Moving along…My research for most of this last year (and the second half of 2011) has been on the connections between Afghanistan and the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia (security mostly). Apparently that was not the best choice for a postdoctoral career trajectory. None of my postdoctoral fellowship applications were successful so I have been cast out of academia to wander Central Asia. I am currently unemployed in Tajikistan, which is actually OK since the locals understand the plight of the unemployed quite well.

So, in lieu of an informative blog post I will provide an update on my publications. First of all, my book on Tajikistan should be out early this year. It’s co-authored with someone smarter than me and it should help to fill a few holes in the scholarship on Tajikistan. Unless the title gets vetoed, it will be published as “Tajikistan: A Social and Political History.” We are not fans of clever titles.

Next up is a journal publication:

‘Muslim Soldiers in Non-Muslim Militaries at War in Muslim Lands: The Soviet, American and Indian Experience,’ Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2012).

If you have an institutional subscription, you can get a copy here. If not, send me an email and I will reply with a PDF of the article.

If and when I return to wherever it is that is home, expect the blogging and critical commentary to resume.

Here’s a picture of some Tajik snow (and my future home if I don’t find work soon):

The Tajikistan Scholars Wiki is a space for scholars and researchers of Tajikistan, both within and outside of the country, to come together and share ideas on research, resources, events and other noteworthy items in order to create a community of people interested in the country. Generally, members are at the Master’s, PhD, postdoc and professor level.

This private wiki, besides being a forum to connect researchers online, is also used to bring together researchers in-country. As such, there have been meetings arranged in Dushanbe and there are plans to continue doing so in the future. Previous meeting were a success and proved an excellent forum for members to exchange research ideas and offer each other advice.

If you are a grad student or professor who does research on Tajikistan you may find membership quite useful. Information on joining can be found here.

Tajikistan Research Bibliography 2012 (PDF)

In other news, I haven’t been blogging very much. This pattern will continue as long as I am in Tajikistan. Please accept this photo of a tree on the shores of Iskandarkul as compensation:

“Instability in Tajikistan? The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Afghanistan Factor,” OSCE Academy – GCSP International Security Programme Central Asia Security Policy Briefs #7. Download PDF.

Earlier papers in this series can be found here.

The Afghanistan Analyst Conflict Bibliography (February 2012). Download PDF.

The relevant sections of the bibliography have been updated since the last regular version was released. There is a full description in the introduction to the bibliography.

Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal From Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011)

Artemy Kalinovsky has worked his LSE dissertation on the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan into a book that is both very readable and a valuable scholarly contribution to the literature on Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and International Relations. The book’s focus – the decision-making process behind the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan – is obviously relevant to the contemporary situation in Afghanistan as the American leadership decides how to attempt to manage its exit. Kalinovsky’s research question is stated clearly:

“Why did it take the Soviet Union so long to bring its troops home? After all, shortly after the invasion Soviet leaders realized that the intervention was becoming a quagmire, with serious costs for their relationship with the rest of the world.”

Kalinovsky helpfully, and honestly, describes the limited scope of his book at the very beginning. He states that A Long Goodbye is “first and foremost a study of Soviet decision making.” So if you are looking for a book on the mujahideen, the effect of the war on Afghan society, Soviet counter-insurgency, or on American and Pakistani military and covert involvement, then you will need to look elsewhere. These subjects are of course discussed, but not with the level of detail as is dedicated to the analysis on Soviet decision making.

Moving back to the book’s thesis, Kalinovsky writes that

“The single most important reason that Soviet leaders delayed the decision to withdraw for as long as they did is that they continued to believe the USSR could help stabilize Afghanistan, build up the Afghan armed forces, and make the Kabul government more acceptable to the people. This is hardly the only reason, however. Soviet leaders found it difficult to disengage from the Afghan conflict because they feared undermining Moscow’s status as a defender of Third World countries against encroaching neo-colonialism.”

Making comparisons to America’s present engagement with Afghanistan is far too easy, with just some alteration of the last sentence to replace “Third World” and “neo-colonialism” with the administration’s favored terms – perhaps “democratic” and “terrorism,” respectively.

The bulk of the analysis focuses on Gorbachev’s attempts during the latter part of the 1980s to secure an agreement on the terms of withdrawal from the United States and Pakistan. Of course, America was playing hardball with a force they knew was going to withdraw anyways, and Pakistan was Pakistan (e.g., “Pakistan refused to admit that it was responsible for any interference.”). Eventually Gorbachev had to settle for an agreement in the framework of the Geneva Accords of April 1988 wherein he did not get the hoped-for concession from America to stop supplying the mujahideen and acquiesce to an Afghan government run by the current President Najibullah. Pakistan did agree to stop delivering weaponry to the mujahideen, but it soon became clear that the Accords were just a piece of paper to the relevant forces inside Pakistan. Islamabad of course did not stop the “flow of arms.” For Gorbachev, “the blatant violation of the accords by Pakistan was an embarrassment, since it revealed that the accords were really little more than a fig leaf.”

