Enter The Taliban

Bill Frist says we ought to support efforts to bring "people who call themselves Taliban" into the government of Afghanistan. What an ass. Why you would say that right before an election, I c'ouldn't say. And Frist is a scumbag who eminently deserves the public coal-raking he's in for.

That said, I do think it's worth pointing out that several weeks ago I was at one of these panel events. This very subject came up, and a range of expert-type dudes with generally sound views all thought that this was the thing to do. Their take was that there had long been a Taliban faction that was uncomfotable with the group's association with Osama bin Laden, and that tried to persuade their colleagues to sell him out after 9/11. They failed, the whole crew got booted from government, and now you get the current situation. But since the hard-core has disproportionately gotten themselves killed, the theory goes, the "moderate Taliban" (not actually especially moderate in their views about domestic governance) now has a stronger hand and it should be possible to cut a deal with them and bring them into the fold.

Blogging involves a lot of discussing issues you don't really understand, and I really wouldn't want to claim any expertise in the nuances of Afghan politics, but it seems worth making the point that sensible people are thinking along these lines. It seems to me that, politically speaking, to make any such arrangement work it would be absolutely vital for whomever you cut a deal with to stop calling themselves "Taliban" since it's never going to fly with Americans under that name.

Comments

> That said, I do think it's worth pointing out
> that several weeks ago I was at one of these panel
> events. This very subject came up, and a range of
> expert-type dudes with generally sound views all
> thought that this was the thing to do. Their take
> was that there had long been a Taliban faction
> that was uncomfotable with the group's association
> with Osama bin Laden, and that tried to persuade
> their colleagues to sell him out after 9/11. They
> failed, the whole crew got booted from government,
> and now you get the current situation.

Were these expect dudes by any chance, oh, I dunno, men? Under this scenario, would the Taliban get to keep the whole "subjegation of women" thing? Would my tax dollars go toward supporting a government which brutally oppressed the 50% of its population that happens to be female?

Just asking. Heh.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | October 3, 2006 10:01 AM

Cranky,

"Would my tax dollars go toward supporting a government which brutally oppressed the 50% of its population that happens to be female?"

I believe we're already doing that in Iraq, which, before the war, was quite liberating to that half of the population.

Posted by Mal | October 3, 2006 10:13 AM

Frist's response to the AP story Matthew posted is here (Instapundit linked to it yesterday). It seems to me that Frist - at least in the response - is making exactly the same distinction Matthew is, between moderate Islamists and hardcore Taliban fighters. (Frist says "Our counter-insurgency strategy must win hearts and minds and persuade moderate Islamists potentially sympathetic to the Taliban to accept the legitimacy of the Afghan national government and democratic political processes.")

Posted by Al | October 3, 2006 10:17 AM

It's not all about us

If, in your mind, it's a deal-killer for the Taliban to keep calling themselves the Taliban, because that offends American sensibilities, then you haven't learned anything from the past five years.

Afghanistan is not your country. It is not my country. It belongs to the Afghans. What they think, what they want, what offends their sensibilities, is what counts in what the govt of Afghanistan should look like. You and I don't get a vote. Not even a friendly suggestion.

This is not just a woozy sentimental notion of universal democracy, how things ought to be in a fantasy world in which all countries were equally powerful. All countries are indeed not equally powerful in their ability to project military force far beyond their borders. Afghanistan will never be our equal in that respect for the foreseeable future. But the balance of force within Afghanistan is not determined by the ability to project force far from the borders of Afghanistan, but by the ability to maintain armed resistance within that country. In this, the peoples of Afghanistan as far outstrip us, as we outstrip them in ability to project force at a distance. Our troops are not being slaughtered right now because of the forebearance of the Afghan factions and the neighboring countries that allow us bases. Should that change, should the use of bases be withdrawn, should the Afghan factions who now use us find us no longer useful -- our forces will be slaughtered as easily as those of the British 150 years ago.

