15
Emotional investment may complicate decisions about negotiations. Some opponents may suggest compromise means that sacrifices in lives and treasure were in vain, that talking with such evil actors is unthinkable. Fred Iklé, a former senior official in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, wrote about the intense and potentially divisive nature of strategy discussions between patriots and “traitors.”1 Stakeholders are likely to frame information in ways that support their conclusions and the interests of their constituents or departments.2 “Those who want their country to pursue ambitious war aims will seek out the favorable military estimates and find reasons why negotiations ought to be avoided,” Iklé argues. “Those who want negotiations to move ahead will select the unfavorable military estimates to argue that war aims should be scaled down.”3 In addition to misinterpreting or overlooking information, actors might simply frame information in ways that support their views. Political leaders may also want to avoid creating winners and losers in their national security teams. Lack of consensus for change thus tends to keep the status quo intact.
Internal politics contributes to strategic paralysis. States are not unitary actors that operate in lock-step or see issues from a single, shared, and objective perspective.4 Differing assessments among decision-makers may entrench the status quo. Actors perceive proposed changes to the status quo as gains or losses of influence, prestige, or power.5 Prospect theory, discussed in more detail in chapter 26, suggests that those deeply invested in a current strategy will fight hard to prevent change—likely harder than those advocating for a new direction. More disconcertingly, such stakeholders could manipulate information asymmetries in cynical efforts to block changes or undermine alternatives.6
Political scientists Stanley and Sawyer suggest that leaders may not want to seek a negotiated outcome due to personal stakes such as power, prestige, and physical or financial security.7 They may have less prosaic motives, too. Policy-makers may prefer to keep fighting if they doubt the sincerity of the adversary. Political scientist Dan Reiter analyzes examples from the US Civil War to the Korean War in which uncertainties about the adversary’s credibility led decision-makers to continue fighting until the doubts subsided.8 An adversary that offers to capitulate, for instance, removes uncertainty about their willingness to stop fighting. Alternatively, an adversary can use cease-fires and negotiations as a ploy to consolidate control, buy time to prepare for future military operations, or undermine their opponent’s legitimacy. These kinds of credible commitment concerns increase when dealing with armed nonstate actors who may not feel bound by international law and the Geneva Conventions.
The Obama administration faced these challenges. Bureaucratic frictions and conflicting assessments undermined the ability to put together a coherent approach toward a negotiated settlement. As mentioned in chapter 13, reconciliation became one of five unprioritized strategic lines of effort in 2010, alongside the civil-military campaign, transition, strategic partnership, and regional diplomacy. The SRAP was responsible for regional diplomacy and reconciliation. Two factors boosted the importance of the latter. First, advisors within State and Defense were successful in convincing the NSC during the 2010 Afghanistan-Pakistan Annual Review that reconciliation was a logical adaptation of the 2009 strategy. With the Afghan government actively resisting reform and with efforts to change Pakistan’s political calculus not bearing fruit, they argued, the Obama administration should investigate the prospects of reconciliation. If done carefully, exploratory measures need not conflict with the other lines of effort.9
Requests from the Taliban for direct talks reinforced the arguments for exploring reconciliation. Tayyab Agha, the chief of the Taliban political commission and former secretary to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, had asked Germany in 2009 to broker a meeting with the United States. After confirming his identity, the Germans arranged the first US-Taliban meeting in Munich in November 2010.10 The discussion covered general points but suggested that the Taliban wanted to continue the talks. The result for the United States, as Secretary of State Clinton later explained, was the “fight and talk” approach. This dual-track effort could lead toward a reconciliation process or, at worst, confirm Taliban duplicity.11
“Our civilian and military efforts,” Clinton announced, “must support a durable and favorable political resolution of the conflict. In 2011, we will intensify our regional diplomacy to enable a political process to promote peace and stability in Afghanistan.”12 Exactly what reconciliation was supposed to achieve, however, remained vague. Officially, it was an Afghan-led dialogue with Taliban senior leaders toward a political resolution of the conflict.
