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Bring Back the Taliban
San Francisco Chronicle |
Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
October 15, 2006

Five years after the United States launched the war in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban from power, some U.S. political leaders and military commanders are saying that the only way to prevent chaos and violence from overwhelming the country is to co-opt the resurgent Islamic militia into the country's political system.

From Gen. David Richards, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., they are stepping up calls for a political approach to suppressing the insurgency.

Pointing to a deal Pakistan forged with pro-Taliban leaders last month, granting the militia control of North Waziristan province in return for a cease-fire, they are raising the idea that NATO could forge a similar agreement and bring an end to the suicide bombings and raids in Afghanistan.

"I think played rightly, with luck and good judgment I believe is there, this could set an example how we should deal with these problems," Richards, a British officer, said during a visit to Pakistan Tuesday.

Critics across the U.S. political spectrum have criticized the Pakistani deal in North Waziristan and lashed out at the idea of bringing the Taliban into the realm of Afghan politics.

When Frist called for the assimilation of "people who call themselves Taliban into a larger, more representative government" last week, Democratic legislators accused him of trying to appease the Taliban, which had provided a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda until the United States launched an offensive Oct. 7, 2001, to depose the radical militia.

"Sen. Frist now suggests that the best way forward in Afghanistan is to coddle the Taliban ... as if 9/11 had never happened," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said in a statement.

But many Afghanistan experts support such an approach, saying the Taliban cannot be defeated simply by military means because of their ethnic links and strong tribal support across huge swaths of the war-torn nation.

"The likelihood that we see a decline in insurgency without addressing the concern of the tribal people is very low. There needs to be an integration of the Taliban," said Carl Robichaud, an expert on Afghanistan at the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy research group in New York.

On a lower scale, negotiations with the Taliban or pro-Taliban elements are already under way in Afghanistan.

Last month, British commanders reached a cease-fire agreement with the Taliban via the local gathering of tribal elders, in the town of Musa Qala in the volatile southern Helmand province, Richards said. Under the agreement, the British troops pulled out of Musa Qala in return for the Taliban doing the same, with the elders serving as the guarantors of the cease-fire.

Hoping to enlist the support of tribal leaders in beating back the insurgency, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed last month to hold jirgas, or tribal councils, in the border areas of their respective countries. The jirgas -- open forums traditionally used to resolve conflicts by bringing the disagreeing parties to a consensus -- would involve leaders of Pashtun tribes, who share ethnic ties with the Taliban. No date for the councils has yet been announced.

"The question is, and it's an open question, could you get enough of a consensus on the part of more moderate voices that you could make progress on the whole insurrection," said William Cole, an expert on Afghanistan at the Asia Foundation in San Francisco.

Karzai's pro-Western government has been courting former Taliban officials for some time. In 2004, Karzai launched a reconciliation program, saying all but a core group of 150 militants wanted for human-rights violations would be able to rejoin the political process. About 2,300 former members of the Taliban and other Islamist insurgency groups have taken advantage of the program, Afghan officials said.

It was "one of the most successful things the Afghan government has done," said Peter Bergen, an expert on Afghanistan at the New American Foundation and the author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden."

Last spring, Karzai named Maulavi Abdul Hakim Munib, a former senior Taliban official, the governor of the southern Uruzgan province. Four former Taliban officials were elected to the parliament in 2005.

Critics of bringing the Taliban into Afghanistan's mainstream politics are oversimplifying the ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda, said Syed Hasnat, an expert on Afghanistan at the Middle East Institute.

The Taliban "might be bad people, they might have a distorted vision, but they are not al Qaeda," said Hasnat, a former head of the Middle East section for the Islamabad Institute of Strategic Studies. "The Taliban and al Qaeda must be seen as two separate entities."

But Cole, with the Asia Foundation, warned that the recent spike in suicide bombs and remote-controlled bombs suggests that the Taliban may have become so radicalized that "I don't know whether the strategy of trying to split the Taliban and al Qaeda is possible."

More than 3,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, including more than 130 foreign troops. On Friday, a suicide bomber detonated his car near a NATO convoy in the southern Kandahar province, killing one NATO soldier and eight civilians and wounding nine others. On Monday, a remote-controlled mine killed five people, including the three top officials of the Khogyani district of the eastern Nangarhar province.

The Taliban is using such tactics not to cut off any possible negotiations, but because they are more effective, said Bergen.

"The fact that they are using these tactics doesn't mean that you shouldn'tbe thinking about ways of dealing with them," said Bergen. Of the idea to bring more members of the Taliban into the government, he said: "I think it's an excellent one."

But simply engaging the Taliban politically is not enough, experts and officials say. The international community must increase efforts to stem the skyrocketing illegal opium trade, which helps finance the Taliban; speed up the pace of reconstruction; and help improve the image of the Afghan government, which currently has little power outside the capital.

"We can take on any military challenge that there is and be successful, but the real challenge in Afghanistan ... is how well the reconstruction mission, the international aid mission, is focused," said U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, NATO's top operational commander, this month.

"There is a requirement to do more, to bring more focus, more clarity, more purpose and more results in a shorter period of time," he said at an event organized by the Council on Foreign Relations. "Fundamentally, this is the exit strategy for Afghanistan."

If the lives of Afghans show no visible improvements soon, more and more of them will support the Taliban, Richards warned.

"They will say, 'We do not want the Taliban but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting,' '' he said.

E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.

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