The Afghan peace council - Jirga, with 1,600 participants selected by the regime, adjourned on Saturday 06/05/2010. The Jirga aimed to bolster the position of the controversial President Hamid Karzai and to appeal to the Taliban to join a peace effort and join the political current Afghani system ahead of the beginning of NATO-ISAF withdrawal from Afghanistan, scheduled to summer 2011 (see - Obama's Surge). The Afghan war became this week the longest war in USA history, longer then the Vietnam War (according to official dates) and the war is still far from over.
The Jirga did not include any genuine representatives of the insurgent groups to whom they were supposed to appeal. Some 28 committees were established to make proposals, which they then submitted to the chairman, Burhanuddin Rabbani (pic), the former First Afghan President after the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Afghanistan in 1989.
The Jirga called the USA and NATO for guarantees of amnesty and safety, as well as job-related incentives for former Taliban foot-soldiers willing to lay down their arms; the release of insurgents held in US and Afghan prisons, presumably to accept the same deal offered to their former Taliban comrades; the removal of certain Taliban leaders from the UN blacklist and arrangements for their "asylum" in a Muslim country where peace negotiations could be held.
At the same time, at least some delegates lobbied strongly against sacrificing recent gains in democracy and women's rights as part of any appeal to the Taliban.
All measures were suggested in the past (see -Karzai's Peace offer) but the Taliban refused to enter any negotiation as long as foreign troops are stationed in Afghanistan. Their missile strikes and attempted suicide attack on the Jirga site (see - Kabul 06.02.10), in the opening session, on Wednesday 06/02/2010, only served the Taliban's long-standing message: The Karzai government is an illegitimate, foreign-imposed entity meant to serve foreign interests, with which the Taliban will deal only after the foreign forces supporting it have left. The Taliban expressed several times its confidence they are winning the war in the long run and there is no need to negotiate (see - Gul's Interview).
It is also hard to imagine that the Taliban would deal with a fundamentally weakened Kabul regime through negotiations. One suspects the Taliban has other, rather harsher measures in mind. The clerically-dominated Taliban has never shown much regard for even traditional Tribal Afghan democratic norms - to say nothing of elections.
Indeed, one of the consistent complaints against Mullah Omar back when his movement controlled most of Afghanistan was that he even ignored the deliberations of his own Shura (advising council). It is also hard to see how and why the Taliban, after all it is a national and not an internationalist movement, would deny safe haven to Al Qaeda and foreign militants, especially given the important support they have provided against what many see as foreign occupying forces.
It seems that Afghanistan is condemned, when all is said and done, to an open, ongoing civil war.
The precise form that this civil war will take, and the longer-term role of foreign military forces in Afghanistan once the counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan's Pashtun areas has failed - both remain to be seen.
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* The article is based on Robert Grenie's article in Al-Jazeera published on Sunday 06/06/2010. Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. He was also the director of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre.
