September 11, 2007:
The
Taliban offered to begin negotiating with the government. In Afghan parlance,
that's the Taliban way of saying they are defeated and want to discuss peace
terms. Over the past few months, Taliban attacks have become increasingly
desperate, and bloody. But most of the dead have been Taliban. The only
"successful" attacks have been those using suicide bombers, and these
kill mostly Afghan civilians.
The Taliban were able to build
up a war chest in the last few years, allowing them to hired thousands of
unemployed young men. But casualties have been high, with over a third of these
hired gunmen getting killed, wounded or captured. In the last two weeks, over 200 Taliban
gunmen have been killed in battles with Afghan and foreign troops. But the
biggest source of problems has been the stupid things they do. Recently, a
Taliban group kidnapped a dozen deminers. This sort of thing is very unpopular
with Afghans, as even the Taliban (officially, anyway) recognize the deminers
as immune from attack. The millions of mines and explosives still in the ground
don't discriminate between Taliban or non-Taliban. The deminers are arguably
more important to the Taliban, who often sneak around at night in
out-of-the-way places. The Taliban also
make themselves unpopular by attacking food relief convoys. One recent attack
saw 13 Taliban and two police killed in such an unsuccessful attack. The
Taliban want to shut down humanitarian and reconstruction projects, and thus
force Afghans to support the Taliban in order to get any help at all. Most
Afghans resent this sort of intimidation.
All this failure caused a
split in the Taliban high command. Actually, the Taliban movement has always
been a coalition, and the Afghan government has already negotiated with several
pro-Taliban tribes, and arranged for a change of allegiance. The current
Taliban strength is mostly in Pakistan, where the Pushtun tribes there are
feuding with the central government over tribal rights. Just across the border
in Afghanistan, the Pushtun trines ARE the government. Pushtuns are a small
minority (less than five percent of the population) in Pakistan, but are the
largest minority (40 percent of the population) in Afghanistan. For centuries,
peace usually came to Afghanistan when the Pushtun, and non-Pushtun, tribes
agreed on which Pushtun tribal chief would be "king" of the country.
The current elected president of Afghanistan is a Pushtun tribal leader.
Negotiations with the Taliban
thus involved dealing with warlords from both sides of the border. The drug
lords, who have been bankrolling the Taliban, also have to be taken into
account. The drug lords, most of whom come from Afghanistan, have been the
biggest supporters of the Taliban resurgence. It's in the drug gangs interest for
government control to be weak in areas where most drug producing operations
take place (like Helmand province, south of the western city of Kandahar). But
the Taliban need some relief. They are at war with the Pakistani government and
their Pakistani bases are in danger. In Afghanistan, hatred of the Taliban
increases with each new suicide bomber attack. Two years ago, there were one or
two of these attacks a month. This year, there are ten times as many attacks.
Even pro-Taliban Pushtuns have been reporting suspected suicide bomber
activity. As a result, dozens of suicide bombers and support staff have been
captured. Most of them are Pushtuns from Pakistan, usually teenagers who were
fed a pile of lies and convinced to carry out a suicide attack. Some of the
kids wised up in time, while others were just reported by locals, and arrested
before they could push the button.
As if there were not enough
reasons for popular anger against the Taliban, we now have the beginning of the
school year. The government announced that about five percent of the nations
8,500 schools would not open because of Taliban violence. All these schools
were in the south, and 200,000 children were affected. There are still six
million kids going to school, up from about a million when the Taliban ran the
country.
The new round of negotiations
will, at best, result in more tribal groups switching allegiance from the
Taliban to the government. This will make the Taliban smaller, but will not
make the Taliban go away. That will not happen for a long time. The Taliban
mentality is part of Pushtun culture, and has been around for thousands of
years. It isn't going to disappear any
time soon.