Some US officials viewed reconciliation as a peace process with strong US involvement. Others believed it should focus on convincing Taliban senior leaders to defect from the insurgency and join the Afghan government. Finally, others believed that the US role was to persuade the Taliban to talk to the Afghan government. The distinctions are subtle, but the ambiguity contributed to the failure to achieve consensus in Washington and Kabul.
To build momentum for reconciliation, Secretary Clinton discussed the political and diplomatic surges at a landmark speech to the Asia Society in February 2011. “Today,” she noted, “the escalating pressure of our military campaign is sharpening . . . a decision for the Taliban.” The choices were to “break ties with al-Qaida, give up your arms, and abide by the Afghan constitution, and you can rejoin Afghan society; refuse and you will continue to face the consequences of being tied to al-Qaida as an enemy of the international community.”13 Clinton had just outlined what became known as the three red lines for reconciliation. Those who met the conditions could participate in the process. The United States would continue targeting those who refused. “This is the price for reaching a political resolution,” she announced. “If former militants are willing to meet these red lines, they would then be able to participate in the political life of the country under their constitution.” Several coalition partners who had come to the same conclusion about the need for a political settlement welcomed the speech.
This new “fight and talk” approach was complicated because the Obama administration had not decided how to achieve a favorable and durable outcome. The NSC never agreed on goals for reconciliation and how those would integrate with other efforts. Petraeus, notes Vali Nasr, was skeptical of Holbrooke’s reconciliation vision.14 When asked by the latter to discuss reconciliation, the general reportedly replied, “that’s a 15-second conversation. Eventually, yes, but no. Not now.”15 Despite having only one year with surge forces in place (unless he could convince Obama to delay withdrawals), Petraeus believed talks were premature. “It was clear from the outset—due to sanctuaries they enjoyed in Pakistan,” Petraeus recollected, “that we could not sufficiently pressure the leaders of the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network to get them to negotiate seriously.”16
The lack of war termination doctrine and clarity on reconciliation led to divergent views within the US government. Within the Obama administration, at least four different ideas competed for traction. The status quo position was that the civil-military campaign to build Afghan capacity and degrade the Taliban, plus efforts to change Pakistan’s political calculus and shut down insurgent sanctuaries, would allow the Afghan government and security forces to take over responsibility for security by 2014. The Afghan troops could finish off a residual Taliban insurgency. Petraeus’s view is consistent with the capitulation model and the three red lines articulated by Clinton. The Taliban could surrender and trust the Afghan and US governments to treat them fairly, or they could keep fighting. Unless the Taliban believed themselves to be on the verge of defeat, they would be unlikely to capitulate. The Afghan National Security Forces, ISAF claimed, would be the “defeat mechanism” of the Taliban.17 In this view, reconciliation would bring surrendering Taliban leaders into the political fabric of Afghanistan. The Afghan government supported this concept, as did the military command and the ambassador in Kabul, and elements within the Pentagon and the White House. This approach was attractive because it required no political compromise, it limited audience costs, and, if achieved, it could be viewed as a clear victory. This approach could have been successful in 2001. The downsides ten years later were its conflicts with reality. The Taliban were under significant pressure, but they were nowhere near the point of contemplating surrender, and the Afghan government was hemorrhaging legitimacy.
Some members of the SRAP team argued that reconciliation should aim for a peace deal or “grand bargain” with the Taliban.18 Vali Nasr argues that this was the view of Holbrooke and some of his advisors.19 “COIN has failed,” a senior SRAP official told me in 2011, now it was the diplomats’ turn to take over.20 The grand bargain offered the potential for a deal to end the conflict. There were downsides, however. First, peace deals in low trust environments can be destabilizing.21 Recent Afghan experiences with peace deals were not positive ones. As noted in chapter 4, the Peshawar (1992) and Islamabad (1993) Accords led to and perpetuated the Afghan civil war. Second, there seemed little appetite within the Afghan government or polity for such a deal. To many Afghans, particularly the former Northern Alliance factions in government and civil society groups in Kabul, a peace deal with the Taliban was anathema. Senior SRAP advisor Rina Amiri voiced concerns about the potential for backlash and the need to gain Afghan buy-in.22 Senior State and Defense officials, myself included, voiced these same concerns.
