NATO on board with peace talks
This is now breaking for discussion in the MSM, and I wish to offer the suggestion that it is more evidence he is methodical like the engineers hauling miners out of a hole in the ground in Chile rather than compromising his word as we all have suspected.
I began this diary August 15th and since then have been tracking rumours that Petraeus has been negotiating with the Taliban for their increased participation in the government and a decreased role for the warlords and drug dealers supporting Karzai. Woodwards Book "Obama's War" which I haven't seen yet apparently supports the idea that we have been doing a lot of negotiating both with the Karzai government and the Taliban and its certain that the political climate of all parties supports our withdrawl.
There are interesting questions about who gives the military its mission, who provides the expertise thats a basis for the intelligence collection, who qualifies as an interested party, who gets tasked to sell the mission to We the People and the MSM politically, and what is really happening on the ground.
Suppose we end up out of Afghanistan, with neighbors like Pakistine and Iran, China and Tajakistan joining the decision making process over the determination of where the oil pipeline from the Caspian will go. Its likely to go through China's Tarim Basin with close proximity to both Tajakistan and Pakistan rather than Iran but you never know.
From what I have been hearing from other sources I'm sure we will be breaking bread with "The Taliban" soon, but the reasons why are complicated and not immediately obvious any more than who we mean when we refer to "The Taliban". "The Taliban" forces in Herat are not homogeneous with those in Mazar el Sharif or Baghlan let alone those in Qandahar, Kabul or Jalalabad. The resistance of the so called Northern Alliance to "The Taliban" was based on personal rather than societal alliegances.
Afghanistan is an ungoverned and ungovernable land even for the Taliban. It doesn't have the infrastructure to make governing possible, it has neither the roads, nor the communications to make the control of different ethnic groups coming from different cultures with different attitudes and values possible.
The nominal government in Kabul is weak and corrupt. Karzai was making his living as a Cambridge, MA restraunteur until the CIA tapped him to try and pull together a loose coalition of warlords, bandits, drug dealers and tribal leaders to wrest control back from "The Taliban" after negotiations with them fell through. RAWA won't be happy with either the corruption or its correction by the strict Sharia law of some elements of "The Taliban".
I went to the Camden Conferance on this and I was amazed at how much of a problem the terrain causes in terms of isolation. In the middle of the country the mountains involved are too high for helicopters and too steep for roads. Where there are passes there are also groups that guard the passes and have about the same ideas of their turf as prison gangs do.
With a per capita annual income of perhaps $40 most Afghans think of school as a luxury that takes time away from doing something about many hungry mouths to feed. The only real sources of income are working for the drug dealers or working for the mujahadin, or working freelance as a quide for journalists/kidnapper, or thief.
Consequently most Afghans are illiterate. What there are in the way of madrasah's don't get much support from American relief agencies many of whom have their own religious affiliations. Medical resources are pretty much non existant. If they did exist they probably would be hesitant about providing anyone who might be perceived as someone else's enemy any sort of aide whatsoever.
Gangs, rebels, bandits, warlords, private security contractors, and Taliban all offer some checks and balances against the worst excesses of the US occupation forces who at one point were speeding down busy urban streets running over anybody who got in their way.
After a decade of being in a no win situation the US is maybe a little too heavily committed to pacification by military force, ie predator drones taking out villages and not quite committed enough to winning hearts and minds, special forces troops arming citizen defense forces who then sell their weapons to the warlords.
The US has to balance the interests of the neighbors, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, Jammu and Kashmir with those of the NATO forces we brought into the game; both Russia and India are interested parties
News articles give the impression that our efforts are mostly stick but in fact there have been a lot of carrots smuggled across the borders of China, Pakistan and Iran. My poll is an effort to solicit your thinking on what the Obama administration really has up its sleeve
Now that this has entered the end game and you can see how the man actually plans to be out in 2011 I really think you need to give Obama some credit for the brilliancy of a non military diplomatic solution.