Last September, an assessment of the war in Afghanistan, by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal, was leaked to the press. The timing was not incidental. President Obama was trying to make up his mind about what kind of war he wanted to wage, for how long, and with how many soldiers. McChrystal had a definite opinion: the best way to win was to send forty-five thousand more troops to Afghanistan—the sooner the better.
That same month, American soldiers in Balkh Province, in the north of Afghanistan, were planning a search-and-clear operation. It was not going well. According to a report written by a member of Task Force Warrior, a unit of the 10th Mountain Division, local civilians would not coöperate, whereupon Afghan soldiers and policemen “harassed and beat” them. The area’s residents “had a negative opinion” of their nation’s security forces, the writer noted. A police district commander
is reported to have had forcible sexual contact with a 16 ye old AC [Afghan civilian] female. When AC from the area went to complain to the ANP [Afghan National Police] district commander about the incident, the district commander ordered his body guard to open fire on the AC. The body guard refused at which time the district commander shot him in front of the AC.
This dispatch was one of some seventy-six thousand classified American military documents, mostly field reports, released online by WikiLeaks, an organization committed to making secrets public. (The group says that, at the insistence of its source, it delayed the publication of fifteen thousand other documents as part of “a harm minimization process”; still, the names of some Afghan informants were posted.) WikiLeaks gave the Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel an advance look at the entire archive, which covers events from January, 2004, to December, 2009, in every corner of Afghanistan.
Almost immediately, a consensus emerged that little in the files was actually secret or new. There is something to that. We did know, in a general sense, much of what they document: that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is corrupt and unpopular, that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency has ties to the Taliban, that too many civilians are dying. There had been reports, including some in this magazine, of targeted killings. And we knew that the Afghan security forces were a disaster, even after we had spent twenty-seven billion dollars to train them. But knowing specifically what happened to a sixteen-year-old girl and to the man who stood up to her alleged rapist—and knowing that her attacker may have been in a position to do what he did because he was backed by our troops and our money—is different.
And what do we still not know? The documents are labelled in various ways, among them whether an incident involved an “enemy” or a “friend.” The Balkh report is marked “enemy,” and it does mention insurgents killing a motorist. But the designation, of this and many of the other reports, raises a larger question: Do we know who in Afghanistan is our enemy and who is our friend? Al Qaeda is our enemy, of course, but after that the lines get blurry. Is a police chief who might chase insurgents one day but creates more of them by alienating the civilian population the next our enemy or our friend? When our soldiers go to the chief’s village and are met with hostility, whose fight are they walking into?
The Afghan security forces apparently can’t tell their friends from their enemies, either. In February, 2008, according to one report, an Afghan policeman “was in the public shower smoking hash” when two Afghan National Army guys walked in. That sounds like the setup for a joke, but the punch line wasn’t funny: the policeman “felt threatened and a fire fight occurred.” In September, 2007, Afghan soldiers went looking for five policemen who had abandoned their post and, minutes later, brought one of them back with a bullet in his head. “Their story is that they tried to fire a warning shot and accidentally hit [the policeman],” the report notes. The area’s entire police force was then “withdrawn to prevent an attempted honor killing.” Both shootings are categorized as “friendly fire.”
If the problem were just undisciplined local units, then a solution that McChrystal advocated—more money and more training—might have a chance. So might a recent plan to set up another police force. But the confusion of friends and enemies goes much deeper. We pay Pakistan a billion dollars a year to fight the Taliban and other insurgents, and yet the WikiLeaks archive is riddled with reports like one from May, 2007, about the I.S.I. sending the Haqqani network, which regularly attacks American forces, “1000 motorcycles” for suicide bombers. More fundamentally, our counterinsurgency strategy relies on strengthening Karzai—“our friend and ally,” as Obama referred to him in May. But many Afghan civilians don’t regard him as their friend, and they associate us with his failings. Karzai’s own friends include dubious warlords, who serve in his government; his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, the provincial council leader in Kandahar Province, is allegedly involved in criminal enterprises. (He has denied it.)
Last week, the White House stressed that much had changed in the seven months since the final entry in the WikiLeaks files. And that is true: we are now more deeply enmeshed in Afghanistan. Obama has doubled the number of troops there, and more are dying—more than sixty were killed in July, the highest monthly toll for Americans since the war began. McChrystal was fired in June, but Obama emphasized that his successor, David Petraeus, would pursue the same strategy. An experiment in being stern about high-level corruption ended with Karzai musing about joining the Taliban and the Administration backing down. Karzai’s initial reaction to the files bespeaks a sense of impunity. His spokesman, Waheed Omar, “was asked whether there was anything in the leaked documents that angered Mr. Karzai or that he thought unfair,” the Times reported. “No, I don’t think so,” Omar said.
Some American observers similarly implied that the lack of broad revelations rendered the contents of the files insignificant. In an Op-Ed for the Times, Andrew Exum, a former Army officer and adviser to McChrystal, wrote that one might “be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.” The Washington Post reported that a “dismissive attitude dominated the national security think tanks.” The Wall Street Journal noted, in an editorial, “Among the many nonscoops in the documents, we learn that war is hell.” The prevailing view in those quarters was that there is no alternative: this is the war we have. But perhaps the leaked documents will persuade us to challenge that sense of resignation. We could reëxamine other proposals, like the one for a pared-down campaign narrowly focussed on hunting Al Qaeda—a plan that McChrystal’s leaked report helped quash. We might even decide, nine years after our arrival, that it is time to leave Afghanistan.
By Joshua Partlow Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, July 23, 2010; A01
PANJSHIR VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN -- The man who served as President Hamid Karzai's top intelligence official for six years has launched an urgent campaign to warn Afghans that their leader has lost conviction in the fight against the Taliban and is recklessly pursuing a political deal with insurgents.
In speeches to small groups in Kabul and across northern Afghanistan over the past month, Amarullah Saleh has repeated his belief that Karzai's push for negotiation with insurgents is a fatal mistake and a recipe for civil war. He says Karzai's chosen policy endangers the fitful progress of the past nine years in areas such as democracy and women's rights.
"If I don't raise my voice we are headed towards a crisis," he told a gathering of college students in Kabul.
That view is shared by a growing number of Afghan minority leaders who once participated fully in Karzai's government, but now feel alienated from it. Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek politicians have expressed increasing concern that they are being marginalized by Karzai and his efforts to strike a peace deal with his fellow Pashtuns in the insurgency.
