Flipping the Taliban

There is no doubt that the gender structures existing in Afghan society have to change.

Your argument, to an extent, is so self-evident as to be tautological. Many of the words you've posted say nothing other than the fact that you have a soul.

Our best efforts at nation-building, however, have historically yielded far less fruit than your ambitions are prepared to accept.

If a central tenet of nation-building is the setup of a functional state government, we still have yet to check this box. Official corruption in Afghanistan is such that President Hamid Karzai has been accused of turning a blind eye to family members and high ranking government officials dealing in their booming narco-economy.

If another core indicator of successful nation- building implies a network of supportive local governments, the statistics here are even more bleak.

If the overarching concern of nation-building is creating the governable space for a regime to assert its authority as the sole legitimate wielder of force, we still have a long way to go on this front as well.

If these core state capacities have yet to come into fruition, how would you propose to attack an issue that exists at the household level?

While your post (which is nothing short of a bleeding heart, a tear on a blanket, and a violin playing sombrely in the distance) tries to paint my analysis as disaffected and simplistic ("morally and intellectually bankrupt") I would ask you to produce a single picture of a palace built in a sink-hole.

Your answer would seem to be that we simply must eradicate the Taliban since they are irreconcilable with your vision for a new Afghanistan and are meany pants women haters. Your answer would seem to be that the US should commit to occupying Afghanistan until men change their minds - when American women make 23% less then men doing the same jobs.

But that isn't your most egregious offence.

Your biggest fault is that you want to make Afghans more like you. You've never heard of cultural relativism and therefore you have no respect for it. Notwithstanding your dramatisations of how terrible things are, you offend everyone here by suggesting that we don't already know the situation of women, etc.

Your post was worthless insofar as failed to offer anything even remotely resembling a policy prescription for any of the issues you lost sleep over last night. Anyone watching a Youtube video about Afghanistan can know what you know.

Tell us what we don't know: How do we MAKE them play nice? More importantly, can we?

Anyone who's taken a conflict resolution class or who's done work in the field knows that consensus-building is the name of the game.

Therefore, how could you, touting human rights, purport to exclude a major sector of Afghan society from nation-building, suggesting instead that we kill them - which is the only other alternative (we tried jailing them and failed miserably).

This somehow seems hypocritical. Afghanistan will not stand unless the Taliban has a seat at the table. Until they do, they will continue recruiting the angry, jobless masses for their cause which, without our help, would prevail. The authors' only sin was being a realist with actual solutions we might try on for size.

In order to get a clearer picture from Afghanistan and the Taliban we need to have more in-depth study of the area and the realities of today’s Afghanistan. Also we need to know that Afghanistan is not Pashtunistan, second: neither all Pashtunes are Taliban nor all Taliban are Pashtunes. Third, Talibanism is not a product of Pashtune society and culture but an ideology cultivated in Pashtune society; and yes, the society is a fertile medium for nurturing such an ideology; because, those who made Talibanism they knew where to sow it to grow for the best.

Now, we have two problems at hand. 1- To convince the manufacturers to stop producing more Taliban and 2- to deal with the Taliban we are already facing with.

To tackle the first problem we need to find out who made them, and why? If the international community and NATO are honest to solve the problem, they need to convince Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to stop propagation of Talibanism and and exporting it out of their borders. If Saudis and Americans want to put Iran under pressure they should use other means, not to beat Shiite fanaticism of Iran by Sunni and Wahabi fanaticism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistani ISI.

Talibanism is not a new religion or religious sect. It is made for political usage. It is an intelligence-made ideology. They have much more and deeper roots in the international and regional politics rather than in Islam, “Pashtunwali” or in Afghanistan society. Even in the Pashtune areas far from Pakistani influence (periphery) the Taliban are not welcomed. So, why these analysts are wasting their precious time beating a dead nail.

Afghanistan is a geo-political Pandora box of events. There are not only the US, NATO, Afghanistan and Pakistan dealing with few faceless Taliban. They are only the peaks of the iceberg. Underground, there is another world of bloodiest businesses going on. China, Russia, India and Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Japan are other players in this arena. There are also rivalry between the NATO allies on ensuring control of certain resources and positions in Afghanistan and or through Afghanistan in other countries…

The essay is touching only superficial issues like Pashtunwali and finding the ways to “flip” the Taliban. It is superficial by the funniest way. Albeit, not for the western media-fed minds. But for us, Afghanistan people, we know how much out of context it is.

Raheel.

email: raheelsaboor@hotmail.com

The authors present many examples of Taliban commanders and fighters shifting their allegiances and conclude that a promising strategy to get these insurgents to support the U.S. backed government would be to exploit this willingness to switch sides. They suggest encouraging defections through payment of money and provision of security for the fighters. They contend that, “For many Taliban fighters, insurgency has nothing to do with Islamic zealotry; it is a way of life.”

I doubt the efficacy of their approach. Their examples of defections and shifting alliances were always among Afghan Muslim groups; the switching of sides never involved movement toward any Western power or group identified with the U.S. Moreover, the authors explain how new fighters are recruited by stating, “Elders and peers tell them that opposing foreign forces is virtuous.” It is unlikely that Taliban insurgents would defect toward the U.S. or its allies, given that their reason for joining was to “oppose foreign forces,” i.e., the United States.

This essay is not only shockingly short-sighted; it is also fatally flawed by its complete omission of gender analysis.

I won't hazard a guess as to whether the authors are ignorant about the conditions under which 50% of the Afghani people live, or if they simply don't care - as long as the men are happy, the authors are happy. I don't know which is worse.

The authors suggest, essentially, that we pay the Taliban to be our friends. We give the men cash and agree to let them to continue to keep all girls and women as slaves; the Taliban agrees not to intentionally try to destroy the U.S. And everybody - that is, the Taliban and the men they negotiate with - is happy. Right?

Wrong. An agreement such as this leaves in place the same factors that lead to violent insurgencies and weak states: high birthrate stemming from restrictions on family planning, driving ever-increasing generations young people whose needs outstrip the capacity of government, the economy, and natural resources; lack of economic growth because half the population is denied education, work, and access to capital; the perpetuation of grossly authoritarian family and social relations, which are associated with a preference for authoritarian politicians and rejection of democracy.

The authors make a number of mistakes. They seem to forget that while its possible that we can pay the Taliban to be our friends, there is always someone else who can pay more. Whether that's the Saudis or Saudi proxies, drug moguls, or someone else, the highest bidder will end up the winner.

They also err in equating the price of this program with the amount of cash payments handed out. They leave out the cost in subsequent development aid needed to deal with the consequences such an agreement: a horrifying rate of maternal mortality is but one of many crises that will have to be addressed.

It was bad enough when the US had no comment on the enslavement and segregation of half the population of Afghanistan. It is worse to give these practices the American seal of approval. Giving cash payments to men who will use that money to consolidate the total oppression of women woul represent a final, fatal capitulation of American values.

Not once do the authors acknowledge that Taliban rule would have a devastating impact on at least half the population. Apparently these people are expendable, superfluous; why not throw them under the bus if it will enable a deal that will help us save face as we retreat. After all, they're only women.

This is no solution - its a recipe for (continued) disaster.

equiv. to history of Texas without cattle or oil.

Fear of rattling drug-warrior-pols & 'wonks' fails to solve the war.

Which Talibs have cash? Source(s)? How stable is their control of the opium business? Should one fall, how businesslike is/are successors?

Remember Sr. Lucky Luciano.