If Americans are skeptical about the hope for winning or withdrawing from the war in Afghanistan, they have good cause. Nine years on, there’s little prospect of change in the reality of an interminable struggle against an elusive and driven foe. The latest scam regarding negotiations with the Taliban toward ending the fighting cements that.
Until recently, American and NATO forces in Afghanistan have not only been fighting the Taliban. Their leaders have also been negotiating – or at least they believed so – with the second-highest Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.
Indeed, American and NATO leaders have joined Afghan President Hamid Karzai in three meetings with the presumed Taliban leader. Karzai even gave him a satchel of cash to lubricate Taliban interest in the talks and to induce the supposed Mullah Mansour to return.
Now, it appears that the man who held himself out as Mansour – and for whom U.S. and NATO troops provided helicopter rides and secure roads to give him safe passage to the talks from Pakistan – was an impostor. Reports say he was fingered at the third meeting, in Kandahar, by an Afghan man who used to know the real Mansour.
U.S., NATO and Afghan officials are disappointed, of course. They say the talks had gone well, and that the fake Taliban leader had proposed only moderate demands for an end to the war: that Afghan Taliban fighters could safely come home, and be given jobs.
Of course that would be ideal. Critics had worried the Taliban would demand a share of the government’s powers and jobs, along with immunity and the authority to impose Sharia law in their strongholds.
Of course it’s too bad the fake Mansour was an impostor. What’s worse is that so many officials fell for his ruse, and did so because they know so little about their enemies – the real Taliban leaders. The scam is symbolic of the over-arching reality: The Taliban fade in and out, fight when they wish, find safe-haven in Pakistan under the aegis of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, and show no sign of giving up. In fact, the Taliban have gained power over the past several years, and their members still will be there when the United States and NATO forces ultimately withdraw.
They can they lay down their arms at any moment, blend in with the civilian populace, and bide their time if necessary. Karzai’s corrupt government, moreover, has yet to gain widely popular support, to extend its reach very far beyond Kabul, or to demonstrate much independent progress in training up the army, the police force and an effective, competent bureaucracy of civil service.
Small wonder all sides grasped the impostor’s discussions for a Taliban compromise. We wish it were true, as well. But if that’s the slender reed on which Afghanistan’s future rests, its future remains bleak.