The New Afghanistan Plan, Negotiating with the Taliban ─ Just How Successful Will that Be?

© 2010 Peter Free

 

02 November 2010

 

When killing people fails, try diplomacy and pretend it will work

 

Sometimes I think that our national leaders are duplicitously cynical, egregiously incompetent, or inexplicably stupid.

 

In this vein, the apparently new plan for Afghanistan is negotiating with the Taliban.

 

After trying and failing to kill the amorphous groups’ members for nine years, we apparently are now going to talk them into playing nice after we leave the country.

 

The logic underlying this negotiation plan is so flawed that most people would consider it invisible or non-existent

 

The negotiation plan overlooks a fundamental rule of human interactions.

 

Successful negotiation depends on having something the other side wants.  In this case, we really don’t.

 

Having demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the Taliban can survive in Afghanistan and push back (with a little help from our purported friends in Pakistan), one scratches one’s head in trying to think of one thing that Americans could give the Taliban fighters in return for their cooperation once America has left the country.

 

Money?  No more fighting?  Approval?

 

Those elements might work for people who need money, peace, and/or cultural support.  But it is unlikely to work for insurgents who simply want to be left alone to pursue their religious and social plans, inside what some of them (probably rightfully) consider to be their own geographic portion of the fictional entity that we call Afghanistan.

 

Furthermore, by definition, the Taliban is comprised mostly of zealots.  Politically-active religious (or religiously-active political) zealots, who happen to know how to fight.

 

Zealots generally don’t want for much.  That’s what being a zealot means.  Dying is martyrdom.  Austerity is a virtue.  And Americans are Islam’s infidel enemies.  Taking unnecessary favors from infidels is disapproved.

 

In sum, we Americans have demonstrated that we can’t win.  And the zealots don’t want anything.

 

So what’s to negotiate?

 

What will happen in the short-term?

 

At best, the Taliban (to the extend that one can think and treat it as an entity, a questionable proposition indeed) will feign agreement, and then do whatever it wants when the Americans go home.

 

What are we going to do, come back and re-start the failed process?

 

The negotiation plan is so dumb that it must be serving another purpose

 

Negotiation can only have been implemented to provide political cover for the United States’ failure in Afghanistan.

 

For perspective, a short review of how we got here

 

Unsurprisingly, the United States could not achieve what was militarily impossible in the first place.

 

One can’t wipe out an insurgency that has either (a) the support of the population or (b) motivation and numbers so strong that fragmented groups of locals cannot resist it.

 

Unless one is willing to do things that Americans have not been willing to do for more than 60 years ─ meaning really act like an oppressor and kill lots and lots of innocent people on purpose. 

 

Realistically, by going into Afghanistan, the United States either had to limit its objectives (squash Al-Qaeda’s training camps and immediately leave) or decide to stay violently there for the American version of “Forever” (fifty years).

 

We did neither, apparently being so enamored of fighting unwinnable wars that we remain content to sacrifice one American after another, and billions of dollars, to the meat grinders we create.

 

Our geopolitical insanity continues, thanks to our complete inability to see beyond two minutes after tomorrow and/or the end of our leadership’s noses.

 

Here’s a mini-progress report on the negotiation strategy

 

A news story from yesterday illustrates the highly probable vacuity of American policy in Afghanistan:

 

For months, American and Afghan officials have been promoting a plan to persuade masses of rank-and-file Taliban fighters to change sides and join the government. The tactic, known as “reintegration,” is one of the big hopes for turning the tide in the war.

But the Taliban, it appears, have reintegration plans of their own. On Monday morning, they claimed to have put them into effect.

In Khogeyani, a volatile area southwest of the capital, the entire police force on duty Monday morning appears to have defected to the Taliban side. A spokesman for the Taliban said the movement’s fighters made contact with the Khogeyani’s police force, cut a deal, and then sacked and burned the station. As many as 19 officers vanished, as did their guns, trucks, uniforms and food.

 

© 2010 Dexter Filkins & Sharifullah Sahak, Afghan Police Unit Defects to Taliban, Leaving Burning Station Behind, New York Times (01 November 2010)

 

This statistically insignificant anecdote demonstrates an Afghani cultural trait that American leaders should have known

 

The Afghani sides-switching, longevity-enhancing cultural trait is not new.

 

Afghanis (their tribes, clans, affiliations, and peoples) have historically survived by changing sides for money or life.  People familiar with that region of the world know this.  Our leadership, apparently, does not.  Or conveniently, at least today, pretends not to know.

 

The police unit’s changing sides is not even morally deplorable by American standards.  Why?

 

Everyone (with a memory) knows, based on History, that the United States is currently completely incapable of staying anywhere painful, with full commitment, for very long.  So Afghanis are predictably looking out for their individual futures by evaluating the pros and cons of remaining aligned with the soon-to-be departed (or defeated) Americans.

 

The United States also has an appalling record of not protecting and/or granting asylum to the people who aided it under extremely difficult conditions in various places around the world.  No pay-back loyalty from us in return for demonstrated courage and honor far beyond the call of ordinary human duty.

 

An Afghani might well think, “Since the Americans aren’t going to look out for us, we’ll have to make peace with the folks who can still kill us.”

 

History’s lessons (again) highlight silly American policy

 

This is a region that no one in recent centuries has ever been able to subdue.

 

That Americans now think they can negotiate their way into placating Afghanistan, when force allied with a few carrots failed, is beyond comprehension.

 

Especially with the hotbed of extremism and deliberate double-dealing named Pakistan just next door.

 

What will happen in the slightly longer-term?

 

What is probably going to happen is that our politicians will declare a negotiated accommodation with the Taliban.  We will eventually leave Afghanistan.  Shortly thereafter, it will go right back to being what it was, or worse.

 

But Americans, with our characteristically short memories, will forget and probably start another counterproductive and unwinnable war someplace else.

 

Conclusion ─ negotiation is just more magical thinking from our pretend leaders

 

With a population of 308 million people, one would think the United States could turn up more effective leaders than the apparently clueless ones we have.

 

Having lived through the Vietnam era and Secretary of Defense McNamara’s post-war apologia for his administration’s unforgivable obtuseness, one has to ask:

 

Why do we have to keep living through sequential presidential administrations filled with incompetents whose mistakes kill our own troops and thousands upon thousands of innocents abroad?

 

Are there no grown-ups in the house?  Was no one paying attention in school?

 

Is egotistical self-gratification the only remaining American leadership quality?

 

Meanwhile

 

Keep counting the dead, the maimed, and our escalating national debt.

 

Then tell me that I am impolite and overreacting.