Frist's statement was wrong only in being too presumptuous. We need to withdraw our forces from Afghanistan yesterday. That's sober realism, not woozy idealism.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | October 3, 2006 10:23 AM

> I believe we're already doing that in Iraq,
> which, before the war, was quite liberating
> to that half of the population.

Mal,
Agreed. Not to mention in the United States as well, although not _yet_ as badly as the Taliban or in Iraq. Yet.

Still, my question to Matt is a serious one. Unlike even the Iraqi factions, the Taliban has explicitly stated that the subjegation of women is one of its social goals. If the US/NATO starts backing Taliban factions (perhaps renamed Kyhber Freedom Fighters or something) will the US/NATO also be supporting the subjegation process?

One of the little-noticed driving forces behing W's Iraq war was the increasing number of lawsuits that US military women were filing and winning over the issue of having Saudi restrictions imposed on them by the US military command (e.g. no driving). Congress was starting to get involved and this was creating an intolerable double-pressure on the military from the Saudis and US public opinion over the bases in SA. The NATO contingent includes Dutch, Dane, and Norwegian units - nations with a stronger committment to full women's rights than the US. Will Danish women soldiers, for example, be required to follow Taliban restrictions while off duty?

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | October 3, 2006 10:25 AM

You need to read Sarah Chayes' new book "The Punishment of Virtue" (for a review, see the url

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/18/AR2006091801402.html

Posted by bemused | October 3, 2006 10:26 AM

Cranky -- typically of a DC national security panel, we were looking at three dudes and one woman; all four were in agreement about this. Of course, one could make much the same critique -- the woman in question lives in the USA and not in Afghanistan, so it's not as if she'd actually be losing anything in the process of selling out women's rights in Afghanistan.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | October 3, 2006 11:10 AM

Cranky, I don't think the current rulers differ that much from the Taliban with the respect to women's rights.

Posted by David Weman | October 3, 2006 11:11 AM

OK, we have all our definitions and statements about the horribleness of various governments toward women agreed upon. Now how about any of my questions?

Let's start with a simple one: under this proposed new structure, would Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch women serving in their armed forces and assigned to Afghanistan under the NATO agreement be expected to assist the Qaliban government in direct subjegation of women? If so, how does that relate to the EU's equal protection laws?

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | October 3, 2006 11:40 AM

I would recommend that people rewatch John Stewart's interview with Pres. Mushariff (sp?). He explained that Taliban refers to the Pashtun (sp?) people/tribe and that the deal he had made was with the moderate Pashtun who were against al Qaida. That the goal was to separate and gain the support of those in fighting the extremists, even if those extremists were also Pashtun (sp?). Or in other words, also Talibani.

Posted by NotInMyName | October 3, 2006 12:07 PM

"If, in your mind, it's a deal-killer for the Taliban to keep calling themselves the Taliban, because that offends American sensibilities, then you haven't learned anything from the past five years."

If the Afghan government wants American money, and it probably will, then a few hot-button American sensibilities will have to be taken into account. And the hottest of all our national buttons is the motherfucking Taliban, all of whose members -- "moderate" or regular -- should be driven as far from power as possible, not rewarded by another chance to exercise their bigotry and cruelty. If the past 5 years have taught us anything, it's to not assume that foreign policy experts are worth listening to.

Posted by Kyle | October 3, 2006 12:16 PM

Matt writes:

Blogging involves a lot of discussing issues you don't really understand, and I really wouldn't want to claim any expertise in the nuances of Afghan politics, but it seems worth making the point that sensible people are thinking along these lines.

As someone who does have a bit of expertise on the nuances of Afghan politics, let me try to interpret Frist and other "sensible" options about the moderate Taliban.

1) By Afghan standards, there do exist "moderate" members of the Taliban -- people who were loyal to Afghanistan first and foremost, whereas in Afghanistan, the leaders of the Taliban movement were seen as traitors who sold out to the Pakistani ISI and Al-Qaeda. What I mean by "moderate" is that to you or I they have indistinguishable policy preferences (w.r.t. women's role in society, non-Muslims rights, tradition vs. modernity, religion's role in the state) from the CURRENT batch of Islamists in Karzai's regime and within the "Northern Alliance". Many people within Afghanistan and Coalition forces would like to attract these people to serve in the current government in some capacity. This way, those people will have "bought in" to the system.