Saleh's warnings come as the United States struggles to formulate its own position on reconciliation with the Taliban. While U.S. officials have supported Afghan government-led talks in theory, they have watched with apprehension as Karzai has pursued his own peace initiatives, seemingly without Western involvement.
NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, Ambassador Mark Sedwill, cautioned recently that "any political reconciliation process has to be genuinely national and genuinely inclusive. Otherwise we're simply storing up the next set of problems that will break out. And in this country when problems break out, they tend to lead to violence."
Still, with war costs and casualties rising, U.S. policymakers are increasingly looking for a way out, and a power-sharing deal between Karzai and the Taliban may be the best they can hope for. One senior NATO official in Kabul described Saleh as "brilliant." But the official said Saleh's hard-line stance against negotiations does not offer any path to ending the long-running U.S. war.
Saleh, 38 and a Tajik, began his intelligence career in this scenic valley north of Kabul working for the legendary guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. He said he is not motivated by ethnic rivalries with the majority Pashtuns or by a desire to undermine Karzai, whom he describes as a decent man and a patriot.
Rather, Saleh said he wants to use nonviolent, grass-roots organizing to pressure the government into a harder line against the Taliban by showing that Afghans who do not accept the return of the Taliban are a formidable force. Saleh resigned last month as director of the National Directorate of Security after he said he realized that Karzai no longer valued his advice.
"The Taliban have reached the gates of Kabul," Saleh said. "We will not stop this movement even if it costs our blood."
Proceeding carefully
Karzai spokesman Waheed Omar declined to comment on Saleh's analysis. Karzai's government has made reconciliation a top priority, and officials say they are proceeding carefully. Karzai has invited Taliban leaders to talk, but he has said insurgents must accept the constitution, renounce violence and sever their links to foreign terrorists before they can rejoin society.
Those conditions do little to mollify Afghan minority leaders, many of whom had backed Karzai in the past but are now breaking with the president. Some are concerned that a deal between Karzai and the Taliban could spawn the sort of civil war that existed in Afghanistan prior to the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.
"The new political path that Karzai has chosen will not only destroy him, it will destroy the country. It's a kind of suicide," said Mohammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara leader and former Karzai ally.
With the defection of Saleh and the transfer of another Tajik, Bismillah Khan, from his position as chief of army staff to interior minister, Karzai critics see an erosion of strong anti-Taliban views within the government. Khan, many argue, was more important to the war effort in his army post than at the interior ministry, which oversees the police.
"Now Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, they are not partners in Karzai's government, they are just employees," said Saleh Mohammad Registani, a Tajik parliament member from the Panjshir. "Karzai wants to use them as symbols."
To spread his message, Saleh has sought out young, educated students and university graduates. Through them he intends to form groups across the country to apply grass-roots political pressure. His aims are nonviolent, he said, and not intended to further ethnic divisions, but he has said they must prepare for the worst.
Saleh was born in the Panjshir Valley before the family moved to Kabul. He joined the armed opposition, or mujahideen, rather than be conscripted into the Afghan army and in 1997 started as an intelligence officer with Massoud's forces.
Saleh was appointed to run Afghanistan's fledgling intelligence service in 2004, and developed a reputation among U.S. officials as one of the most effective and honest cabinet ministers.
In Saleh's view, Karzai's shift from fighting to accommodating the Taliban began last August. The messy aftermath of the presidential election, in which Karzai prevailed but was widely accused of electoral fraud, was taken as a personal insult, Saleh said.
"It was very abrupt, it was not a process," Saleh said of Karzai's changing views. "He thought he was hurt by democracy and by the Americans. He felt he should have won with dignity."
Frayed relations
After the election, Afghan relations with the United States plunged to new lows, as Karzai railed against Western interference in his government and threatened to join the Taliban. Saleh said Karzai believes that the United States and NATO cannot prevail in Afghanistan and will soon depart. For that reason he has shifted his attention to Pakistan, which is thought to hold considerable sway over elements of the insurgency, in an attempt to broker a deal with the Taliban.
"We are heading toward settlement. Democracy is dying," Saleh said. He recalled Karzai saying, "'I've given everybody a chance to defeat the Taliban. It's been nine years. Where is the victory?'"
In his speeches, Saleh recounts Taliban brutalities: busloads of laborers lined up and executed, young men chopped in half with axes, women and children slain before their families. His rhetoric is harshly critical of Pakistan.
"All the goals you have will collapse if the Taliban comes back," he told a gathering of college students under a tent outside his house in Kabul. "I don't want your university to be closed just because of a political deal. It will be closed if we do not raise our voices."
Saleh believes the Taliban will not abide by a peaceful power-sharing deal because they want to regain total authority. Despite a significant U.S. troop buildup this year and major NATO offensives, he estimated that insurgents now control more than 30 percent of Afghanistan. He said the Taliban leadership -- about 200 people, many of them in the Pakistani city of Karachi -- are financed, armed and protected by Pakistan's intelligence agency. "The inner circle is totally under their control," Saleh said. Pakistan has long denied it supports the Taliban.
The second ring of Taliban leadership -- about 1,700 field commanders -- oversees a fighting force of 10,000 to 30,000 people, depending on the season, Saleh said. Under former NATO commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, 700 of these Taliban commanders were captured or killed, Saleh said, only to be replaced by a new crop.
"The factory is not shut," he said. "It keeps producing."
Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.
In the media celebration of our "victory" over the Taliban in the Helmand Valley, little attention has been given to the nature of insurgency: the proper tactic of guerrillas is to fade away before overwhelming power, leaving behind only enough fighters to force the invaders to harm civilians and damage property. This is exactly what happened in the recent fighting in Marja. Faced with odds of perhaps 20 to 1, helicopters, tanks and bombers, the guerrillas wisely dispersed. Victory may not be quite the right description.
That battle will probably be repeated in Kandahar, which, unlike the agricultural area known as Marja, is a large and densely populated city. Other operations are planned, so the Marja "victory" has set a pattern that accentuates military action. This is not conducive to an exit strategy--it will not lead out of Afghanistan but deeper into the country. Indeed, there is already evidence that this is happening. As the Washington Post reported shortly after the Marja battle ended, not far away "the Marines are constructing a vast base on the outskirts of town that will have two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see."
