12/26/12 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today is Jonathan S. Landay, reporter for McClatchy Newspapers at McClatchyDC.com.
And there are a few important articles in question for today's interview.
First of all, Afghanistan peace plan would increase Pakistan's role.
Pakistan-Afghanistan moving ahead on peace plan that cuts U.S. peace role.
And there's this other one by Saeed Shah, also at McClatchy, Fear Spurs New Drive for Talks with Afghan Taliban.
Very important stuff.
Welcome, I guess, back to the show, Jonathan.
Been a while?
Yes, it has.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And as always, it's very important work that you're doing here.
It looks like you have your hands on a draft peace process roadmap.
Does that sound as good as it sounds?
Well, I do have my hands on a draft, yes.
And if this was a perfect world, which, unfortunately, it's not, this would be a great thing.
But, unfortunately, I think there's a lot of serious potential problems with this plan that could derail it very easily.
All right, so now we're really talking about very early stages of any kind of negotiation here, right, talks toward the holding of talks, and yet they do already sort of have a, well, as it's called in the title here, a roadmap, some kind of plan or goal, something general enough that people could agree going in that maybe it's something that they could agree to?
It's early days, as you note.
We haven't even, as far as we know, any senior Taliban leaders who are prepared to enter negotiations, none that hold any sway.
They haven't been identified.
And beyond that, there are other serious problems with the way that this proposal has been put together, in terms of the willingness of the Taliban to participate, in that they have consistently said that they will not enter negotiations until all foreign troops have left Afghanistan.
And yet, according to this roadmap, those negotiations, the negotiations that this roadmap envisions would actually begin while U.S. troops were still in the country, and this would be in the second half of the coming year.
That's just but one of the problems.
Well, and that is a big one.
And yet, I guess I think I picked up the gist of this, too, is that the Pakistani government has decided that the Americans really are leaving, and it's time for us to go ahead and play some cards here and get the show on the road and get things moving.
So perhaps that same motivation could animate the Taliban's behavior as well, that, you know what, even if they're still here, they are going, and so maybe we should go ahead and throw in?
No, I don't think that's quite true.
The Taliban have no real incentive at this point to negotiate.
They know the Americans are going.
There's no question about that whatsoever.
And therefore, in fact, they've known that since President Obama gave his speech on the surge in 2009.
They've known exactly where this has been going.
And so they have absolutely no incentive to negotiate.
The idea of the American strategy was that there would be such enormous military pressure put on the Taliban that they would embrace the peace talks that the Obama administration was looking to try and get started.
Well, that effort collapsed in March when the Taliban said, No, we're not going to participate.
We have no reason.
We don't trust the Americans.
And therefore, as I said, at this point, they have no incentive to negotiate at all because they know that the American troops are leaving.
Well, so maybe this is just an exercise in the limits of Pakistani influence over the Taliban and Afghanistan if they're saying, Hey, come to the table, and the Taliban aren't even answering.
That's right.
And I think it's wishful thinking.
It's where the Afghan government and the Pakistani government would like to see this go.
And when you say Pakistani government, let's stress that we're not really talking about the civilian part of the Pakistani government.
We're talking about the Pakistani army, which controls Pakistan's national security and foreign policy.
And so they believe they've been telling their American interlocutors that they can bring the Taliban to the table, and yet they've not been able to do that.
There's no proof at this point of certainty that they're going to be able to do that.
And my understanding is there are a lot of people within the American government who have serious doubts that they can do that.
The Pakistanis for a long time have had this idea that they could manage, as they like to say, the, quote, good Taliban, unquote.
That would be the Afghan Taliban, while fighting the bad Taliban, which are their own insurgents.
The problem being, though, that if the Pakistanis try to put too much pressure on the Afghan Taliban to negotiate, they could very well decide to stop being the good Taliban and join up with their Pakistani brethren, in which case you'd have an even more serious problem on your hands in Pakistan's border regions and inside Afghanistan.
So it sounds like nobody has very strong cards to play when it comes to these guys at all.
That's absolutely correct.
And the fact is that, I mean, these guys may decide that it's in their interest to get a, you know, that they might be able to get some kind of a deal that gets them a considerable amount of power through some kind of power-sharing agreement, and that's what this plan calls for.
It calls for, among other things, offering the Taliban non-elected positions in every level of the Afghan government, which in effect would give them political and economic control of the eastern and southern regions of Afghanistan, which are their homeland.
