A Reconciliation Plan in Afghanistan

KABUL — The Afghan government is set to unveil an ambitious, far-reaching plan to persuade the Taliban’s foot soldiers to abandon their fight and to offer an opening for the movement’s leaders to return to politics in the country they once ruled. The new program, which President Hamid Karzai will outline Thursday at a conference in London, seeks to avoid the problems that dogged earlier, more piecemeal approaches. This time it will be a comprehensive plan, operating at the district, provincial and national levels, according to his advisers, who describe it as “bottom-up and top-down.”
“We see this program as the main pillar for bringing peace to Afghanistan,” said Shaida Mohammed Abdali, the deputy national security adviser.
“There’s an ideological motive for an insurgency like this, and the trouble will not be resolved unless you reach out to the leadership; they are the food of the foot soldiers and where they are getting ideological and political incentives. If we only concentrate on the foot soldiers it will not be a sustainable program.”
The Karzai government envisions a two-track program and wants Western and other countries whose representatives will be attending the London conference to agree to back both of them.
One track is reintegration of fighters — to entice the Taliban’s rank-and-file fighters to lay down their weapons and rejoin Afghan society. The core of that is a vast jobs program and an amnesty for the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in Afghanistan’s villages and mountain redoubts.
The other track is reconciliation, a far more diplomatically charged and complex endeavor whose goal is to bring Taliban leaders, most of them now in Pakistan, back to Afghanistan and allow them to play a political role, if they are willing to abide by the Afghan Constitution.
Such an agreement, if it can be forged, would involve negotiations with Pakistan, which has sheltered the Taliban leaders, and with the United States and its Western allies, who have lost more than 1,600 service members fighting the Taliban.
It also means winning the help of Saudi Arabia, which has ties to Pakistan and the United States and was one of a handful of countries that recognized the Taliban government and so is trusted by the movement’s leaders.
Mr. Abdali, the deputy national security adviser, and Massoom Stanakzai, a special adviser to President Hamid Karzai on reconciliation and reintegration, said that the government has learned from its past mistakes and that this time around it will design a much more comprehensive program. “We have to provide them with a package — jobs, protection,” said Mr. Stanakzai. “They have legitimate concerns.”
In exchange, both rank-and-file Taliban fighters and leaders would have to pledge to renounce violence, separate completely and permanently from Al Qaeda, and accept the Afghan Constitution.
Whether the effort will be successful depends on a host of factors far larger than the program itself, including its implementation at the village level and the geopolitics that will determine whether a deal can be struck with the Taliban leadership.