Since the Helmand Valley is the focal point of the military strategy, it is important to understand its role in Afghan affairs. The Helmand irrigation project, begun in the Eisenhower administration as a distant echo of the TVA, was supposed to become a prosperous island of democracy and progress. As a member of the Policy Planning Council in the Kennedy administration, I visited it in 1962. What I found was deeply disturbing: no studies had been made of the land to be developed, which proved to have a sheet of impermeable rock just below the surface that caused the soil to turn saline when irrigated; the land was not sufficiently leveled, so irrigation was inefficient; nothing was done to teach the nomad settlers how to farm; plots were too small to foster the social engineering aim of creating a middle class; and since there were no credit facilities to buy seed, settlers were paying 100 percent interest to moneylenders. In short, after the buildup of great expectations, disappointment was palpable.
Was it a portent? It seems likely. At the least, it's striking that precisely where we carried out our first civic action program is where the Taliban became most powerful.
So what should that experience have taught us? That we should learn about the Afghans, their country and their objectives before determining our policy toward them. There is much to be learned, but I will here highlight what I believe are the three crucial issues that will make or break our relationship.
The first issue critical to evaluating US policy is the way the Afghans govern themselves. About four in five Afghans live in the country's 20,000-plus villages. During a 2,000-mile trip around the country by jeep, horseback and plane half a century ago, as well as in later trips, it became clear to me that Afghanistan is really thousands of villages, and each of them, although culturally related to its neighbors, is more or less politically independent and economically autarkic.
This lack of national cohesion thwarted the Russians during their occupation: they won many military victories, and through their civic action programs they actually won over many of the villages, but they could never find or create an organization with which to make peace. Baldly put, no one could surrender the rest. Thus, over the decade of their involvement, the Russians won almost every battle and occupied at one time or another virtually every inch of the country, but they lost about 15,000 soldiers--and the war. When they gave up and left, the Afghans resumed their traditional way of life.
That way of life is embedded in a social code (known in the Pashtun areas as Pashtunwali) that shapes the particular form of Islam they have practiced for centuries and, indeed, that existed long before the coming of Islam. While there are, of course, notable differences in the Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik areas, shared tradition determines how all Afghans govern themselves and react to foreigners.
Among the shared cultural and political forms are town councils (known in the Pashtun areas as jirgas and in the Hazara area as ulus or shuras). The members are not elected but are accorded their status by consensus. These town councils are not, in our sense of the word, institutions; rather, they are "occasions." They come together when pressing issues cannot be resolved by the local headman or respected religious figure. Town councils are the Afghan version of participatory democracy, and when they act they are seen to embody the "way" of their communities.
Pashtunwali demands protection (melmastia) of visitors. Not to protect a guest is so grievous a sin and so blatant a sign of humiliation that a man would rather die than fail. This, of course, has prevented the Afghans from surrendering Osama bin Laden. Inability to reconcile our demands with their customs has been at the heart of our struggle for the past eight years.
As put forth in both the Bush and Obama administrations, our objective is to prevent Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base for attacks on us. We sharpened this objective to the capturing or killing of bin Laden. That is popular with US voters, but even if we could force the Afghans to surrender him, it would alienate the dominant Pashtun community. Thus it would probably increase the danger to us. But it is unnecessary, since a resolution of this dilemma in our favor has been available for years. While Pashtunwali does not permit a protected guest to be surrendered, it allows the host, with honor, to prevent the guest from engaging in actions that endanger the host. In the past, the Taliban virtually imprisoned bin Laden, and they have repeatedly offered--provided we agree to leave their country--to meet our demand that Al Qaeda not be allowed to use Afghanistan as a base. Although setting a withdrawal date would enable us to meet our objective, we have turned down their offers.
The second crucial issue in evaluating our policy is the way the people react to our civic action programs.
Afghanistan is a barren, landlocked country with few resources, and its people have suffered through virtually continuous war for thirty years. Many are wounded or sick, with some even on the brink of starvation. The statistics are appalling: more than one in three subsists on the equivalent of less than 45 cents a day, almost one in two lives below the poverty line and more than one in two preschool children is stunted because of malnutrition. They are the lucky ones; one in five dies before the age of 5. Obviously, the Afghans need help, so we think they should welcome our efforts to aid them. But independent observers have found that they do not. Based on some 400 interviews, a team of Tufts University researchers found that "Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative." We must ask why this is.
The reason, I think, is that the Taliban understand from our pronouncements that civic action is a form of warfare. The Russians taught them about civic action long ago, and Gen. David Petraeus specifically proclaimed in his Iraq days, "Money is my most important ammunition in this war." Thus many ordinary citizens see our programs as Petraeus described them--as a method of control or conquest--and so support or at least tolerate the Taliban when they destroy our projects or prevent our aid distribution.
To get perspective on this, it is useful to look at Vietnam. There too we found that the people resented our efforts and often sided with our enemies, the local equivalent of the Taliban: the Vietminh, or, as we called them, the Vietcong. The Vietminh killed officials, teachers and doctors, and destroyed even beneficial works. Foreigners thought their violence was bound to make the people hate them. It didn't. Like the Kabul government, the South Vietnamese regime was so corrupt and predatory that few supported it even to get aid. When we "inherited" the war in Vietnam, we thought we should sideline the corrupt regime, so we used our own officials to deliver aid directly to the villagers. It got through, but our delivering it further weakened the South Vietnamese government's rapport with its people.
Is this relevant to Afghanistan? Reflect on the term used by Gen. Stanley McChrystal when his troops moved into Helmand: he said he was bringing the inhabitants a "government in a box, ready to roll in." That government is a mix of Americans and American-selected Afghans, neither sent by the nominal national government in Kabul nor sanctioned by local authorities.
How will the Afghans react to McChrystal's government? President Karzai was at least initially opposed, seeing the move as undercutting the authority of his government. We don't yet know what the inhabitants thought. But we do know that when we tried similar counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam, as the editor of the massive collection of our official reports, the Pentagon Papers, commented, "all failed dismally."
If we aim to create and leave behind a reasonably secure society in Afghanistan, we must abandon this failed policy and set a firm and reasonably prompt date for withdrawal. Only thus can we dissociate humanitarian aid from counterinsurgency warfare. This is because once a timetable is clearly announced, a fundamental transformation will begin in the political psychology of our relationship. The Afghans will have no reason (or progressively less reason, as withdrawal begins to be carried out) to regard our aid as a counterinsurgency tactic. At that point, beneficial projects will become acceptable to the local jirgas, whose members naturally focus on their own and their neighbors' prosperity and health. They will then eagerly seek and protect what they now allow the Taliban to destroy.
