By David Nordell
An unusual international conference was due to open in London this morning. Its aim: to raise a $500mn fund to buy off the Taliban gunmen fighting the British army in southern Afghanistan, as part of Britain’s exit strategy from that country.
According to the report in the London ’Times,’ the intention of the many international delegations taking part in the conference is to raise money for President Hamid Karzai to pay Taliban leaders to reintegrate their followers into mainstream Afghani life: the money would supposedly be used to pay for projects and infrastructure that would allow the young men currently fighting among the Taliban ranks to find jobs as guards and in agriculture, instead of fighting the government.
Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, was quoted as saying that "the overwhelming majority of these people are not ideological supporters of Mullah Omar and al-Qa’eda .... Based on interviews with prisoners, returnees, experts, there must be at least 70 per cent of these people who are not fighting for anything to do with these causes."
But can this strategy work, or is the belief that the majority of Taliban fighters are only
there because they have nothing else to do and no alternative source of income just self-delusion?
The ’Times’ quoted the Taliban’s own website as rejecting the move, saying that they were not fighting for "money, property and position; but for Islam and to end the foreign military presence."
Hypothetically, they could be holding out for better terms and conditions than the $500mn currently being considered. But even if this were the case, could Karzai actually deliver on the plan? His regime is a byword for corruption, even after all the billions of dollars in aid funds and the tremendous involvement of international bodies, foreign governments and armies in trying to rebuild the country. It’s no accident that one of the two authors of the book ’Failed States,’ a trenchant analysis of how even generous foreign aid can rebound in countries like Afghanistan to produce even more corruption, is the country’s former finance minister, Dr. Ashraf Ghani, who unfortunately failed ignominiously in the recent presidential election, not least because of the corruption he has tried so hard to fight. And although there have been all sorts of initiatives to raise profitable cash crops in Afghanistan to replace the opium poppies that satisfy most of the West’s heroin habit, the fact remains that a great deal of the Taliban’s income comes from smuggling drugs across the totally porous border into Pakistan.
On the contrary, it would probably be wiser to take the Taliban at their word and to rethink this initiative before any money is committed by the donor states gathered in London. With the poor controls offered by Karzai’s government, it is almost certain that at least some of the money will end up paying for more weapons, training and infrastructure for Taliban operations. And if this is part of the British exit strategy, so that there are no more British troops left in Helmand province to fight the insurgents and prevent their expansion, both within the Afghani body politic and perhaps outside as well, then the history books of 50 years from now will most probably be analysing how the free world was stupid enough to pay for Taliban’s eventual takeover of Afghanistan, after so much blood was spilled to free the country of them.
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