2. Our so-called allies, the Pakistanis, are certainly pushing for this because they view Taliban elements within Afghanistan as pro-Pakistani and allies with Pakistan against an Indian push into Afghanistan.

3. Many Afghans would support this because for them, the only crime the Taliban committed in America's eyes was to ally with al-Qaeda. After all, America supported (or at least allowed) hard core religious Islamists (equally fundamentalists in their views), like Sayyaf and Rabbani, to play an important role in Afghan politics post-Taliban. So, to Afghans, it's not the extremist Islam nor the support for Pakistan (since Bush seems to always kiss Musharaff's butt) that hurt the Taliban, it was only their support for Bin Laden. This also seems odd to many Afghans since everyone in the region knows that Pakistan's ISI gave Al-Qaeda much more support than the Taliban ever could, yet Pakistan has been "cleansed" of its association with the hardcore Arab Jihadists.

It's taken American strategists 5 years on the ground to come to such views. For the longest time, we've been outsourcing our intelligence to Pakistan's ISI, who have been feeding us obviously a very biased picture of what's going on there.

Now that many senior members of the military have been in Afghanistan for quite a while they see that choosing corrupt Islamist hardliners (many members of the Karzai coalition who are not the Western-trained technocrat guys) or honest and well-meaning but ideologically wacko Taliban, the choice is a difficult one. By "well-meaning", I am referring to the fact that the mid-level Taliban guys typically believe in their ideology and generally adhere to the rules of tradition and literal Islam, as they see it. Paradoxically, this is not true of the other Islamists in Afghanistan who are viewed by Afghans as utterly corrupt and criminal. Thus, when many Afghans were faced with a Hobbesian dilemma of choosing chaos with criminals over an austere and severe order with illiterates, they chose the illiterates.

That's why if you go to Kabul and ask a Sikh or Hindu shopowner who they prefer, most of them will privately tell you that the Taliban, while crazy and severe, were not theives -- unlike the current bunch that constantly demand bribes.

Posted by AfghanAmerican | October 3, 2006 12:17 PM

In other words, Musharraf is right. You can't govern Afghanistan without the Pashtun majority (which supported and still supports the Taliban, or whatever you want to call the Pashtun Islamic fundamentalists who kicked ou the Soviet occupiers and are on their way to doing the same to the Americans).

Posted by Murph | October 3, 2006 12:51 PM

Murph writes:

In other words, Musharraf is right. You can't govern Afghanistan without the Pashtun majority (which supported and still supports the Taliban, or whatever you want to call the Pashtun Islamic fundamentalists who kicked ou the Soviet occupiers and are on their way to doing the same to the Americans).

You obviously didn't understand what I was trying to write. Here are some points I'd like to make:

1) Ethnicity, along the lines of Pashtun or Tajik, is a very fluid notion in Afghanistan. Remember, that for the "old world", Afghanistan was its center for 5 millenia. Every conceivable group, except Africans, went through Afghanistan at one time or another. So, through wars and conflicts and migrations, people are extremely mixed, racially and ethnically.

2) Musharraf isn't referring to "Pashtuns" per se, as there are plenty in Karzai's administration. He is referring to "Pashtuns that support Pakistan", which is a very small minority of Pashtuns, mostly in border areas. I found his comment about equal representation in Afghanistan's gov't precious, especially when you consider the fact that in Pakistan, the Punjabis have overwhelming representation relative to the Kashmiris, Pashtuns, Sindhis, and Baluchis. Musharraf may just be the most opportunistic man alive who knows well how to capitalize on American ignorance regarding the region.

