Bringing the Taliban to the table

What happened

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s inner circle has been negotiating secretly with senior Taliban commanders, U.S. and Afghan officials confirmed this week. It marks the first time in the nine-year Afghan conflict that top Afghan and Taliban commanders are meeting face to face. To facilitate the talks, NATO troops have provided security to Taliban leaders en route from their bases in Pakistan to meeting sites. In at least one case, Taliban militants were ferried to Kabul aboard a NATO plane. Karzai said that while the talks are informal, it’s time to “talk with the Taliban at a fixed address and with a more open agenda to tell us how to bring peace to Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s top leader, has not been brought into the negotiations; NATO officials believe he is too closely tied to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, which has its own political agenda in Afghanistan. An unnamed NATO official told CNN this week that the ISI enables Omar’s movements between the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Karachi. He also said the ISI is likely protecting al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, in homes in northwest Pakistan. “Nobody in al Qaida is living in a cave,” the official said.

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What the editorials said

It’s obviously not ideal to negotiate with people who bomb girls’ schools, said the San Francisco Chronicle. But this is not an ideal world. Nine years into the longest war in U.S. history, it’s clear that “military victory over the Taliban is beyond reach.” The only route to peace is through “compromise, not eradication.”

That’s true only if you stick to the “impossible deadline” President Obama set for withdrawal next year, said Investor’s Business Daily. The original counterinsurgency strategy was to “win hearts and minds” by having the military build public works and protect villagers, who would then “rat out the Taliban in their midst” so that our local partner, the Afghan government, could take over. But since that takes time, Obama has opted instead for “appeasement talks” that will almost certainly fail, doing a “dishonor to the sacrifices of our troops and their mission.”

We have no local partner in Afghanistan, said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Afghan elections have been “scarred by fraud,” leaving Karzai with “no mandate to rule the country,” while his forces have been losing ground to the Taliban. The best the U.S. can hope for is a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban while we keep a watchful eye on al Qaida to prevent their return to power.

What the columnists said

For talks to succeed, Pakistan must be brought on board, said Dexter Filkins in The New York Times. Despite receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid, the Pakistani army and the ISI are still supporting the Taliban. They sabotaged an attempt at negotiations earlier this year, detaining 23 Taliban leaders whom they suspected of “quietly reaching out” to Afghan leaders.

That’s why negotiations are being coupled with tough military action on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. In effect, we’re now pursuing the same “talk and shoot” policy that Gen. David Petraeus honed successfully in Iraq. But the precedent for that strategy isn’t Iraq, it’s Vietnam, said Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. And just as the communists did in Vietnam, the Taliban will use talks to “pocket U.S. concessions, forestall U.S. military actions, and manipulate U.S. public opinion.” They’ll string us along until continued U.S. engagement becomes politically impossible—then the Taliban will seize “absolute power.”

Sadly, Afghanistan is no Vietnam, said Nancy Goldstone in the Los Angeles Times. Instead, it’s a medieval fiefdom ruled by cronyism, where warlords cut deals with whomever seems to be winning. We’re engaged in a replay not of Iraq or Vietnam, but of the Hundred Years’ War, when England ruled France by bribing one French faction to fight another. When those factions negotiated a deal, England lost. Likewise, Karzai’s talks with the Taliban will lead to Karzai’s “comfortable retirement—and the Taliban will ride into Kabul.”