The Wall Street Journal reported on US plans to open direct negotiations with Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. The fact that the Journal, a conservative financial paper, broke the story shows that it was not a journalistic exposé, but a deliberate public declaration of a shift in state policy.
According to the Journal, “The US is actively considering talks with elements of the Taliban, the armed Islamist group that once ruled Afghanistan and sheltered al-Qaeda, in a major policy shift that would have been unthinkable a few months ago.” It reported that such talks were included in a “draft recommendation in a classified White House assessment of US strategy in Afghanistan.”
These plans seek to address a serious deterioration of the US position in Afghanistan. Violence has spread through the country and into neighboring tribal areas of Pakistan, whose US-backed government has been discredited by its acquiescence in US bombings and ground incursions into Pakistan against Taliban militants. The US war on the Taliban has also antagonized important US allies that helped the US organize the Taliban militias in the interests of US pipeline politics in the mid-1990s: the Saudi clerical establishment and Pakistan’s powerful military espionage agency, Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).
Notwithstanding US “war on terror” rhetoric, which portrays the Taliban as monsters, US-Taliban talks are not new. The 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan deployed relatively few troops and the US occupation of the country has depended on manipulating Afghanistan’s fractious tribal elite. A State Department official told the Journal: “We and the Afghans negotiate with the tribes every day on the district level. Sometimes they’re Taliban or their supporters. Often they say: ‘If we get what we want, we’ll lay down our arms.'”
US officials have, however, been constrained in their attempts to create a workable Afghan policy by restrictions on negotiations with the Taliban. An intelligence official told the Journal, “some US officials quietly conducted informal outreach to Taliban leaders, but the military was more interested in taking them into custody.” The leaking of plans for US-Taliban talks is a signal to opinion-makers, as well as to observers abroad and particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that Washington will no longer impose such limits on itself.
This policy shift is particularly significant in that the candidate now considered the likely winner, Democrat Barack Obama, has long attacked the Bush administration for being distracted from the war in Afghanistan and called for strikes against targets in Pakistan.