Daily Times editorial Jan 31, 2012

Talking season

It seems this is the season of talking as far as Afghanistan is concerned. The US has entered preliminary conversations with the Taliban after the latter were allowed to open a political office in Qatar for the purpose. Pakistan, about whom rumours were rife until recently that it opposed the Qatar process because it was not kept in the loop by the Americans, even if true, appears to have rethought its position. Reports say an Afghan Taliban delegation was facilitated to leave Pakistan for Qatar recently. Afghanistan too was reported as miffed at the Qatar bypass and recalled its ambassador to Qatar in annoyance over Qatar facilitating the talks process without taking Kabul into confidence. The ambassador will only return, Kabul says, once a Qatari delegation has visited to clear the air. Now, Kabul has relented to the extent of a reluctant and halting blessing to the Qatar process. Similarly, Kabul’s earlier demand that if the US was considering transferring some important Taliban leaders from Guantanamo Bay prison to Qatar, these leaders should instead be handed over to Kabul. Since the US denies it has as yet taken the decision on the transfer, the issue has cooled, and Kabul is not pressing its case too vociferously any more.
Although Islamabad and Kabul are now reluctant fellow travellers with the US on the road to Doha, they are also exploring the possibility of their own talks with the Taliban, either in Saudi Arabia or Turkey. The Saudi Arabia site finds the Taliban’s Quetta Shura amenable. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan may be calculating that Saudi Arabia’s influence over the Taliban would lend strength to the talks. Also, Qatar’s perceived pro-US tilt in the matter may have clouded its credentials in Islamabad and Kabul. And in the view of some observers, the feeling of ‘neglect’ in Washington’s unilateral efforts to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table in Qatar may have persuaded Islamabad and Kabul that the two had interests in common after the US’s bypassing them. Thus Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar travels to Kabul tomorrow to re-engage with the Karzai regime after the hiatus since September last year when Peace Council head Professor Rabbani was assassinated by a Taliban suicide bomber. Kabul accused Pakistani intelligence of being behind the assassination, producing a great deal of frost in relations between the two neighbouring countries. The hope in Islamabad and Kabul may be that together they might stand a better chance of ensuring their interests are looked after in post-withdrawal Afghanistan. That proposition is still to be tested, and if successful, would constitute an unusual success in cooperation between the two often at loggerheads countries.
While the rash of actual or potential talks between the main stakeholders is welcome, the prospects of successful negotiations still face many hiccups. Not the least is the perception that the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, and al Qaeda have splintered and the emerging factions do not always see eye to eye. An example of the difficulties attending the process of talks inherently as well as specifically, is the incident the other day of a relatively lowly member of the Afghan Peace Council, Maulana Shafihullah Shafih being kidnapped in the eastern province of Kunar when he travelled to deliver a message of peace and reconciliation to the Taliban fighters in the area. That area may well be in the control of the Haqqani network, the incident therefore reflecting the often divergent perspectives of discrete factions of the militants. While such rifts could offer opportunities for widening the chinks and perhaps extracting better outcomes while negotiating with the factions separately, there is little doubt that the process will be difficult, protracted, and not without setbacks of the above nature.
Even if the best case scenario of successful negotiations leading to a relatively smooth withdrawal of foreign forces is achieved, suspicions will linger about what will follow. The Taliban, who have proved themselves redoubtable and determined foes (with some help from our military establishment), have yet to convince the world that they have no intention of just playing along with the talks process in order to secure the foreign forces’ withdrawal before once again unsheathing their sword to try and ‘reconquer’ Afghanistan exclusively for themselves.