Negotiating With Taliban Will Do More Harm Than Good

From the moment I heard that President Barack Obama is thinking he may be able to treat the Taliban like the U.S. handled Sunni shaikhs and tribal elders in Iraq, I didn’t like it.

Many Sunnis in Iraq were not long-time sympathizers with the likes of al-Qaeda and its twisted view of Islam and nihilistic world view.  Sure, many of them threw in their lot with al-Qaeda in Iraq, but at the time I believe that was perhaps an action rooted in self preservation.  The U.S. took out the despotic Saddam Hussein regime and in the process created a vacuum where the Shia majority began having its way with the Sunni minority.  It was retribution in large part for the Sunni’s own political subjugation of the Shia and Kurds for decades.  By the time of the “Surge” and General David Petraeus’ more effective counter-insurgency tactics, the Iraqi Sunni flirtation with al-Qaeda was already losing steam.  Many of the tribal elders were ready to work with U.S. military and civilian leaders to rid themselves of the terrorists. Again, these Sunnis could perhaps be described as more passionate about their tribal affiliations and regionalism than to the specific Islamic theology which al-Qaeda bases its terror campaigns on.

The Taliban are altogether different.  The Taliban actually ran their own state for a time according to a fundamentalist view of Islam and Shari’a laws which forbid the participation of women and girls in society, outlawed cultural expression, and turned education into the madrasa system where boys learn little more than rote memorization of the Koran and are programmed for violent jihad.  There were public executions for those who did not conform and rape and pillage tactics used to spread their “government” throughout Afghanistan.

Of course, by early 2002, U.S. and Northern Alliance forces toppled the Taliban’s regime in Kabul.  The Talib, however, merely melted into the background and across the border into Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Northwest Frontier Provinces.  In Afghanistan people were liberated, girls began to go to school again, the U.S. and our allies built those schools and things were perhaps going to be different.  Enter the Iraqi War and Afghanistan became for a time a backwater.

We backslid.

Anyone who votes in this country or cares about our South Asian entanglements should watch a Frontline World Documentary which aired this past week.  Called, Children of the Taliban, it takes viewers on the ground in the FATA where the Taliban is not only hiding out, they are taking over.  Here in the states we are fairly aware that Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters slip across the Af-Pak border to raid and sometimes re-exert control over swaths of Afghani real estate.  They leave burned schools and the headless corpses of those who resist in their wake.  What we might not realize is that they are now also focusing their political sights on Pakistan.  The FATA and Northwest Provinces are no longer merely hiding places.  The Talib are also at work there taking over villages, winning new recruits and luring a new generation of young Pakistani boys into those madrassas.

Many of these places being taken over are the Wild West according to our standards.  What they are becoming is Afghanistan pre-9/11 only now on the territory of a fragile state with nuclear weapons.  The documentary also reports that the Taliban are gaining ground in some of Pakistan’s major cities not located on its fringe.  This is scary as hell and not just for ordinary Pakistanis.

The Taliban cannot be “negotiated” with.  There is no place in the 21st century for their world view and especially for their method of ruling through violence.  Negotiation with some Taliban may gain us brief respites in the level of violence in Af-Pak, but the moment we turn our backs, these bastards will be right back to their evil ways.