By Steve Coll

I have a new post on my New Yorker blog about negotiations with the Taliban.

Of all the messages in President Obama’s Afghanistan speech last week (a speech with so many messages that it sounded like a chorale, and not a particularly harmonious one), one of the least remarked upon was a passing reference to efforts by Afghanistan’s government to negotiate a settlement with elements of the Taliban. “We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens,” Obama said.

Over the next eighteen months, we can probably expect three levels of American-backed political engagement with Taliban elements, in parallel to military and governance efforts. The least strategic and the least controversial will be a British-led plan to encourage defections by individual Taliban soldiers and commanders, who will be induced to change sides with money and employment-training programs. In addition, district-by-district and province-by-province, American and Afghan commanders will reach out opportunistically to Taliban commanders, as conditions permit, in the hope that promises of money and autonomy might “freeze” some of them in place as home-guard militias, a la the Sons of Iraq program. Finally, and most controversially, there will probably be efforts to renew the aborted Saudi-led negotiations with Taliban leaders around Mullah Omar, which were conceived as a strategic initiative to engage the Taliban in talks that might eventually draw them into a national political settlement in exchange for a time-bound American withdrawal plan. Hamid Karzai has expressed an interest in such negotiations, although his record of succeeding in such talks, dating back to the nineteen-nineties, is not very strong. If achievable, such a settlement could certainly be desirable, if it left behind an Afghan government and army strong enough to defend the country from Al Qaeda and like groups. Such a settlement would be more durable still if it were linked to or coincided with improved relations between India and Pakistan.

To read the rest, visit Think Tank.

By Steve Coll

I have a new post on my New Yorker blog.

My attention has been drawn to an amazing exchange of letters between an Australian academic and Abu Walid al Masri, the nom de guerre of an apparently Egyptian-born writer for the Taliban. I’m told that Al Masri is one of the more prolific and talented contributors to the official Taliban magazine, whose articles have to be vetted by leadership, and that he has also independently published his own book on war strategy and related issues. He is evidently one of the few jihadi writers with a sense of humor and self-awareness.

His correspondent is Leah Farrall, about whom I was previously unaware. Her blog biography discloses that she had been an intelligence analyst for the Australian federal police and is now completing her doctoral dissertation. Her exchange with al Masri is still developing, and we non-Arabic readers only have access to the first of the Taliban writer’s letters. Farrall promises to translate four more but says she is currently snowed under with edits of her dissertation. The photograph of Farrall on her blog -- she is a blonde -- seems to have attracted al Masri’s attention. This is from his initial letter to her:

In our minds are the horrible images of the beautiful female solders and their exercise on our brothers of a torture sport in Abu Ghraib. We don’t forget the image of the beautiful American, as she draws one of our brothers from his neck with a rope like a dog while he was naked and lying on the floor.

For the rest, visit Think Tank. 

By Steve Coll

My thoughts on President Obama's Afghanistan speech are up over at Think Tank.

The President gave his generals what they asked for, essentially. He also purchased from his own deeply skeptical party eighteen months of political forbearance. That is the boiled-down news of the speech last night.

As policy, the speech seemed hard-headed, realistic, careful, and in my oft-laundered view it offered the right choice in a difficult situation. As rhetoric and narrative, however, it disappointed. One problem was that the line of Obama’s argument suffered from its embedded and deliberately constructed contradictions. We are going in but we are going out; we are fighting to defend a vital national interest, but only to the extent that we can afford to do so. We must prevail in this struggle, but we must recognize that we have other challenges that are perhaps more important. All that duality does not lend itself to a smooth narrative or an emotional crescendo.

The speech’s first section—justifying the length of the President’s autumn policy review, and blaming his troubles, mutedly but unmistakably, on his predecessor—seemed, in this setting, and given the solemn and forward-looking character of the President’s decision, unnecessarily defensive. At the least, this first passage was out of rhetorical step with the rousing ending, which was by far the best formal section of the writing. There the President summoned his gifts to invoke a vision of national unity and America’s role in the world that was consonant with his inspiring campaign for office. As uplifting as they were, however, those passages actually treated a different subject—they were about the kind of Presidency Obama wished to have, and not very much about his decision to redouble his commitment to the war in Afghanistan. The final section felt a little like the speech the President would have wished to give from start to finish if he had not inherited a deteriorating Afghan war and boxed himself into fighting that war during the election campaign.

By Steve Coll

I have a new post up on my New Yorker blog.

In the comments on Thomas Ricks’s blog at Foreign Policy, I came across a well-informed dissent to my straw-man forecast about what failure in Afghanistan would bring. Here is the writer’s alternative take on my failure scenarios one and two:

On a 90s-style Afghan Civil War:

There already IS a civil war. It’s just that we’re fighting it on behalf of the Northern Alliance at the moment. We’d have to turn it over to them to fight. Also, one key difference between the 90s War and the new one would be that we would be backing one of the sides with arms, money and diplomatic cover. As would the rest of the world. So all the nasty things that our Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara brethren would be doing to the Pashtuns would be looked over by virtually every major player on the International scene.

