And this brings us back to Zaeef, and to the question of what kind of Afghanistan the Taliban is prepared to accept. I asked him whether he believed, as some other Taliban figures have said, that the group made mistakes during its period of brutal and reactionary rule in the late 1990s. He wouldn't bite. "There was no government then," he said. "We have to disarm the warlords. We have to punish the criminals. You have to be strong with them, be harsh with them." Zaeef is very fond of the words "harsh" and "punish," and he uses them as terms of praise. "Afghanistan cannot be controlled without a good and smart dictator," he told me. "You need someone to be strong, honest, and also harsh." Zaeef views democracy as a Western bauble prized only by decadent urbanites. (He is himself a rustic from Kandahar province.)
At the same time, Zaeef is no medievalist. The day before we spoke, he approached Fatima Gailani, a leading Afghan feminist also attending the conference, to ask for help in opening separate boarding schools for boys and girls. Under the Taliban, he insists, "there will be freedom for women." It's not quite clear what Zaeef means by that, since he says that the Taliban's goal is "Islamic law." But he also favors (as the Quran dictates) female inheritance and the payment of dowry to women rather than their families. Zaeef says that the Taliban will not insist on control over the Pashtun-majority districts of the south, though David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency guru with long experience in Afghanistan, says that the Taliban field commanders he has spoken to say that they expect just that, along with control over several central ministries.
Can the United States live with such an Afghanistan? It can -- so long as the Taliban, in Obama's words, "break from al Qaeda, abandon violence, and abide by the Afghan Constitution." American officials say they believe that Taliban leaders are prepared to accept those conditions -- or at least the central leadership in the Pakistan city of Quetta is. It's not at all clear that the young bucks who have taken over for older field commanders decimated by American forces will abide by decisions from Taliban HQ. And the Haqqani network responsible for so much of the violence in Afghanistan is considered responsive only to Pakistani intelligence -- which is another problem altogether.
Can Afghans like Fatima Gailani, or the many non-Pashtuns in the country's north, live with such a negotiated solution? That's far from clear, and both liberal-minded Afghans and non-Pashtuns worry that President Hamid Karzai, with the tacit approval of the Americans, will sell them out. A Taliban that does not feel defeated, negotiating as much from a position of strength as one of weakness, may forget the lessons it has learned from 10 years in the wilderness and interpret its fidelity to Afghanistan's constitution more and more loosely over time. And the truth -- the harsh truth, as Zaeef would say -- is that the United States is willing to live with a settlement that keeps out al Qaeda and averts civil war, even if it comes at the cost of the social progress made possible by the past decade's Western presence. The Afghan people will have to stand up for themselves.
The other harsh truth is that the surge in Afghanistan -- unlike the surge in Iraq -- was unnecessary. The limited counterinsurgency strategy that Obama agreed to adopt in the fall of 2009 did not produce an Afghan government able to "build" where international forces had "cleared" and "held" territory or to command the loyalty of its citizens, and the real military gains have not been sufficient to make the Taliban lay down its arms and accept otherwise intolerable terms. The killing of Osama bin Laden was a great success, but it's simply not credible that this one act so reduced the al Qaeda threat that the United States could bring the surge to an end. It offered, rather, an excellent pretext to do so. If there is now light at the end of the tunnel, it's because the Obama administration has ratcheted its hopes and expectations ever downward. It's an irony that few could have expected in early 2009 -- that the Iraq war has been a success for Obama, and Afghanistan a failure.
Zaeef told me that his new book is coming out in two weeks. The Pashto title translates as The Fundamental Problem of Afghanistan. I asked him what that fundamental problem was. "The Afghan people are too optimistic," he said blandly. They keep trusting foreigners -- the British, the Russians, the Americans -- and then getting betrayed. He forgot to add: and then they tear them to bits.
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