Besides which, the entire negotiations track the U.S. took never made any sense. The American negotiating strategy with the Taliban seems to revolve around somehow providing sufficient incentives for the Taliban to give up their opposition to foreign forces in the country, their opposition to the Karzai government, and their opposition to the supposed anti-Islamic bent of both. In other words, it is focused on figuring out how best to bribe the Taliban to abandon their ideals and their reason for being.

A real negotiated framework for defusing an insurgency would involve creating the structures and institutions of a government so that an insurgency is unnecessary--so that the Taliban, in this case, can pursue their goals of removing foreigners and making the central government more Islamic and less corrupt without resorting to violence to do so. Demanding they accept the current constitution as is (even though the Afghan government itself doesn't seem to think it terribly functional), and that they give up violence as a means of achieving change (even while the new U.S. ambassador seeks to deny them non-violent means of doing so) not only doesn't make sense. It is yet more evidence that the U.S. government not only doesn't get politics, but that it actively rejects political considerations.

The war in Afghanistan is fundamentally a political conflict. It is years past time that we began to treat it like one.

A version of this post appeared at Registan.net.

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