Bringing the Taliban Back In The Fold?

Nir Rosen does away with the happy talk about Afghanistan.

“Negotiation might be a great idea,” Rosen says, “but the Taliban may not feel like they should” negotiate, because they might get more out of a war with the Karzai government than by any promise of inclusion. The Taliban already have governors in Afghanistan loyal, or acquiescent, to them.

Interesting items from Nir’s Afghanistan trip:

the Taliban he talked to drew a distinction between the Afghan security forces (they kind of like them) and U.S. forces (they don’t like them) [...]

With some of the Taliban, “I wouldn’t call them moderates or liberals,” but there’s a strain that Rosen describes as “pragmatic” and would negotiate with the Karzai government. In parts of Ghazni, the Taliban patrol openly, with RPGs out and everything.

Some of them talk about “fighting the Americans after they leave” as a matter of national pride. Police defected in Helmand to join the Taliban. In Ghazni, the Taliban governor actually issues Taliban passports.

“They’ve really taken over much of the countryside,” Rosen says, “I think the U.S. is incapable of defeating them. … There’s a real sense of hopelessness on the part of the international community in Kabul. … The Afghan government is a joke.”

The movement among even the Bush Administration toward negotiation with the Taliban shows just how dire the situation is. I guess "America doesn't negotiate with the enemy" has been thrown out the window. Privately, Bush and his cohorts are admitting they took their eye off the ball and let Afghanistan slide into neglect.

A draft of the latest National Intelligence Estimate says conditions are worst now since the 2001 U.S. invasion. Bush administration officials said privately today that Afghanistan is now the single most pressing security threat in the war on terror.

Control from a military standpoint over the region now falls to David Petraeus, and last week he signaled a policy with Afghanistan that looks much more like what the Democratic nominee would propose rather than the Republican one.

Petraeus discussed whether his strategy in Iraq — protecting the population while cleaving apart the insurgency through reconciliation efforts to crush the remaining hard-core enemies — could also work in Afghanistan. The question has particular salience as Petraeus takes over U.S. Central Command, which will put him at the helm of all U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, thereby giving him a large role in the Afghanistan war.

“Some of the concepts used in Iraq are transplantable [to Afghanistan] while others perhaps are not,” he said. “Every situation is unique.”

Petraeus pointed to efforts by Hamid Karzai’s government to negotiate a deal with the Taliban that would potentially bring some Taliban members back to power, saying that if they are “willing to reconcile,” it would be “a positive step.”

In saying that, Petraeus implicitly allied with U.S. Army Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Last week, McKiernan rejected the idea of replicating the blend of counterinsurgency strategy employed in Iraq. “The word that I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word ’surge,’” McKiernan said, opting against recruiting Pashtun tribal fighters to supplement Afghan security forces against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. “There are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan,” he added.

If we rely on the central government in Kabul we're sunk. They are deeply corrupt and have little power outside the capital. If the Taliban actually wants to join the government - a big if - the question becomes whether they would again sponsor repression of dissent and violence against women. But talk of reconciliation and negotiation is a whole lot better than the alternative.