ندوة “الحوار بين الولايات المتحدة وطالبان إلى أين؟” تنظم من طرف منتدى العلاقات العربية والدولية

 click here to view the source link

• The exclusion of the Taliban Movement from the 2001 peace settlement and the persecution of members of the Movement in the immediate aftermath of the toppling of their regime.
• The ideological commitment of the supporters of the Taliban Movement and the cohesiveness of their organization.
• The reservoir of support for jiihadi, anti-American and anti-Indian causes in Pakistan and some parts of Afghanistan.
• The pursuit by the Afghan Government of an approach of patrimonialism, which resulted in predatory institutions and the alienation of those who did not benefit from state patronage.
• The existence of a large pool of marginalized rural youth in the Pashtun areas along the border, whose best hope of achieving prestige was through joining the insurgency.
• The militarization of the international presence in Afghanistan, which provided a pretext for Taliban and their backers to fight, while never achieving the security that the international forces were supposed to provide.

Together these factors provided the Taliban with the motives and means to launch and sustain their insurgency.

2) why can’t the Afghan government and the international community negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban?

Because it is complex….

• The Afghan conflict involves multiple stake-holders, all of whom have some capacity to block any deal contemplated by the others. These stakeholders include the Afghan Government, the various parts of the constitutional opposition, the Taliban, other insurgents, the US Department of State, the US Department of Defence, the ISI…..
• The Afghan Government has never pursued a “peace deal” with the Taliban Movement. Instead it has tried to persuade individuals or factions in the insurgency to shift their allegiance to the government, basically to surrender and ally themselves to Karzai. Few people in the insurgency have found these terms acceptable.
• The “international community” has limited capacity and willingness to engage politically in Afghanistan, except under the mantle of the Afghan government. Thus the pursuit by the Government of unrealistic terms blocks international efforts also.
• The Taliban Movement has a long track record of difficult dealing. It is deliberately inaccessible and introverted. The leadership is not responsible to anyone, and certainly not to its base. It tends to exaggerate its bargaining power and to hold out too long in pursuit of unrealistic objectives.
• The major players all think they have acceptable alternatives to a negotiated solution, most of which involve sustaining the military campaign.

3) how can we bring an end to the Taliban insurgency?

• The Taliban Movement will have to be incorporated in the political system on the basis of an intra-Afghan agreement. However whether all or most of the Movement will be party to the agreement is not clear.
• An internationally backed mediation effort would be one of the ways of moving towards such agreement and securing a ceasefire in the meantime.
• Afghans will have to put a new leadership into their presidential palace, capable of leading the country, sustaining the current order and making it clear to Taliban supporters that they have no prospect of military victory.
• More effective means will have to be found to neutralize Pakistan support to insurgents.

By Michael Semple, Fellow at Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Michael_Semple@hks.harvard.edu

“Evening, the twilight arrives slowly with its lap full of red flowers;

Pink rays are spreading over the blush of sky.”

“Take care not to play with wounded hearts,

I am someone’s heart’s wish as well.

I am Ariana, Khorasan, I am Afghanistan.”

“The nightingales cry and remember their lawn,

The foreigners brought autumn to it.

They are buying its honour and esteem with dollars.”

“But amongst these graves

One of them can be seen from afar.

A martyr’s tomb it is;

Its beauty is seen from the flags.”

These verses, part of a new chapter in the literature of war, have triggered what has been dubbed the “Afghan poetry controversy”.  I recall meeting the author of the first couplet, Abdul HaiMotmain. At the time he was the Taliban leader’s personal spokesman and his face lit up when he found we could actually converse, without the need for a translator. The verses above are extracted from Poetry Of The Taliban, edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten & Felix Kuehn, published by Hurst & Company, London (released May 17) and Columbia University Press, available for pre-order on Amazon now).The book is part of a growing field of Taliban poetry studies, focusing on what Taliban and their supporters have written.I pitched in last year with a paper based on seventy Taliban ballads I had collected. I gather that some people are surprised that the Taliban have poets and others are perturbed that western academics are giving them a platform.  The Taliban poetry controversy is part of the long journey towards understanding the culture and politics of a conflict in which the US has been involved for over a decade.

It pays to understand how the other side behaves, thinks and imagines. Some of the early mistakes during the intervention in Afghanistan arose from US actors failing to appreciate and leverage Afghan inter-connectedness. In those early days we snubbed Taliban offers of cooperation (because they were the evil enemy) and went along with our new Afghan allies’ opportunistic witch hunts of their old rivals. In the process we helped sow the seeds of the insurgency and Afghanistan missed out on its best chance for peace.

The first issue in the poetry controversy was whether the poems are propaganda. While assembling this material scholars have found that young Taliban have collections of multi-media MP3 files on their smart phones – ballads sung alongside scenes from Afghanistan. They swap these via Bluetooth. The resistance ballads are more subtle than propaganda. The poets are artists in their own right and their poems spread because they have resonance with that bit of Afghan society which identifies with the Taliban and the insurgency.

