Last Shot in Afghanistan

February 19, 2010

By The Diplomat

How significant is the capture of the Taliban’s No. 2 likely to be moving forward?

It’s a significant development to have captured the No. 2 of the Taliban insurgency, especially the chief military strategist and especially as we can see they have followed some very smart and effective military strategies over the years. This is a significant blow for the Taliban.

But I think what is less clear is the implications for the medium and long term. For example, as I have said, we’re talking about talking with the Taliban. Well, if you start beheading the very group you want to talk to, then the risk is that you’re going to end up with a group that’s very fragmented, where there’s no obvious leader and one that won’t be able to make any hard political decisions. So here you have the tension between the immediate benefit of taking a Talban leader out of the field and the longer term question mark about who is going to be your counterpart. Who are you going to deal with?

So we have to be careful about going for quick results and in the process losing a grip on the longer term. And I also think what might happen is that we could see some kind of internal struggle in the Taliban leadership, which wouldn’t be the first time. The Taliban is already an opaque organization and all the experts are struggling to give it a clear reading. Is it made of loose cannons and small-time criminals who are pretending to fight jihad? Or is it really a co-ordinated and centralized movement?

I think cutting the head off this movement is going to make the understanding of–and therefore engagement with–the group more complicated. Of course it’s also significant that this was done in collaboration with the Pakistan government and security services who have kept–and still hold onto–a strategy of ambiguity, of hedging their bets geopolitically. They say they’re in an alliance with the United States and they get $8 billion of military and civilian aid, but on the other side they’re supporting the very groups that the United States is fighting because those groups are their best guarantee of strategic depth vis-a-vis India.

So I’m not sure if this strategy of ambiguity is going to cease anytime soon. We can hope that they’re getting serious about it, but we have to keep focused on the longer-term political outcome. Look what Israel, for example, has been doing in recent years in going after the Hamas leadership. It has not necessarily solved the political problem and has actually created a status quo where you don’t have a political partner with whom to negotiate.

There’s been a lot of talk about defining–and redefining–victory. The US effectively set a timeline to begin withdrawing troops of 18 months. What do you think the US can realistically expect to achieve in this time, and can it be anything that could be called a victory?

I don’t think the Obama strategy is fighting for victory. I think the Obama administration is realistic and modest enough to know that the best result is a relatively stable and functional country, where al-Qaeda has been disabled, terminally, and where the Taliban are too weak to pose a real threat. This is not the case currently as they control formally or informally almost half of the country. And it would also be a situation where the Kabul government is what I would say functional enough to start delivering basic security and services to the population. So it isn’t about victory. It isn’t even about success. It’s about trying to turn the dynamic from a Taliban-led one to a Kabul/Western-led one.