Remember last month,
when all the news was atwitter about the prospect of meaningful negotiations
with the Taliban in Kabul?
The story was moderately shocking: a senior Taliban figure was being flown
around the region, talking directly with General Petraeus, President
Karzai, and other senior figures in the International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF) and the Afghan government. The driving force behind coverage of those
negotiations was New York Times
reporter Dexter Filkins, who wrote
that NATO had provided air transportation and secure road travel for Taliban
leaders to visit Kabul
for the negotiations.
Almost precisely one
month later, Filkins and Carlotta Gall are writing the exact
opposite.
In an
episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials
now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted
with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.
"It's not
him," said a Western diplomat in Kabul
intimately involved in the discussions. "And we gave him a lot of money." ...
The fake
Taliban leader even met with President Hamid Karzai, having been flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft
and ushered into the presidential palace, officials said.
Think about this for a
moment: a man whose identity no one was able to verify was flown, by NATO, for
face-to-face meetings with high-ranking members of the coalition (though Karzai
denies
having met Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the impersonated Taliban leader in
question). We don't know what his intentions were, nor do we know what
information he may have stolen for whatever his ultimate goals are. We can
speculate all we want about what really happened: the impostor was out to grab
cash ("we gave him a lot of money," one U.S. official lamented), he was an
ISI agent sent to penetrate the negotiations process, and so on. But no matter
how we spin it, this is hugely embarrassing for ISAF, for the war, and for any
prospects of ending it soon.
Mullah Omar, who leads
one group of Taliban fighters based in Quetta,
has insisted from the beginning that the talks last month were not taking
place. At the time, Filkins had written that Omar was being "explicitly being
cut out" of the talks. Now, it seems that is because the talks weren't really
occurring.
Are there any lessons
we can learn from this? For one, the officials hyping the talks to reporters
never seemed to talk about the prospect of American withdrawal. Filkins himself
reported
last year that this is a primary, unchangeable goal of the Taliban.
But ISAF and Afghan
officials spun
the talks as evidence that the new, aggressive stance taken by General
Petraeus, focused on killing mid-level commanders to ‘force' the Taliban to the
negotiating table, was working. They were partially right: something had
changed. But it wasn't the effectiveness of their tactics or strategy. Instead,
this episode confirms what many Afghanistan
watchers have long feared: the leadership of ISAF doesn't seem to have any idea
what it's doing, who it's talking to, and (probably) who it is really killing.
You can see this
confusion in press reports of what the Taliban look like (reporters almost
always get their information about the Taliban from U.S. officials). The Washington Post claims
Mansour, the man this impostor was impersonating, took over the number two
position within the Taliban after a joint CIA-ISI operation resulted in the
February arrest of Mullah Baradar, the Taliban's previous number two (and who
was widely rumored to be engaged in tentative negotiations with Kabul). The AP, however, explicitly
says that didn't happen, and that after Baradar's arrest Mansour was passed
over in favor of Maulvi Zakir Qayyum -- a former Guantanamo detainee who
rejoined the Taliban a few months after being released from prison.
We don't know the real
truth. In part, we are left with spin -- from the Taliban, to be sure, but also
from ISAF, which has developed a habit of pushing
misleadingly optimistic stories through reporters. The result is total
confusion about who the enemy is and is not, and incoherence in terms of policy
and execution. This impostor is another data point that ISAF is crippled by its
own leadership, believing its own spin about how well the war is going. As
Michael Cohen has noted,
only the U.S. military is
truly optimistic about the chances for success in Afghanistan
-- literally every other party to the conflict, including the Taliban, is
convinced the U.S.
is slowly losing its ability to win.
Next month, the
Pentagon begins its latest review of the war strategy in Afghanistan.
The constant refrain General Petraeus has shouted to reporters is that his new
strategy is working -- it is "degrading" the Taliban; it is reversing momentum;
it is forcing their leadership to the negotiating table to beg for relief. None
of that is actually true -- and as Alex Strick van Linschoten has explained,
there is very
little data to support any of it. We cannot identify an insurgent leader
sitting across the table from senior officials; how can we possibly know what's
really happening in the insurgency (or even identify people through the video
feed from a drone)?
Will the strategic
review take into account that every high profile attempt to break through the
war's impasse in the last year -- Marjah, Kandahar, and now Mansour -- has not
only apparently failed, but likely made our position within the country worse
off? Probably not, unfortunately. If we can learn anything from this, it is
that the U.S. military is so blinded by its belief in its own effectiveness
that it won't examine its own failures to see what went wrong. So the review
will say there's progress, the tide is turning, and the insurgency is breaking...
even as the actual insurgency expands its attacks, occupies and controls new
swaths of the country, and laughs itself to tears while we waste our time shuffling
businessmen from the back alleys of Quetta, congratulating ourselves on eking
out a win.
Joshua Foust is a military analyst specializing in Central Asia. He is a contributor to PBS Need to Know,
and a contributing editor at Current Intelligence. He is the author of Afghanistan
Journal: Selections from Registan.net, available
from Just World Books.
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