Not all Afghans have signed up for the 'talk and fight' plan

Timing can be critical in war and peace, which made the weekend’s sequence of events in the Afghan capital of Kabul unfortunate at best, ominous at worst.

A day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced, for the first time, that the US was holding talks with the Taliban, a month-long period of calm in Kabul was shattered on Sunday by a deadly attack on a police station near the presidential palace.

The attack came as outgoing US Defence Secretary Robert Gates confirmed Karzai’s revelation, admitting that the US has been engaged in “preliminary” peace talks with the Taliban.

Talking peace while waging war has been a strategy of the decade-long Afghan war over the past few years, although it has gained momentum since Karzai established a High Peace Council to open negotiation channels last year.

In a conflict choked with mixed messages, “talk and fight” has turned into the new war catchphrase as US President Barack Obama prepares to announce his blueprint for a troop withdrawal plan, possibly starting this summer.

The underlying tenet of the talk-and-fight strategy is to increase the military pressure on the Taliban in the short term to force them to the negotiating table.

But while a battery of Afghan and non-Afghan officials and experts discuss the strategic merits of talking to the Taliban inside Afghanistan, a fragmented but increasingly vocal spectrum of Afghan society – including minority ethnic groups and civil society activists – have been voicing concerns over the negotiations.

“Ten years ago, the international community made a commitment to Afghanistan to root out terrorism,” said Ahmad Wali Massoud, a former Afghan ambassador to Britain and the brother of slain Afghan resistance hero Ahmad Shah Massoud.

“After 10 years, the US is engaged in secret talks with the Taliban. Now the question is, why did the Americans come to Afghanistan? They could have made a deal with the Taliban in Bonn,” Massoud said, referring to the UN-sponsored talks in the German city shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that set the stage for the creation of today’s Afghan state, including drafting a new constitution.

Hazaras fear a blast from an oppressed past

A predominantly Pashtun group, the Taliban has recently tried to introduce a more inclusive tone in their communiqués. But not many non-Pashtuns take them at their word.

For some ethnic groups, such as the historically oppressed Hazaras, the prospect of a deal with the hard-line Sunni movement has raised alarm bells.

“The Hazaras are following the recent talk about reconciliation with the Taliban with a high degree of concern and anxiety for the obvious reasons, which is the history of the Hazaras and the Taliban,” said Niamatullah Ibrahimi, co-director of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Watch and a leading scholar on the Hazara community.

A Shiite Muslim group, the Hazaras suffered severe oppression under the Taliban regime, with international human rights groups documenting evidence of massacres in Afghanistan’s Hazara-dominated central region.

“When it comes to negotiations, the Hazaras are particularly concerned if any negotiated settlement could jeopardise the current constitutional structure, the most important principle of which is the admission that Afghanistan is a multiethnic country,” Ibrahimi said.

Despite the misgivings, Ibrahimi noted that, after 10 years of conflict, there’s a strong desire for peace, and the Hazaras – like many Afghans – are willing to give peace attempts a shot, provided crucial constitutional guarantees are met.

‘Death to the Taliban … Death to the Punjabis’

But not all ethnic groups are as amenable to giving peace with the Taliban a chance.

On May 5, around 15,000 people gathered in the parking lot of one of Kabul’s many immense wedding halls to express their opposition to the reconciliation talks.

Organised by Afghanistan’s former intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh – a Tajik and former aide to Ahmad Shah Massoud – the gathering was overwhelmingly attended by Afghans from the north, especially from Panjshir Province, home of the slain resistance hero, who was killed by al Qaeda suicide bombers two days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

While Saleh blasted Karzai's description of the Taliban as "brothers", the crowd chanted slogans such as, "Death to the Taliban. Death to the suicide bombers. Death to the Punjabis" – referring to the commonly held opinion that the Taliban is controlled by Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Punjabi-dominated ISI.

‘A betrayal of Afghanistan’s women’

Women’s rights groups are yet another section of Afghan society that has vociferously opposed negotiations with the Taliban.

AF-PAK BLOG Talking to the Taliban: Violence against women not on the cards

“I am not optimistic about talking to the Taliban and creating a possible setup for negotiation. I think there are too many unanswered questions about the Taliban and their position,” said Orzala Ashraf, an Afghan women’s rights activist who ran an underground female literacy program under the Taliban, in an interview with the New Internationalist magazine.

According to Ashraf, negotiating with the Taliban “is not only a betrayal of Afghanistan’s women. It is also a rather useless effort that will not achieve any effective peace”.
Some experts – such as the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Andrey Avetisyan, who served as a political officer during the 1980s Soviet occupation – have warned that any attempt to make a quick deal with the Taliban could lead the country into a civil war.

The ‘warlords’ peace council’

One of the biggest concerns among Afghan opposition and civil society circles is the manner in which the current negotiations are being conducted under the auspices of the Karzai administration.

“I have no faith in this because the mechanism is wrong, secret talks are not the right mechanism. If you want to do a deal, it should be transparent and on a national level,” said Massoud. “What’s more, the government of Afghanistan is not in a good position to make a deal with the Taliban. The government is weak, corrupt, dysfunctional, and it does not enjoy the confidence of the people of Afghanistan,” he added.

The government-appointed High Peace Council, which was set up last year as the sole body authorised to pursue reconciliation, has been dubbed the “warlords’ peace council”.

Members of the High Peace Council meet in Kabul in May 2011. (Photo: AFP)

The council’s 70-odd members include a roster of familiar mujahideen figures who fought a brutal, fratricidal war following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. Their inclusion in the High Peace Council has raised fears that that any negotiated deal with the Taliban would in effect amount to a thieves’ pact that would see the spoils of power distributed between the usual suspects.

Afghanistan has a history of power-sharing deals between warlords who have never faced justice for a slew of alleged war crimes. Many war-weary Afghans would be willing to overlook alleged war crimes in exchange for a lasting peace, but even that is sometimes a tall order.

“Personally, if I could see that we’re moving in the right direction, I would say my brother’s sacrifice for the nation was OK,” said Massoud. “But we know this will not yield any results. Frankly, I believe this is just Karzai’s attempt to deflect attention from the very basic services he has failed to provide the Afghan people.”

Massoud went on to say that there are likely political motives on the US side also.
“As for the Americans, Obama wants to seize some success before next year’s election,” he said. “But I really don’t see how there can be any lasting peace deal with the Taliban.”