Last week, Afghanistan held its first major peace conference. It didn’t start out well. The Taliban fired a couple of rockets at the venue in Kabul during President Hamid Karzai’s opening speech, and a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up nearby. Afghan security forces killed two other suicide bombers; one of Karzai’s guards was severely injured in the attack. The security breach forced two Afghan government officials out of office: in the wake of the attack, Karzai accepted the resignations of the interior minister (not coincidentally, a political rival) and the director of national security. In the end, the three day conference produced around 200 recommendations to put Afghanistan on a path towards peace.
Don’t get your hopes up. The country has been in a nearly continuous state of war for three decades, and the smart money is on years more of the same. Sadly, in the aftermath of the peace conference, these feelings are just confirmed. Despite its perhaps noble intentions, critics viewed the conference as a way for the Karzai government to suck yet more aid money out of the international community. Abdullah Abdullah, the former presidential candidate and reformer called the whole thing a “PR exercise.” The conference ended up exposing all the reasons why a lasting peace appears to be an impossibility, at least for now. Mainly: the major players don’t really want it. The incentives are all towards more war.
Karzai’s claims of peace appear particularly dubious. Most at the conference agreed that as long as there are foreign troops in Afghanistan, peace will be elusive. Yet Karzai relies on the NATO forces for both his survival, and his cash. He wants them there, despite his regular criticisms of them for killing civilians, which allows him to score political points at home. One of the 200 recommendations to emerge was to put a timeline on foreign troops in Afghanistan, which Karzai appeared to endorse. Yet Karzai really doesn’t want a timeline. The Obama administration’s attempt at putting even a wishy-washy deadline on American involvement—Obama said he would start withdrawing combat troops in July 2011, which he has since backed away from —sent Karzai’s government into a panic.
Last month, Karzai went to Washington to make sure Obama wasn’t really serious about leaving in 2011. Karzai was publicly assured that the troops would be there well past 2011—perhaps even to the earliest date that Karzai has said he’ll need foreign troops to stick around, 2024. And though Karzai would like to see his enemies lay down their arms, US officials privately say that he’s not keen on giving them any real political power that could threaten his own.
For America, peace doesn’t appear to be a priority either. Obama’s strategy—now about one year old—has ensured at least two or three more years of bloody fighting, with the tripling of Western forces in Afghanistan to almost 150,000. And while it’s a favorite talking point of American and Afghan officials to say that there’s no “military solution” to Afghanistan, only a “political solution,” the vast majority of our resources are spent on making-war there. The US State Department tripled the number of civilians it had in Afghanistan as well—to a paltry 1,000, utterly dwarfed by the US military’s troops and private contractors. The US is going to spend about $120 billion in Afghanistan this coming year—only a fraction of that will be for diplomacy and aid.
Furthermore, while there’s a single military commander of US and NATO forces—making it easier to command the effort, and giving his singular voice credibility—there are at least five US and British diplomatic roles. The latter often seem to be fighting amongst themselves, trying to figure out who’s in the lead. That makes each diplomatic voice less credible. Our diplomatic effort, writes counterinsurgency expert Andrew Exum, has been on an “ad-hoc” basis. “Politics is the blind spot in America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan,” he wrote in a paper released last month. If we're blind in politics, then we’re also blind to peace.
Then are the folks the Americans and the Afghan government are fighting: the Taliban, in reality an assortment of home-grown fighters and militant factions, with the occasional connection to international terrorist networks across the border in Pakistan. The Taliban’s appetite for peace appears sketchy at best, especially since almost all the factions have said there won’t be peace until America leaves. Many have made fighting their business; other younger fighters take pride in their role as mujahedeen, and they don’t see any actual incentives for laying down their arms. Even if the Taliban wanted to quit fighting, the reception they’ve gotten in the past from Kabul has been extremely hostile. In 2007, two Western diplomats were expelled by Karzai’s government for just talking to the Taliban.
Another recommendation that came out of the peace process was to take Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s name off the US and UN blacklist—which is something the Americans would never go for. And since Omar would have to adopt the Afghan constitution, embrace a Western view on human rights, and renounce violence, it appears unlikely that he’d bite either.
Which leads us to where we are now, and where we're headed: Afghanistan as a battlefield, where the fighters are gearing up for more war, not peace.
Michael Hastings – regular contributor to GQ magazine. He recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan.