They would get, I mean, if you believe this, they would get not only posts in the central government of Afghanistan, including cabinet positions, but they would get posts all over, at every level, and that would mean the governorships, that would mean district governors, that would mean police chiefs, that would mean administrators on the local level, and that might be enough to maybe entice them to negotiate.
And the other thing that you don't know is whether or not they might do so just to get their nose under the tent, or get inside the tent, and then, you know, after some time, say we're not happy with the way that the constitution is, we want a more Islamic constitution, and sooner or later you end up with a renewed civil war.
Yeah, I mean, that's what I was thinking, that maybe there was enough, you know, as far as care being offered in this plan, to entice them to go ahead and, hey, you could have all of this without fighting for it anymore, and have the full backing of the Pakistanis, and retaking the south and the east, as it says here, and getting all these things.
But then again, the way you describe it now, it really just smells like blood in the water.
This is just desperation on the part of Hamid Karzai.
He wants to make Mullah Omar his vice president now or something.
Why should they settle for anything?
Well, you know, I don't know if it's much desperation as it is recognition that he's got to get this, you know, that the train is leaving the station in the form of the American withdrawal, and the fact that, you know, there's a vacuum here because the American effort to do this failed.
And so the only sort of game in town that's left in town is this idea that perhaps the Afghan government, Karzai, working with the Pakistani army and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, their main espionage service, could put together some kind of a deal in that the Pakistanis allegedly have considerable influence over the Taliban leadership, which has sanctuaries on its soil, and may be able to deliver them.
And Karzai, who at this point controls the levers of the Afghan government, but I think that it's a pretty shaky idea at this point, and I don't see any reason to think that it might be successful.
Now, I don't know if this even really matters all that much.
I guess it sort of does.
Are we talking about Mullah Omar when we talk about the Taliban here, or is he even alive anymore?
Listen, the Taliban are not, you know, they're not a monolithic structure.
They have factions within the Taliban that are based on, to some extent, on where people come from, their localities, and the super-tribes that dominate, I call them super-tribes, the two main tribes, the two tribes of the Pashtun people.
You have the Hilzai tribes, which are kind of sort of the mountain, people from the mountains, sort of the lower end of the economic scale, and then you have the Durranis, and the Durranis are, Karzai comes from the Durrani tribe, the royal family of Afghanistan are from the Durrani side of the Pashtuns, and so is a man by the name of Mullah Baradar.
Now, Mullah Baradar was a member of the Taliban leadership, Shura, the ruling council, who was taken prisoner by the Pakistanis several years ago because it appeared that he was ready to start doing some talking with his Durrani brother, Hamid Karzai.
The Pakistanis did not want that to happen, they do not want to lose control, they want to maintain some kind of control or leverage within the peace process, so they arrested Mullah Baradar, and the thought is that perhaps, I mean, the Afghans would like to get him released, because they see him as being a guy who they could negotiate with.
The thing is, though, the dominant faction, at least within the Quetta Shura now, is led by Mullah Omar, and they are the Gilzai Pashtuns, and so, you know, it's hard to say whether or not, you know, if you get Mullah Omar to come over to negotiate, and I think that's a huge stretch, whether or not you're going to get every Taliban leader.
And then you have, of course, you have two other major groups involved here.
You have the Hezb-e-Islami faction, which is controlled by a longtime Pakistani favorite by the name of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
He's not as strong as the Taliban, but he controls some significant pieces of territory.
His people are in and around the Kabul region.
And then you have the Haqqani Network, run by, titularly anyway, Jalaluddin Haqqani, an old leader of the guerrilla war against the Soviets, whose network is very powerful in parts of eastern Afghanistan and south Waziristan, north Waziristan, sorry, on the Pakistani side of the border.
His network is run effectively by his son, Sirajuddin, and they've been declared a terrorist group by the United States.
So how does the United States support peace negotiations with a group that it's got on its list of international terrorist organizations?
There's a lot of uncertainty in this whole thing.
Well, it seems like you are pretty certain about the withdrawal, right?
Yes.
I think that you will see all U.S. combat forces, regular combat forces, leave Afghanistan, and maybe even earlier than most people believe, because this debate is going on within the American government over the pace of the withdrawal and how many people are going to come out.
And I think that the advocates of an earlier withdrawal may well prevail.
I don't think that the proposal to put American trainers and special forces in after 2014 has been solidified and decided on.
We're hearing numbers all over the place from anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000.
And so there's that debate going on as well.
So will we see a complete American withdrawal?
I don't know.
