Don’t talk with the Taliban -by Husain Haqqani
WASHINGTON — THE United States is still planning to hold peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar, despite the fact that the group attacked the presidential palace and a C.I.A. office in Kabul, Afghanistan earlier this week. As was the case in the 1990s, negotiating with the Taliban now would be a grievous mistake.
Unlike most states or political groups, the Taliban aren’t amenable to a pragmatic deal. They are a movement with an extreme ideology and will not compromise easily on their deeply held beliefs. Before committing the blunder of negotiating with them again, American diplomats should read up on the history of Washington’s engagement with the Taliban during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
The planned talks have been arranged through the good offices of Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. At the urging of Pakistan’s military, the United States agreed to the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar. Taliban officials immediately portrayed the American concession as a victory. They flew the Taliban flag, played the Taliban anthem and called their new workplace the office of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — the name of the state they ran in the 1990s before being dislodged from power after 9/11. This was intentional. It reflected the Taliban’s view of the talks as the beginning of the restoration of their emirate.
There is no reason to believe — and no evidence — that the Taliban are now ready for political accommodation. Pakistan’s rationale for the talks differs little from the last two times it tried to save the Taliban from America’s wrath, after the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and immediately after 9/11. Pakistan’s goal has always been to arrange American talks with the Taliban without being responsible for the outcome.
Declassified State Department documents and secret cables made public by WikiLeaks show that in the 1990s, as now, Pakistan claimed it had contact with the Taliban but no control over them.
As the Taliban advanced in eastern Afghanistan in 1996, they took over several terrorist training camps run by various Pakistan-supported mujahedeen factions and Arab groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. The Taliban’s deputy foreign affairs adviser at the time, Abdul Jalil, told American officials that the “Arab” occupants of the camps had fled, and that Osama bin Laden’s precise location was unknown. Taliban interlocutors assured the United States that the “Taliban did not support terrorism in any form and would not provide refuge to Osama bin Laden.”
That was, of course, an outright lie. The C.I.A. concluded that the Taliban had closed down training camps run by their Afghan rivals but not the ones run by Bin Laden and Pakistani terrorist groups.
In October 1996, Mr. Jalil delivered a friendly diplomatic message from the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, to American representatives, letting them know that “the Taliban think highly of the U.S., appreciated U.S. help during the jihad against the Soviets, and want good relations with the U.S.” This, too, turned out to be nothing but dissimulation. At one point, Pakistani officialseven suggested that America “buy” Bin Laden from the Taliban.
Ironically, while American diplomats were interacting with Taliban officials, Western journalists traveling in Afghanistan often found evidence of large-scale terrorist training. An American Embassy cable in November 1996 spoke of an unnamed British journalist’s seeing “assorted foreigners, including Chechens, Bosnians, Sudanese” as well as various Arabs training for global jihad in Afghan provinces adjacent to Pakistan.
Mullah Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Taliban representative, told American officials in 1997 that Bin Laden’s expulsion was not a solution and urged them to recognize the legitimacy of Taliban rule “if the U.S. did not want every Afghan to become a Bin Laden.” By then, the Taliban had changed their story on Bin Laden. They admitted that he was their “guest” but insisted that they had “instructed him not to commit, support or plan any terrorist acts from Afghan soil.”
On Aug. 20, 1998, American missiles struck Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the terrorist attacks on the embassies in Africa. Two days later, Mullah. Omar called the State Department and demanded President Bill Clinton’s resignation, asserting that the missile attack would spread Bin Laden’s anti-American message by uniting the fundamentalist Islamic world and would cause further terrorist attacks.
Fifteen years later, the Taliban and their Pakistani mentors have hardly changed their arguments or their tendency to fudge facts. Americans may believe that talks offer an opportunity to end an expensive war that is no longer popular among Americans, but they shouldn’t forget the Taliban’s history of deception.
For the Taliban, direct dialogue with the United States is a source of international legitimacy and an opportunity to regroup. They are most likely playing for time while waiting for American troops to withdraw in 2014.
Everything about the talks in Qatar hints at déjà vu. America must enter these talks with a healthy does of skepticism, or not participate at all.
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011, is the author of the forthcoming book “Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding.”
Source: The New York Times
It may not be the most dangerous place in the world, but, with its mix of political instability and nuclear capability, it’s plausibly the most dangerous place for the world. Yet according to Husain Haqqani, Americans have a chronically hard time understanding why.