3) The whole point of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan was that they WERE NOT the "Pashtun Islamic fundamantalists who kicked out the Soviet occupiers". That was the "Mujahideen" and the Taliban always claimed to be fighting against the Mujahideen. That's why caravans driving through Taliban territory in the 90's were worried about being stopped for fear of being thought of as MUJAHIDEEN -- former fighters against the Soviets.

4) There may or may not be a Pashtun majority in Afghanistan, but you nor I nor Musharraf knows if there is one. A real census has not been taken for 40 years. Furthermore, defining who is or who is not "Pashtun" would be very problematic. For example, Karzai is considered Pashtun in some circles, but his family primarly speaks Persian at home. For many hardcore Pashtuns in Pakistan, Karzai is not considered a Pashtun.

5) The whole notion of ethnic quotas in ruling parties has led to civil war and state failure everywhere it has been tried (Nigeria, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, etc.). Why start supporting this policy now?

Posted by AfghanAmerican | October 3, 2006 1:18 PM

Maybe they could call themselves "Kadima". Oh, sorry, that one's
been taken already.

Posted by Richard Cownie | October 3, 2006 1:22 PM

This is about quieting Afghanistan down before the attack on Iran. Actually, it may be part of the war with Iran; I am not sure about the relationship of the above listed players with the Western Afghanis.

Posted by bob mcmanus | October 3, 2006 1:59 PM

On the one hand, bringing these guys into the fold is what democracy is all about. If they're not part of the discussion, then they're as powerless as democrats here at home. And in some way, that's really offensive.

On the other hand, these guys don't believe in democracy as we understand it - so giving them any power could lead to the destruction of the democracy we hope will grow in Afganistan. Look what happened when we let the right have a hand in the political system here...

So what to do? I don't know. How do we weigh the benefits and costs of either inviting them in or excluding them? What are the likely effects of keeping anyone Taliban related out of power? What does that exclusion cost in terms of money and ideals? And the same questions for inclusion.

It's a good thing there are smart people paid to think hard about these issues who will have the ear of the policy makers. (snark)

And - BTW - I'm terrified that changing the name from Taliban to Taliban prime would actually make enough of a difference that the US would support it.

Posted by The Black Monk | October 3, 2006 2:01 PM

"We aren't Taliban, we are the Pashtun People's Front." Or, I suppose, the Koranic Students' Association, which is a reasonable translation of the word "Taliban" into English organizational naming traditions.

Posted by rvman | October 3, 2006 2:11 PM

The headline on the article about Frist in the LA times today was
"Frist says Afgan War Can't be Won."

My reaction was, "!"
and then "!!?"

Why is it that top republicans get to be defeatist, but when it's someone else they're delude and deeply unhelpful?

Posted by Barry | October 3, 2006 2:14 PM

First to address some points made by Afghan American:

I am an Afghan from the Hazara ethnic group and as far as I am concerned I don't think the only crime the Taliban have committed is to ally with al-Qaeda and Pakistan. I would say they have to answer to a bit more than that. Amensty International and Human Rights Watch reports circa 1998 and later will bear this out.

Also, ethnicities are not fluid in Afghanistan. It is as concrete as ethnic identity can be. Bamyan for instance has a female governer because the majority of the province is populated by Hazaras (who are culturally moderate). This isn't just a simple fluke. It simply won't work anywhere else in Afghanistan because other ethnic groups have different takes on the issue.

I am as much against over-emphasizing ethnicity as the next guy, but at the same time I can't simply wish it away either.

That said, there are nationalists elements within the Taliban who are moderate by Afghan standards. At this point though I don't think they can separate themselves from the hardliners (just as for instance in Iraq the "guests" are essentially running their own show). The formula did work with the Mendano Islands in the Philipines, but I am not sure if it will succeed as easily in Afghanistan. Karzai does have a standing amnesty offer but there aren't many takers.

Posted by Ali G | October 3, 2006 4:36 PM

The Taliban have in fact taken some heavy losses in recent months. Where does this ass get off waving the white flag?

Posted by bob h | October 4, 2006 7:02 AM