If under this different circumstance the Taliban try to destroy what the town councils have come to see as beneficial, the councils will cease to provide the active or passive support, sanctuary and information that make the Taliban effective. Without that cooperation, as Mao Zedong long ago told us, they will be like fish with no water in which to swim. Thus, setting a firm and clear date for withdrawal is essential.
This leaves us with the third issue, the central government. We chose it and we pay for it. But as our ambassador, Gen. Karl Eikenberry, has pointed out in leaked reports, it is so dishonest it cannot be a strategic partner. It is hopelessly corrupt, and its election last year was fraudulent; General Petraeus even told President Obama that it is a "crime syndicate." It is important to understand why it lacks legitimacy in the eyes of its people.
For us, the answer seemed simple: a government must legitimize itself the way we legitimize ours, with a reasonably fair election. But our way is not the Afghan way. Their way is through a process of achieving consensus that ultimately must be approved by the supreme council of state, the loya jirga. The apex of a pyramid of village, tribal and provincial assemblies, the loya jirga, according to the Constitution, is "the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan."
Like the Russians, we have opposed moves to allow Afghanistan to bring about a national consensus. In 2002 nearly two-thirds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for Afghans to work out their future. But we had already decided that Hamid Karzai was "our man in Kabul." So, as research professor Thomas Johnson and former foreign service officer in Afghanistan Chris Mason wrote last year, "massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Karzai, installed instead.... This was the Afghan equivalent of the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam: afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government." An interim Afghan government certified by the loya jirga would have allowed the traditional way to achieve consensus; but, as Selig Harrison reported, our ambassador at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, "had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy." We have suffered with the results ever since.
Could we reverse this downward trend? If we remove our opposition to a loya jirga, will the Kabul government respond? Probably not so long as America is willing to pay its officials and protect them. But if we set a clear timetable for withdrawal, members of the government will have a strong self-interest in espousing what they will see as the national cause, and they will call for a loya jirga. Indeed, President Karzai already has.
Would such a move turn Afghanistan over to the Taliban? Realistically, we must anticipate that many, perhaps even a majority, of the delegates, particularly in the Pashtun area, will be at least passive supporters of the Taliban. I do not see any way this can be avoided. Our attempts to win over the "moderates" while fighting the "hardliners" is an echo of what we tried in Vietnam. It did not work there and did not work for the Russians in Afghanistan. It shows no sign of working for us now. As a 2009 Carnegie Endowment study of our occupation and the Taliban reaction to it laid out, even after their bloody defeat in 2001, "there have been no splinter groups since its emergence, except locally with no strategic consequences."
Nor, as I have shown in my history of two centuries of insurgencies, Violent Politics, are we likely to defeat the insurgents. Natives eventually wear down foreigners. The Obama administration apparently accepts this prediction. As the Washington Post reported this past fall, it admits that "the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a political or military movement, regardless of how many combat forces are sent into battle."
A loya jirga held soon is the best hope to create a reasonably balanced national government. This is partly because in the run-up to the national loya jirga, local groups will struggle to enhance or protect local interests. Their action will constitute a brake on the Taliban, who will be impelled to compromise. Today the Taliban enjoy the aura of national defenders against us; once we are no longer a target, that aura will fade.
If we are smart enough to allow the Afghans to solve their problems in their own way rather than try to force them to adopt ours, we can begin a sustainable move toward peace and security. Withdrawal is the essential first step. Further fighting will only multiply the cost to us and lead to failure.
About William R. Polk
William R. Polk (williampolk.com) is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. He is the author, most recently, of Understanding Iran, and is working on a new book on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, tentatively titled The Cockpit of Asia
KABUL, Afghanistan — As President Hamid Karzai made more antagonistic statements over the weekend toward the NATO countries fighting on behalf of his government, the West was taking stock of just how little maneuvering room it has.
There are no good options on the horizon, many analysts say, for reining in Mr. Karzai or for penalizing him, without potentially damaging Western interests. The reluctant conclusion of diplomats and Afghan analysts is that for now, they are stuck with him.
Many fear the relationship is only likely to become worse, as Mr. Karzai draws closer to allies like Iran and China, whose interests are often at odds with those of the West, and sounds sympathetic enough to the Taliban that he could spur their efforts, helping their recruitment and further destabilizing the country.
“The political situation is continuing to deteriorate; Karzai is flailing around,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul with long experience in the region. “At the moment we are propping up an unstable political structure, and I haven’t seen any remotely plausible plan for building consensus.”
The tensions between the West and Mr. Karzai flared up publicly last Thursday, when Mr. Karzai accused the West and the United Nations of perpetrating fraud in the August presidential election and described the Western military coalition as coming close to being seen as invaders who would give the insurgency legitimacy as “a national resistance.”
On Saturday, Mr. Karzai met with about 60 members of Parliament, mostly his supporters, and berated them for having rejected his proposed new election law. Among other things, the proposal would have given him the power to appoint all the members of the Electoral Complaints Commission, who are currently appointed by the United Nations, the Afghan Supreme Court and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. The Electoral Complaints Commission, which reviews allegations of voting fraud and irregularities, documented the fraud that deprived Mr. Karzai of an outright victory in the presidential election.
At the meeting, Mr. Karzai stepped up his anti-Western statements, according to a Parliament member who attended but spoke on condition of anonymity.
“If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban,” Mr. Karzai said, according to the Parliament member.
A spokesman for Mr. Karzai, Waheed Omar, could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
In a speech in Kandahar on Sunday, Mr. Karzai promised local tribal elders that coalition military operations planned for the area this summer would not proceed without their approval.
“I know you are worried about this operation,” he said, adding: “There will be no operation until you are happy.”
Given his tone in the last few days, it was unclear whether he was literally extending the elders veto power over the offensive, or merely trying to quell their fears and bring them on board.
Interviews with diplomats, Afghan analysts and ordinary Afghans suggest that the United States and other Western countries have three options: threaten to withdraw troops or actually withdraw them; use diplomacy, which so far has had little result; and find ways to expand citizen participation in the government, which now has hardly any elected positions at the provincial and district levels.