“I do believe that Pakistan is a dangerous place,” Haqqani said, speaking with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius and retired U.S. general Stanley McChrystal at the Aspen Ideas Festival today, “but … not for the reasons the Americans think it is. The Americans don’t get Pakistan.”
Haqqani, who served as Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington from 2008-2011, thinks that U.S. diplomats and military leaders have, after decades of on-again, off-again engagement with Pakistani officials, internalized a distorted sense of possibility in the United States’ involvement in Pakistan as a whole.
Ideas Special Report 2013
Dispatches from the Aspen Ideas Festival. Full coverage.
Haqqani believes that Islamabad’s generals in particular have played a big role over time in flattering Americans’ sense of efficacy in Pakistan — and seems to believe that U.S. generals have been particularly susceptible to being misled, tending to see Pakistan’s military leaders as their apolitical counterparts, rather than “politicians in uniform.” It’s not that American officials’ thinking about Pakistan is insufficiently complex, according to Haqqani (McChrystal, after all, had just emphasized the importance of not looking for simple fixes in Pakistan); it’s that American officials’ thinking about Pakistan serially overestimates the United States’ ability to promote stability and development in the country at all.
U.S. foreign policy naturally looks for levers to pull. But what if, despite all the complexity among all the issues where the U.S. has been looking for levers, there is, after all, a central, defining issue with no lever connected to it? “It’s not America’s problem to solve Pakistan’s problem,” Haqqani said. “It’s Pakistan’s problem to solve Pakistan’s problem.”
So what’s the problem?
Haqqani’s account here is rather meta: The problem is a dominant and determining sense of collective insecurity that prevents Pakistan from understanding its situation in the world.
It was a country that was created with very little prior discussion and analysis. People forget: There’s been an Egypt for 5,000 years; there’s been an Iran for centuries — for millennia. There’s been an India for millennia. Pakistan is only 66 years old. So therefore it has, essentially, a lot of psychoses, more than it has actual threats and challenges.
India, for example — I understand that Pakistanis have a lot of concerns about India. But, as a Pakistani, I look at history. … Yes, India has never philosophically accepted the idea of Pakistan. But it has never been responsible for initiating any of the wars with Pakistan. Let’s be real about that. Afghanistan is too weak and too poor to attack Pakistan. So most of the problems that Pakistan sees itself in are psychological rather than real.
Which isn’t to say Pakistan doesn’t have real problems. This is, after all, a country now with a population of 210 million and the highest population-growth rate in the region. Half the country’s population is below the age of 21. One-third of them have never been to a school of any kind. One-third of the population overall is below the poverty line, with another one-third just above it.
And this country has nuclear weapons.
“The nuclear weapons should have been enough to make us finally secure about India,” Haqqani said. “We have mutually-assured destruction, so they will never invade us. Well guess what? We are now like the guy who keeps buying guns to try and protect himself, and then says, ‘Oh, gosh, I can’t sleep because I’m afraid that somebody will steal my guns.”
So Pakistan’s threat to itself and the world, Haqqani believes, is essentially a failure to come to terms with itself as a nation. Which is, here as anywhere, not just a broad, collective failure but a failure of political leadership — and one that Pakistan has previously shown promise of overcoming: “Benazir Bhutto, before she was assassinated, had a new vision for Pakistan,” Haqqani said. “And her vision was: We will focus inward. We will put the kids in schools. We will keep the nukes, but we will eventually sign up for some kind of international agreement that will make sure that we are not looked upon as a pariah. We will join globalization.”
Haqqani isn’t overly optimistic about the prospect of Pakistan’s new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, now bringing the kind of leadership that can meaningfully change his country and move it beyond its “psychoses.” But Haqqani doesn’t take a pessimistic stand, either, seeing Pakistan as the scene of both instability and potential.
So is there any role at all for the United States in helping realize that potential? Haqqani thinks that there can be, but only if Pakistan assumes the national self-possession to define that role in the right way. “… if America is available to us, we will use it like Korea did or Taiwan did,” Haqqani said — in the notably optimistic future tense. “We are not going to live as an insecure nation, because that insecurity then makes people think, ‘Al Qaeda? Well, how can we use them against our enemy, India?’ — instead of considering them the enemy.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/the-most-dangerous-threat-to-the-world-is-collective-psychosis-in-pakistan/277298/