Obama seeks accommodation with the Taliban?

This New York Times article on Sunday generated a lot of e-mail traffic, some of it misguided.  Barack Obama told the NYT that he would seek accommodation with the Taliban as part of his approach to Afghanistan, and immediately people took that as surrender.  Afghanistan is a different war than Iraq, much more of a civil war, and even the Karzai government recognizes the need for reconciliation at some point:

Asked if the United States was winning in Afghanistan, a war he effectively adopted as his own last month by ordering an additional 17,000 troops sent there, Mr. Obama replied flatly, “No.”

Mr. Obama said on the campaign trail last year that the possibility of breaking away some elements of the Taliban “should be explored,” an idea also considered by some military leaders. But now he has started a review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan intended to find a new strategy, and he signaled that reconciliation could emerge as an important initiative, mirroring the strategy used by Gen. David H. Petraeus in Iraq.

“If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Obama said.

At the same time, he acknowledged that outreach may not yield the same success. “The situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex,” he said. “You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, and so figuring all that out is going to be much more of a challenge.”

The Karzai government has done this on occasion, peeling off an important former Talibani and giving him a job in the administration as a show of openness to national reconciliation.  Many of the Taliban come from Pakistan, but a large number are Afghanis who will eventually have to live there when the fighting ends.  Karzai has repeatedly called for negotiations with the Afghani Taliban as a means to bring fighting to an end, but the Taliban as a whole are not accommodationist.  They want to live in a shari’a world that they run without interference from pesky, elected officials and others who don’t appreciate the oppressive system they want to impose.

The question is how many of these dead-enders still exist, and what percentage they comprise of the overall effort against Karzai and NATO.  Obama notes correctly that the Sunnis in Iraq were dead-set against elections and democracy in 2004-5, thinking they could ride several insurgencies and al-Qaeda back into domineering power in Baghdad.  By 2007, the Sunnis discovered that they’d formed an alliance with the Devil himself, and most of them switched sides after a change in US tactics and strategy made it clear that we intended to win.  Even most of the insurgents got disgusted by their putative allies in AQI and allied, somewhat uncomfortably, with the Americans and the Baghdad government.

Can that be done in Afghanistan?  Again as Obama notes, the issue is a lot more complicated there, where tribal politics play an even greater role than they did in Iraq.  It’s worth exploring, however, and if we can peel off significant numbers from the Taliban and reconcile them to the Karzai government (and whatever follows in the upcoming elections), it will go a long way towards isolating the dead-enders, making it easier to defeat them.  In the end, as in Iraq, this is a political problem, and eventually will require a political solution.

The question is whether one can take root in the long-standing tribal conflicts of Afghanistan.  Joe Biden’s partition suggestion for Iraq might make a little more sense in Afghanistan, but none of the other powers surrounding the nation would ever accept it, as it would require them to surrender territory themselves.  I’d say the prospects are bleak on all fronts for a while, but we should be trying everything short of actual partition, including an effort to find political solutions.