Threatening to withdraw, which Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called the “nuclear deterrent” option, would put the United States and other Western countries in the position of potentially having to make good on the promise, risking their strategic interest in a stable Afghanistan. Few experts think the country would remain peaceful without a significant foreign force here. Moreover, withdrawal could open the way for the country to again become a terrorist haven.
Some Western critics of Mr. Karzai believe that the West has no choice but to threaten to leave.
“There is no point in having troops in a mission that cannot be accomplished,” said Peter W. Galbraith, former United Nations deputy special representative for Afghanistan, who was dismissed after a dispute with his superiors over how to handle widespread electoral fraud and what senior U.N. officials later said was his advocacy of Mr. Karzai's removal. “The mission might be important, but if it can’t be achieved, there is no point in sending these troops into battle. Part of the problem is that counterinsurgency requires a credible local partner.”
Diplomacy has so far failed to achieve substantial changes, although some analysts, like Mr. Biddle, who opposes the so-called nuclear option, believe that the West should demand concessions before spending any more money on development projects like digging wells and building schools.
“We do millions of things in Afghanistan, and any of those things can become a source of leverage,” he said. “Far too much of what we do in Afghanistan we just do without asking for anything explicit in return.”
That approach can backfire, some argue, hurting those the West most wants to help.
Greater power sharing, while promising, faces structural obstacles. Under the Constitution, provincial governors, local judges, district governors and most other offices are appointive rather than elective. In some areas, Afghan and American programs have begun to involve communities in local budgeting, but progress is slow and it would probably take several years to expand it to higher levels of government.
“There are no better angels about to descend on Afghanistan,” said Alex Thier, a senior Afghan analyst at the United States Institute of Peace. “Unless some drastic action is taken, Mr. Karzai is the president of Afghanistan, and he was just elected for another five years.”
That prospect leaves some Afghans uneasy. In interviews with more than a dozen people around the country, there was apprehension and dismay over Mr. Karzai’s clash with the international community, and the specter of renewed chaos it could lead to.
“Karzai delivered this speech based on his own difficulties with the foreigners,” said Gulab Mangal, a tribal leader in the Musa Khel area of Khost Province.
“When the international community criticized his brother, he started to raise these problems,” he said, referring to Ahmed Wali Karzai, a prominent figure in southern Afghanistan. “It shows the relation between Karzai and the international community is deteriorating day by day, and that should not be allowed to happen.”
Mehram Ali, a man from Wardak Province who was shopping in Kabul over the weekend, voiced a similar qualm. “We need the international community to keep supporting us and our government,” he said.
“In this recent situation we do need foreign soldiers to help us in bringing peace and stability for our country, and if the foreigners leave us, then the people of Afghanistan will face adversity from every direction, and Afghanistan will return to what it was like 10 years ago when we had the Taliban government.”
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr., Abdul Waheed Wafa and Sharifullah Sahak from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar.
WASHINGTON — The deadly suicide bombings in Iraq on Wednesday highlight the central quandary facing President Obama as he tries to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the war there: Will parliamentary elections, scheduled for Sunday, throw the country back into the sectarian strife that flared in 2004 and delay the planned American withdrawal?
Senior Obama administration officials maintained in interviews this week that Mr. Obama’s plan to withdraw all American combat troops by Sept. 1 would remain on track regardless of who cobbles together a governing coalition after the election. Under the plan, no more than 50,000 American forces would stay behind, mostly in advisory roles. (Now there are slightly more than 90,000 troops in the country, down from 124,000 in September.)
But administration officials also acknowledged that the bigger worry for the United States was not who would win the elections, but the possibility that the elections — and their almost certainly messy aftermath — could ignite violence that would, at the least, complicate the planned withdrawal.
In part for that reason, “we’re not leaving behind cooks and quartermasters,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Wednesday in a telephone interview. The bulk of the remaining American troops, he said, “will still be guys who can shoot straight and go get bad guys.”
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top American military commander in Iraq, has drawn up a contingency plan that would keep a combat brigade in northern Iraq beyond the Sept. 1 deadline, should conditions warrant, administration officials said. Kirkuk and the restive Kurdish area in the north remain major concerns for American military planners.
Beyond that, military and administration officials say they are prepared to use the remaining American noncombat troops for combat missions, if things heat up.
For Mr. Obama, however, such a sleight of hand could have huge political repercussions back in Washington. The centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy platform when he ran for president — and indeed, the reason many political experts say he was able to wrest a primary victory from Hillary Rodham Clinton — was his opposition to the Iraq war from the start.
At a time when Mr. Obama has already angered his liberal base by ramping up the number of American troops in Afghanistan and missing his own deadline to shut down the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even the appearance that he has fudged the troop drawdown in Iraq could set off a rebellion as Democrats face difficult midterm elections.
There is also concern that the administration has been so preoccupied by Afghanistan and Pakistan that Iraq has gotten less attention from top policy-makers in the State Department or the National Security Council, according to administration officials and outside experts.
Ten months ago, Mr. Obama effectively handed Mr. Biden the administration’s Iraq portfolio, and the vice president has been to Iraq several times since then to cajole, prod and push Iraqi political leaders to compromise — often using the looming American troop pullout as a warning to the politicians that they will not have an American security blanket forever.
Mr. Biden has led monthly meetings in the White House Situation Room and recruited other agencies, like the Treasury and Agriculture Departments to help with Iraqi reconstruction.
But below Mr. Biden, the main Iraq working group consists of five relatively junior officials from the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, one administration official said. Other officials counter that senior policymakers, including Antony Blinken, the vice president’s chief foreign policy adviser and Puneet Talwar, a senior director in the National Security Council, are both heavily involved in Iraq.
Still, with Mr. Biden also juggling other duties, some experts contend that the administration could use more senior-level officials whose primary focus is developing Iraq policy.
For his part, Mr. Biden said that while the administration was worried about trouble spots, particularly in the north, he was confident that Iraqi violence would not reach the levels it did during the last election in 2005. He said that was in part because Iraq’s quarreling sects had realized that they could achieve more working within the political process than by lobbing grenades from the outside.
“Politics has broken out in Iraq,” Mr. Biden said.
For the Obama administration, the best strategy could be to remind the Iraqis that they must conduct a responsible election if they want a long-term relationship with the United States, experts said.
The American ambassador to Baghdad, Christopher R. Hill, has been meeting with party leaders to deliver the message that the United States wants a clean election. While he said the administration recognized the danger of uncertainty after the vote, he said Iraq had shown it could navigate such periods peacefully.
