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President-elect Barack Obama should resist his generals’ calls for a surge of additional troops to confront the Taliban in Afghanistan, and concentrate instead on cleansing Pakistan’s tribal areas of foreign militants with political pressure – and better targeted missile attacks by unmanned drones.
The advice comes from a former member of the Taliban’s senior leadership, who some years ago accepted an offer of reconciliation from the western-backed Kabul government.
“As long as these Arabs and other foreign extremists are hiding in Pakistan, there will be war,” he tells skyreporter. “But placing more American and NATO troops on the battlefield in Afghanistan will only spread the fighting. There will be more clashes, more bombing, and so even more civilians will die.
“This is not Iraq. The arrival of thousands of new foreign soldiers will only encourage the Taliban to continue. It will strengthen their belief in war and killing as their only option for the future.”
The former commander and political figure asked not to be identified because of the controversies swirling around proposed peace negotiations between Kabul and Afghanistan’s various opposition groups, principally the Taliban. He has contributed to recent attempts to establish channels of communication for the talks.
“We should continue to seek contact with the Taliban at every level possible,” he says. “It’s best to start with very basic issues. For example, their concerns about the release of their prisoners at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay.
“On our side, we should bring up their killings of teachers, and attacks on schools and construction workers. Then we could move on to larger issues. If we don’t try to talk, we know what we can expect. More fighting.”
He acknowledges that negotiations should proceed only from a position of strength. “It would be a mistake for the U.S. and the other countries to take any of their troops away from Afghanistan. This would make the Taliban feel stronger, and it would encourage them to continue their armed campaign.
“But sending more troops is also a bad idea. It presents a challenge many Taliban commanders and fighters can not resist.”
The C.I.A.’s current wave of Predator strikes on targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas, he says, is long overdue. But the attacks should be guided by better intelligence to avoid civilian casualties, and western powers should increase pressure on Pakistan’s government and military to remove extremists from their territory.
“These people from Arab countries, from Uzbekistan and other foreign places, they will always stand in the way of negotiations. They are the cause of many of Afghanistan’s problems. The Americans should have dealt with them long ago.”
The Bush administration has been tragically slow in coming around to this truth. Similarly, Washington’s power brokers seem incapable of rising above their steadfast conviction that more boots on the ground guarantees stability.
There was clearly time for that approach in Afghanistan: the period immediately after the dispersal of the Taliban regime in November, 2001. Today, as the former Taliban insider suggests, a build up of troop numbers could simply stamp the Afghan landscape with the Bush era’s regrettable hallmark: wrong war, wrong place, wrong time.
Two prominent holdovers from the Bush administration, Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Central Command chief General David Petraeus, seem to have swayed the thinking of the incoming president.
Gates has already signalled that up to 20,000 more U.S. troops will hit the ground early in the new year, supposedly to facilitate successful Afghan elections.
"We are clearly going to be putting more troops in and I think that the prospects for being able to have these elections successfully are good," he told reporters last week.
If history tells us one thing about Afghanistan, it is to be wary of predictions hatched in the big buildings along the Potomac. Which is something that Barack Obama could usefully keep in mind if he genuinely intends to do things differently in Washington D.C. - and around the world.
Next, as corruption continues to surge through the Kabul regime, will President Hamid Karzai ever do anything meaningful to stop it?
