Following the announcement that the US government is to begin talks with the Taliban, we look into the archives of the RSGS magazine,
The Geographer. In this article, Ahmed Rashid discusses the effects of NATO and US policies in Afghanistan, and lays out his suggested steps for beginning a worthwhile dialogue with the Taliban. (To read the article as it appeared in print, scroll to the bottom of this page)
Ahmed Rashid (see www.ahmedrashid.com) is a Pakistani journalist based in Lahore, and writing regularlyfor many European and American daily newspapers and websites. He is an expert on Central Asia, on jihad and Muslim extremist movements,on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, on insurgency, and on the impact of US policy in this region, on which he has reported for 25 years. For his latest book, Descent into Chaos, he met and interviewed many of the key players in Central Asia.
This article was published in the Spring 2011 edition of The Geographer and in in The New York Review of Books, January
13, 2011.
For the 100,000 American forces, 40,000
NATO troops,
and their commander, General David Petraeus, it’s Year One of the Surge in
Afghanistan. For many Afghans it’s Year Nine of the
US
Occupation—or, to be kind, Year Nine of the
US-led war
against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
US officers say that the war is finally on the right
footing, with enough men and equipment to hammer the Taliban in their bases in
the south. For
US and European diplomats there are
larger imponderables. The strategic policy review released by President Obama
on December 16 is extremely cautious, noting that recent gains in the south
remain “reversible.” The report says the strategy “is setting the conditions”
to withdraw a small number of
US troops in July 2011,
but it does not specify how many of the 100,000 American forces might leave. A
Western ambassador posed the problem to me clearly: “Are we creating a
sustainable government, are we getting the politics right, will there be an
Afghan army and civil service to take over when we leave?”
In Kabul the foreigners breathe a little easier after several months with no
suicide attacks. Kabulis say that the protective blast walls and concrete
barriers that line the streets are now twenty feet high, suffocating them and
eating up their road and living space.
War is always a mixture of different, conflicting stories, depending on
whether you are crouching in a ditch or sipping tea at the presidential palace.
To have dinner with Petraeus and tea with President Hamid Karzai is a central
part of the story, as is journeying to the edge of the city to tiny, unlit,
unheated flats to talk to former senior Taliban officials who want to explain
to you how the Americans and the Taliban can make peace. Everyone tells you the
endgame has started in Afghanistan but nobody can tell you how it will end.
The world is obsessed with the big picture of the Afghan war, not the
domestic details that make it so difficult to end. The
NATO
summit in Lisbon on November 19–20 was a clear example. It tried to clarify the
vision of a Western withdrawal but also created confusion. The
NATO leaders—speaking for the organization, not the
US—said that they planned for a phased transfer of
responsibility for security to Afghan forces and the end of
NATO’s
combat role by 2014. They were committed to stay after that in a supporting
role, while the
US warned that its forces would
continue fighting beyond that date if the security situation deteriorated.
Clearly, the
US and
NATO are on
two different timetables.
To confuse Afghans even further, President Barack Obama also added that some
US troops would start withdrawing from Afghanistan next
July. That date, announced in January 2010 as the
US
surge began, has proved deeply embarrassing to the White House. It has been
challenged by the Republicans, dismayed the Afghans, and created enormous
uncertainty among regional countries such as Pakistan and Iran.
Obama’s final words in Lisbon were extraordinarily vague. Apparently
speaking about the
NATO decision to withdraw in 2014,
he said, “It is a goal to make sure that we are not still engaged in combat
operations of the sort that we’re involved with now,” but “it’s hard to
anticipate exactly what is going to be necessary.” He added, “We are much more
unified and clear about how we’re going to achieve our ultimate end state in
Afghanistan.”
What Is the End State and How Do You Get to It?
None of the attempts at rebuilding the Afghan state over the past nine years
have really worked. What assurance is there that they will work by 2014? The
dates and debates in the White House tell only half the story. Afghanistan is
going through a series of domestic crises, which will determine whether there will
be a functioning state by 2014 or not.