The themes of Taliban poetry are revealing. They sing of a war firmly located in the mountains, valleys and rangelands of Afghanistan. They find inspiration in the soil of Afghanistan, not in the global jihad. What I call the “burden of history” is evident in many the ballads – somewhat clichéd references to previous defeats of foreign armies and youths’ obligation to hand out the same treatment. There are many references to Pashtun ideas of honor and rather fewer references to religious ideas. There are also witty works of satire, lampooning Afghan and American leaders. But much of the poetry is tender, with themes of love, regret and evocation of the beauty of the land. All this links the best of the pro-Taliban poetry to a tradition of Pashto and Farsi literature.

I spend more time as a political analyst than as a ballad collector. Therefore I also try to work out what the Taliban think from what they say. Now is a real time of ferment for the Taliban. Of course they talk first of the daily reality of sustaining the fight. But many Taliban are tired of war and wonder how it will end. For six months the movement has struggled with the notion that its leadership is in negotiation with the US. Everyone is suspicious of secret deals conducted by unaccountable leaders – just like Afghans on the other side they are worried about being sold out. Taliban have remarkably little to say about how they envision Afghanistan after peace breaks out. None of them really provides a convincing account of what they expect to happen to the role of women, in part because none of them is really clear about the compromises they will eventually have to reach with non-Taliban Afghans. Of late the Taliban base has been struggling with the case of Mullah Ismail, one of the Movement’s second rank leaders who in March was accused of treachery and has now been disappeared by the leadership. Other Taliban are worried about meeting his fate and many complain about the authoritarian style of the leadership, which is apparently happy to make an example of Ismail, without any due process.

The Chicago announcements of continued engagement in Afghanistan implywe are still obliged to try to understand the Taliban. We could start by drawing four simple insights from the poetry and conversations. Firstly the Taliban are Afghan and neither an offshoot of Al Qaida nor stooge of Pakistan. Secondly Taliban have a real Afghan constituency and thus have the capacity to fight on beyond 2014 if they so decide. But there is genuine confusion in the Movement over whether to pursue this course, amounting to a naked power grab. Thirdly some good Afghans have stuck with the Taliban, even if their Movement has played a troubling role. The balladeers sing in praise of the Taliban as brave or upright individuals. No one eulogizes the Movement as such. And finally hopes that the Taliban insurgency might taper off after 2014 depend on finding a way to clean up the government and ensuring that it is headed by a fairly elected President.When I try to explain all this to Taliban I resort to Irish poetry – “Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart” (Yeats). As the conflict drags on it will get nastier and the Taliban will experience this as much as other Afghans.

By Michael Semple, Fellow at Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Michael_Semple@hks.harvard.edu

Anyway, good that such a document is now in the public domain.

By Michael Semple, Fellow at Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Michael_Semple@hks.harvard.edu

For a reality check I interviewed an experienced Election Commission official. We talked uluswali by uluswali through one of the provinces where security is now precarious. For the moment Election Commission personnel are restricted to indoors activities in the provincial centre and Kabul. They are in sort of state of hibernation, just guarding the body’s equipment and premises and attending training courses. Most of the real work of the Election Commission should involve travelling in the districts – for civic education, voter registration, preparation of polling sites and the actual conduct of polling. My friend reckoned that in current conditions free movement of personnel for such activities would only be possible in one of the province’s districts. Three of the districts face a latent Taliban threat. Militants regularly stage raids and the police hold on the district centres is precarious. The rest of the districts are dominated by “strong-men”. A dominant commander has emerged in each tribe and they operate armed groups which, in their own areas, are more powerful than government. DIAG is a distant dream and government authority has receded. Government officials, in both the Taliban-affected and commander-dominated zones are essentially under siege in district head-quarters. They dare not travel district to district by land unless they are unimportant enough simply to go by bus in plain clothes. When I asked my friend what an election would look like if conducted in such circumstances, he laughed. Apart from the problems of the electoral staff, it would be impossible for campaigners, candidate agents and independent monitors to travel to the districts to connect with the electorate and observe polling. You cannot hold a normal free and fair election where campaigning is deadly, voting is dangerous and observing impossible. Something like a normal election would only be possible in the one secure district and the security bubble around the provincial headquarters. Any attempt to hold polling in the insecure districts would, according to the official, degenerate into a process of handing over ballot boxes to the local strongmen and waiting for them to return them, stuffed. This is how the 2010 parliamentary elections worked in the province. It would be impossible to deploy staff and expect them to apply the procedures inherent in lawful polling – checking of identity, enforcing of one-man-one vote, maintaining records and tallying votes. Of course something called an election would be possible. But if the Election Commission applied its own rules it would be obliged to invalidate all the votes coming in from the districts – because there would be no documentation to prove that real voters had cast them. This could be expected to provoke another round of protests, orchestrated by whoever had ordered the stuffing of the boxes in the insecure districts.

No well-wisher of Afghanistan could wish for a disastrous repetition of this destabilizing exercise. My reading of the political and military situation is that it is all too likely that security and access for official personnel to remote uluswalis will be no better in 2014 than it is today. Therefore the election official’s reality check suggests that if elections are to go ahead in 2014 the whole process will indeed have to be “bomb-proofed”.

