Last Shot in Afghanistan

February 19, 2010

By The Diplomat

So I think this has to be an open political process. You can’t settle with the Taliban on the cheap–there has to be due process. It’s about discussing the Constitution. And I think that’s where the argument by the Afghan finance minister and other senior government members in London, who were saying that as long as the Taliban agree with the Constitution and lay down their arms that they will be welcome, is a nonstarter. The key is that you need to renegotiate the Constitution–how the central power operates with the districts and provinces in Afghanistan, what place for women’s rights. These are going to be difficult questions, but you can’t do them in a backroom deal, they need to be done as part of the political process.

And I think we can’t be naïve–and I’m sure the Afghan people are aware of this—because we have within the current Afghan government some very conservative, if not fundamentalist, views. So it’s not like you’re going to import something that doesn’t already exist. I think that’s where we should be a little modest in our analysis and not so clear cut in saying the Taliban are 100 percent bad guys and the Afghan government are 100 percent good guys. Because as we all know, you also have bad guys within the Afghan government, especially some former and current warlords who have human rights violations on their hands but who sit at the Cabinet table. It’s not going to be pretty. But in order to avoid unnecessary tensions, especially with the Afghan people, it should be as open as possible.

Pakistan is seen by many as a key link in any outreach to moderate Taliban. What do you make of the role Pakistan has been playing in Afghanistan, and is a bigger role for it desirable?

It’s not now a question of whether it is desirable–it’s a necessity to make Pakistan part of the solution as Pakistan is one of the main channels toward Mullah Omar and the Haqqani network. Obviously you would need to use and leverage Pakistan’s interest in supporting the Afghan Taliban to get it to see the interest in being part of some kind of political process. And there’s some open-mindedness about this as they realize it might be a good strategy to have, let’s say, some friendly actors in Afghanistan. But that’s obviously going to raise a lot of geopolitical questions in the region, especially regarding India, which is fiercely against any major rehabilitation of the Taliban because they see the Taliban as similar to the group that hit India in Mumbai in 2008.

So India will feel it is under a growing threat, and this is where that the United States will really need to lead and provide some guarantees–it is the only country that can. For example, Pakistan will have to show it’s being more proactive in uprooting those groups like Lashka-i-Taiba that operate not only in the frontier provinces between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also throughout the country, including in the Kashmir region. In fact, India and Pakistan have reopened, modestly, communication on the Kashmir question, something which had been closed for the past few years. This is very encouraging as it could make India less nervous about Pakistan playing a more proactive role in helping the Taliban to join the political fold in Afghanistan.