Chronicles of a wartime reversal: ten years ago, the U.S. secretly sent a message to Mullah Omar that it was about to erase his Taliban from the face of the earth. Now it's acquiescing to a plan for the insurgent Taliban to open an embassy far from Afghanistan, a prelude to peace talks.
On the eve of the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell instructed his ambassador in Islamabad, Wendy Chamberlin, to get a message to Omar through Pakistani intermediaries. It was neither a lengthy nor complicated communication. Nor was it an invitation to further dialogue.
"It is in your interest and in the interest of your survival to hand over all al-Qaida leaders, to close the terrorists' camps and allow the U.S. access to terrorist facilities," reads Powell's message, prompted by suspicions of a 9/11 follow-up attack and unearthed by the National Security Archive. "We will hold leaders of the Taliban personally responsible for any such actions. Every pillar of the Taliban regime will be destroyed."
It didn't exactly go Powell's way. Omar didn't turn over bin Laden and company. The U.S. crushed the Taliban and ran them out into Pakistan. It took about four years for an insurgency to begin in earnest and then gather in force. The U.S. has been fighting ever since, and the violence has crested at a high point. Omar, however, has outlived even Osama bin Laden, and his political career may make a comeback.
Because now there's a new U.S. message: negotiations. About two weeks ago, Omar put out a message gesturing toward negotiating an end to the war with the United States, which happens to be the position embraced by President Obama. Now, with the approval of Washington, the Taliban is opening a quasi-embassy in Qatar, so the talks have an address.
The Times of London -- whose website is annoying -- reports that by the end of the year, the Taliban will have a "political headquarters" open in Doha to conduct its affairs. That's a big deal: the Taliban are under United Nations sanctions, a remnant of the post-9/11 solidarity with the U.S., obligating member-states to freeze their assets and harass their leadership. (Never mind Pakistan's sponsorship of the Taliban.) The Doha office appears to be a workaround.
The idea is for the Taliban to have a place to work outside of the pressures of the war -- and far from Pakistani influence. The way U.S. diplos think about it, it wouldn't be a new safe haven to fundraise or plot more insurgent attacks. (Enforced, uh, how?) And don't call it an "embassy," even though that's what it sounds like, says a "Western diplomat" quoted by the Times. It's a "residence where they can be treated like a political party."
Whatever. Ten years of war have proven that the Taliban don't stay vanquished, no matter how tough the U.S. talks, leaving a negotiated settlement as perhaps the only possible end to the war. And another newly-disclosed memo from the Bush administration from the immediate aftermath of 9/11 may help explain why.
"The U.S. should not commit to any post-Taliban military involvement," reads a Pentagon strategy memo from October 30, 2001, (.PDF) "since the U.S. will be heavily engaged in the anti-terrorism effort world wide." As it turned out, the U.S. kept a rump force of around 20,000 troops in Afghanistan after the downfall of the Taliban, badly coordinated with NATO forces out of an ideological distaste for "peacekeeping" missions. The end result: a lot of time and space for the "pillars of the Taliban regime" to pull off a violent second act.
Photo: ISAF
