Bargaining in Afghanistan will open up new fissures
The New York Times reported on March 22 that Afghan President Hamid Karzai met with a delegation representing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of one of the three main insurgent groups fighting against the government and international military forces in the country. According to the Washington Post, Hekmatyar's opening bid was a 15-point plan calling for the withdrawal of foreign military forces over the course of six months beginning in July, the appointment of an interim council to govern the country, a new constitution, and new national and local elections.
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Before the arrival of Hekmatyar's delegation, Karzai scheduled a peace conference for late April, which he hopes a broader range of insurgent groups, factions in parliament, and civil society organizations will attend.
One should not make too much of these developments. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's August 2009 assessment of Afghanistan rated Hekmatyar's force as the weakest of the three groups he is fighting. McChrystal also concluded that Hekmatyar has no geographical objectives and is just hoping to bargain for a role in a future Taliban government.
However, some bargaining process, even if notional, has likely begun. The various actors onstage in Afghanistan -- Karzai and his allies, the various insurgent factions, elements of Pakistan's government, and the U.S. government -- will each make their own assessment of what could constitute an acceptable deal and whether continued fighting will get them closer or further away from their goals.
The U.S. "surge" of reinforcements is designed to increase the coalition's bargaining leverage. Neither Karzai nor U.S. President Barack Obama's team will see much reason to scale back their current objectives until this autumn when the results of the summer fighting season are in. Coalition leaders are hoping that continued attrition of Taliban leaders, both from ground combat and from drone strikes, might compel some of those leaders to seek a truce. From the Taliban's perspective, each summer's escalation of combat brings a new opportunity to apply political pain on electorates in Europe and North America. The Taliban's dominant factions -- the Quetta Shura led by Mullah Mohammed Omar and the Haqqani network -- will likely also wait to see whether this summer's combat might drive some less-committed coalition members out of the fight.
Although battlefield results should influence bargaining strategies, such logic might not apply in this case. For Afghan players like Karzai and the Taliban, there may be no incentive to settle no matter how much pressure they might come under. They understand that truces are likely to be broken; here the calculation switches to who can gain an advantage rearming during any lull in the fighting.
Of course, U.S. policymakers will not see it that way. As in Vietnam in 1973, the United States will see a truce as an opportunity to declare victory. The weak South Vietnamese government saw the need to keep fighting no matter how badly its position deteriorated. It correctly judged any truce to be neither credible nor enforceable.
For now, Karzai and the Americans fight the Taliban. But as the bargaining process develops, the next struggle will be between Karzai and the Obama team.
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