“We can draw comfort from the fact that Iraq politicians have always pulled back from the brink,” he said in a telephone interview. “We believe they fully understand the risks of a protracted government formation period.”
With no party expected to get a majority, or even a strong plurality, analysts foresee intense horse trading, with factions like the Kurds trying to play kingmaker as diverse groups attempt to cobble together coalitions.
Mr. Hill emphasized that the United States did not want to get drawn into postelection wrangling among Kurdish, Shiite or Sunni parties. He and General Odierno have already been criticized in some quarters in Iraq for speaking about Iran’s influence in the election process.
“Assuming that everything is going to go off fine, we will execute our withdrawal as we advertised,” Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, said Tuesday in an interview. It would take a “proactive national decision” by Mr. Obama to divert from the withdrawal plan, he said, adding, “The military always thinks through different options in how we might react.”
Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting.
By Joshua Partlow Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, February 26, 2010; A01
HERAT, AFGHANISTAN -- As the Taliban commander in the Pusht-e-Zargon district of western Afghanistan, Abdul Wahab considered himself the law. A stolen sheep? He would choose the thief's punishment: often a gunshot to the forearm or calf muscle. He was careful to avoid the bone.
When salaries arrived from the Taliban leadership in Pakistan -- $100 a month per man -- he doled them out. Thirty fighters moved at his command. "If I asked them to jump in a river and drown, they would," he said.
Power and respect, this is what the Taliban meant for Wahab. A government job and protection from U.S. raids are what he thought he was getting when he agreed to lay down his weapons in November.
The United States, along with its NATO and Afghan allies, is trying to "reintegrate" militants like Wahab, offering them jobs on the assumption that they would rather earn a salary than spend their days fighting. The effort is a central pillar of the Obama administration's Afghan war strategy.
Taliban leaders scoff at that notion, saying their loyalists are waging a determined holy war against the infidel armies of the West and can't be bought off.
Interviews with Wahab and other fighters who recently left the Taliban as part of an Afghan government effort to lure them from the battlefield suggest that in many cases, U.S. policymakers may be on to something. Several ex-fighters said they joined the Taliban not out of religious zealotry but for far more mundane reasons: anger at the government in Kabul, revenge for losing a government job, pressure from family or tribe members -- or simply because they were broke.
"Nobody goes to the other side for fun," Wahab said. "There must be a pain in your heart."
In the complex world of Afghan loyalties, some had fought both for and against the Taliban. The most fearsome Taliban commander in Herat, killed by a U.S. airstrike in October, used to be the mayor.
The diverse strands of the insurgency make it difficult to generalize about the motives of fighters across the country. Insurgents in Herat probably differ from those elsewhere, particularly in southern Afghanistan, where Taliban leader Mohammad Omar's original following was born. But at least in this strategically important city on Afghanistan's western frontier, there's evidence of a deep pragmatism when it's time to choose sides.
"The Taliban here are not ideological," said Delawar Shah Delawar, Herat's deputy police chief. "These people have lost something. They feel ashamed that they have no cars, no bodyguards. How can they face people when they walk in the streets?"
Nobody fit this description better than Ghulam Yahya Akbari, who served as Herat's mayor in the early 1990s after the Soviet withdrawal. Back then, he was a staunch opponent of the Taliban, and he fled to Iran when the group came to power. After the U.S.-led invasion, he came back to run Herat's Department of Public Works and helped develop one of Afghanistan's most modern cities. But after a dispute with the previous governor, Akbari was fired in 2006.
"Ghulam Yahya was a good man. Anyone you ask will tell you," said Ahmad Yousaf Nuristani, the governor of Herat. "Most people say he was forced by the government to adopt this position. Maybe he had no choice."
Following his firing, Akbari retreated to the picturesque orchards of his home village of Siyawooshan and recruited an army. Even though he was Tajik, he aligned with the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, which sent money, weapons and a half-dozen explosives experts from Pakistan and Iran to train his followers, police officials said.
His fighters grew into Herat's most feared militia. They periodically launched rockets at the Herat airport, the United Nations compound or the American military base, including one that pierced the barracks, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. The fighters severed opponents' heads and financed themselves by demanding ransom from kidnapped businessmen.
"Bad people got along with him. Killers, kidnappers, their safe haven was with Ghulam Yahya," said Maj. Mohammad Rahim Panjshiry, director of counterterrorism in the Herat police department. "He started with five or six people and eventually had 300 to 400 people."
On Oct. 8, a U.S. airstrike killed Akbari and 22 of his fighters as they camped in a tent in Siyawooshan. He was buried next to a mosque he had built. A procession of thousands mourned his passing. For Herat, Akbari's death "was the biggest security event in a couple of years," one U.S. official said.
One of Akbari's subordinates was Sharif, a wheat farmer from the village of Adraskan. He had viewed the government as his enemy after his well ran dry. Elsewhere, the government helped maintain the irrigation system, he said, but his village saw no help. "Since the government has been established, it hasn't done anything for us. Nobody paid attention. Nobody came to see what our problems were," he said. "The farming stopped, so I decided to join the Taliban."
Another militia leader, Suleiman Amiri, fired from his job as a battalion commander in the Afghan army, took to the mountains in a government-owned Ford Ranger and amassed a militia.
"I wanted people to respect me. I wanted to have an honored life in this province," Amiri said. "Why isn't the government asking me for help? Why aren't the Americans asking me? Right now, if I ordered 50,000 families to die, they will die, or to live, they will live. They are under my command. Whatever I want I can do, but nobody is asking my opinion."
After Akbari's death and a purging of several top police and intelligence officials, the insurgency began to fray. Nearly 300 fighters surrendered to the provincial government, many drawn in by incentives offered by the local reconciliation office.
All of the former fighters interviewed said they were promised jobs if they gave up the fight, but for the past four months, the government has honored none of these commitments. Among the aid available are some food rations and the limited supply of USAID-funded "winterization kits" -- sacks of blankets and coal.
Many former fighters have taken up residence in downtown Herat, afraid enough of Taliban reprisals that they do not return to their villages. They idle away the days debating whether to return to the insurgency, as some already have.
Amiri, the former militia commander, has been offered a position as a district police chief, but the approval from Kabul has not come. He shares a house with dozens of his men who have no work and grow more anxious by the day. "I pay for 80 people out of my own pocket," he said.
