Are the chances of the U.S. government's attempts to peacefully talk to the Taliban remote in terms of success? According to a new report, they are, The Telegraph reports.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced Thursday in Qatar that his country would withdraw from the first official peace talks with Washington and denounced all peaceful plans and negotiations. On Tuesday, President Karzai indicated willingness to participate, but has since changed his mind, complaining about how the peace talks process has been unveiled to the world and the Taliban's use of the name "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" for the Doha office, according to The Independent. Afghan officials were also angry at the decision to use the name, which was the name used by the Taliban when they held power from 1996 to 2001.
The leading author of the new report on the peace talks said that best, the talks could provide a "sticking plaster" to the departure of NATO military forces by 2014. "The strategic rationale for talks has never been clear," said the report, written by a group of British and American experts from King's College London and the New America Foundation in Washington. The report said that efforts of resolution with the Taliban have been a "chaos of good intentions" over the past few years, as different branches of the international community pushed their own agendas at the same time.
"There were too many cooks, and not enough strategic direction," wrote John Bew, leading author on the new report and director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) at King's College. Representatives from the United Nations, the European Union, the British, American and German intelligence services, and the U.S. military were all involved in attempts to contact the Taliban at various stages and points in time.
"The whole process has been too secretive, when we should have been open about talks and clear leadership should have been provided. Like the whole campaign, it wasn't clear why we were doing what we were doing," argued Brew. "If you can't define the mission, how can you define why you are going to talk to these people?"
The report said that the chances of a last-minute political breakthrough were slim, and in many ways echoing "the experience of the Soviet Union trying to negotiate itself out of Afghanistan".
"There could be a successful sticking plaster aspect to these talks. The Taliban could agree to disassociate from al-Qaeda, and the talks could nurture the Taliban into party politics after Karzai's term is up in 2014," Brew said. "The U.S. is back to its basic reason for being in Afghanistan, which is stopping al-Qaeda. Winning hearts and minds has gone, counter-insurgency has gone. This is now a containment exercise."
