether this was because the tone has changed, or because the attendees’ hearing has. They seemed delighted to be addressed by Biden rather than by former Vice President Dick Cheney — delighted to the extent that this itself represented a change in policy. Thus, in everything Biden said, the conference attendees saw rays of a new policy.
Policy Continuity: Iran and Russia
Consider Iran. The Obama administration’s position, as staked out by Biden, is that the United States is prepared to speak directly to Iran provided that the Iranians do two things. First, Tehran must end its nuclear weapons program. Second, Tehran must stop supporting terrorists, by which Biden meant Hamas and Hezbollah. Once the Iranians do that, the Americans will talk to them. The Bush administration was equally prepared to talk to Iran given those preconditions. The Iranians make the point that such concessions come after talks, not before, and that the United States must change its attitude toward Iran before there can be talks, something Iranian Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani emphasized after the meeting. Apart from the emphasis on a willingness to talk, the terms Biden laid out for such talks are identical to the terms under the Bush administration.
We at the “Jaff Sassani Organizations” from Iran and Iraq have been writing about the Wrong policy of the US Government around the World and Especially about Russian, Iran and “Muslim World”.
Please read our articles in the addresses below:
http://www.opednews.com/author/author26258.html
http://www.buzzle.com/authors.asp?author=22116
http://www.jaff-sassanie.com/Default.aspx
Dear American people please take your time to fix the wrong doing of your Government around the World. Stop wrong policy in favor of the right policy to help other nations just like what you did after the World War II.
You country are suffering “Morally and Economically” because of the special interest and the wrong policy of the US Government for the last fifty years.
The World people are more educated and smarter people. They see your country as an Imperialist change that perceptions now before it are to late. Not let special interest lobbyist run the USA again.
People like former President Clinton, Dr. Zbigniew Bzrezinski, Dr. Hennery Kissinger ideas are outdated and dead wrong.
We are loyal friend of the US people and want to warn you about the wrong policy of your Government in the past and hope your new Governments are smarter and more have humanity toward other nations around the World. That is the way to make ally and friends not sale others for small gains. They are putting up Kurds for sale; the Kurdish people are the only nation want to be your friend but your Governments are always disappointing them over and over.
Sincerely,
Jaff Sassani
From the SKDC
Pingback posted February 11, 2009 @ 9:06 am
[...] are just not people to negotiate [...]
Pingback posted February 28, 2009 @ 9:16 am
[...] striving to create the conditions that can make the reconcilables part of the solution, Read More|||Thursday, February 12, 2009. Chaos and violence continue, the UK announces a death, the US [...]
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