The most immediate issue has been the parliamentary elections, which were
held on September 18, but whose final results were delayed until the end of
November. After the rigged presidential elections in 2009, which Karzai won
after immense controversy and international embarrassment, the United Nations
and
NATO were reluctant to hold parliamentary elections
so soon. However, Karzai insisted—hoping that his preferred candidates would
win a majority in the 249-seat lower house of parliament, which would prepare
the way for it to endorse Karzai’s peace talks with the Taliban.
Again rigging took place on a huge scale—except this time it was done by
individual candidates, not by the government. Karzai’s handpicked Independent
Election Commission (
IEC), which oversaw the poll,
stunned everyone by acting remarkably independently. It invalidated 1.33
million votes for fraud, or nearly a quarter of the 5.74 million cast, and in
mid-November disqualified twenty-four candidates who had been declared
unofficial winners, including a cousin of the President. The
IEC
asserted itself but left behind an intractable problem.
Turnout among the Pashtuns of southern and eastern Afghanistan,
who make up some 40 percent of the population, was very low. The Taliban, who
are largely Pashtuns, had threatened the Pashtun voters, telling them to
boycott the polls. As a result the Pashtuns lost between 10 and 20 percent of
their seats to ethnic minorities, especially the Tajiks and Hazaras. In the last
parliament Pashtuns held 129 seats and now they are down to around ninety. All
eleven seats in the important province of Ghazni, which has a mixed
Pashtun-Hazara population, were won by Hazaras, a result that infuriated both
the Pashtuns and Karzai. Ghazni’s results were announced after much delay and
the eleven Hazaras were declared winners. Earlier the results were challenged
by the attorney general, who ordered the arrest of several
IEC
officials, and there were demonstrations in Kabul for the failure to announce
the results.
The election drama will continue. The non-Pashtuns are broadly against any
peace deal with the Taliban, resent Pashtun dominance, and want to amend the
constitution to introduce a parliamentary system in place of the current presidential
system, which gives Karzai enormous powers. Karzai is trapped. If he accepts
the election results, as he eventually must, he faces a parliament dominated by
non-Pashtuns and his political opponents, which could scuttle his talks with
the Taliban. Yet if he declares the elections null and void on account of the
rigging and orders them redone, he could face open defiance from the ethnic
minorities.
These election results have brought the unresolved ethnic
problems to the forefront. Nine years after 2001, the divisions between the
Pashtuns and the non-Pashtun nationalities that make up the complex weave of
the Afghan national carpet are worse than ever. The notorious corruption and
incompetence of the Karzai administration are still seen to have benefited the
Pashtuns. The American development efforts have focused heavily on wooing the
Pashtun south and east where the Taliban insurgency is based, to the neglect of
the minorities in the north and west. Non-Pashtuns are furious that an
estimated 70 percent of all development funds are being spent in just two
provinces in the south to woo the Pashtuns away from the Taliban.
The non-Pashtuns mistrust Karzai’s talks with the Taliban. Despite several
attempts by Karzai to arrange a national consensus, the non-Pashtuns are deeply
suspicious that any Karzai–Taliban deal will only strengthen Pashtun hegemony
in the country and further reduce minority rights. As a result non-Pashtun
leaders from all the ethnic groups have launched political and grassroots
movements to oppose talks with the Taliban.
Meanwhile the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, and Turcomen minorities have achieved
advantages that cause immense resentment among the Pashtuns. For the first time
the Tajiks and Hazaras dominate the upper officer class in the army and police
even though
US training and recruitment includes a
strict parity between all ethnic groups. Traditionally the Afghan officer class
has been Pashtun. Pashtun representation in the army is lower than its
proportion of the population, and only 3 percent of recruits are from the
volatile south.