Marc Grossman, a highly accomplished and respected career ambassador, was in an awkward position as Holbrooke’s replacement. He likely recognized that large-scale Taliban defections were unlikely and appreciated the downsides of the grand bargain. He consequently developed, over time, a less ambitious and potentially more achievable approach of using confidence-building measures and regional diplomacy to get the Taliban to agree to meet with the Afghan government: “To try to open the door for Afghans to talk to other Afghans about the future of Afghanistan.”23
The upside to this approach was its limited and potentially attainable goal. It focused on playing a declining hand well rather than seeking to improve it or change the game. The United States was losing negotiating leverage but might have enough carrots to get the Taliban to agree to official talks with the Afghan government. Such a step would imply Taliban recognition of the Karzai government as a legitimate negotiating partner—a substantial achievement. This approach limited the need for interagency coordination and conformed closely to the traditional envoy-to-envoy discussions diplomats spend their careers doing. It also removed the United States from having to negotiate peace.
The downsides to this approach included the potential backlash in the United States and Afghanistan of talks with and concessions toward the Taliban—which vocal constituencies in both countries regarded as a terrorist group. Discussions with the United States would confer more political legitimacy on the Taliban than they had had to date. There was also a danger that the Taliban would get concessions from the United States, agree to the meeting with the Afghan government, and then walk out of it. This approach was unlikely to bring an end to the conflict. Unless sufficiently coordinated, it might also be viewed suspiciously by the Afghan government.
At best, this approach would set a precedent for discussions. Because this approach did not address the drawdown timeline, the Taliban could simply play for time and not engage in serious talks until after international forces completed the drawdown. At that point, the Afghan government would be in a much weaker bargaining position than it was from 2011 to 2014. In short, the approach might accomplish the narrow objective of arranging a meeting between the Afghan government and Taliban, but arguably little to support US strategic goals.
My personal view, as the Defense Department lead for the effort, together with some senior advisors at State, was that reconciliation should be a deliberate and incremental peace process (rather than a peace deal) that was coordinated carefully with the Afghan government. We based this view on our war termination research.24 The prospects for a favorable and durable outcome that met US interests, we felt, were more likely in this approach than the other three. Reconciliation should be the priority among the five lines of effort.
We argued that a deliberate peace process held the best opportunity for the United States to achieve the most favorable and durable outcome possible at the lowest costs. Rather than continue with a strict drawdown timeline, the administration should stabilize the troop presence indefinitely to convince the Taliban it would not win through force of arms. Ideally, exploratory talks should begin before the surge forces arrived to take advantage of the uncertainty within the Taliban about how much damage the military effort would do to them. If the Taliban withstood the surge and the United States began drawing down forces, we argued, the Taliban could simply play for time. They might negotiate our withdrawal, as the North Vietnamese did during the Vietnam War, but not an end to the conflict. A stalemate in which the Afghan government controlled 90 percent of the country to the Taliban’s 10 percent was a position of strength for negotiations.
A compelling vision and strategy were needed to bring about a peace process. A step-by-step approach that built trust and confidence, we reasoned, could lead within a few years to growing consensus on political principles and measures to reduce violence, and eventually to cease-fires and discussions on more sensitive political issues. This process could also test Taliban intentions at relatively low risk while assessing the integrity of their statements and the credibility of their commitments. The national-level process needed to be complemented by local reintegration efforts that focused on good governance and conflict resolution, and a regional dimension to address interstate issues. This approach was more likely than the alternatives to result in a successful resolution to the conflict but would probably take years to come to fruition. Afghanistan had been at war by then for over 30 years. A durable peace would not break out after a few meetings. The other lines of effort would need to align accordingly.