We might well see that, because don't forget that after 2014, the continued presence of American troops in Afghanistan, be they trainers or special forces whose mission would be to go after al-Qaeda, will depend on the conclusion of an agreement between the Karzai government and the United States government that governs the legal grounds on which these troops remain in Afghanistan, kind of what their mission would be, how many there are, where they would be based.
And that agreement, they've only just started negotiating that agreement.
It's known as the Status of Forces Agreement, a SOFA.
And right now, if Karzai, which he is, I believe, is insisting that American troops be subject to Afghan law after 2014 and not have the special statuses they have now where they're subjected to the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, American jurisprudence, that could be a deal killer.
It was the deal killer in Iraq, let's not forget, when the Iraqi government insisted that any American troops that remained would be subject to Iraqi law.
That was the end of that, and all of the troops came home.
And that same thing could happen in Afghanistan as well.
Although Karzai needs this a lot more than Maliki did, right?
Unless he has some kind of peace agreement, but yes, I think that's true.
The other thing that he's going to need, and the Pakistanis as well, is some kind of mechanism to monitor compliance with any kind of peace plan, if they get that far, a peace agreement, as well as enforcement.
If there are any groups who try to violate, who refuse to uphold their part of the deal, I mean, how are you going to deal with that?
You need to have a mechanism to deal with that, and I suspect that the one that would be preferable to Karzai and the Pakistanis would be an American mechanism that would maybe comprise, for the most part, military observers.
You know, guys whose job it is to observe compliance with any peace agreement.
You know, Afghanistan and Pakistan have a very dismal historic record when it comes to upholding peace agreements.
There was an agreement between Pakistan and the Soviets when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, and that didn't last as long as the ink was wet on the paper.
So, you know, it's really early days, and the hurdles that face this particular effort are quite considerable.
Well, now, it seems to me like leaving six or ten thousand or something like that is a recipe for disaster, right?
You've got to leave, if you're leaving that many, you've got to double that in order to have force protection for the first half, right?
No, you'd use contractors for that.
That could be a disaster, yes.
But, I mean, I think that there would be a great, large number of contractors who would support American forces.
Yeah.
I don't know, I guess when I was a kid, there was no war, but the last war ended with a bunch of people fleeing, hanging on to the skids of the U.S.
A lot of helicopters, and there are a lot of people who are afraid of that kind of scenario in Afghanistan, absolutely.
Yeah.
All right, now, so, let's see, we talked about this a little more than two years ago, when they were trying to kind of do a feint and get some, try to see if they could break off some nicer Taliban from the meaner Taliban, and that kind of thing, and it didn't really work out so well.
But you really portrayed the situation then, as America's stuck in this situation, very, very, very damned if we do or if we don't, if we stay or if we leave.
We are causing terrible problems that are going to have terrible consequences, and if we leave, those consequences and other things are going to all hell break loose, too.
Yeah, I mean, you're talking about a scenario, I mean, the worst case scenario, of course, is that the Taliban do not adhere, that no one adheres to any kind of peace agreement, and you get yourself a civil war on steroids, given the amount of weaponry the United States has poured in.
And the main bulwark against the Taliban, of course, is the U.S.
-trained Afghan National Army.
But, you know, this is an army that's not going to put its life on the line to defend Hamid Karzai and his family and their network of corruption.
And so, you know, it's an army that is divided along ethnic, comprised of various ethnic groups, and so the potential for the army to implode along ethnic lines is quite considerable.
Beyond that, you have to think about the question of whether or not, should the Taliban return to power in, just say, a part of Afghanistan, their southern and eastern bases, where, you know, I mean, their heartlands.
The question you have to ask then is, what will they do in terms of when al-Qaida, but more than al-Qaida, when the Pakistani Taliban and Pakistani Islamist groups come over to the Afghan side of the border, looking for sanctuary from which to fight the Pakistani government.
I mean, that is the ultimate nightmare for the Pakistani army and the Pakistani government, which is kind of a reversal of what you have now, where you have the Taliban operating out of sanctuaries in Pakistan.
If you have the Taliban return to power in the east and south of Afghanistan, then you potentially have sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which the Pakistani insurgents can operate.
And so, you know, that is the ultimate nightmare scenario.
Yeah, well, it sure sounds like a nightmare.
Although, you know, I don't know, I guess, you know, one of the other things we talked about last time is, I guess you thought that, well, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the way I understood it, you really thought that a great deal of this depends on India and Iran and, I guess, a little bit less so Russia and China, but that it's really going to be, and of course Pakistan, it's really all about the foreign states around there working out some kind of deal that, you know, I guess basically the goal is to try to work out a deal before NATO leaves that would have power more or less where it would be without us, right?