The minorities who dominate the north and west have opened up roads and
trade networks, imported electricity and gas supplies, and created other
profitable links with their neighbors—Iran and the Central Asian states of
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Afghanistan’s drug trade—30 per- cent
of which travels into Iran and Central Asian countries such as Tajikistan—has
also enriched local elites. All this has improved lives for ordinary people,
provided independent sources of wealth for local warlords and elites that are
not dependent on Kabul, and given them political power. Meanwhile the Pashtuns
in the south are stuck with the power of their neighbor Pakistan, which
supports the Taliban and has done little toward improving their lives.
Tajik and Uzbek warlords have become so rich and powerful in the north that
they now barely listen to Karzai. Governors of northern provinces have created their own
fiefdoms that are left alone by
NATO forces based there,
because removing them would create further instability. You may not know it
from press reports, but the most powerful man in the country after Karzai is
probably Atta Muhammad Noor, a Tajik general who once fought the Taliban and is
now the governor of Balkh province bordering Uzbekistan. He and his fellow
northern warlords are rearming their militias in preparation for what they fear
will be a long war with the Taliban.
The fear is justified because the Taliban have already arrived in the north,
setting up bases, appealing to local populations, attacking
NATO
and Afghan forces, and infiltrating militants into Central Asia. For the first
time, say
US officials, there is evidence of the
Taliban winning support from not just northern Pashtuns but even Tajiks and
Uzbeks.
Making the Transition
Amid these worsening political problems there is the complex question of
transition. After years of neglect, the
US and
NATO are at last trying to invest more in the numbers,
equipment, training, and mentoring of the Afghan army. This year the
US alone will spend $11 billion on the Afghan security
forces—the largest single item in the
US defense
budget. The Afghan army has reached its first target of 134,000 men and will
expand further, according to
US officers involved in
the training program. The police now number 109,100.
Yet these figures are seriously deceptive. The attrition rate from the
Afghan army is still a staggering 24 percent per year. Some 86 percent of
soldiers are illiterate and drug use is still an endemic problem. The Afghan
police are even worse. (As a recent report on
60 Minutes showed, they
are plagued by elementary incompetence, illiteracy, and corruption that make
the creation of an adequate police force one of the country’s most intransigent
problems.) Although 80 percent of army units are working with
NATO
units, no single Afghan unit is ready to take responsibility on its own in the
field. Afghan forces are only in command in Kabul, but this is largely because
there is a sizable
NATO presence there.
Moreover, when there is so little Afghan administrative presence in the
provinces, Afghan forces, even if they are well-trained, can achieve very
little. There is now a civil service academy turning out bureaucrats, but it
will be years before they make a difference.
Equally grave is the failure to establish an indigenous Afghan economy that
is not permanently dependent on aid handouts. For the first few years after
September 11 President Bush refused to rebuild Afghan infrastructure, including
adequate roads and electrical supplies, and this stymied economic growth. Kabul
got full-time electricity only this year. Industry failed to develop because of
the lack of infrastructure and because neighbors such as China and Iran were
dumping cheap goods in the Afghan market and undermining local productivity.
Obama has initiated a program to help the local civilian economy take off,
but it needs time. The
US Army still buys no local
produce, but the Afghan army, at least, is being equipped with locally
manufactured boots and uniforms. Another acute problem is that the huge profits
of the drug trade are recycled into property speculation rather than economic
production.
Thus the key question for General Petraeus is not how many Taliban he kills,
but whether the bare bones of an Afghan state—army, police, bureaucracy—which
have been neglected so badly in the past nine years, can be set up by 2014.
Moreover, can Afghan leaders, including the President, win the trust of a
people who have put up with insecurity, gross corruption, and poor governance
for many years?
If there is to be progress toward self-government in Afghanistan, a
clear-headed Afghan president is badly needed. Yet Karzai is wrapped in
contradictions and enigmas. During a two-hour animated conversation I had with
him in the presidential palace, he seemed to be straining to not break ties
with the
US and
NATO, while at
the same time wanting to throw off their yoke because it makes him appear as a
Western puppet.
