Reconciliation and COIN in Afghanistan

[goesh]

No WM, but I've been trying to send a psychic message to General P and channel Ghengis Khan. When the Shining Path under Guzman in Peru was really doing its thing and its soliders were making too much headway in the small villages, a crew went down there and convinced a village that wanted to be left alone to 'protect' themselves my making their own amulets and tailsmans and putting them on high poles around the perimeter of the village. Guzman was essentially regarded as a powerful shaman by most country folk. I'm getting this vision of dog skulls stuck on black poles, lots of them, up on the mountain passes and trails used by the taliban where they cross over and I'm seeing crude pictures of black dogs painted on the rocks too near the skull poles. there is something about peasants and the extreme rigidity of fundamental beliefs that always allows one crease, one opening for manipulation. When the vision is real clear, I'll 'send it off' to General P.

[Jedburgh]

The Other Side - Dimensions of the Afghan Insurgency: Causes, Actors and Approaches to ‘Talks’

.....this paper advocates developing multilayered contacts (‘talks’) with different elements of the insurgency in order to differentiate between the motivations, aims and demands of its different components. A build-up of better mutual understanding and possibly some trust with reconcilable elements might be an early side-effect. But a ‘talks’ approach must be embedded in a broader ‘reconciliation’ strategy. A first step would be to differentiate between short term ‘talks’ and long-term reconciliation.

The kind of ‘reconciliation’ pursued up to date has failed because of wrong assumptions. Individual or groups of insurgents were urged to join the existing government. This ignores the fact that the character of the regime itself is one reason for many insurgents to take up arms. It cannot therefore be considered neutral and an arbiter itself. Reconciliation also cannot be approached in an ahistorical way, i.e. with some of those who either had been involved in past crimes (and contributed to the emergence of the Taleban as a ‘purification’ movement) or have later caused the alienation of many of those who have joined the insurgency setting the terms of reconciliation. The same goes for NATO and ISAF and even the UN mission in Afghanistan.

This requires a new, broader strategy on reconciliation and a political consensus about such a strategy, both internally amongst Afghan, amongst – at least – major international actors and, finally, between Afghan and external actors.......