So there won't be a big turnover in power as soon as we go.
I think the one country that matters the most in all of this is India.
I'm not sure that Iran is a huge factor, as big a factor as people like to make out.
I think the bigger factor is India and the question of whether or not it might be prepared to, for a scenario of the kind I just painted for you where the Taliban come back to power and you have Pakistani extremist groups that then take sanctuary in Afghanistan, in parts of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, and these groups including, possibly including Islamist guerrillas whose purpose, whose goal is fighting India.
The India control of the Indian side of the Kashmir region.
These groups, these are groups that have staged some very, very serious attacks inside India.
You had the Mumbai attack, you have the attack on the Indian parliament, and you have an ongoing low-level guerrilla war up in, on the Indian side of Kashmir.
The Indian government is not going to sit by and watch these Pakistani extremist groups set up new bases inside of Afghanistan from which to train and launch missions into its side of the border of Kashmir.
Yes, so India, you know, India is a major factor.
Let's not also forget that India is the second largest bilateral donor of aid to Afghanistan, somewhere in the neighborhood, it's pledged somewhere, committed somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.2 billion.
And the Pakistanis don't want to see that.
They don't want to see India with interest, with influence, with considerable influence over government in Kabul.
And so that too remains a major factor.
If there is this implosion, as I've talked about, where you have the Taliban in some kind of peace agreement breaking down and a return to the pre-U.S. invasion civil war where you had the Taliban, which is overwhelmingly almost exclusively Pashtun, fighting what was known as the Northern Alliance, which is comprised of mostly, dominated by ethnic minorities, the Indians would, under that scenario, most likely resume the support they were giving the Northern Alliance before the United States intervened in Afghanistan, and you'd end up having a proxy war in Afghanistan between India and Pakistan.
You know what I don't understand, though?
What's the American interest in inviting the Indians to participate in even some military training and other kind of relations with them?
It's trying to strike a balance whereby they're saying, you know, to Pakistan, we recognize that you have a major interest in Afghanistan and sort of the post-American political setup, but India does too, and so you can't sort of monopolize.
We don't think you should be able to monopolize foreign influence in Kabul.
There needs to be a balance.
Beyond that, as I said, India also has this enormous economic interest in Afghanistan.
Particularly, an Indian company won the contract, won the bid, for what is estimated to be the world's largest or second-largest untapped iron deposit in central Afghanistan, in a place called Hajigak, and it's a huge contract.
The Indians won that, and it's potentially worth billions of dollars.
And so the Indians have an interest in being able to have representation in Kabul.
That's something that the Pakistanis are not going to want to see.
It just seems like all this time the Americans have been even encouraging more and more Indian intervention there, and it just seems like a provocation to the Pakistanis, who we would like for them to put pressure on the Taliban to stop killing our guys and all of that.
It's not just the Americans that have been doing this.
Karzai himself, don't forget, I think it was earlier this year, signed a strategic agreement, partnership agreement, with the Indians.
Karzai wants it, too.
Karzai wants to have some kind of counterbalance to Pakistani influence in Afghanistan.
Don't forget, most Afghans detest Pakistan.
They blame Pakistan more than any other actor for the more than 30 years of war and violence that they've had.
They see Pakistan as being their greatest threat.
And so Karzai has been looking to try and create this balance as well in Afghanistan's foreign relations.
And he's taken this money from the Indians, and they're sending Afghan, I believe, police and perhaps even army officers for training in India.
India has a very large interest.
Don't forget, Pakistan, before the Taliban were in power, they did allow Kashmiri rebel groups to set up camps in their country.
And there was an incident in which an Indian airline flight was hijacked to Afghanistan, and the Indians were forced to release some pretty bad characters in order to get their plane and their people back.
So the Indians' interest is not to destroy or surround and destabilize Pakistan, as the security establishment loves to say, but India's interest is to try and contain Pakistani misbehavior in the region that is to the detriment of India.
All right.
I'm sorry that we have to leave it there.
I could ask you about Central Asia all day, Jonathan, but I sure appreciate your time.
Sure.
Anytime, Scott.
Everybody, that's Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
Afghanistan peace plan would increase Pakistan's role.
Pakistan, Afghanistan, moving ahead on peace plan that cuts U.S. peace role.
Take a look at that, please.
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