Reconciliation and COIN in Afghanistan

[davidbfpo]

Positive, calculated gesture by Pakistan?

Details emerged after Afghanistan's High Peace Council met military and civilian leaders in Islamabad....seven "mid-ranking" Taliban figures had been released. It is understood that Mullah Nooruddin Toorabi, the former hardline Taliban justice minister who ordered men to grow beards, is among the names agreed for release but not Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, deputy to Mullah Omar.

Why do I use calculated? This helps:

Toorabi, notorious hardliner during the Taliban regime .....he was said to have mellowed in exile after 2001 and in 2005 met his previous colleagues in Abbottabad and Peshawar to consider making peace with Kabul. He was arrested soon afterwards.

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...e-process.html

Slightly different report:http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2...050926816.html

Somehow I doubt release actually means free to travel, just a nicer compound bungalow.

[davidbfpo]

Pakistan will consider freeing former Afghan Taliban second-in-command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, if current releases of lower level members help to advance peace efforts, officials from both countries told Reuters on Thursday

Link:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8AE13B20121115

[Bob's World]

http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-e...RoveeM.twitter

Until we are willing to subjugate our tactical goals to the pursuit of our strategic ends, we are simply not going to get in front of this conflict.

Not only are Mr. Karzai's demands reasonable, their is no way any one can perceive his government as sovereign if we persist in denying this, and similar, fundamental and legal requests.

Our message is clear. We believe it is more important to roll up Taliban Squad leaders unconstrained by GIRoA's rules, than we it is to support GIRoA's pursuit of the sovereignty that is absolutely necessary to the achieving any kind of true stability.

We say we promote democracy, yet we are dedicated to preventing any Taliban influence in the government of Afghanistan.

We say we promote sovereignty, yet we allow our general's to tell a sitting national President "no" in his own country to a legal request.

That is neither democracy nor sovereignty. When Gian Gentile says we pursue a "strategy of tactics" this may not be what he means, but this is absolutely a campaign that places a cobbled together mix of tactical programs over the very strategic ends critical to resolving the conflict. We have lost our way.

[jmm99]

Reminds one a bit of the Iraq situation where 2008 Agreement signed; impasse reached on permanent agreement with Maliki; and US troops leave Iraq.

Will Karzai and his Krooks "succeed" as well as Maliki and his Muggers ?

It wouldn't break my heart if no US troops remained in Astan at the end of 2014.

Regards

Mike

[Bob's World]

Mike,

I doubt very much that GIRoA as we have helped create and sustain over the past 11 years will last long after we leave. It was never a sustainable model to begin with, but then the Northern Alliance core of GIRoA has always known that, even if we have deluded ourselves by the trappings of modern governance that we have draped over it.

The Northern Alliance is dedicated to the exclusion of Taliban influence, or more accurately, the Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek minorities will make any compromise - to include allowing US-led NATO forces occupy their land in pursuit of defeat, deny, disruption of AQ - to the end of not being second to the Pashtun majority. Similarly those Pashtun tribes out of patronage under the Taliban were quick to sign up with the Northern Alliance to turn those tables as well.

After all in a patronage society such as Afghanistan, there is no second place. Particularly under the clever constitution we help Mr Karzai and his inner circle put in place. The constitution takes traditional patronage and centralizes and elevates it as never seen before in Afghanistan. The Loya Jirga members reacted with outrage to this concept, but deals were made and the document was ratified. Western analysts by and large lauded it as a great advance toward modernity and democracy. In reality it was a grand scheme to control the country and exclude the return of any influence of those so recently excluded.

For the Taliban government in exile this was the throwing down of the proverbial gauntlet. The revolutionary insurgency began to grow as soon as the Constitution became a reality. No longer could they just bide their time for the foreigners to leave and regain power through traditional means. The rest is history, we countered the revolution, and those actions began to grow a resistance among average, apolitical Afghans increasingly affected by our COIN efforts. The Revolutionaries provided support to the resistance, we conflated both as one in our mind, and continued to pile in more and more effort to "defeat" what we had in many ways created.

Better we just pull the plug. Not pull the plug as in leaving, but pull the plug on that damn constitution. We should tell Mr. Karzai that we will agree to all of his demands regarding his sovereignty immediately if does one simple thing: Follow through on his promise to hold a true reconciliation and constitutional loya jirga. The new constitution can take many forms, but it needs to ensure fundamental rights in the context of this culture, it needs to guarantee quotas of power across the major groups, it probably also needs to disempower the central government with a central army and put the majority of power down to the province level to governors with regionally recruited and operating national guard forces. IE, something sustainable and closer to the context of the place.

