America’s longest war, the conflict in Afghanistan, looks increasingly unwinnable, but no one wants to admit defeat and put the Taliban back in control of the country.
It seems like there is no way out. But Selig Harrison, a journalist and scholar who summers on Islesford, has proposed a controversial but intriguing solution. His article, “How to Leave Afghanistan Without Losing,” appears in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine.
His key is the clear interest of six neighboring nations — Russia, Iran, India, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — in sharing the U.S. goal of preventing the return of a Taliban dictatorship in Kabul. All six of them “fear that a resurrected Taliban regime would foment Islamist insurgencies within their own borders.” Only Pakistan, which helped install the Taliban regime that ruled from 1996 to 2001, wants it back in power. But Harrison found a possible way around that obstacle.
“Regional diplomacy” has already figured in discussions of Afghanistan policy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March 2009 proposed a regional conference that would have included Iran. Henry Kissinger said the neighboring states would be threatened “more than we are by the emergence of a base for international terrorism” in Afghanistan.”
The trouble with those proposals, he wrote, was that they implied “that the United States would remain in the driver’s seat in Afghanistan.” The regional neighbors don’t want a longtime U.S. presence in Afghanistan, particularly permanent U.S. air bases, now used for intelligence surveys of areas bordering Russia, China and Iran. Huge base expansion programs, now underway, “indicate that the U.S. Air Force plans to stay in Afghanistan even if the Army and the Marines pull out.” He said it was up to the Obama administration to override Pentagon opposition and take a firm stand to permit the regional backing necessary to contain the Taliban.
Harrison proposed that the U.S. exit process start with a United Nations initiative to get the regional neighbors to agree to provide for the military neutralization of Afghanistan and support for the country as it stabilizes. A timetable would call for the complete withdrawal of U.S. and NATO combat forces within three years, as well as “termination of U.S. military access to bases in Afghanistan, including air bases, within five years.”
With disengagement would come U.N.-brokered peace negotiations with the Taliban — but with a switch. Instead of power sharing in Kabul, the talks would determine what power the Taliban would continue to have in its present strongholds in the ethnically Pashtun south and east of the country. He suggested that this regional containment should get Pakistan’s blessing and had already been discussed in talks earlier this year.
The plan would leave the Taliban locally in control, with its cruelty and fanaticism supposedly contained. But it would face the facts on the ground, let the interested regional powers join in managing the mess, and get the United States entirely out of it.
In a situation with few options — and even fewer of them positive — it is a solution worth consideration.