This approach had its downsides, too. It would require Obama to modify the withdrawal timelines and suffer potential audience costs.25 Talks with the Taliban were politically risky in the United States and Afghanistan. The administration would also incur the fiscal risk to higher domestic and international priorities of having large numbers of troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 if the negotiations had not progressed by then to entail troop reductions. This approach required strategic patience and a long-term view, both often in short supply in Kabul and Washington. Lifting the withdrawal timelines could be seen as a betrayal to Obama’s political base. It would probably require lengthy interagency deliberations, and White House officials were reportedly sensitive to criticisms about drawn-out decision-making discussions.
In short, it was tough to make reconciliation the priority effort, but preferable, we thought, to losing or to post-2014 negotiations in which the Taliban had much higher leverage. State and Defense coordinated a paper along these lines just before Grossman took over at SRAP. NSC deputies approved the proposal, but it was never moved forward to principals or disseminated to the field.26 Officials close to the effort suggested that the concept was much more ambitious than Grossman, newly arrived as SRAP, was comfortable attempting.27
SRAP moved forward with a more limited approach. Defense agreed that reconciliation needed to coordinate several elements of national power.28 With 100,000 troops on the ground, the Pentagon believed their military capabilities could be helpful. They were also concerned about the security and force protection implications if negotiators made uncoordinated agreements. Conversely, military operations conducted in isolation could have very damaging effects on reconciliation. Talks could easily be derailed, for instance, if an interlocutor was killed or captured. Spoiler activity needed to be understood and managed.
Moreover, the military had several “tribes” of its own that needed to support the effort. In addition to the military and civilian officials at the Pentagon, the four-star commands at ISAF, US Central Command, US Special Operations Command, and NATO all had equities. Two ISAF commanders told me that they wanted to support the effort but needed to know what to do.29 The military wanted to help but needed an approach that they could understand.30
SRAP’s resistance to a reconciliation strategy might seem odd, while the Pentagon’s insistence on having one might appear as a terrible encroachment. The military tends to favor deliberate strategy, while diplomats tend to embrace emergent strategy.31 The Pentagon is very good at the former. Important issues undergo a rigorous planning effort that coordinates the activity of thousands of people, massive amounts of logistics, and lethal force and capabilities. Deliberate strategy, however, can over-engineer problems and limit flexibility. State’s institutional culture views planning as a waste of time. As explained to me by former State Department officials, when a diplomat wants to slow-roll something into nonexistence, they call for a plan.32 American diplomats tend to be more comfortable with emergent strategy—skillfully playing your hand while adapting to a dynamic situation and protecting US interests. Holbrooke appropriately likened diplomacy to jazz.33 This approach, however, limits interagency coordination and integration and can come across as making it up as you go along—if the players do not understand music, noise results. The risks to this approach may be low if the diplomatic effort is operating on its own, but they increase significantly when other stakeholders and American lives are involved. Those who think ahead usually outmaneuver those who fixate on the next move.
Reconciliation needed an appropriate blend of both deliberate and emergent strategies. The United States never articulated its reconciliation strategy, which frustrated Defense and some in SRAP and probably made Grossman feel second-guessed and micromanaged. “There were occasions,” Grossman reflected, “when some colleagues tried to micromanage the conversation with the Taliban in ways designed to make it impossible to continue, but the need to keep inter-agency representatives engaged and as supportive as possible overrode my periodic frustrations.”34 To be sure, ideas on reconciliation from Defense could be as unwelcome to some diplomats as State recommendations on military efforts would be to some generals.
The result was the lack of an agreed concept within State, within the US government, and between the American and Afghan governments. Various stakeholders were pulling in different directions and potentially sending mixed messages to other parties. “Bureaucratic silos and turf battles undermined coordination on reconciliation,” reflected former Deputy SRAP Vikram Singh.35 These paled in comparison to disconnects with Kabul, which made the issue explosive.