Monday, October 20, 2008

Insergents, and the Prospect for Peace Talks

Pajhwok news agency has reported that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of Hizb-e-Islami has claimed the ambush on French soldiers in Sorubi, East of Kabul. According to AFP report, Hekmatyar has made the claim in a video delivered to Pajhwok Agency office in Peshawar. In the Sorubi ambush in 19the August, 10 French soldiers were killed and 21 wounded. This was called the ‘deadliest incident for the French army in 25 years’. The Taliban had claimed the ambush immediately after the battle, but now Hekmatyar has announced that he is responsible for it. Despite declaring Jihad against the foreign troops in Afghanistan back in 2002 Hekmatyar had not personally been taking responsibility for attacks on the Afghan government or international forces in a video record –a typical use of media for Al-Qaeda leaders- in the past.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is the former prime minister to the Islamic State of Afghanistan, and who played a strong role in Jihad against the Soviet Union, joined the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in 2002 after having been fully excluded from the post-Taliban government structure designed at the Bonn conference. Although some believe that Hekmatyar’s insurgents are among the Taliban and have a big role in the insurgency, especially in the areas closer to the capital he seems to have a complicated relation with Taliban. It has not been clear if his men are incorporated into the insurgency movement or are a separate body within it. His recent move to deny the Taliban’s hand in the killing of French soldiers and take its responsibility himself confirms that he preserves his own independent position within the insurgency structure.

Hekmatyar takes responsibility for the attack while the Afghan government is trying to launch a peace negotiation with insurgents through Saudi Arabia’s mediation. The government has been repeatedly asking Hekmatyar and Mullah Omar to put down their arms and join the peace and political process, despite the fact that they are on the CIA black list. But they both have rejected the proposal. Recent reports say that there have been covert talks with Taliban for the past some months, but neither Afghan officials nor the Taliban has admitted it. On 29th of September, Reuters reported that ‘The Taliban leadership on Monday denied a report they were negotiating with the Afghan government to end the war and the insurgents repeated their pledge to keep fighting till foreign troops were expelled from the country’.

Hekmatyar’s act of taking responsibility for attack on French soldiers can be interpreted as re-stating his commitment to the same objective shared by Mullah Omar. Hekmatyar and Mullah Omar’s rejection of peace talks implies that negotiation –though should be encouraged- will not immediately lead to a resolution or significant security improvement in Afghanistan. In order to get a deeper sense of the insurgency and its character we should look at the insurgency in a nuanced way in the sense to see it as comprised of different groups and its structure as fragmented and largely decentralized that is not bound together by a single central authority. In such cases, bringing a leader into the peace process might have very little effect on brining down the insurgency machine.

This situation is presumably realized by insurgency leaders too. It puts the leaders in a position that would make it hard for them to convince sub-insurgent networks in case of negotiation. the insurgents have proved to be tough on leaders who give up their resistance and join the enemy. They have killed many prominent religious authorities who cooperated with the government, and have not followed some senior Taliban authorities who joined the peace process. For some groups within the insurgents accepting peace proposals from a western backed government, which has no legitimacy for them, is almost equal to compromising their faith and ideological commitments. The major challenge in this regard has been that the groups under Mullah Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s leadership have opposed the very legitimacy of an Afghan government. From this position, they have challenged any authority within their groups or outside who have tried to show that there is no problem with the government from the view point of religion.

Last week, President Karzai said to AFP that he had asked Saudi Arabia’s king as the leader of the Muslim world to mediate a peace talk with insurgents in Afghanistan. The success of this initiative seems to be very unlikely too. This is partly due to the decentralized structure of Islam as a social and political system that allows for fragmentation in it in terms of authority. But in regard to militant Islamic groups in particular, this kind of mediation is very unlikely to work out as the insurgents have never come under a central authority like Saudi Arabia’s king. Further, Islamic militants’ perception of Saudi’s king as an ally of the western countries, who has no authority before them, makes the perspective for the initiative very gloomy.

The unclear relation of insurgents with religious authorities or leaders makes it very hard to determine whether a peace negotiation through authorities’ mediation would help the security situation to improve. Further, for leaders like Mullah Omar and Hekmatyar, it is in their strategic interest not to come along with the government’s peace proposals. They see the peace proposal by the government and the international society as showing the government and its backers’ frustration rather than giving a signal of good intention towards them. They might even take the proposal as sign of gradual die out of the government and victory for themselves- a perception that was widespread among Jihadi groups throughout1989-92 when the communist regime was pushing for a national reconciliation program, but they rejected and fought till the collapse of Dr. Najeebullah’s government.

It would be unrealistic to say that the current insurgency would lead to a similar break down of the state like the one that communist regime faced because of many differences between the two circumstances such as insurgents’ technical capacity and scope of popular support, but the continuation of insurgency puts the government in a far challenging situation that can consequently lead to a popular frustration and lose of capital for the Afghan state. A double strategy of negotiation and building up of the military capacity to aggressively target insurgents seem to be a temporary option for the Afghan government until changes in the internal circumstances bring up new opportunities. However, a regional anti-insurgency strategy needs to be developed in longer turn to deal with the problem.

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