Editor's Note: At key junctures on Afghanistan, the United States has balked at compromising with its adversaries. For instance, in 1989, President George H.W. Bush rejected a plan by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for a coalition government, and after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush refused to deal with the Taliban, preferring instead a military solution.
Now, new information suggests that the Taliban was willing to go further than previously known, agreeing to repudiate al Qaeda as part of a peace settlement, reports Gareth Porter in this guest article originally written for Inter Press Service.
The central justification of the U.S.-NATO war against the Afghan Taliban -- that the Taliban would allow al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan -- has been challenged by new historical evidence of offers by the Taliban leadership to reconcile with the Hamid Karzai government after the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001.
The evidence of
the Taliban peace initiatives comes from a new paper drawn from the
first book-length study of Taliban- al Qaeda relations thus far, as well
as an account in another recent study on the Taliban in Kandahar
province by journalist Anand Gopal.
In a paper published by the Center on International Cooperation at New
York University, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn recount the
decision by the Taliban leadership in 2002 to offer political
reconciliation with the U.S.-backed Afghan administration.
Citing an unidentified former Taliban official who participated in the
decision, they report that the entire senior Taliban political
leadership met in Pakistan in November 2002 to consider an offer of
reconciliation with the new Afghan government in which they would "join
the political process" in Afghanistan.
"We discussed whether to join the political process in Afghanistan or
not and we took a decision that, yes, we should go and join the
process," the former Taliban leader told the co-authors.
They cite an interlocutor who was then in contact with the Taliban
leadership as recalling that they would have returned to Afghanistan to
participate in the political system if they had been given an
assurance they would not be arrested.
But the Karzai government and the United States refused to offer such an
assurance, the interlocutor recalled. They considered the Taliban a
"spent force," he told Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn.
Gopal, who has covered Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor and
the Wall Street Journal, provided a similar account of the Taliban
attempt to reconcile with the Karzai government in a lengthy study
published by the New America Foundation last November, based on his
interviews with present and former Taliban as well as with officials in
the office of President Karzai.
The entire senior Taliban leadership, meeting in Karachi, "agreed in
principle to find a way for them to return to Afghanistan and abandon
the fight," Gopal wrote, but the initiative was frustrated by the
unwillingness of the United States and the Afghan government to provide
any assurance that they would not be arrested and detained.
The Taliban continued to pursue the possibility of reconciliation in
subsequent years, with apparent interest on the part of the Karzai
government, according to Gopal. Delegations "representing large
sections of the Taliban leadership" traveled to Kabul in both 2003 and
2004 to meet with senior government officials, according to his
account.
But the George W. Bush administration remained uninterested in offering assurances of security to the Taliban.
Robert Grenier, then the CIA station chief
in Islamabad, revealed in an article in al Jazeera on Jan. 31, 2010,
that former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil had been
serving as an intermediary
with the Taliban on their possible return to Afghanistan in 2002 when
he was "arrested and imprisoned for his pains."
The CIA sought to persuade the U.S. Defense Department to release
Muttawakil, according to Grenier. But Muttawakil remained in detention
at Bagram Airbase, where he was physically abused, until October 2003.
The new evidence undermines the Barack Obama administration's claim
that Taliban-ruled areas of Afghanistan would become a "sanctuary" for
al Qaeda.
Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn suggest that the proposed
reintegration of the Taliban into a political system that had been set
up by the United States and its allies was "totally alien to al-Qaeda
ideology but logical for the Taliban."
They acknowledge that the Taliban have
welcomed the support and assistance of al Qaeda cadres in the war. But
they argue in the new paper that the relationship is a "marriage of
convenience" imposed by the foreign military presence, not an
expression of an ideological alliance.
They also cite evidence that the Taliban leadership recognize that
they will have to provide guarantees that a Taliban-influenced regime
in Afghanistan would not allow al Qaeda to have a sanctuary.
They note in particular a Taliban public
statement released before the London Conference of January 2010 that
pledged, "We will not allow our soil to be used against any other
country."
An earlier Taliban statement, distributed to the news media on Dec. 4,
2009, said the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" -- the term used by the
insurgent leadership to refer to the organization -- had "no agenda of
meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to
give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan."
Independent specialists on the history of the Taliban-al Qaeda
relationship have long questioned the assumption that al Qaeda would
return to Afghanistan if the Taliban held some power. These specialists
have emphasized that the Taliban leadership was never very close to al
Qaeda.
Leah Farrell, senior counter-terrorism intelligence analyst with the
Australian Federal Police from 2002 to 2008, wrote in her blog that the
relationship "is not a marriage, it's friends with benefits."
Farrell has also said that jihadi accounts
of the late 1990s have shown Osama bin Laden was not that close to
Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar before the 9/11 attacks.
The new paper, based on both Taliban and jihadist documents and from
interviews with Taliban and former Taliban officials, points to basic
differences of ideology and interest between the Taliban and al Qaeda
throughout the history of their relations.
Relations between Taliban and al Qaeda leaders during the second half
of the 1990s were "complicated and often tense," according to Strick
von Linschoten and Kuehn, even though they were both Sunni Muslims and
shared a common enemy.
They recall that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's plotting against
the United States was done in direct violation of Mullah Omar's
directives to him.
An e-mail from two leading Arab jihadists in Afghanistan to bin Laden
in July 1999, which Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison later
found in a laptop that had once belonged to al Qaeda, referred to a
"crisis" in relations between bin Laden and Mullah Omar that threatened
the future of al Qaeda-sponsored training camps in Afghanistan. The
message expressed fear that the Taliban regime might "kick them out" of
Afghanistan.
Mullah Omar nevertheless regarded bin Laden as an "important
connector" to the Muslim world, according to Strick van Linschoten and
Kuehn. And the Taliban leadership faction that was pushing hard to
force bin Laden out of the country was weakened by the death of its
leading figure, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, in April 2001.
Contrary to the suggestion that the
Taliban were complicit with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, however,
Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn assert that Mullah Omar and other
leaders resisted handling over bin Laden to the United States mainly
because of the fear of losing the few allies they had in the Muslim
world.
They suggest that a primary reason for the Taliban decision not to
give in to U.S. pressure on bin Laden both before and after 9/11 was to
maintain the support of Pakistan, which was encouraging them to hold
out against those pressures.
Other published sources have confirmed that, even in October 2001,
Pakistani intelligence officials were advising the Taliban to avoid
handing over bin Laden, in the hope that the Taliban-al Qaeda
resistance to the U.S.-led military offensive would continue.