I'm taking a holiday from the rough-and-tumble world of Washington to spend a week in the relative peace and stability of Afghanistan. (That's me interviewing Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Forces, on Monday.) Here are some thoughts:
Meet Afghanistan’s Greatest Hope: “The Re-integree”
No, “re-integree” is not really a word in English,
but among the U.S. and NATO officials
who are trying to wrench Afghanistan into something like a manageable shape before
they leave, it’s become a critical one. A relatively new program to reintegrate
Afghan Taliban and other insurgents into society may, in fact, be one of the
most hopeful routes to a successful –or at least less than disastrous-- U.S.
withdrawal in 2014. Despite all the headlines about getting high-level Taliban
to the peace table in Qatar (where the Taliban have gingerly set up an office
but are balking at serious negotiations), a much better prospect for neutralizing
the insurgents may lie with
village-level efforts at inducing low-ranking fighters and commanders to
surrender arms and rejoin their communities.
The strategy, in other words, is to hollow out the Taliban
army even as its top commanders enjoy relative security across the border in
the tribal regions of Pakistan. Given the recalcitrance of the Pakistanis in
rolling up what they consider their Islamist allies, that may be the only way,
senior U.S. and NATO officials suggest. “We’re leveraging it,” Gen. John Allen,
commander of all international security forces in Afghanistan, said in an
interview with visiting reporters on Monday at his southern regional command in
Uruzgan. Ryan Crocker, America’s ambassador to Afghanistan, also likes this
approach. “If we have a [Taliban] command that no longer has an army to
command, that works for me,” he said in a separate interview.
Hence ISAF’s tongue-tying neologism: the
“re-integree.” According to a senior U.S. advisor to Mohammad Stanekzai, head
of the “Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program (APRP),” one measure of
success of the U.S. “counterinsurgency” strategy is that, since the first “re-integree” came
over in October 2010, some 4,200 to 4,300 insurgents have returned to their
villages and towns in the last year and a half. (Another 600 are now being
“vetted,” he says) Under the APRP, these
former fighters give up their “heavy arms,” sign an oath renouncing violence
and abiding by Afghan constitution and get three months of $120 a month
payments, and are consigned to the wrath of their village elders if they
relapse. An added inducement is that communities can only qualify for small
grants from the national government if they show they have some
re-integrees.
And yet, admits the advisor, “we’re not at the point
where 4,000 is statistically significant.”
That’s because most of the fighters who surrender arms are in the areas
with the least diehard jihadists in the non-Pashtun North and West, like
Badghis and Herat. (Badghis, in Regional Command West, has by far the largest
proportion of re-integrees, some 12-to-1,300 or one third of the total). “The
problem with the south and east is you’re much closer to the heart of the
insurgency, they’re much more hard-core, and there are more concerns about
retribution,” the advisor says. As yet, no more than a thousand have come out
of the south and east.
Gen. Allen and Amb. Crocker say they place a lot of
hope in anecdotal evidence that, slowly, even some of the more zealous,
Pakistan-supported Taliban in the south and east are realizing that, in fact,
the U.S. and NATO are never going to depart entirely.
They say the ten-year
strategic partnership that President Obama announced just last week will have a
tremendous psychological impact, as will similar commitments expected at the NATO
summit in Chicago in two weeks. “There’s going to be an international military
presence here in Afghanistan for a long time, a long time after 2014,” Allen
said. “While the Taliban for the purposes
of recruiting and to maintain the coherence in their units may well desire to
say that we’ll just wait you out, I think the reality is that every day they
wait is a day they’re at greater disadvantage, frankly,” Allen said. Crocker
indicated that, based on what he’s heard, the “informal” reintegration of
Taliban in the south is also picking up. “Taliban fighters just want out of
this,” said Crocker . “In Helmand the governor thinks there’ s quite a bit of
that going on. They make contact with their home village … and just schlep on
home at night.”
Returning Taliban sometimes cite the newly empowered
Afghan security forces, saying they signed up to fight foreigners, not other Afghans,
both NATO and Afghan officials say.
Still, one of the more disturbing revelations here
is that ISAF officials don’t seem to have a good feel for the total number of
insurgents out there—it could be “as low as 20,000 to a s high as 45,000,” one
of Allen’s staffers said. Allen himself,
in the interview, dismissed the higher number but added: “Nobody knows for sure. … I think most estimates would put it between thirty
and thirty-five [thousand]. Some large number of them are in Pakistan. And the
term ‘enemy’ has many different meanings here. A significant number of what
might be considered enemy are in a support role, they’re not fighters necessarily.
And frankly some of what masquerades as
enemy are really criminal networks….So
it’s never been more than an estimate.”
On such estimates may ride the success or failure of
the decade-long U.S. effort in Afghanistan.
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