Eat Your Spinach: Time for Peace Talks in Afghanistan

In the last week the New York Times and Inter Press
Service have reported that the Obama Administration is having an
internal debate on whether to supports talks with senior Afghan
Taliban leaders, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, as a means of ending
the war in Afghanistan. Senior officials like Vice President Biden are
said to be more open to reaching out because they believe it will help
shorten the war.

Wouldn't it be remarkable if this remained merely an "internal
debate" within the Obama Administration? Wouldn't you expect that the
part of public opinion that wants the war to end would try to intervene in
this debate on behalf of talks in order to end the war?

As an administration official told
the New York Times,

"Today, people agree that part of the solution for
Afghanistan is going to include an accommodation with the Taliban,
even above low- and middle-level fighters."

And in fact, US and British officials have been saying for months
that the "endgame" in Afghanistan includes a negotiated political
settlement with the Afghan Taliban.

Now, suppose you tell Mom that you want to have ice cream. And Mom
says, you can have ice cream when you've eaten your spinach. Wouldn't
you eat your spinach? If you don't eat your spinach now, you didn't
want ice cream very badly.

So if U.S. and British officials say the endgame includes a
negotiated political settlement with the Afghan Taliban, and you
figure, extrapolating from the last five thousand years of human
history, that a negotiated political settlement typically does not
just drop down from the sky, but in fact is generally preceded by
political negotiations, and you want to end the war as soon as
possible, wouldn't you be clamoring for political negotiations to
start as soon as possible? Because the longer political negotiations
are delayed, the longer the war will last. If you don't support
political negotiations now, you don't want to end the war very badly.

If you consider peace negotiations with the Afghan Taliban
"distasteful," consider this: every month that the war continues,
every month that U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, is another month
in which U.S. soldiers will die horrible deaths, be horribly maimed,
and be horribly scarred psychologically, perhaps for life. It's also
another month in which the U.S. military is likely to "accidentally"
kill Afghan government soldiers (such episodes "are not uncommon," the
New York Timesnotes)
and kill Afghan civilians, as they have done at least twice in the
last week, according to the reporting in the New
York Times and the Washington
Post.

I put the word "accidentally" in quotation marks, not of course
because I believe that the U.S. military is killing Afghan soldiers
and Afghan civilians "on purpose," but because when you repeatedly
take an action (continuing the war) that leads to a predictable result
(killing Afghan government soldiers and civilians) you lose the
exoneration otherwise conferred by the word "accidentally."

Is this not also "distasteful"? Is killing innocent people not more
"distasteful" than peace talks?

Gareth Porter, writing for Inter
Press Service, reports that an official of the Western
military coalition says there has been a debate among U.S. officials
about "the terms on which the Taliban will become part of the
political fabric." The debate is not on whether the Taliban movement
will be participating in the Afghan political system, Porter reports,
but on whether or not the administration could accept the
participation of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar in the political
future of Afghanistan.

The Afghan Taliban has insisted in published statements that it
will not participate in peace talks that would not result in the
withdrawal of foreign troops, Porter notes. That raises the question
of whether the administration would be willing to discuss the complete
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan as part of a negotiated
settlement to the conflict.

The Obama Administration has stated publicly that it has no
long-term interest in maintaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Therefore, should not the U.S. be willing to agree to a timetable for
the withdrawal of U.S. troops as part of a negotiated settlement?
We're leaving anyway, according to U.S. officials - what's holding us
back from agreeing, as part of a negotiation, to do what we plan to do
anyway?

U.S. officials have said that the war is
all about the relationship between the Afghan Taliban
and al Qaeda. When the Afghan Taliban breaks with al Qaeda the war is
over, say these officials. Some say that Mullah Omar is ready to break
with al Qaeda, including the
Pakistani intelligence officer who trained him; while Osama bin
Laden's son Omar says
Al Qaeda and the Taliban are only "allies of convenience." Why
wouldn't we put these propositions to the test through negotiations?

If you think, for the sake of peace, the United States should be
willing to agree to do on a timetable that which it claims it intends
to do anyway, tell President
Obama.