Talks with the Taliban

The former top UN official in Afghanistan has come out and publicly claimed what many have been arguing privately. He has said that the recent arrests in Pakistan of senior Afghan Taliban leaders, headlined of course by that of Mullah Baradar, was a deliberate attempt by the security establishment here to scuttle the possibility of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

The logic goes something like this: Pakistan has clearly indicated that it wants to be a central player in any process that decides what a post-war Afghanistan will look like; any channels of communication with the Afghan Taliban that do not include Pakistan threaten its self-professed ‘central player’ status; therefore the Pakistan Army-led security establishment moved to shut down what amounted to tentative ‘talks about talks’.

Demonstrating the terrible opaqueness of what may be happening, there is a counter-narrative available — that the Pakistan Army has finally ‘got it’ and has begun the process of a ‘strategic shift’ from its long-standing policy of a benign approach towards the Afghan Taliban. The middle ground between these two theories is occupied by a third, more mundane explanation. The Pakistani intelligence agencies acted on ‘actionable intelligence’ given by outsiders without realising that Afghan Taliban leaders such as Mullah Baradar would also be netted in the raids. So which of the three, mutually exclusive explanations is true? Since the handful of people in a position to know the truth are not talking, little can be said with any certainty.

The competing explanations, however, overlook at least two fundamental problems with this whole business of ‘talks about talks’. First, with the Americans focused on the military surge, the possibility of talks any time soon is remote. True, the Karzai-led Afghan government is pushing hard for talks with the Taliban and the British have cautiously backed the idea, but the Americans are the real locus of power in Afghanistan. The American approach is reasonably well known by now. The Americans hope that the surge will dent the Taliban insurgency and force the Taliban to negotiate from a position of weakness later. So whatever Kai Eide, the former special representative of the UN, was doing and whoever he was talking to, the possibility of achieving any ‘breakthroughs’ would have been very low. Already, other UN officials have come forward to contradict Mr Eide’s remarks. Second, what even vaguely could be the common ground between the Afghan Taliban and the Kabul government backed by foreign powers? The two sides have antithetical visions for Afghanistan’s future and no one has yet been able to explain how those two visions can both be accommodated in the same set-up.