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Our report today that Britain and America are pressing for UN sanctions against 18 former senior members of the Taliban to be lifted is encouraging news. In opposing the troop surge in Afghanistan, we have argued that this long war will only come to an end with a political settlement which will involve some role for the Taliban in the future government of the country. Such talks require, at the very least, a neutral venue to which representatives can travel back and forth in safety. The first direct meetings between US officials and the Taliban have already taken place in Qatar and Germany. Delisting 18 individuals – and hopefully dozens of others – from UN sanctions, which prevent them from travelling or holding bank accounts, is essential if the Taliban is to establish a political office in Turkey, Turkmenistan or Qatar, all of which have offered to host one.
However – and here come the caveats – there is always less than meets the eye when it comes to claims of talks with the Taliban. Contacts were initiated years ago, only to be severed by Hamid Karzai when he threw the two officials involved out of the country. Now that senior officials of the government in Kabul are involved in a series of exchanges with Taliban representatives, including those of the Haqqani network, Karzai claims ownership of the process. But this, again, is not the whole story. The timing of these leaks is not coincidental. With no signs of a breakthrough in a war which costs $112bn a year, and faced with increasing scepticism at home that a military-led campaign will ever yield a result, western politicians are desperate to talk up the prospect of talks. If real negotiations took place, they would allow Barack Obama and David Cameron, both of whom will announce the start of troop withdrawals next month, to claim prematurely that a peace process exists. With a conference in Bonn at the end of the year, a US presidential election next year, and the deadline of 2014 rapidly approaching, when all international combat operations are supposed to end, Mr Obama is under pressure to show that he has found a way of ending American involvement in this war. Talks with the Taliban would allow him to claim that the big green exit sign is in sight.
Job done? Well, not quite. If the aim of this strategy is simply devolution, a handover of the daily battle to Afghan proxies in the hope that the Pashtun insurgency will one day fragment and fizzle, this is delusion on a grand scale and doomed to failure. Why would senior members travel back to Afghanistan when Pakistan and Saudi Arabia still exist, the former as a permanent safe haven and the latter as a steady financier? And how can talks take place that do not include the involvement of either? What certainty is there that the UN is delisting the right Taliban representatives, and not simply yesterday's people? If we can be confident of anything that has happened in the past 10 years, it is the Taliban's ability to replace one generation of commanders with another, even more committed than the last and less squeamish about causing mass civilian casualities. The current strategy of decapitating the Taliban through drone strikes in Pakistan and enticing lower-level fighters to come in from the cold across the border shows no signs of dealing with the core of the conflict. It will not address the need for a new political settlement for Afghanistan linked to the departure of all foreign troops.
There are shifts in position, such as the hint that the US would see the severing of contacts between the Taliban and al-Qaida as part of a settlement, rather than a precondition of it. If they are to be genuine, talks would involve a reversal of current strategy rather than a continuation of it. One sign that talks were succeeding would be the ending of drone strikes in Pakistan. None of this will be easy, nor will it correspond to the timetable of a US election. Unfortunately, it is difficult not to conclude that this is the primary motive for them.
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