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Talking to the Taliban

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Could diplomacy be the answer to ending the war in Afghanistan? What would it take bring the Taliban to the table? Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Michael Semple, who spent 20 years working in Afghanistan and has tried to think through the idea of talking to the Taliban.

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MARCO WERMAN: Another idea that’s thrown around as a potential resolution to the war in Afghanistan is talking to the Taliban, but what does that really mean?  Michael Semple has tried to think through that idea.  He’s worked in Afghanistan for more than 20 years in development, and is now a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights.

MICHAEL SEMPLE: Broadly there are two sets of approaches to talking to the Taliban. One is within the realm of counterinsurgency, and the other is in the realm of politics. There is a lot of thinking going on in both of them.  I rather favor shifting towards doing it through politics.

WERMAN: When you say that, do you mean bringing the Taliban into Afghanistan’s political mainstream as perhaps a political party?

SEMPLE: It’s first of all recognizing that the Taliban are part of Afghanistan’s political reality, and at the moment their movement is the key force in the armed struggle against the government.  But they do include many people who have played a critical role in the past and as far as I can see it, the only way forward to stability in Afghanistan is when we get out of the armed struggle and into the political process.

WERMAN: How do you do this without selling out the existing Afghan allies, I mean if one can consider how many Hamid Karzai an existing ally.

SEMPLE: If you just first of all, it’s a step back a bit and look at the overall political logic about what everybody is talking about what everybody is talking about.  You know, what actually unites Harmid Karzai and other parts of the Afghan political elite, President Barack Obama and the leaders of the western countries who’ve got troops in Afghanistan, and Umar and the other leading insurgents.  What unites these three apparently very different sects is they all want an end the western combat mission in Afghanistan.  So you are not talking about a  zero sum gape.  We’re talking about ostensibly in terms of what they say they’re after, everybody being broadly after the same thing.  In terms of the broad picture and there is hope for coming up with some kind of accommodation between these and different protagonists without necessarily selling out on fundamental goals.

WERMAN: Is that kind of the theme that the U.S. would approach the Taliban with?  “Look, you guys know that you want us out of here.”  And so this is what you have in common.  You should unite over that, and that seems like a weird thing for the U.S. to be saying.

SEMPLE: Well, I don’t think the …  I don’t think the U.S. is going to, you know, whenever they do talk to the Taliban is going to put it quite that way.  I use this just to encourage people to say the actual engagement is not futile.  It serves a purpose.  I think that whenever there is some kind of engagement between the U.S. and the Taliban, the U.S. will first of all spell out its real bottom line, which is wanting to ensure that there are concrete guarantees that Al Qaeda or no other terrorist group should be able to use Afghanistan for subverting international security and that’s basically our bottom line.

WERMAN: How do you get the Taliban to agree to that bottom line?  How do you go about separating Al Qaeda from the Taliban when the ethical code of the Taliban says you must protect someone who’s asked you for protection?

SEMPLE: I think the top leadership of the Taliban while at the moment they clearly have a strong working relationship with al Qaeda, the political ones amongst them are well aware of the cost which they incur by the continued association with al Qaeda.  So the challenge of separating them is basically I’m giving them the chance and seeing if they take it.  Of course, they have to use rhetoric in Afghanistan.  They have this wonderful ability to come up with extremely convincing moral cases to justify the action that politically they’ve decided they have to take.  When the circumstances are right and the Taliban are ready for this decisive break with Al Qaeda, they will present a wonderful case which demonstrated their Jihadi duty to do so.

WERMAN: Why do you think the Taliban would want to talk now when it seems they’re doing pretty well?

SEMPLE: Unfortunately, there already has been a military escalation on all sides, and there are very different assessments as to where they will get to end this.  The alignment of the stars is not actually right for the full negotiated settlement to happen just now.  I think that we are some distance away from near a negotiated settlement with either a large and/or a chunk of the Taliban or if they had the whole movement.  That’s not to say … You know, it is still important to keep alive the prospect of achieving this, but I think that more things are going to play out on the battlefield before we actually see real progress in negotiations.

WERMAN: Michael Semple, a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights.  Thank you very much for your time today.

SEMPLE: Okay.

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