India's role in a multi-polar world - Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft

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Through a billion voices: India’s role in a multi-polar world
way to do this is by brokering a new power sharing
arrangement between all Afghan ethnic factions.
That can only happen if they agree to another peace
conference – perhaps another grand Loya Jirga –
attended by all warring groups, but especially the
Taliban. What has made the paralysis in Washington
perfect is the adamant refusal of the Taliban to join
any peace process in Afghanistan.
There has been no dearth of efforts to bring them
to the conference table. Hamid Karzai began to
reach out to the Taliban even while US and NATO
commanders were mounting new offensives in 2006.
The Taliban spurned his offer, but this only made him
change tactics. Previously, Pakistan and Afghanistan
had been attempting to make their separate peace
with elements within the Taliban, but this only created
sanctuaries in one country and military offensives
in the other. Karzai realised that the two countries
stood a much better chance of bringing the Taliban to
the negotiating table if they co-ordinated their peacemaking
efforts. After a year of preparation he was
able to hold a peace Jirga in Kabul in August 2007
which Musharraf himself attended on its last day.
The Jirga generated considerable optimism and
even appointed a fifty member committee drawn
from both Afghanistan and Pakistan to coordinate
future initiatives. But it had no impact whatsoever
on the Taliban. Although Karzai issued two more
public invitations to the Taliban to participate in
peace talks while preparations for the peace Jirga
were underway, he received his answer from them
only a month after it ended. This took the form of an
assassination attempt in the heart of Kabul.
Even this did not discourage Karzai. In 2008, with
the full backing of the US, he induced the Saudi
Arabian government to act as a go-between to
reach Mullah Omar. Saudi Arabia had been chosen
because it was one of the only three countries that
had recognised the Taliban government in 1996, and
had been its main financier. Riyadh persisted in its
efforts through the early months and the summer of
2008 but these too ended in failure.
Afghanistan: reversing the vicious circle | Prem Shankar Jha
Nevertheless, in October 2008 the US too
announced openly that it was ready to talk to the
Taliban and brought out the second string to its bow.
This was the discredited leader of the Hizbe-Islami,
Gulbudin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar is a Pashtun, and
although he was born in the north, he had been the
principal recipient of American largesse in the war
against the Soviet Union. In recent years he was
believed to have drawn closer to Mullah Omar. But
this initiative, although launched in February 2009,
has also yielded no fruit so far.
If all of these efforts have failed is there any point
in trying to convene a new Loya Jirga? If the US and
NATO are willing to understand and accept the reasons
for their failure, then the answer is “yes”. There are
two reasons for this: the first is that every effort has
been made by or on behalf of the Taliban’s adversaries.
The Taliban command therefore read them as signs
of growing weakness and an increasingly desperate
desire to achieve at the conference table what they
have not achieved through war. They have, therefore,
strengthened their will to fight and their ability to find
fresh recruits. The second is that none of the peace
initiatives has explicitly offered the one thing that all
Afghans want – the exit of the foreigner from their
soil in return for a durable peace.
The importance of this omission is hard to
overestimate for in the absence of an explicit quid pro
quo, any leader who shows signs of even wanting to
talk to the enemy runs the risk of being denounced
by his peers as a traitor and himself becoming a
target.
The need for an explicit quid pro quo to get peace
talks moving has been apparent for at least the
last three years. In September 2007 the New York
Times reported that when the US ambassador to
Pakistan asked Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the mentor
of the original Taliban, to support a government led by
Benazir Bhutto after the coming elections, he
immediately agreed to do so provided Bhutto
committed herself to asking the US to leave
Afghanistan. Without such a commitment from