Focusing on the Realities of Negotiations in Afghanistan…~sighhh

~i just liked the pic~

The controversy over the burning of Korans at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan continued to rage Thursday. Though the specifics remain somewhat opaque, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan quickly acknowledged and apologized for the incident.

But by Wednesday, protests had spread to additional provinces. And on Thursday, the Taliban issued their own statement condemning the incident. As Stratfor has noted, that response came as the Taliban seek to maintain their anti-U.S. credentials while continuing talks with Washington to reach some sort of political accommodation and negotiated settlement.

The Taliban’s current response stands in stark contrast to its reaction to the prior release of a video purportedly showing U.S. Marines urinating on corpses in Afghanistan. Though not quite as starkly religious in nature, the dead were supposedly Muslim Taliban fighters and presented the Taliban a clear opportunity to highlight the insensitivity of their principal opponent. The Taliban at the time went out of their way to say that the incident would not interfere with their talks with the United States.

The change in the Taliban’s tone from the first incident to the more recent is striking, and it is tempting to try reading into the distinction to gauge the status of talks between the United States and the Taliban. As talks and negotiations intensify, however, this becomes more difficult.

As we have argued, moving from talks to negotiations (the latter being defined as the hashing out of specific points in an agreed framework) in the midst of a shooting war is necessarily chaotic. Focusing on the details of specific incidents within that din is not in its own right instructive — one must first identify the underlying structure on which these events are playing out.

This war involves not two sovereign states, but a state (the United States), a diffuse and amorphous insurgency (the Afghan Taliban), a government propped up by Washington (the regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai) and the dominant regional power in the equation (Pakistan). Any meaningful engagement across these lines will be complex and inevitably appear chaotic. The most important developments in such an engagement happen behind closed doors — think for instance of talks between the United States, South Vietnam and North Vietnam, and the Viet Cong — so visible behaviors and public statements are often aimed at a broader reality that is not readily visible. Within that hidden context, multiple players are jockeying for position — they could attempt to sew chaos and reap its advantages at the negotiating table.

The following realities — not the apparent chaos — should remain at the forefront of negotiations. The United States is drawing down in Afghanistan, but since the war has not attracted the domestic ire that Vietnam or Iraq did, the pace and pressure for ending the war are not the same. Washington is working toward an exit that, if necessary, would entail a more enduring special operations presence than both the Taliban and Pakistan would like. Since the Taliban cannot eject the United States and its allies by force, they have some incentive to reach an understanding with Washington. But the Taliban have survived the worst of the surge’s counteroffensive and are deeply entrenched in both Afghanistan and restive, isolated areas of Pakistan, so time is on their side. Meanwhile, Pakistan must deal with whatever remains in Afghanistan — Islamabad has both fundamental interests in these talks as well as enormous influence in Afghanistan. The Karzai regime has some leverage but is principally concerned with its own survival.

The maneuvering that each party is engaged in is active and complex — and each party will necessarily engage in ambiguity and deceit. Negotiations involve not only objectives and incentives but also bluffing and perceptions. And in a negotiation, you want to be the party who must be placated for a settlement to be reached — not the party that is trapped, needing quickly to reach an agreement.

This is a subtle game. Attempting to navigate and decode the subtlety involved requires enormous sophistication from those involved day by day in the talks. From the outside, trying to infer what daily warzone developments say about the state of negotiations will be more misleading than instructive.

Talks are taking place. The specifics are opaque, though the details of an eventual settlement will matter enormously. But both the key objectives and the timeline (major American and allied withdrawal by 2014) have been established. This framework cuts through the chaos to the underlying rationality for a negotiated settlement on Afghanistan. But as we enter a phase of intensifying talks and negotiations, what we can glean about those negotiations from day-to-day events on the ground may actually decline.

http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical-diary/focusing-realities-negotiations-afghanistan