3/24/11 

Yesterday, a high-level task force convened by The Century Foundation released a road map for negotiating peace in Afghanistan. The report emphasized that the U.S. and NATO currently hold their greatest negotiating position right  now, as our troop strength and effectiveness has reached its height, meaning that a serious push for peace talks should begin immediately. According to the report, such efforts must move beyond simply trying to co-opt Taliban fighters, and move towards creating credible peace talks that can foster "a broad political framework to end the war."  It also recommends that U.S. and NATO diplomatic efforts going forward should immediately begin to focus on how to most effectively shape the kind of Afghanistan that the U.S. and NATO want to leave behind after 2014 - the date when responsibility for security in Afghanistan will be fully shifted to Afghans. These efforts should include plans for economic growth, ensuring women's rights, strengthening institutions and reforming the political system - all of which will serve broader American interests and goals for the region.

America and its allies are at our greatest negotiating strength right now; it's time to start negotiations. American and NATO forces are currently at their highest historic levels in Afghanistan.  At the same time, the transition of security responsibility for Afghanistan to Afghan forces began in earnest this week. The AP reports, "An emboldened Afghan president said Tuesday that his nation's security forces will take over from the U.S.-led coalition in seven parts of the country, a first step toward his goal of having Afghan police and soldiers in charge by the end of 2014 so foreign combat troops can go home." Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, has said that he believes the military has seized the initiative from the Taliban, telling Congress last week that Taliban momentum "has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas," although he noted that those gains are "fragile and reversible." Those factors mean that America and its allies are at our greatest negotiating strength now, making it essential to support immediate negotiations with the Taliban. Reinforcing this view is the conclusion of a new report by a high-level international task force brought together by The Century Foundation and co-chaired by Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former undersecretary of state and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Lakhdar Brahimi, former UN special envoy in Afghanistan. The report explained that: "[W]e believe the best moment to start a political process toward reconciliation is now. For the government's allies, the optimal window would seem to be before their capacities peak, not when force levels have commenced a downward trajectory." [AP, 3/22/11. David Petraeus, via AP, 3/14/11. The Century Foundation, 3/23/11]                                                            

Winning over Taliban fighters won't be enough -- full peace talks, known as reconciliation, are needed. Much has been made of "reintegration" efforts in Afghanistan, which are efforts to convince Taliban members to stop fighting and accept the authority of the Afghan state in exchange for jobs. Gen. Petraeus mentioned those efforts in a speech in London earlier this week. "There are some 700 or so individuals, former Taliban, who have officially gone through all the steps of the process of reintegration into society," Petraeus told the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense think tank. "There's another 2,000 or so that are in various stages of the process and we think there's another ... couple thousand that have literally gone to their homes and laid down their weapons."  Even with those efforts at reintegration - the specifics of which are questioned by many analysts - the Taliban remains, in Gen. Petraeus's own words, "resilient."  Therefore, according to The Century Foundation's Task Force report, full peace talks - known as reconciliation - are needed. It concludes, "Securing defections of insurgents or trying to co-opt senior-level Taliban to join the Kabul regime is unlikely to be sufficient to bring peace; reconciliation with insurgents will eventually have to involve creating a broader political framework to end the war." Longtime South Asia analyst and New America Foundation President Steve Coll writes that, "...even a partly successful negotiation might help create political conditions that favor the reduction of American forces to a more sustainable level." [David Petraeus, via Reuters, 3/23/11. Petraeus, via the NY Times, 3/16/11. The Century Foundation, 3/23/11. Steve Coll, 2/28/11]

Urgent need to focus on a political, economic and diplomatic strategy for what we leave behind post-2014. American and NATO efforts moving forward should focus on making sustainable gains in Afghanistan's political and economic structures that will outlast our presence there.

Reform Afghan governance. The Center for American Progress states that, "The Afghan government structure is one of the most highly centralized in the world. President Hamid Karzai and the parliament are democratically elected but the system is fundamentally autocratic in nature. The executive branch controls appointments from provincial governors to district police chiefs to mayors and community leaders. It operates on a patronage model in which it distributes resources, access to international funding, and power to individuals in return for their loyalty to the Karzai government. The Afghan public's resentment of this imposition from Kabul and the inherent lack of accountability in the system fuels the insurgency and is a chief means of its mobilization." [Center for American Progress, 11/23/10]

Ensure women's rights. Brahimi noted during The Century Foundation report's public release event, "Women's rights are very, very far behind what these Afghans want them to be. There are still women who burn themselves to death because they are forced to be married. There are still many, many problems. So those struggles are going to continue. They are going to continue whether you have peace or not. I think they will have a much better chance of moving forward, however slowly, in a peaceful environment, than they have now in a war environment." [Lakhdar Brahimi, 3/23/11]

Foster economic development. A recent report from the Center for a New American Security points out that, "The economic component of the new strategy should be reshaped to prioritize the improvement of the macro conditions necessary to enable sustained Afghan economic growth. U.S. development activities should enable the acceleration of Afghan private sector growth by focusing on large-scale projects that enable business growth such as communications, power, water, transport and related infrastructure as well as the development of a functioning legal system that makes investment attractive to both Afghan entrepreneurs and foreign investors. Afghanistan's central geographic location in Central Asia positions it well to serve as a conduit for pent-up demand for north-south and east-west trade from across the region. Road, rail, power and pipeline networks all hold major potential as engines of future growth - and must be a focus of U.S. and international attention." [CNAS, 12/10]

Strengthen the financial sector. Colin Cookman of the Center for American Progress explains the problems with Kabul Bank. "The bank is the country's largest and the mechanism through which the bulk of Afghan civil service and security forces' salaries are distributed. Its provision of poorly accounted for loans in the absence of Afghan government oversight has endangered the savings of thousands of Afghan citizens and the larger system of international assistance on which the government is so dependent... That will have serious consequences for the sustainability of Afghanistan's government and the U.S. effort there." [Colin Cookman, 3/10/11]

What We're Reading

The United States and its allies shifted to ferocious airstrikes on Libyan ground forces, tanks and artillery, marking the second phase of a military campaign that drew the Pentagon deeper into the fight.

A U.S. Army soldier confessed to intentionally killing innocent Afghan civilians last year and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates resigned after parliament rejected his minority government's latest round of proposed austerity measures aimed at preventing the country from having to ask international institutions like the International Monetary Fund for bailout loans.

At least 15 Syrians died in clashes between security forces and protesters in the southern city of Daraa.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to act "vigorously and responsibly" in response to the terrorist bombing at a Jerusalem bus station.

Two workers at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were hospitalized due to radiation exposure.

Kenyan forces entered Somalia to fight the al-Shabab militant group.

The Canadian government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper will face a no-confidence vote following organized Liberal opposition to his proposed budget.

Ahead of its upcoming summit, the European Union was hit by a "serious" cyber attack targeting the European Commission and External Action Service.

Two commercial airliners were forced to land at Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC without the guidance of the control tower.

Commentary of the Day

Dick Vandewalle says that if the hurried diplomatic negotiations leading up to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 seemed a Herculean task, they may pale in comparison to the challenge that comes next: keeping Libya intact and on the road to recovery.

Joel Rubin argues with Max Boot over whether the American role in the war in Libya is working.

Seth Cropsey argues that growing economic constraints and a changing global threat environment raise questions about how long the United States can sustain missions that are non-critical to national security.