1
Karzai’s on-again, off-again fights with Petraeus about the tactics of the
US military surge are essentially about his own role, his own
sovereignty, his own image in Afghanistan—in all respects he feels he is losing
power. He wants the war to somehow go away. Petraeus wants to conclude it,
which means more violence in the months ahead.
Karzai’s view of the world has undergone a dramatic change and he is
bitterly critical of the West and everything it has failed to do in the past
nine years. He no longer supports the “war on terror” as defined by Washington,
and he sees Petraeus’s surge as unhelpful because it relies too much on body
counts of dead Taliban, often killed by
US drones with
civilian casualties that are resented deeply, and on nighttime raids by
US special forces. The alternative, says Karzai, is to seek
help from nearby countries like Pakistan
and Iran,
which he thinks could help him talk to the Taliban and end the war.
The Neighbors
Many Afghans would disagree with Karzai. Neighboring states like Pakistan
and Iran have a long and bloody record of monumental interference in
Afghanistan, propping up proxy Afghan warlords and fighting over the spoils.
Afghanistan will not become peaceful unless the neighbors are brought into an
agreement not to interfere there that could be monitored by the international
community. Obama made a promise to do just that when he was inaugurated but
little has been accomplished.
The major problem is Pakistan. All three major Taliban factions have been
based in Pakistan for nine years, receiving official and unofficial support,
sanctuary, funding, and recruits; yet three successive
US
administrations have been unable to stop the Pakistan military from continuing
that support. The December 16 strategy review avoids direct criticism of
Pakistan for failing to crack down on Taliban and al-Qaeda bases. However, two
classified intelligence reports given to the President in late November cited
Pakistan’s hosting of sanctuaries as a serious obstacle to
US
objectives.
President Bush never tried very hard, but Obama has offered much larger
incentives and a tougher stick to Pakistan. Petraeus has been aggressive and
made it clear to Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kiyani that its support
for the Taliban must end. But the
US has no
comprehensive strategy that either offers the Pakistani military some of what
it wants or changes its assumptions that it must dominate Afghanistan. The army
fears growing Indian influence in Afghanistan—an issue that nobody has
addressed. It wants to use talks with the Taliban as a card in the endgame, so
that maximum concessions can be extracted from the
US,
India, and Afghanistan in exchange for Pakistan obtaining concessions from the
Taliban.
Iran too has learned to raise the stakes. Shia Iran has no love for the
Sunni fundamentalists who make up the Taliban, but Tehran has stepped up its
support and sanctuary for the Taliban groups operating in western Afghanistan.
Like Pakistan, Iran sees them as a useful hedge for the endgame, when the
US and
NATO will have to bring it in
to discuss noninterference in Afghanistan. Iran has joined with India and
Russia to ensure that Pakistan is unsuccessful in dominating Afghanistan.
So the region is already sharply divided. On one side stands Pakistan,
virtually alone with some support from China, but none from the Arab-Muslim
world that used to support the Taliban. Opposing Pakistan are Iran, Russia,
India, and the Central Asian states, which are extremely suspicious of Pakistan
and the Taliban but lack a strategy to deal with them. They want the
US to stay longer in Afghanistan, but are also suspicious of
an indefinite
US presence.
The Taliban Want to Talk
What of the Taliban?
In separate interviews four former Taliban officials, now living in Kabul,
told me that the Taliban leaders want to open a political office in a third
country that is not Afghanistan or Pakistan, so that they can start talks with
the Kabul regime, the
US, and
NATO.
All four occupied high office in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan
and cannot be identified for security reasons.
Some were captured and held for several years by
US
forces before being freed, and they all now live quietly in Kabul under heavy
government guard. Still, they are allowed to remain in touch with the Taliban
leadership based in Pakistan and have facilitated Karzai’s attempts to talk to
Taliban leaders.
They all said that negotiations would be possible only when they were free
to negotiate from a neutral place—preferably an Arabian Gulf state, Turkey,
Germany, or Japan. With Afghanistan under
US occupation
and Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence (
ISI) trying
to manipulate them, they needed space, freedom, and an address of their own.
