Reconciliation with the Taliban is critical to the US transition plan for Afghanistan. Although there have been secret and persistent talks with some key elements of the Taliban leadership during the last two years, a tangible outcome has yet to emerge from these negotiations.
The impetus of talking to the Taliban emerged in July 2010 with the departure of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his replacement by Gen. David Petraeus as commander of the NATO International Security Assistant Force. The inspiration was President Barack Obama's grand new strategy regarding Afghanistan, one that involved a complete withdrawal of troops by 2014. The first known round of direct talks between the Taliban and U.S officials took place in a small village outside Munich on November 28, 2010. The talks, coordinated by a senior German diplomat, Michael Steiner, lasted for 11 hours. There has been no official statement on the outcome of the talks. The fact that there was no change in the situation on the ground in Afghanistan indicated that the talks had not achieved anything much, except for talking for the sake of talking.
The US too continued with its two-pronged approach to deal with the Taliban - talking and killing. In the last three months of 2010, the US forces killed and captured even more Taliban leaders - almost 400 top-level commanders were killed.
Interestingly, neither of the sides abandoned the path of talks. The next round of talks took place alternatively in Germany and Qatar - two "neutral" countries - with the last of the three rounds reported to have taken place on May 7 and 8, 2011 in Germany. The country seems to be a natural host to these talks as the immediate objective of these talks is to persuade the Taliban leadership to attend the Bonn II conference scheduled for December this year.
In these talks, the US is represented by officials from the CIA and US State Department while the Taliban envoys are Motasim Agha Jan and Mohammed Tayeb Agha. Agha Jan is Mullah Omar's son-in-law and Tayeb Agha - close to Mullah Omar and the ISI - is the head of the political "wing" of the Taliban. He was a prominent leader during 1996-2001 and was part of the earlier talks with the UN representatives in Dubai in 2009 and 2010. The fact that a senior Taliban official close to Mullah Omar is engaged in talks with the US is clearly a sign of the magnitude of the talks - unlike the negotiations of November 2010 where the Taliban official Mullah Mansour was in fact a "fake".
As the talks appear to be at an early stage, the issues dealt with are therefore limited and are primarily aimed at bridging the "trust deficit" between the decade long adversaries. Hence for the moment the negotiations are more on issues such as the release of some Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo and the removal of Taliban leaders from the UN sanctions list. The first set of concessions was made to the Taliban when 14 of its leaders were delisted from the sanctions list. There is also the talk of opening a Taliban office in Turkey. In fact, Turkey had suggested on April 15 of having a Taliban representative located in Istanbul. Likewise, Turkménistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have also made similar offers.
Yet, the purpose and genuineness of these talks remain an open question. The Taliban still deny that any talks are taking place while US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently remarked that talking to the Taliban was "not a pleasant business". Thus these "very preliminary talks" - according to US Defence Secretary Robert Gates - were engaged by two reluctant participants, more committed to military than to diplomacy. Yet the necessity of talks is very clear for a US administration fixed on its 2014 deadline.
Major hurdles still remain for these talks to be effective, especially considering that those talks are bilateral while there are a series of actors involved in the `AfPak game`. For instance, Pakistan needs to be engaged if the negotiations were to be productive. The Pakistan Army wields considerable leverage over the Haqqani network, without whom a political solution in Afghanistan is inconceivable. At the same time, Hamid Karzai's government, which has been negotiating with the Taliban In Saudi Arabia in 2008, Dubai in 2009 and the Maldives in 2010--needs to be an integral part of these talks. The problem is the Karzai government lacks legitimacy and the High Peace Council set up in September last year to open negotiations with the Taliban has had a mixed result.
A outcome of the negotiations with the Taliban, which the Afghans call it as the reintegration process, will depend on how different stakeholders interact with each other on common objectives.
(Guillaume Gandelin is a Research Intern at Observer Research Foundation)
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