The author 'talking to the taliban'!
Obama’s Afghanistan strategy review is the West’s last chance to get it right in that troubled country, but will it work? His emphasis on governance and development is the right one – although heaven knows we have heard the rhetoric about a “comprehensive approach” before. What is new is his announcement that the US is ready to talk to “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban. This could be the beginnings of a “Plan B” – because if the strategy accompanying the troop surge fails, the US may one day be forced to talk to Mullah Omar himself, not just the “reconcilables.” And don’t all counter-insurgencies end eventually with dialogue, negotiation, compromise?
The case for a deal with the Taliban leadership – the so-called Quetta shura – is based on Realpolitik. Historically, they have never been a direct threat to the West. Whatever one thinks of their ideology and methods – and these can certainly be brutal – they have never exported terrorism themselves, nor expressed any aspiration beyond the establishment of their version of an Islamic utopia within their own borders. The Realpolitik solution is actually quite simple, therefore: a ceasefire, followed by reconciliation and political power-sharing for the Taliban, in return for a promise to keep Al Qaida out and prevent Afghanistan from reverting to a base for terrorism. In other words, we will leave you alone if you leave us alone.
There is no reason that such a deal should not stick, so long as it is properly handled. I have sat down with the Taliban often enough in the last twelve years to know that the standard Western view of them as a band of intractable zealots, bent on a fight to the death with the hated infidel, is wrong. Their revolution is a work in progress. They often disagree even among themselves about the direction of their future regime, and they are not always too proud to change their minds. I have found that not all Taliban are against girls’ education, for instance. Many are deeply uneasy about their war effort’s reliance on the poppy trade.
A tradition of slow, intellectual deliberation is central to Pashtun culture, and it is the same with the Taliban, a fundamentally Pashtun movement. Many Westerners find the shura system ponderous, with its seemingly endless, tea-fuelled arguments in cushion-filled rooms. Business is always mixed with hospitality, and discussions can certainly meander, but in the end it is not a bad way of reaching a consensus. What is certain is that Pashtuns genuinely love a good debate, especially with foreigners, to whom they are seldom exposed – and that represents a great opportunity for Westerners seeking dialogue.
My last encounter with the Taliban was in Wardak province, south-west of Kabul.
I spent most of a night talking to the province’s senior commander and a dozen of his lieutenants in a safe-house, a remote farmstead backed by snow-clad mountains. The meeting, arranged by a trusted intermediary and sanctioned by Taliban HQ in Quetta, certainly had an edge to it: most of these men were newly returned from the frontline in Helmand where they had been killing my countrymen. But I was protected by malmastia, the tradition of hospitality to strangers, which is a pillar of Pashtun wali, the cast-iron code of conduct that governs the Pashtun tribe. Come to their door with a gun, and they will try to kill you; come as a guest, and they will die for you if necessary.
The stumbling block to negotiations now, I learned then, is the ongoing American troop surge. “Troops out first” remains the Taliban’s pre-condition for any talks. The point of their insurgency, the commander said, was not to win, but to resist: “We are against war. It creates nothing but widows and destruction. But Jihad is different. It is our moral obligation to resist you foreigners… At Judgement Day, Allah will not ask, ‘What did you do for your country?’ He will ask, ‘Did you fight for your religion?’”
I argued that our troops were needed to protect the foreign engineers and agricultural experts who had come to help secure Afghanistan’s economic development, but the Taliban shook their heads.
“Are you saying that it would be different if we had come here unarmed?”
“But of course! In that case you would have been our guests, just as you are our guest now. If your engineers had come to us and explained what they were trying to do, we would have protected them with our lives.”
The idea is not so ridiculous. After all, the Taliban have co-operated with the West before, including with America. In December 1997, for example, a black-turbaned delegation travelled – with full State Department approval – to Sugarland, Texas, to discuss the construction of a trans-Afghan gas pipeline with the energy firm Unocal. The Talibs dined at the palatial home of a Unocal vice-president, Martin Miller, where they were fascinated by his Christmas tree (and, especially, the meaning of the star on top of it). They visited Houston’s zoo and the Nasa space centre, and shopped happily at the Super Target discount store. There was even a rumour that they had played in Miller’s garden with a Frisbee.
When Al Qaida attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, relations hardened and the US demanded the handing over of bin Laden. The Taliban balked at that. Their Foreign Minister, Mullah Hassan, said that to do so would be like “giving up one of the pillars of Islam.” Bin Laden, of course, was their “guest.”
Even so, the Talibs did not dismiss the idea outright. Some of the ulama, Afghanistan’s senior clerics, were actually in favour of handing over bin Laden; and US-Taliban meetings on the subject continued sporadically right up until the summer of 2001.
It was arguably President Clinton, not the Taliban, who closed off the avenue of fruitful dialogue when on 20 August 1998 he ordered Operation Infinite Reach, a cruise missile attack on Al Qaida training camps. From then on, the Taliban felt obliged by Pashtun wali to defend their guest with their lives.
With a little more patience – and perhaps, one suspects, a greater understanding of Pashtun tradition – the US could have had bin Laden on a plate in 1998, 9/11 might never have happened, and everything would now be different. It has taken too long to resume dialogue with the Taliban, but at least it has begun again now.
James Fergusson’s book, A Million Bullets – The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan, is published by Bantam Press £16.99