In addressing the challenge of “bomb-proofing”, Pakistan provides a next door example of how a flexible response can help ensure that extreme violence does not upset the electoral process. The 2008 general election was held at a time when the country faced both an insurgency in the north and terrorism in all its main cities. The first big shock came with the terrorist assassination of main opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on 27^th December 2007, only two weeks before voting was due. The Election Commission responded by postponing polls by forty days. This allowed enough time for the opposition to reorganize, without it appearing that the government was procrastinating. As this was the period in which the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan had started to agitate, some of the “tribal areas” were too dangerous for electioneering. In Kurram Agency polling was initially postponed because of an upsurge of pre-election violence. But its seat was filled in a subsequent by-election. However the seat for NA-42, covering the Mahsud area of South Waziristan remained vacant throughout the 2008-2013 parliament because of the army operation there and mass displacement. Lately, Imran Khan has petitioned for future polling to be allowed outside the NA-42 constituency, as so much of the population has been displaced. This has forced the Election Commission to address the issue of disenfranchisement of a part of the electorate and consider whether there is a flexible solution for this worst-affected constituency. The point of the Pakistan experience is that the authorities and political parties were able to respond flexibly to serious challenges of insecurity and terrorism and still produce one of Pakistan’s most successful democratic exercise – an election that peacefully defeated an incumbent party and produced the country’s first parliament and government to last the full term.

Internationally, electoral support organisations have tried to distill experience of conducting elections against a context of violence, from countries like Lebanon, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Iraq or Bangladesh, all of which have grappled with variants of the challenge. IFES (the International Foundation for Electoral Systems) recently published a report on “An integrated approach to elections and conflict”. They advocate breaking down the traditional barriers between those who manage the elections (the Election Commission) and those who deal with conflict (security forces or mediators and humanitarian agencies). The report advocates that electoral authorities should explicitly address conflict issues in their planning of every stage of the electoral cycle, by conducting election-relevant conflict analysis, conflict prevention, conflict mitigation and conflict resolution. It should be obvious in Afghanistan that early in the electoral cycle someone must do conflict analysis to identify the areas where problems can be expected. This will entail systematic versions of my reality check, so that the alarm can be sounded as soon as possible in affected constituencies. Another important point made by IFES is that it is important that the Election Commission be credible if it is to maintain public confidence in taking the difficult decisions that inevitably arise in managing an election during conflict. Clumsy government attempts to change commissioners and plant loyalists can backfire because this so weakens the electoral management body it has no authority to deal with crises. One of the eminent electoral experts who has served in Afghanistan, Ray Kennedy, suggests that flexibility (as in the Pakistan example) is the key to a successful election in a situation of conflict. Dates should not be fixed in stone and electoral law should leave reasonable latitude to the Election Commission to update regulations and procedures, so as to cope with evolving conflict conditions.

Bomb-proofing an Afghan election can benefit from these international insights. But measures will have to be tailored for Afghan conditions and address the three peculiar sets of conflict related threats.  The first set of threats comes from insurgents who, on current form, can be expected to be targeting the election and anybody associated with government or the international community. The second set of threats comes from unscrupulous officials who seek to exploit the conditions of insecurity as a cover for electoral fraud – industrial scale ballot-stuffing in provinces with unmonitored polling stations. Although protests at election results have been generally peaceful in recent Afghan elections, the third threat is that of post-poll violence in the case of a disputed result. Measures are available which could address each of these threats. The most radical change in the way Afghan elections are conducted would occur if the Electoral Commission implemented a clear decision only to open polling stations in locations which are accessible to voters, candidate agents and observers alike. This would involve abolishing the hundreds of polling stations where officials rather than real voters have previously stuffed ballot boxes. Such an attempt to apply the rules, where people have become accustomed to mass cheating, would require lots of advance-planning, transparency and involvement of all stake-holders (as described in the IFES report). A similar approach can be adapted for the other threats. For example once officials accept the basic reality that there is a war on they are obliged to look differently at basic tasks such as voter registration or facilitation of observers and candidate agents. Because a normal election is impossible it is time to rethink all the old procedures which were based on the illusion of freedom of movement and access throughout the country.

The run up to the 2014 presidential election and the way that the government, election commission, politicians and other stake-holders deal with the challenge of bomb-proofing it will be the ultimate test of the post-Bonn political order.  Ensuring that there is a legitimately elected president demands that the incumbent government resist the temptation to exploit insecurity in pursuit of electoral advantage. The election commission and the political class will have to cooperate from now on to update election plans and procedures to take account of the likelihood of much of the rural hinterland being inaccessible. Of course, the whole endeavour would be made much easier if someone could arrange a ceasefire and freedom of movement in time for the elections. For the moment this remains a distant dream. However they say that the same political will is necessary for the resolution of violent conflict as is required to hold elections in a conflict. So whether there is a ceasefire or active conflict by 2014, much hard work lies ahead.

By Michael Semple, Fellow at Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Michael_Semple@hks.harvard.edu