The constitution is the key, and yet we not only don't see that, we do the opposite. We continue to protect and laud that document.

[jmm99]

I'd suggest that "Reconciliation" in Astan is a horse no more alive today then it was five years ago - or will be five years from now. The term "COIN" may or may not be used five years from now in Astan (except as it might have propaganda value). I'd bet on the notion of "Civil War" as being the more accurate.

We'll see old and new "Northern Alliance" people - e.g., Ismail Khan and Abdul Dostum of the "old", if they manage to stay alive. I'm not an Astan analyst and won't even attempt to ID the "new" people. Karzai and his Krooks should have enough assets now to live well anywhere in the World.

The Astan Bonn Constitution is not the problem. It's a mere piece of paper which has no materiality to Astan governance. That is based on its real constitution, which is what its people do - acts, not words, govern Astan.

I wouldn't negotiate with any of these ba$tards - none of whom are worth the little finger of any one of our people in Astan. Anything that we (the USA specifically and solely, not including any allies) need to get done in Astan, can get done quietly, clandestinely and covertly (if we still are able to act according to those concepts ?).

I'm sure you believe this:

from BW
We should tell Mr. Karzai that we will agree to all of his demands regarding his sovereignty immediately if does one simple thing: Follow through on his promise to hold a true reconciliation and constitutional loya jirga. The new constitution can take many forms, but it needs to ensure fundamental rights in the context of this culture, it needs to guarantee quotas of power across the major groups, it probably also needs to disempower the central government with a central army and put the majority of power down to the province level to governors with regionally recruited and operating national guard forces.

but, it's so far removed from my position that I can't even address its assertions.

So, I guess I'll just have to plead the "general issue", and let the jury decide.

Regards

Mike

[Bob's World]

Mike,

So a constitution is a "mere piece of paper"? A Certificate for a million shares of Goggle is "mere paper" as well. President Obama's birth certificate is "mere paper."

Fact is, some paper is more important than others. I know you know that, so I find your position odd.

The "mere paper" of the Afghan constitution vested in one man virtually all Afghan patronage. The King did not have that power in the "good old days" of Afghanistan. No leader before Karzai has had such power to my knowledge has. Perhaps Genghis...

Karzai got "elected" in a process that is perceived globally as being highly fraudulent. Probably not quite as bad as the process the garnered Diem 110% of the vote in Saigon when he rose to the presidency in a US supervised election there, but close.

Then once elected he picks 1/3 of the Jirga; all the supreme court, all the ministers, all the Provincial and District Governors and Chiefs of Police - and they in turn all owe their patronage up to him and his cronies. This is a Ponzi scheme that is the root of the scale of Afghan corruption we all complain about. Everyone who buys a positing in this scheme (good rumors are that the latest minister of defense paid $2 million US for his appointment) are then in competition with each other, not just to enrich themselves and their friends and families, but also their patrons, in hopes of earning even better positions where they can make more money.

This means all of those who had such positions prior to the constitution were immediately kicked to the curb. Entire tribal structures were disempowered, while those they had lorded over stepped up to take their jobs, their farms, their power. This is not the type of turmoil that occurs in DC where one party leaves their appointments to go to think tanks, and vise versa. This is like if every member of a particular party that just lost acorss the country had to surrender they homes, their businesses and their pride.

Just a piece of paper? Hardly. And now, as a price of "reintegration" that we offer to the Taliban is that "all" they have to do to come back in from the cold is to swear allegiance to this "piece of paper." Essentially agree to a life of second class citizenry in a country where there is no second class.

I think the Billy Bean quote in money ball applies in his answer to "what the problem is"

"The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us."

This is the same conversation that formerly powerful people who are the core of the insurgency in Afghanistan have around their campfires...

Oh, and I am curious. When is it that an insurgency becomes a civil war? People like to say that the insurgency in Syria is a civil war; like it is a degree of violence that is the critical distinction. That a civil war is by its nature worse than an insurgency. I think either one can be "worse" than the other, depending on how it unfolds. Certainly historians are very casual about what gets called a civil war vs what gets called an insurgency

For me, it is like cellular biology. if there is once cell, and the conflict is internal to that cell, it is insurgency. When the cell divides, each with all the working parts of a full cell, and those two cells then go into competition with each other to see which will grow to fill the entire space, then it is civil war. Degree of violence is, IMO, moot.