The killing of Osama bin Laden, combined with success of drone attacks against lower-level al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, have put additional pressure on the Obama administration to find a way to reduce U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Early in his administration, the president set as his goal “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” It was not, he added, to “rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.”
The time has come for the United States and its coalition partners to recognize that Afghanistan has never been centrally governed and begin to focus on a sustainable result that requires a political settlement involving all the internal tribes. That would includea governing role for the conservative Taliban Pashtuns of the south.
That view comes from David Miliband, former British foreign minister and a current Labor member of Parliament. He discussed Afghanistan last week at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting and his presentation deserves wider consideration.
Miliband is concerned that in Afghanistan, 2014 is to mark “an end date, but not an end game,” though “in the popular imagination we have a date for the end of the war.”
Though that is the designated year for all foreign combat troops to be out of Afghanistan, he remarked, “If you read the small print, [it] is not actually the date for all foreign troops to leave. It’s a date for the transition to [Afghan] leadership.”
Miliband’s main point is that the needed political settlement is not one that features control from Kabul. He described Afghanistan as “a country of 40,000 villages and valleys,” where a political settlement needs to be “internal with all the tribes and regional with the neighbors.”
He recognized this would be “an exceedingly complicated process, but until that ‘North Star’ [meaning the political settlement] is established, the military effort, the development effort, the civilian effort, will not be sustainable.”
A beginning step would be the appointment of a U.N. mediator or facilitator from the Muslim world. A second step would be for the coalition — and particularly the United States — to set out its outline of a political settlement. Until that happens, he said, “Every other party to the conflict, [meaning various Taliban groups and neighboring countries] is going to be playing all sides against the middle.”
Over time, he said he fears the situation could worsen, so it requires a council of regional stability to bring the parties together. “It’s only when they’re staring each other in the face that we’re going to get to serious discussion,” he said.
Miliband’s own approach, based on talks with people who have spoken to various branches of the Taliban, is that many of them are stuck in Pakistan at the moment, where it’s “increasingly hot for them there.” They want to come home, he said, but they want to talk to the United States and not just to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Miliband mentioned a November 2010 New America Foundation report that outlines how several Kandahar Taliban leaders in 2002 were willing to accept the Karzai government and stay out of politics but were turned down. They went to Pakistan. “And it’s out of those decisions that the Kandahar Taliban was recreated in 2004, 2005 and in some ways we’ve ended up where we are now,” he said.
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