For now, he is prepared to wait. "We will not leave the government until they say, 'We have nothing for you,' " he said. "If I have no choice, I have to become a Talib."
The prospects for Wahab, the former Taliban district commander who joined the insurgency after being fired from his job as a major in the police department, look no better. He rents a decrepit mud hut in a slum on the outskirts of Herat. On rainy days, the dirt floors turn to mud; on cold ones, to frozen earth. He must borrow money to medicate his five sniffling children. He can rarely offer hot food to his guests.
For the first three weeks after he left the insurgency in November, the Taliban's "shadow governor" in Herat called Wahab on his cellphone. He was a traitor, an infidel, no different from an American soldier, he was told: "As we kill them, we will kill you."
As a fighter for most of his life, Wahab does not feel qualified for a civilian job, but the Afghan security forces have offered him nothing. He refuses to go back to farming in his village of Salimi, unwilling to endure the jeers of his neighbors for falling so low. He might leave Afghanistan.
In the complex calculus of Afghan politics, he is one of many who have fought both against and with the Taliban. At least as a Taliban leader, he had respect. Now, he said, "we have nothing."
Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.
Is there any chance that the logjam on negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan is loosening up? You might think so, from the spate of reports that various parties -- including the United Nations and the government of Afghanistan -- are serious about reconciliation talks with Taliban officials. So far, however, the United States seems to be taking a hands-off attitude.
In six weeks or so, President Karzai of Afghanistan -- yes, that supposedly discredited figure who stayed in power by rigging last summer's election -- will convene a grand tribal council, or loya jirga, to seek a broad pact of reconciliation that, he says, is meant to include Afghan leaders of the Taliban. To the horror and consternation of US officials, who say that they support "reintegration" of the Taliban's fighters into Afghan society but oppose "reconciliation" with the Taliban as an organization, Karzai is offering to deal with the Taliban all the way to the top, including Mullah Omar, the one-eyed thug and would-be caliph who holds the loyalty of many if not most Taliban insurgents.
"There are some contacts, and contacts will continue on the local, national and broader political level, but it is too eaerly to speak about the outcome of those contacts."
A possible signal of more breakthroughs to come occurred when the UN, with US support, removed five former Taliban officials, including former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, from the blacklist that placed them under sanctions. While the exact connection of these officials to the Taliban, including Mullah Omar, today is unclear, there is hope that the UN action is a step toward loosening sanctions on hundreds of other members of the Taliban, paving the way to more productive talks.
In early January, Kai Eide, the outgoing UN representative in Afghanistan -- who has been all along a consistent advocate for talking to the Taliban -- met with several representatives of the Taliban, although, as the New York Timesreported:
"Most of the important details of the meeting were unknown: exactly when and where the meeting took place; what, if anything, was agreed upon; and who represented the Taliban."
And the Times added:
"American leaders have begun to search for a road that could eventually lead to a political settlement with the Taliban's leaders."
Is that true? For any talks with the Taliban to succeed, the United States will not only have to swallow the idea that top- and middle-level Taliban chiefs will be welcomed back in Afghan politics and given a share of power, but Washington will also have to put on the table a plan for withdrawing US forces from the conflict to sweeten the deal. Perhaps, President Obama's pledge to start pulling US forces out of Afghanistan by July 2011 could serve as the opening gambit to get talks with the Taliban going.
According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, the ultraconservative commentator and columnist, Obama is sending General James Jones, the national security adviser, to Pakistan to find out what kind of role Pakistan could play in ending the war. More importantly, he says that during his recent tour of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Gates came to the reluctant conclusion that ending the war means rebalancing the Afghan government in a way that takes both Indian and Pakistani interests into account, which happens to be exactly right. Says de Borchgrave:
"All the talk is how to end the Afghan war, not how to win it. ... For U.S. Defense Secretary Bob Gates, just back from India and Pakistan, a power-sharing compromise in Kabul is the only way to cut short a war that no longer has the support of the American people."
The attitude of Pakistan is, and will be, crucial. Yesterday, General Kiyani, the Pakistani chief of staff -- whose command and its intelligence service, the ISI, have long supported the Taliban -- suggested that Pakistan might be willing to train Afghan security forces in order to help stabilize the country. Reading the intentions of the Pakistani army and ISI are difficult, since they are notorious liars, but it just might be that Kiyani is making a serious offer here. If Pakistan does engage in training Afghan forces, it might create a dynamic in which Pakistan needs to rely less on the Taliban for influence in Afghanistan, and thus Pakistan might be willing to coax the Taliban, or parts of it, to the bargaining table.
"We want to have strategic depth in Afghanistan, but that does not imply controlling it. If we have a peaceful, stable and friendly Afghanistan, automatically we will have our strategic depth because our western border will be secure, and we will not be looking at two fronts."
His offer to train Afghan forces is "being considered by US and Afghan officials," according to the Times, which added that "Kiyani's offer appeared to be in part driven by a desire to limit the influence in Afghanistan of India." Well, duh.
Gen McChrystal said Taliban figures might participate in government
Nato's top commander in Afghanistan has said increased troop levels could bring a negotiated peace with the Taliban.
US Gen Stanley McChrystal told the UK's Financial Times newspaper that there had been "enough fighting".
He said a political solution in all conflicts was "inevitable". His remarks came as the top UN envoy in Kabul said it was time to talk to the militants.
"I'd like everybody to walk out of London with a renewed commitment, and that commitment is to the right outcome for the Afghan people," Gen McChrystal told the Financial Times.
It's impossible to paint the Taliban all with one brush... [the rank and file] don't want to pay the price for al-Qaeda's extremism for ever
Gen Stanley McChrystal, Nato commander in Afghanistan
He said the arrival of the extra 30,000 US troops pledged by President Obama and the additional 7,000 troops promised by other Nato countries should deliver "very demonstrably positive" progress in 2010.
But he warned that the level of Taliban violence could increase sharply this year.
The Taliban wanted to create the perception that Afghanistan was on fire, and that President Karzai and his Western allies could not cope, Gen McChrystal said.
However, if the new US-led strategy was successful, the militants "could look desperate" in a year's time, he said.
"I think they will look like an entity that will be struggling for its own legitimacy... I think they will be on the defensive militarily, not wiped out."
On the issue of reconciliation, Gen McChrystal said: "I believe that a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome. And it's the right outcome."
