Bribe the Taliban?

Barbara Elias, Director of the Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Taliban Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, wrote an article last week for Foreign Affairs explaining why:

Many of the important "moderate" Taliban figures who could have been leaders of a more acceptable Taliban (such as Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, Mullah Omar's former second in command) have already died or been killed, quite a few by Mullah Omar himself. Most Taliban officials know little but war and would fit uncomfortably in a peaceful state. Everybody in the region expects the United States to leave, just like the Soviet Union, and so allying with U.S. forces seems to them like a bad bet.

Yet we've still got people like Bill Maher continuing to float the idea of simply letting the Taliban come back into power. "The Taliban is no more repressive than the Saudi Arabian government," Maher said in October on his HBO talk show, Real Time. And it's been rumored that top level American officials are willing to negotiate, as Richard Holbrooke may have indicated to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

The Taliban's self-interest would seem to pull them toward moderation, or at least conciliation to United States' interests. But as Elias points out, the Taliban has already proved that it does not operate according to rational self-interest. "If key Taliban officials behaved as representatives of a government seeking to maintain control of their territory," they would've given up Osama bin Laden and cooperated with the U.S. after Sept. 11, she writes.

Obviously, they did not.

"Their legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concessions to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states," Elias says.

Now, that's not entirely the case. From what I've read, it does seem that the Taliban is able to gain legitimacy through a certain kind of governance - providing services and the immediate adjudication of disputes in the areas of Afghanistan where the national government has no presence, which is to say, quite a lot of places.

Yet I think it is true that the Taliban, at least with its current leadership, will never risk its Islamic or popular legitimacy by compromising with the United States. There's just nothing it in for them. They've proven that they can survive for eight years against the world's most formidable military, just as they did decades ago against the Soviets.

The rationale that Maher, and perhaps others, use to convince themselves that the Taliban is OK - that they're "no more repressive" than the Saudis - does not compute. On a basic level, I don't think it's true. Criminal justice in Saudi Arabia may be hopelessly Draconian, but the people who would lead a Taliban government are warlords, pure and simple, responsible for the deaths of thousands. Even if the Saudis and the Taliban were interchangeable, how does the existence of one repressive government justify the creation of another? Finally, in terms of realpolitik, we can at least negotiate with the Saudis and receive benefits from them. The only benefit to letting the Taliban take over in Afghanistan is being able to bring our troops home - in defeat - and gaining some kind of short-term "stability."

All this leaves Elias with a disheartening conclusion: "Since the Taliban won't give al Qaeda up, the United States has little choice but to destroy al Qaeda, and since the Taliban cannot be meaningfully split or co-opted, Washington, unfortunately, has no real option but to prepare itself for a long struggle in the region."

How long that struggle may be is hard to say, though U.S. commanders have suggested something like five years, if my memory of Dexter Filkins' profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal serves me. Elias and I are of the mind that the best option, which is still possible, is to build a legitimate Afghan alternative to the Taliban. Given the corrupt state of Hamid Karzai's government, that will be a challenge, to say the least.