The United States was advised on Monday to identify common ground and seek political accommodation with the Taliban and other insurgents to bring an end to violence in Afghanistan. Writing in the New York Times, Greg Mills, who was special adviser to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan from May until this month, said that the Taliban and their allies cannot be beaten by military means alone. “Perhaps then, the moment has come to talk to the Taliban and other insurgents,” Mills said.
It should be understood that nearly half of Afghanistan’s population is Pashtun, which has proved more resistant than the country’s other main groups, the Tajhiks, the Hazaras and the Uzbeks, he added. For all these groups, the Americans and other NATO members are “visitors, probably temporary and increasingly unwelcome, like the British colonisers and Soviets”. Mills pointed out that although the Taliban came to be loathed by most non-Pashtuns, it was important to remember that initially their efforts to restore security after the chaotic collapse of communist rule in the mid-1990s were applauded. Some Afghans maintain that it was only after non-Afghans, especially Arabs, began to exert control over the movement in the late 1990s that the Taliban became sinister and brutal. “Memories of their early role might explain why many Afghans are prepared to turn a blind eye to their resurgence.”
Mills argued that it was important to remember that the insurgency consists of more than just the Taliban. To describe the anti-coalition forces in Afghanistan as a single entity was to ignore their important differences, which can only “hamper our ability to negotiate”, he said. He pointed out that the Taliban were aligned to the Pashtun ethnic cause and their alliance with Al Qaeda seemed more a marriage of convenience than ideology, given the Afghans’ mistrust of the Arabs. Afghanistan, he emphasised, was driven by ethnic divisions and within each group in the insurgency, tribe, clan or family membership often transcended other loyalties. These competing objectives provide an opportunity to split and co-opt these groups, even as “we seek militarily to deny them sanctuary in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. This is not possible if all of them are lumped together as “terrorists”, he said. |