Afghan President Karzai told the BBC last week of his desire for reconciliation
Asked if he thought senior Taliban could have a role in a future Afghan government, he said: "I think any Afghans can play a role if they focus on the future, and not the past.
"As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there's been enough fighting," Gen McChrystal added.
'Time has come'
In an interview with the New York Times, United Nations special representative Kai Eide called for some senior Taliban leaders to be removed from a UN list of terrorists, as a prelude to direct talks.
"If you want relevant results, then you have to talk to the relevant person in authority," Mr Eide said. "I think the time has come to do it."
President Karzai recently told the BBC that he planned to introduce a scheme to attract Taliban fighters back to normal life by offering money and jobs.
He said he would offer to pay and resettle Taliban fighters to come over to his side.
Mr Karzai said he hoped to win backing for his plan from the US and UK at the London conference.
The Barack Obamaadministration is refusing to acknowledge an offer by the leadership of the Taliban in early December to give "legal guarantees" that it will not allow Afghanistan to be used for attacks on other countries.
The administration's silence on the offer, despite a public statement by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton expressing scepticism about any Taliban offer to separate itself from al Qaeda, effectively leaves the door open to negotiating a deal with the Taliban based on such a proposal.
The Taliban, however, has chosen to interpret the Obama administration's position as one of rejection of its offer.
The Taliban offer, included in a statement dated Dec. 4 and e-mailed to news organisations the following day, said the organisation has "no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan".
The statement did not mention al Qaeda by name or elaborate on what was meant by "legal guarantees" against such "meddling", but it was an obvious response to past U.S. insistence that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is necessary to prevent al Qaeda from having a safe haven in Afghanistan once again.
It suggested that the Taliban is interested in negotiating an agreement with the United States involving a public Taliban renunciation of ties with al Qaeda, along with some undefined arrangements to enforce a ban al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan in return for a commitment to a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops from the country.
Despite repeated queries by IPS to the State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley and to the National Security Council's press office over the past week about whether either Secretary Clinton or President Obama had been informed about the Taliban offer, neither office has responded to the question.
Anand Gopal of The Wall Street Journal, whose Dec. 5 story on the Taliban message was the only one to report that initiative, asked a U.S. official earlier that day about the offer to provide "legal guarantees".
The official, who had not been aware of the Taliban offer, responded with what was evidently previously prepared policy guidance casting doubt on the willingness of the Taliban to give up its ties with al Qaeda. "This is the same group that refused to give up bin Laden, even though they could have saved their country from war," said the official. "They wouldn't break with terrorists then, so why would we take them seriously now?"
The following day, asked by ABC News "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos about possible negotiations with "high level" Taliban leaders, Clinton said, "We don't know yet."
But then she made the same argument the unnamed U.S. official had made to Gopal on Saturday. "[W]e asked Mullah Omar to give up bin Laden before he went into Afghanistan after 9/11," Clinton said, "and he wouldn't do it. I don't know why we think he would have changed by now."
In the same ABC interview, Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggested that the Taliban would not be willing to negotiate on U.S. terms until after their "momentum" had been stopped.
"I think that the likelihood of the leadership of the Taliban, or senior leaders, being willing to accept the conditions Secretary Clinton just talked about," Gates said, "depends in the first instance on reversing their momentum right now, and putting them in a position where they suddenly begin to realise that they're likely to lose."
In a statement issued two days after the Clinton-Gates appearance on ABC, the Taliban leadership, which now calls itself "Mujahideen", posted another statement saying that what it called its "proposal" had been rejected by the United States.
The statement said, in part, "Washington turns down the constructive proposal of the leadership of Mujahideen," and repeated its pledge to "ensure that the next government of the Muhajideen will not meddle in the internal affairs of other countries including the neighbours if the foreign troops pull out of Afghanistan."
The fact that both the State Department and the NSC are now maintaining silence on the offer rather than repeating the Clinton-Gates expression of scepticism strongly suggests that the White House does not want to close the door publicly to negotiations with the Taliban linking troop withdrawal to renunciation of ties with al Qaeda, among other issues.
Last month, an even more explicit link between U.S. troop withdrawal and a severing by the Taliban of its ties with al Qaeda was made by a U.S. diplomat in Kabul.
In an article published Nov. 11, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin, who was then visiting Kabul, quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying, "If the Taliban made clear to us that they have broken with al Qaeda and that their own objectives were nonviolent and political - however abhorrent to us - we wouldn't be keeping 68,000-plus troops here."
That statement reflected an obvious willingness to entertain a negotiated settlement under which U.S. troops would be withdrawn and the Taliban would break with al Qaeda.
A significant faction within the Obama administration has sought to portray those who suggest that the Taliban might part ways with al Qaeda as deliberately deceiving the West.
Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, who headed the administration's policy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan last spring, recently said, "A lot of smoke is being thrown up to confuse people."
But even the hard-liner Riedel concedes that the Pakistani Taliban's attacks on the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) threaten the close relationship between the Afghan Taliban and ISI. The Pakistani Taliban continue to be closely allied with al Qaeda.
The Taliban began indicating it openness to negotiations with the United States and NATO in September 2007. But it began to hint publicly at its willingness to separate itself from al Qaeda in return for a troop withdrawal only three months ago.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar's message for Eid al-Fitr in mid-September assured "all countries" that a Taliban state "will not extend its hand to jeopardise others, as it itself does not allow others to jeopardise us... Our goal is to gain independence of the country and establish a just Islamic system there."
But the insurgent leadership has also emphasised that negotiations will depend on the U.S. willingness to withdraw troops. In anticipation of Obama's announcement of a new U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar issued a 3,000-word statement Nov. 25 which said, "The people of Afghanistan will not agree to negotiations which prolongs and legitimises the invader's military presence in our beloved country."
"The invading Americans want Mujahidin to surrender under the pretext of negotiation," it said.
That implied that the Taliban would negotiate if the U.S. did not insist on the acceptance of a U.S. military presence in the country.
The day after the Taliban proposal to Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai made a public plea to the United States to engage in direct negotiations with the Taliban leadership.
In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Karzai said there is an "urgent need" for negotiations with the Taliban, and made it clear that the Obama administration had opposed such talks.
Karzai did not say explicitly that he wanted the United States to be at the table for such talks, but said, "Alone, we can't do it."
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It's impossible to paint the Taliban all with one brush... [the rank and file] don't want to pay the price for 
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