TEXT-Excerpts-The Afghan tent has room for ex-Taliban
March 31 (Reuters) - Some Taliban insurgents can be split off from the group's hardline Islamist core provided peace efforts forge a credible government and improve security, a renowned Western expert on Afghanistan said. [nLU79873]
Michael Semple, the Irish former deputy head of the European Union mission in Kabul, was speaking on the sidelines of a seminar on Afghanistan at the Clingendael Netherlands Institute of International Relations.
Following is a partial text of the interview.
Q - How realistic is it to want to peel away the people we call Taliban from the so-called hardcore Taliban. Can it be done and does the latest strategy from Obama get us there?
A - It can be done and we do have a few demonstrated examples that prove that it is possible. But also we have to say that it is challenging and it is going to require a lot of things are going to have to be done right if it is going to deliver enough people coming in to be able to make a difference to the overall conflict.
Q - If you send in more U.S. troops, won't that inflame Afghan nationalism and help the al Qaeda propagandists work against the conditions that would allow that process to happen?
A - In the long run it is clear that al Qaeda propagandists depend upon the spectacle of seeing Muslims and Americans fighting. That's what they do their propaganda around. So that anything that contributes to getting away from that is going to help a solution. On the other hand, it is also clear, and that is what is driving the troop surge, that a collapse of security in the south of Afghanistan is not going to aid the cause of reconciliation. And is not going to put anyone into a position where you can discuss a reasonable accommodation of splitting the international jihadists away from those Afghan fighters who are basically interested in national or local issues. And it is necessary to prop up security but it is also necessary to take the job of coming up with a reasonable accommodation and having a credible Afghan government underpinning it. All that does have to be done.
Q - Can you give me an anecdote where you have been involved in the case of a man who may have switched over to the Taliban for purely bread and butter issues but who could come back?
A - There's a very specific example. I've always been interested in how people got into the insurgency. I have talked to a mid-level Talib commander who explained how 'I tried to live at home peacefully in the first three years of the Karzai government. One day I went to town and was stopped at a police checkpost where they stole my mobile phone. When I asked for my mobile phone back, they threw it on the ground and it broke. I went off and joined the Taliban.'
That is a very concrete issue for me of the linkage being proposed in terms of improving the performance of the Afghan police.
Q - Has that man left the Taliban?
A - He's sitting on the fence, waiting to see what will happen.
Q - So is the image that we have, sitting at home in our living rooms in the West, that the Taliban are a monolithic group of Islamic fundamentalists a distortion?
A - Yes, the whole notion of a great war on terror was inadequate to cope with the complexity of Afghanistan, and fundamentally the Taliban movement, like it or not, is an Afghan movement which arose because of things which happened inside Afghanistan. And it was not Afghans who carried out the attacks on New York. It was al Qaeda who were sheltering among those Afghans which is the reason for this fundamental optimism that if handled in the right way it should be possible to peel away those Talibans who are focussed on Afghan issues and who say that we have learned something from the past few years, from those who signed up to the global jihadi agenda who you and I, sitting in our living rooms, have good reason to fear.
Q - You said the current government programme of reconciliation is a masquerade. Could you give some detail about why it is so dysfunctional?
A - Very basically the what I was referring to there was the reconciliation commission which was established in 2005. For a whole series of reasons, the great majority of the people that it has paraded in front of the cameras or reported as having been reconciled were not involved in the insurgency in the first place. If they had actually removed 5,000 foot soldiers from the insurgency it would have been a major achievement. However, unfortunately, they weren't in the insurgency in the first place.
Q - Three years from now what are the chances of having former Taliban people playing a role in the Afghan government - possible, good, bad?
A - Already there are former Taliban senior officials playing a strong positive role in the process. People in Holland are very familiar with that because a mid-level Taliban leader, a former deputy minister, played an extremely positive role as governor in Uruzgan. So it has already happened but on a small scale. There is a significant chance of senior Taliban officials playing a positive role in Afghanistan in the next three years and I can also say that, coming from an Irish perspective where the way that we got peace in Ireland was when (firebrand Protestant cleric) Ian Paisley and (former Irish Republican Army commander) Martin McGuinness went into government together. They had spent their lives fighting each other.
Q - The issue of justice reoccurs in the militancy debate around the world. But isn't it like saying 'Please stop rebelling -- oh, and at the same time, we might put you on trial for things you've done in the past' It's a dilemma isn't it?
A - It has been a lack of justice which has driven recruitment for the Taliban or even just passive tolerance for the Taliban. When you talk to some people who have experienced the more benign aspects of Taliban justice you find that the more benign versions are a bit like the kind of thing you could apply for an Asian development grant to do an access to justice project. Give it a different label from what the Taliban label it and actually that is what you would be doing.
It's local disputes resolution. And this is something that there is a long tradition of in Afghanistan. Over the past 30 years, not just in the Taliban era, when armed groups have tried to organize in an area, one of the first things they do is they start to dispense justice. That's the way the mujahideen spread their influence as well. So when we are talking about justice versus injustice we are talking about the failure of the state to address people's demands for accessible and fair and transparent justice at the local level. The issue about putting lots of murders on trial is a separate issue.
Q - Do women have a lot to fear from a reconciliation scenario involving the Taliban?
A - Women have a lot to hope for from the restoration of security in Afghanistan. Women are big losers in the current situation in Afghanistan where the country seems to be locked into a perpetual conflict and the price of that continuing conflict is lack of access to the basic services that are there on paper but don't exist or that they are not safe in accessing. Women are big losers from the killing of children and family members. So women have a lot to gain from the restoration of stability. However of course there is this key issue of the terms on which that security and stability is restored.
Q - American officials place great emphasise on decoupling elements in Pakistan intelligence from the Taliban. Is that an important thing to have happen?
A - The sooner that the Taliban can be dealt with essentially as Afghan actors inside an Afghan context and as part of an Afghan accommodation, there will be a chance of restoring stability and security. They will have to be decoupled from various adverse influences, they'll have to be decoupled from all forms of external support and basically brought back into an Afghan tent. (Editing by Matthew Jones)
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