Afghanistan after Bonn
December 7th, 2011Update: I have just done an interview on Radio 4’s World at One – you can listen in the player here:
When I gave a lecture at MIT in April, entitled Afghanistan: Mending it not just Ending It, I made some disobliging remarks about the preparation for the summer Kabul conference, and the December Bonn Conference. I immediately received an angry letter from one of the chief organisers of the Bonn conference saying how wrong I was. I replied that I was pleased to hear this, and looked forward to a successful conference. Unfortunately this has not come to pass. Suffice to say that the new word on the street from people in Afghanistan and outside is “wait for Chicago” – a reference to yet another conference, this time in Chicago, in the middle of next year.
As far as I can see the Bonn conference has repeated many of the aspirations of the January 2010 London Conference, but pushed them forward beyond the 2014 date for Afghan security leadership across the country – a date which interestingly the Afghan and German foreign ministers also refer to as a date for “withdrawal” of foreign troops in their article for the New York Times. Meanwhile, levels of violence seem to me to be up – Taliban mid level commanders being killed, Afghan and foreign troops being killed, and Afghan civilians being killed, including in the deadly and atrocious attacks yesterday. Regional engagement is down – led by the Pakistani standoff with the US that led to their misguided boycott of the Conference (read more here).
Ahmed Rashid points out that division in the US system about the relationship of military to political effort is dogging the process of peace making in Afghanistan. The point is simple and not new: do you have to kill enough Talibs to make the remainder sue for peace, or in the process of killing Talibs do you make peace harder to find?
My view is that we have lost sight of the twin objectives that should be driving all our actions: first, ensuring that Afghanistan and Pakistan do not come back to haunt us a base for AQ, and second, ensuring that the Western investment of blood and treasure in Afghanistan , and the manner of its transition from military to civilian effort, are not seen to represent a defeat for the West. Recent events have confirmed in the starkest possible terms that the only way to achieve this is through the ‘double decker bus’ approach coined by Britain’s former Ambassador to Kabul Sherard Cowper Coles. This refers to a two tiered political settlement – all Afghanistan’s tribes on the lower deck, all the neighbours on the upper deck – and the UN in the driving seat with the US providing the maps and the Gulf providing the money. Leave the metaphor to one side. The important thing is that politics needs to join national and regional reconciliation. Unfortunately, the sense that the West has an end date but not an end game is making it impossible to achieve either the internal or the regional settlement – with the result that all sides, internal and external, just want the West to leave (but continue to pay the bills).
I don’t know if it is “too late” – for the sake of our troops still there it should never be too late. So I stand by my call for a UN mediator; for negotiated local cease fires; for a regional process with incentives and teeth; without any illusions about how difficult this will be. But the alternatives are really dreadful: warlordism, the descent into civil war, and in some ways worst of all, an unresolved tension in western policy, between withdrawal and a continuing commitment to training and support of Afghan security forces to hold the ring. The latter could easily make it impossible to leave in a way that does justice to the word ‘withdrawal’.
I haven’t been focussed on Afghanistan for a bit. But having met civil society representatives to the Bonn Conference, and now read myself into some of what is being said by the political leaders, I am shocked by how little has changed for the better. Yes, there may be an economic crisis, but we have got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.