On momentum for a Taliban revolution in Pakistan:

I usually agree with Steve Coll about AfPak but the logic behind this scenario is murky, at best. The ISI, as a rule, still backs the ‘Afghan Taliban.’ The loose coalition of militants that exists in FATA and NWFP that are known as the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ have distinct ambitions from the ‘Afghan Taliban.’ They attack ISI and Pak military targets, and the leaders have supposedly said they would target NATO convoys once they’re ‘finished’ with the Pak Army. No one yet knows what the future of the two Talibans is going to be. Steve’s assumption seems to be the ‘worst case scenario.’ And even then it doesn’t address the fact that the ‘Afghan Taliban,’ in helping the ‘Pakistani Taliban,’ would be biting the hand that helped create them (ISI), sustain them, protect them, and brought them back to power again….

Just a couple of thoughts. I take the point that the international community already engaged in an Afghan civil war; that’s well said. But it is for the moment clearly a war that is not yet producing the kinds of ethnic schisms and civilian deaths familiar from the recent past. Note the Oxfam poll of Afghan civilians, for example, as evidence about skeptical Afghan attitudes toward the Taliban, despite the stresses and failures of the Karzai government.

By Steve Coll

I have a new post up over at Think Tank.

Last week, I found myself at yet another think tank-type meeting about Afghan policy choices. Toward the end, one of the participants, who had long experience in government, asked a deceptively simple question: What would happen if we failed?

First, the question requires a definition of failure. As I’ve argued, in my view, a purpose of American policy in Afghanistan ought to be to prevent a second coercive Taliban revolution in that country, not only because it would bring misery to Afghans (and, not incidentally, Afghan women) but because it would jeopardize American interests, such as our security against al Qaeda’s ambitions and our (understandable) desire to see nuclear-armed Pakistan free itself from the threat of revolutionary Islamist insurgents. So, then, a definition of failure would be a redux of Taliban revolution in Afghanistan -- a revolution that took control of traditional Taliban strongholds such as Kandahar and Khost, and that perhaps succeeded in Kabul as well. Such an outcome is conceivable if the Obama Administration does not discover the will and intelligence to craft a successful political-military strategy to prevent the Afghan Taliban from achieving its announced goals, which essentially involve the restoration of the Afghan state they presided over during the nineteen-nineties, which was formally known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

What would be the consequences of a second Islamic Emirate? My scenarios here are intended analytically, as a first-draft straw-man forecast:

The Nineties Afghan Civil War on Steroids: Even if the international community gave up on Afghanistan and withdrew, as it did from Somalia during the early nineties, it is inconceivable that the Taliban could triumph in the country completely and provide a regime (however perverse) of stability. About half of Afghanistan’s population is non-Pashtun, from where the Taliban draw their strenth, and most of that non-Pashtun population is ardently anti-Taliban. In the humiliating circumstances that would attend American failure, those in the West who now promote “counterterrorism,” “realist,” and “cost-effective” strategies in the region would probably endorse, in effect, a nineties redux -- which would amount to a prescription for more Afghan civil war. A rump “legitimate” Afghan government dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks would find arms and money from India, Iran, and perhaps Russia, Europe and the United States. This would likely produce a long-running civil war between northern, Tajik-dominated ethnic militias and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. Tens of thousands of Afghans would likely perish in this conflict and from the pervasive poverty it would produce; many more Afghans would return as refugees to Pakistan, contributing to that country’s instability.

By Steve Coll

I have a new post over at my New Yorker blog.

Antonio Giustozzi, a fellow at the London School of Economics, is the editor of a new volume of research essays about the Taliban entitled “Decoding the New Taliban,” which is being published here by Columbia University Press. It is an outstanding and important collection -- just the sort of locally specific, openly debatable, scholarly analysis about the diverse structures and leaders of the Taliban that will be required more and more if the international community is ever to understand the insurgents and divine how to prevent a second Taliban revolution.

I thought I should mention two selections from among those I have read so far, and also urge the more dedicated Afghan watchers out there to order the book and plunge in. This is not for the general reader, but those who work in the region or have an interest in the granular challenges facing international policymakers in Afghanistan will find much of value here.

In an essay entitled “Reading the Taliban,” Joanna Nathan of the International Crisis Group updates some of her work on Taliban propaganda and communications strategies. Her analysis of the repetitious themes in Taliban magazines and DVDs -- the recapitulation of Guantánamo imprisonment stories as folk culture narrative; the amplification of Pashtun grievances around ethnic revenge killings and notoriously corrupt figures such as the Uzbek commander General Dostum -- is particularly chilling.