The four former Taliban officials also called for a release of all Taliban
prisoners held by the
US in Guantánamo and Bagram, the
main
US base in Afghanistan, and the removal of the
Taliban names from a list of terrorists that is maintained by the United
Nations Security Council. Three of the four men I talked to said that Taliban–
US talks were essential because the
US
is “the occupying power.” Karzai also admits that in his previous contacts, the
Taliban have demanded talks with the Americans and he has tried to persuade
Washington to agree.
The
NATO summit did not mention anything about
talking to the Taliban but it was the elephant in the room. Karzai sees his
political survival as being linked to ending the war through a negotiated
settlement with the Taliban. Petraeus is less keen, wanting to continue the
surge next year, killing more Taliban commanders and weakening others before
inviting them to any negotiating table.
Petraeus does not accept the argument that by killing more Taliban you
radicalize the movement further, bringing in younger and more militant
commanders who owe nothing to the older leadership and are easier for the
ISI to manipulate. He believes that the Taliban leadership
can be broken, fragmented, and split off one by one. As a result, while drones
target Taliban leaders and frequently kill them and people near them, less than
a handful of
US officials in Petraeus’s headquarters
are addressing the issue of reconciliation with the Taliban.
The
US administration is divided about the need for
talks now or later. Skepticism is greater after the
CIA
and Britain’s
MI6 were duped by a fake Taliban
negotiator who twice held talks with Karzai, but turned out to be a Pakistani
shopkeeper who was paid $65,000 each time he came to Kabul. Western officials believe
the
ISI was behind the scam.
Moreover, at the moment neither Karzai nor the Taliban have a clear agenda
for talks. They do not even have a clear notion of how to get to actual
negotiations—but both sides realize that such a venture would have to include
confidence-building measures to create trust on all sides.
The Taliban leaders said that their first political aim would not be to lay
down terms for power-sharing with Karzai, but to reach an agreement on a
definition of what the future Afghan state would look like—would it be a
democratic state or a shariah state? The most sensible among the Taliban also
realize that since they could not run the country in the 1990s they will not be
able to do so in the future. Rather than trying to grab power and then face
isolation by the international community and the denial of funds and aid, they
see the logic of a power-sharing formula with Karzai that would retain Western
aid and international legitimacy. Their main concern right now seems to be how
to break free from Pakistan, something the
US can help
them do only when it is ready to support peace talks.
An Approach to Peace
To answer these questions and not give away too much to the Taliban at the
outset, Karzai, neighboring states, the
US, and
NATO need to work together on a common agenda that reduces
regional tensions and builds trust between the Taliban and Kabul. Any new
approach to peace must include reciprocal confidence-building measures by
Pakistan, Iran, and India as well as by the Taliban and the West. Karzai has
set up the High Peace Council, a sixty-eight-person multiethnic body to
negotiate with the Taliban, but he needs to do much more to build a consensus
across the country. The main question, of course, will be how soon the White
House and the Pentagon decide that it is time to talk to the Taliban. Victory
on the battlefield is not possible but peace cannot be achieved without
US participation in negotiations.
Here is a possible step-by-step approach, involving all the players, that is
intended to build trust and confidence in the region so that ultimately
negotiations with the Taliban can take place.
1.
NATO, the Afghan government, and Pakistan free
most Afghan Taliban prisoners under their jurisdiction and seek to accommodate
them safely in Afghanistan or allow them to seek refuge in third countries.
NATO guarantees freedom of movement for Taliban mediators
opening an office in a friendly third country.
2. Iran enters into negotiations with the United Nations and European
countries to end its safe haven for Afghan Taliban and allow them to return
home or seek refuge in third countries. None of these actions includes amnesty
or safe passage for al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups.
3. The Taliban respond with confidence-building measures of their own such
as publicly dissociating themselves from al-Qaeda, ordering an end to targeted
killings of Afghan administrators and aid workers, and an end to suicide
bombings and burning schools and government buildings.
