Watch this video and then say you support negotiating with the Taliban

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If Steve Coll’s recent piece in the New Yorker is correct, bilateral talks between the Obama administration and Taliban leaders began late last year. Last week, members of an Afghan “High Council for Peace” announced they would like to send a delegation to Guantánamo Bay seeking the release of some big fish detained there.

The idea of talking to the Taliban has been floated for years — ever since we began losing the war, in fact — and it’s an even worse idea now than it was when things looked better.

The most potent argument against negotiations is the nature of the Taliban itself. Watch this security-camera video of a February 19 Taliban attack on a Jalalabad bank. Then try to argue that the Taliban is just like, say, the Soviet Union.

In the video, the thugs — the likes of which President Hamid Karzai called “angry brothers” at a peace jirga last June — gun down 38 unarmed Afghans. Dressed as police and Afghan National Army soldiers, the five gunmen were apparently targeting the Afghan police, whose salaries are paid monthly by direct deposit. They killed 14 police, 7 ANA soldiers, and 17 civilians who had the bad luck to be in the bank at the time.

As if this weren’t enough, there were more Taliban strikes against civilians in the following days, culminating in a bomb attack that killed ten at a dogfight in Kandahar — the sort of event attended by the poorest, least educated Afghans.

Coll, a New Yoker staff writer and president of the New America Foundation, makes a typical argument for negotiations:

For the United States, the overarching goal of such negotiations would be to persuade at least some important Taliban leaders to break with Al Qaeda, leave the battlefield, and participate in Afghan electoral politics, without touching off violence by anti-Taliban groups or gutting the rights enjoyed by minorities and women.

Every statement here is dubious, and depends on even more dubious, and simplistic, assumptions.

First, the problem with the Taliban isn’t just its relationship with al-Qaeda, which is murky and likely to remain so. It’s not as though fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan go around with name tags that say, “Taliban” or “al-Qaeda.” (To give an example that defuses the bogeyman aspect of the discussion, imagine trying to “peel off” libertarians from Republicans.) Intelligence experts disagree as to what extent, if any, al-Qaeda is active in Afghanistan. It is unlikely that if we left tomorrow al-Qaeda would set up shop in Afghanistan in a major way. But the idea that the Taliban, sans al-Qaeda, is just another political party is ridiculous. Watch that video again. The problem with the Taliban is that it’s the Taliban.

Second, plenty of Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers and enablers are already in the Afghan government, both in Parliament and in governor and district governor positions appointed by President Karzai. In fact, President Karzai’s choice for speaker of the lower house of Parliament, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, was the man who brought Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place. On Sunday, the legislators chose an obscure Uzbek Afghan as speaker, an MP from strife-torn Kunduz Province who had previously fought with Hekmatyar’s group Hezb-i-Islami. Not an encouraging selection, but miles ahead of Sayyaf, who’d had the highest vote total on a previous ballot. No one has prevented insurgents from joining the political process. They are fighting because they think they have more to gain that way, not because they have been marginalized.

Third, Coll seems to think that the danger of violence comes not from the Taliban gaining more of a foothold in the Afghan government but from those “anti Taliban groups.” Who is conducting all these suicide bombings, “anti Taliban groups” or the Taliban? Coll writes, “If mismanaged, full-blown Afghan peace talks might ignite a civil war along ethnic lines. (The Taliban draw their support from Afghanistan’s Pashtuns; the most vehement anti-Taliban militias are non-Pashtun.).” That’s an irresponsible, misleading statement, which makes it sound as if the ambient conflict in Afghanistan is between the Taliban and “non-Pashtun” militias.

The conflict is between Taliban insurgents and unarmed civilians, on the one hand, and the Afghan National Police and Army, which are relatively ethnically balanced. There is no violence to speak of by non-Pashtuns, in militias or not, against Pashtuns. Sixty percent of the Afghan population is non-Pashtun and by and large loathes the Taliban. A good argument can be made that the US has done little to empower the more progressive, peaceful non-Pashtuns, while pouring hundreds of millions in aid upon the heads of rural Pashtuns in the south and east — essentially rewarding bad behavior and punishing good.

Coll is correct that the situation has reached a “strategic stalemate” in which the Taliban can’t take power. But the same stalemate that keeps the Taliban from rising also keeps us from leaving: a stalemate brought on by the idiotic pursuit of bad strategies, a stalemate that we can break only if we free ourselves from some of our favorite false choices in this war.

The first false choice is between President Karzai and the Taliban. In fact, the choice is between getting rid of Karzai and getting Karzai plus the Taliban (which is what he seems to prefer). The more we empower Karzai, overlook his efforts to dismantle democracy in Afghanistan, and ignore his corruption, the more we increase popular support for the insurgency. I would almost guarantee that if we continue to support Karzai, we will end up with the Taliban. Get rid of Karzai, and we might just win.

The second false choice is that we either kill off the Taliban ourselves or negotiate with it. The overlooked option is that we facilitate the Afghans getting rid of the Taliban. We use our huge influence in the country to jigger things in favor of the progressive elements, the non-Pashtuns who comprise 60 percent of the population. “We will cause a civil war,” is the usual answer, and indeed Steve Coll gives a variant of it. The best answer I’ve heard came from Afghan opposition politician Ahmad Wali Masoud: the insurgency is a civil war. We Americans just go on pretending it has something to do with global jihadi terrorism.

The elephant in the room in Afghanistan is the terrible passivity of the Afghan people. Seeing as Afghans have little sense of themselves as citizens of a nation, prospects are bleak for their situation improving. They don’t like the Taliban, but how many of them are actively fighting against it? Afghan army and police both have terrible attrition rates, and the US command training them is only able to proclaim success by constantly recruiting new men to replace those who leave every month. By and large, American men are doing work Afghan men should be doing. (In its wisdom, the US Army got rid of a longstanding conscription system in Afghanistan, which is another problem.)

This Afghan passivity may be rational, up to a point. As Charles Wolf Jr. and Nathan Leites pointed out in a 1970 RAND book, insurgencies can take hold even when they are unpopular. The population makes a calculation of the costs and benefits of supporting one side or another and decides accordingly.

Making the Afghan government lovable will not necessarily impact that calculus. But reducing the supply of insurgents may, because the less effective the insurgents are at enforcing their threats, the less the population will obey them. The way to reduce the supply of insurgents is to reduce the allure of becoming one. And that probably involves cleaning up the Afghan government, on the one hand, and making the life of an insurgent far more difficult and shorter, on the other. It does not involve accepting the Taliban as a legitimate political voice. That would be the equivalent of the US entering into negotiations with the Branch Davidians or some neo-Nazi militia instead of targeting them.

Coll quotes Hillary Clinton as saying, “Diplomacy would be easy if we only had to talk to our friends. But that is not how one makes peace.” This is the same inspiring voice for American values who said on January 25, “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

Our secretary of state seems to have forgotten that the aim of our war in Afghanistan was victory, not peace. We had peace with the Taliban up through September 11, 2001. If we just wanted to restore the status quo ante in Afghanistan, all we needed to do was expel bin Laden and leave. Yet even if al-Qaeda had stayed out, Afghanistan today would still be a medieval theocracy, with, by now, an almost 100 percent illiterate female population and a generation of young men trained in madrasahs.

That’s also the future for southern and eastern Afghanistan if the US negotiates with the Taliban. With some luck, wiser voices will prevail. But it seems that our policymakers would rather go down with their conceptual ship — “Karzai or the Taliban!” — than take a fresh look at a deteriorating situation.