Also, in a piece called “The Haqqani Network as an Autonomous Entity” the German researcher Thomas Ruttig provides an extraordinarily detailed and useful analysis of the Taliban-affiliated networks founded by Jalalauddin Haqqani, the former Central Intelligence Agency asset whose followers apparently were responsible for the kidnapping of New York Times reporter David Rohde. The Haqqanis are arguably the Taliban insurgency’s most potent force. Ruttig documents compellingly its connectivity with and separation from the Old Taliban around Mullah Omar and his leadership councils. There is much new information here -- new at least to the open literature -- about marriages and internal personalities within the Haqqani network. The sections of Ruttig’s research that overlap with my own work are unfailingly careful and accurate.

By Steve Coll

Some of my thoughts on the Afghan presidential election are up over at my New Yorker blog.

Like Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah earned the credibility he enjoys among Afghans (hardly universal or complete, but substantial nonetheless) because he worked for the country and for the northern militias grouped around the late Ahmed Shah Massoud during the miserable, isolated years of Taliban rule. I’ve always found him to be measured, dignified, and elusive.

Those were certainly characteristics present in his comments about his decision to withdraw from the election yesterday. (Karzai has now been declared the winner and Afghans will be spared the security risks of a cosmetic voting exercise.) Many lesser politicians would have handled themselves less responsibly than Abdullah in such circumstances. He has ample reason to resent Karzai; he was forced from Karzai’s cabinet a few years back in less than happy circumstances, only to have Karzai or his team try to steal the presidential election—unnecessarily, and thuggishly. No doubt this personal history had some influence on Abdullah’s decision to foil the satisfaction of an outright Karzai election victory by employing complaints about fraud to withdraw from participation. But a better explanation lies in an analysis of Abdullah’s interests and current negotiating position. He has long sought constitutional reforms to strengthen parliament over the presidency. He is almost certainly interested in rejoining the government, with some of his allies, if the deal is attractive enough. He retains ambitions and wishes to remain a viable national figure in a post-Karzai Afghanistan. He will be in a stronger position to negotiate toward all of these goals by adopting the posture he announced yesterday than he would have been if he had participated in the runoff and been defeated. Rather than a confirmed election loser, Abdullah now presents himself to the international community and the Karzai government as a problem to be solved—a responsible, reasonable problem, open to constructive negotiations that will address his interests and concerns.

To read the rest, visit Think Tank.

Steve Coll is the president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

By Steve Coll

The next post in my Afghanistan series is up over at Think Tank.

We’re all prisoners of our own experiences. Richard Holbrooke, the Obama Administration’s diplomatic point man on Afghanistan, and the subject of my colleague George Packer’s terrific Profile last week, arrives at the current dilemmas influenced by Vietnam and Bosnia. General David Petraeus, Obama’s commander for the Middle East and Central Asian region, and General Stan McChrystal, his commander in Afghanistan, arrive at this intersection with the recent lessons of counterinsurgency in Iraq ringing in their ears. In some respects the debate over what strategy Obama should now adopt in Afghanistan has become a debilitating contest of historical analogies and comparative case studies. A similar discourse broke out recently after Russia’s incursion into Georgia; the incident occurred during the Obama-McCain Presidential campaign, and McCain invoked comparisons to Hungary, 1956, and even the Second World War. The wise editor of this magazine, setting such comparisons aside, quoted the English theologian Joseph Butler, with whom, frankly, I was unacquainted. Anyway, Butler apparently once wrote, “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” It is a more useful way to think about the value of history in policymaking than the historical-case-study debate method, I agree, and the quotation has stuck with me.

Of course, this philosophy does not make history irrelevant at moments like this. And you might argue that of all the analogies that should be reviewed as Obama makes his choices, those rooted in recent Afghan history are the most useful, since, in some respects, they are “not another thing.”

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, he inherited a deteriorating war in Afghanistan. He wanted out but he was boxed in by hardliners in his Politburo and military. Gradually, however, he constructed an exit strategy from Afghanistan. It had several components, all of which are present, in amended forms, in the current Obama policy debate.

In Afghanistan, after an initial and failed attempt to use special forces more aggressively to hit Islamist guerrillas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the Soviets began to pull back into Afghanistan’s major cities and to “Afghan-ize” their military operations. As they prepared to withdraw, Soviet troops moved away from direct combat, particularly in the countryside, and instead concentrated on training and equipping the Afghan forces. They also provided supplies and expertise the Afghans lacked -- air power, for example, and SCUD missiles. As I described in a previous post, this military strategy worked pretty well, and the Soviet city-fortresses withstood heavy assaults from the U.S.-financed mujaheddin even after Soviet troops left the country; they left only a thousand or two military and intelligence advisers behind.

Read the rest here.

Steve Coll is the president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at the New Yorker.