4. The
US,
NATO, and the
UN declare their willingness to negotiate directly with the
Taliban when the Taliban publicly request it, although they insist that the
dialogue between Kabul and the Taliban remain the main avenue for negotiating a
peace deal.
5. A new
UN Security Council resolution calls for
negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban to bring the war to
an end. The
UN resolution mandates its special
representative in Kabul to help those negotiations and to start a dialogue
between Afghanistan’s neighboring states to reduce their mutual antagonisms and
interference; the resolution also calls for Afghan Taliban leaders who do not
have ties to al-Qaeda to be struck off the list of terrorism suspects.
6. India and Pakistan enter into secret talks between their intelligence
agencies in order to make their presence in Afghanistan more transparent to the
other and end their rivalries. Later the two governments come to agreements
that would allow each one to tolerate the other’s embassies, consulates,
rebuilding activities, and trade interests in Afghanistan. Both pledge not to
seek a military presence in Afghanistan or to use Afghan soil to undermine the
other.
7. Central to any plan would be a deal with the separatist insurgents in the
Pakistani province of Balochistan who make use of territory in Afghanistan to
carry out their attacks on Pakistan. To address the problem, Pakistan issues a
general amnesty for all insurgent Baloch separatist groups and dissidents and
announces its intentions to discuss a new peace formula with all Baloch
separatist groups to end the current insurgency. The army and
ISI
free all Baloch prisoners they are holding including the hundreds of
“disappeared” prisoners.
8. The Afghan government makes a commitment to return all Baloch separatist
leaders on its soil once agreement is reached on a political deal in
Balochistan and safe passage for Baloch leaders to return home is guaranteed by
the Pakistan army and an international agency such as the International
Committee of the Red Cross.
9. Pakistan issues a timetable and deadline of between six to twelve months
for all Afghan Taliban leaders and their families who want to do so to leave
Pakistan and return to Afghanistan. Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the
UN would jointly help those Taliban not wishing to return home
and not on any terrorism list to seek political asylum in third countries.
Simultaneously Pakistan would undertake military action in North Waziristan in
an effort to destroy remnants of al-Qaeda and Afghan and Pakistani Taliban who
may remain and try to sabotage any peace process. Even if such action were not
fully successful, the aim would be to limit their capacity to sponsor
insurgency.
10. The Afghan government works to build a national consensus inside the
country among all ethnic groups, civil society, and the tribes before entering
into formal negotiations with the Taliban. Negotiations also start between the
US and the Taliban. The
US agrees to
sharply restrict killing of Taliban leaders by drones and other means.
Many questions hover over such a plan. It is a tragic loss that Richard
Holbrooke, who would have been a strong leader in advancing such steps, died
before they could be pursued. The former Taliban officials I talked to seemed
open to a sequence of this kind. Whether their comrades in Pakistan can be
persuaded to make a series of compromises and to estrange themselves from
al-Qaeda is far from clear. But if after ten years the war is to be ended and
the “end state” is to be actually achieved, then some such series of steps will
be needed.
See the article as it appeared in The Geographer
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There are three key elements required for a home to be considered smart: an appropriate internal network (wires or wireless); a mechanism to manage the system (intelligent control); and, objects or items within the home which can be automated, for instance a smart TV. Moreover, smart homes can be designed and built from scratch, or features of a smart home can be retrofitted as homes are upgraded. Although the extent to which homes in the UK are smart is not fully known, it is clear that the direction of the domestic arena is towards a smarter’ more ubiquitous home, animated by the development of coded objects and pervasive computing. A smart home may, for instance, turn off lights when a person leaves a room, may close windows if a sensor detects rain, or may even recommend foods to buy as the fridge empties. The potential implications of smart homes are numerous and mean that seemingly mundane and routine domestic practices are changing, and by so doing are imperceptibly reconfiguring and reshaping the spatiality of homes.
