RECENTLY, the US and UK called for the lifting of UN sanctions against 18 former senior Taliban figures.
The move was widely hailed as the beginning of the end of the Afghan war, as it is the most concrete, public step the West has taken towards a negotiated peace with the Afghan Taliban.
While it would be too optimistic to think that this gesture changes ground realities, it certainly helps clarify some of the major challenges to finding a non-military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan.
The first challenge is identifying who in fact can speak for the Afghan Taliban. Much has been written about how the hierarchical entity of the 1990s is now a hydra-headed mess. Overtures for negotiations are thus being made in all directions: the US is speaking directly to a Taliban representative; senior Afghan officials have an envoy on the move between Kabul and Islamabad; the Afghan leadership also recently connected with a representative of the Haqqani network;and now comes the push for senior leaders of the former Taliban regime, including the head of the brutal Vice and Virtue Ministry, to be removed from the UN sanctions list.
And yet, the Afghan parliamentarians have complained that the High Peace Council, tasked with initiating negotiations, remained clueless as to whom to engage in peace talks. Even as the momentum for negotiations gained speed, violence erupted in Pakistani Shaltalo, and the Afghan National Directorate of Security separately accused Taliban insurgents of trying to derail the handover of security responsibilities from Nato to Afghan troops. These incidents highlighted that mixed messages and crossed agendas proliferate among the cocktail of militant groups along the Durand Line. Not surprisingly, then, the initiative to de-list former Taliban also raised tough questions about whether or not the selected individuals were the right negotiators.
The problem of who to talk to can only be addressed by jumpstarting Afghan-led negotiations on many fronts: they’ll get it wrong before getting it right, but the process must begin. In this context, the sanctions initiative holds some lessons on successful mechanisms that can be deployed by Kabul and Washington.
Removing restrictions against former Taliban has been a major demand of Afghan insurgents, and has long been backed by Afghan officials. By supporting the move at the UN Security Council, the US and UK are facilitating, not driving, the negotiation process. The lifting of sanctions will not ensure the success of negotiations, but it does help create conditions that encourage intra-Afghan dialogue.
This dynamic sets a helpful precedent for what role the US may play in peace negotiations. Although the US has tried to establish direct contact with the Afghan Taliban, it is widely acknowledged that any talks driven by an outsider cannot result in enduring agreements. It is up to the Afghans to define the parameters of negotiations, and raise the unasked tough questions: is the constitution binding? Can there be a blanket amnesty? Who will be allowed to keep their arms? Should truth and reconciliation committees be instituted? Through measures like the proposed delisting, the US can encourage this process without hijacking it.
Beyond US involvement, the sanctions initiative points to another major challenge for Afghans who support peace talks — the need to broaden the definition of ‘negotiations’. As it stands, negotiations occur on one side between members of the Afghan government, the US and Pakistan, and on the other with insurgent leaders, commanders and former Taliban figureheads. To succeed, negotiations must become a bottom-up, rather than top-down, process, involving locals from across Afghanistan.
Many of Afghanistan’s security problems are reflected in local disputes, and they fester because locals refuse to participate in the country’s budding institutions and security forces. The truth is, the government in Kabul has little real control of the rural areas, and the Taliban can only reintegrate peacefully if they have the consent of local leaders.
To make negotiated settlements valid and sustainable, the peace talks must be genuinely inclusive. Average Afghans will bear the brunt of any deal struck between the Afghan government and the Taliban leadership; they will also be the ones to either successfully implement or sidestep such a deal. For that reason, it is essential that communities be empowered to address abovementioned questions on a village-by-village basis. Members of Afghan civil society should come to the table along with militant leaders and government officials.
The urgent need for a ground-up process is reflected in Afghan distaste for the High Peace Council handpicked by President Hamid Karzai and including controversial militia leaders who killed Afghans during the civil war. Owing to its top-down composition, the council is berated for a lack of transparency in its activities, and a lack of clarity in its goals.
By calling attention to the focus on leaders, rather than locals, in the Afghan peace process, the sanctions initiative draws out another important challenge: the need to distinguish between negotiations and political reconciliation. Negotiations are the means to an end, and that end is political reconciliation. The former are functional and finite in scope, while the latter is an ongoing process that aspires to genuine representation for all Afghans. By conflating the two, the Afghan government and international community have made their job seem undoable. Maintaining the distinction, however, allows stakeholders to get on with negotiations without worrying about political reconciliation at the outset. If for no other reason, the call to remove sanctions against former Taliban leaders should be lauded for clarifying why it’s so hard to get people talking.
The writer is the Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, DC.
huma.yusuf@gmail.com