Serious Negotiations for a Solution in the Works

It is more and more a question of negotiation, the solution envisaged since last autumn, before the American presidential election, or even before the United States proposed sending reinforcements as their priority, following, understandably, a withdrawal from Iraq. We know the way Afghan President Hamid Karzai initiated this approach, tested the waters in his preliminary encounters with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia, and now it is the American President Barack Obama who says he is “convinced” that brute military force is not the solution to the conflict in the country. And this after having announced the deployment of two supplementary battalions and logistic support forces, totaling about 17,000 men in Afghanistan from now until the summer of 2009, according to a defense representative. “I am absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means,” he declared on CBC and is in Canada today for his first foreign visit. “We are going to have to use diplomacy. We’re going to have to use development…,” he added, talking about his “comprehensive strategy.” President Obama, who has made the conflict in Afghanistan one of his priorities, has promised a new approach in the struggle against the Taliban, combining military force, diplomacy, and development.

He told CBC that he plans to present a “comprehensive strategy… very soon… Obviously here as well, there are a lot of concerns about a conflict that has lasted quite a long time now and actually appears to be deteriorating at this point,” he added, insisting that “Afghanistan is still winnable… I think it’s still possible for us to stamp out al-Qaeda to make sure that extremism is not expanding, but rather is contracting,” Mr. Obama said. According to him, one reason that explains the absence of results in Afghanistan is that the war in Iraq drew too much attention from Washington. “We took our eye off the ball. We have not been as focused as we need to be,” he said. He has, however, recognized that a return to peace in this country will be difficult as long as the Taliban are financed by drug trafficking, that Afghanistan has the impression of being a lawless country, and that the “problem” of the Pakistani-Afghan border will not be resolved. “I will continue to ask other countries to help us think of ways to confront this very difficult problem,” he added.

Because they are not able to stop the Taliban’s operations and that they themselves are threatened, the Afghan authorities welcomed President Obama’s decision to send reinforcements, insisting that they be deployed along the border with Pakistan in order to prevent insurgents from infiltrating the country. The spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, Sultan Ahmad Baheen, believes that the arrival of new troops would assure the security of the presidential election, which will take place on August 20. “The Afghan government welcomes this particularly important decision in relation to the elections. These reinforcements will help us improve security, so that our fellow citizens will be able to vote freely.” Insurgent acts of aggression, in particular among the Taliban, who were driven from power in 2001 by a U.S. lead coalition, has intensified for the past two years despite the presence of close to 70,000 foreign soldiers, of which 38,000 are American. The commander of international forces in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, has asked for 30,000 additional soldiers. But is it sufficient to turn the tide on the kind of war that the Americans are not guaranteed to win? The question remains: in the case that there will be effective negotiation, with whom will the negotiations be?