PRESIDENT OBAMA TAKES THE RIGHT PATH REGARDING AFGHANISTAN

President Barack Obama has mooted the taboo option. In a conversation with The New York Times aboard the presidential aircraft, Air Force One, he made two vital statements. The first was an admission that the US was not winning the war in Afghanistan. And the second was the possibility of reconciliation with moderate elements within the Taliban in an effort to break them away from the insurgency. That can succeed if it’s part of an overall effort to defeat the insurgency.

The perception that the Taliban is a monolithic entity is a false one. The insurgent forces controlling the southern regions of Afghanistan consist of disparate elements. There are, of course, core groups of hard-line Islamists who view the fight through the prism of religion and ideology and are unlikely to be amenable to settlement. But there are also outliers consisting of those fighting for ethno-nationalist reasons such as the Pashtun cause, or out of resentment at the infringement of Afghanistan’s sovereignty and personal loss at the hands of US and allied forces. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the latter elements can be weaned away with political settlements, isolating the remainder and making them military vulnerable.

Neither is President Obama suggesting capitulation; his stand is more nuanced than that. The strategy is to first ramp up military operations, thus hurting the insurgents to the point where some of them are compelled to the table. It is a sound one, and builds on the Iraqi precedent. There too, the situation improved only after the US reached out to some among its former enemies. As General Petraeus, one of the architects of that success put it; it is not possible to kill one’s way out of an insurgency.

The smart option – in fact, the only option – is to identify the fault lines among the opposing elements and insert wedges along them. To rely solely on military strength would simply be to repeat the Soviet mistakes, and reap the same whirlwind.