A political endgame in Afghanistan

The only way to peace and stability in Afghanistan, says David Miliband, the former British foreign secretary, is “working to mend it not just rushing to end it.”

In a widely circulated op-ed piece in the New York Times yesterday, Miliband gave a detailed roadmap to this “mending.”

His approach is both simple and revolutionary.

First and foremost among his recommendations are genuine negotiations, conducted in good faith and with realistic expectations, by “Western powers led by the United States, with all factions in the Afghan struggle and their backers in the region.”

This recognizes an important truth in the Afghan war: that negotiations will have to be a far-reaching, multi-national affair, including Pakistan as well as Afghanistan; NATO, in particular the United States, which is the overwhelming military force now in Afghanistan; and other regional players.

So far, “talks” have been largely limited to vague interchanges between the Afghan government and the Taliban, neither of which can, by itself, make any permanent decisions on peace.

The negotiations themselves are the endgame, Miliband tells us; a political settlement “is not one part of a multipronged strategy in a counterinsurgency; it is the overarching framework within which everything else fits and in the service of which everything else operates.”

What Miliband is advocating is nothing less than standing the entire U.S. strategy in Afghanistan on its head.

Since the beginning of military operations in Afghanistan, and even more dramatically since General David Petraeus assumed command of U.S. and NATO troops here last June, military gains have been seen to be driving the political agenda.

If the Taliban see they are losing, the reasoning goes, they will be more inclined to negotiate. Then the “civilian surge” — the influx of specialists and advisors who help the Afghan government build its capacity to serve its citizens and convince them that democracy is the better road — steps in.

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in remarks she made at the Asia Society in New York on Feb. 18, “As the military surge weakens the insurgents and pressures them to consider alternatives to armed resistance, the civilian surge creates economic and social incentives for participating in a peaceful society. Together, the two efforts prepare the ground for a political process, which history and experience tell us is the most effective way to end an insurgency.”

So far, this approach has borne little fruit. Like the Hydra’s head, the Taliban seem to sprout two fighters for every one killed. Adversity has only strengthened their resolve, and the populations in Taliban-controlled areas, far from perceiving the Taliban as finished, are still sitting on the fence.

Their ambivalence is reinforced by a mounting anger and frustration at the prolonged war, civilian casualties, and perceived insults from the West, particularly the United States, to Afghan religion and culture. This culminated in a series of riots throughout Afghanistan at the beginning of April, in reaction to reports of a Quran-burning by a fundamentalist preacher in Florida.

In addition, Afghans are profoundly disillusioned by their own weak, ineffectual, and corrupt government.

They may not want the Taliban back but, as researchers from the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit have argued, they are not so sure about democracy as an alternative.

“Afghans have negative associations attached to the word ‘democracy’ itself,” wrote Anna Larson and Olivier Lough, in a piece they wrote for Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel last February. “In the view of many Afghans we spoke to, the idea of democracy extends far beyond elections and parliamentary politics to encompass an entire package of Western liberal values, where freedom is equated with an absence of rules, immorality, and secularism.”

The pessimism with which Afghans view representative democracy has only deepened following the fraud-plagued parliamentary elections last September, said Larson and Lough.

This is bad news indeed for the counterinsurgency, which relies on convincing Afghans that they are better off in the democracy camp than with the other side.

Miliband is proposing that we dump what he deems a losing strategy and concentrate on trying to reach a political settlement.

“It is time that we stopped behaving as if there were a military solution and developed a political one,” he said.

This has been advocated by many in the policy world, including researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, in a paper they wrote for NYU’s Center on International Cooperation.

A chorus is building, in which Miliband’s may be the loudest voice yet.

At the end of his well-argued piece, the former foreign secretary sounds a cautionary note:

“Our leverage will decline, not improve, as 2014 approaches. The insurgency can spread, outstripping the ability of international and Afghan forces to check its growth. The warlords can strengthen their grip. Inter-ethnic strife can come to look more and more like civil war.”

This is a point that anyone living and working in Afghanistan will appreciate. Most discussions among old Afghanistan hands these days revolve around how long it will be until open conflict breaks out among the various strongmen that U.S. Special Forces have been so diligently training and empowering for the past few years.

With two international conferences on Afghanistan scheduled for the next six months, the time has come to step up efforts to end the war, insists Miliband.

“The 2014 end date set by NATO will prove illusory unless there is an endgame. And that endgame must be negotiations,” he writes.

Let’s hope someone is paying attention.