And what of America’s future fig leaf? What is remarkable about the current situation is the inability of the US to find anyone to negotiate with. The Soviets were able to talk to people who they knew were in charge, whether it be Pakistani leaders, American diplomats, CIA officers or envoys, or even forces on the ground such as Ahmed Shah Massoud. The US has no such luxury today and instead scrambles for contacts with mid-level envoys of the major insurgent groups that may represent only themselves and, in one notorious case, may be an outright fraud (e.g., the “Quetta Shopkeeper”). Also a major difference is that the Soviet Union was able to negotiate with the funders and supporters of the insurgency. The US and Afghanistan have clearly been unable to find negotiating partners. And even if they could, funding for the insurgency comes from so many diverse sources including, as Hillary Clinton testified to the US Senate in December 2009, US Department of Defense contracts. For the United States, there is no guarantor partner that could stop funding from reaching the insurgency.

A further comparative analysis of failures can be extracted from Kalinovsky’s description of the Soviet management of their war in Afghanistan. He notes the failure of the Soviet troop surge of 1985 and of an attempt at “reconciliation” with the insurgents in 1987, failures with parallels to current trends too obvious to merit further mention. More importantly, he asks “How did those who came to dominate decision making on Afghanistan reach their individual conclusions about what policy should be followed in that country?” He finds several factors, including “Unjustifiably positive reporting was a problem in many areas of Soviet bureaucracy, and it almost certainly contributed to Soviet leaders’ misunderstanding of the situation in Afghanistan.” The result was that leaders from 1980 until well into the second half of the decade admitted that there were problems but claimed that progress was being made overall. Furthermore, he finds that interagency rivalry in Soviet organs resulted in opposed proxies in Afghanistan, with groups like the KGB supporting their own proxy in KhAD (the Afghan intelligence agency) even if it was not in the best interests of the USSR. Added to this were the calculations by members of the Soviet Politburo. Potential successors for various positions did not want to admit failure as they would then take the blame in any power struggle.

“Unjustifiably positive reporting?” Sounds familiar. Interagency rivalry and the backing of different proxies? The US has definitely done that by backing various power-brokers who are themselves opposed to the Kabul government or whose works degrades its authority and legitimacy. And while the acknowledgment of failure may not hurt US leaders in any Soviet-style politburo wrangling, Obama surely wants to defer the most obvious failure (i.e., a withdrawal that could well be viewed as an American failure) further into the future with presidential elections in mind.

Despite the parallels between the Soviet and American experience, the Soviet decision-making process was driven by much different factors. The Soviet Union was being pushed by its leadership towards an improved relationship with the West, and the war in Afghanistan was seen as an obstacle to that. For the United States, a withdrawal from Afghanistan does not hold the promise of an immediate improvement in relations with any entity as significant as it was for the Soviets. As Kalinovsky argues, the withdrawal was not just about the state of the war in Afghanistan. It was rather more so about a desire for reaping benefits from engagement with the US (e.g., the all-important nuclear weapons issue). Yet the war that Gorbachev called, in February 1986, a “Bleeding Wound,” would involve Soviet troops for another three years. Of course, as Kalinovsky notes, the belief by Gorbachev that he could both withdraw Soviet troops and salvage the friendly Soviet-supported government in Kabul is what caused him to drag out the final decision to withdraw for so long after coming to office in 1985. The second half of the 1980s saw drawn out attempts to negotiate at two levels: on with the US and Pakistan, and at a lower level with the “National Reconciliation” program closer to the grassroots level in Afghanistan. To a certain extent Gorbachev was successful. Soviet forces withdrew in February 1989 and the Afghan government of President Najibullah lasted until April 1992 – outliving the Soviet Union itself.

Kalinovsky’s book is quite readable. Kalinovsky does not burden the reader with obscure academic jargon or with thinly disguised op-ed style writing. In addition, Kalinovsky’s fluency in Russian and his academic training allows him to get deep into Russian archives, memoirs and secondary sources in a way that few other authors could. As a result we now have a much clearer view of Soviet decision-making and a better insight into the current dilemmas faced in Afghanistan. Kalinovsky’s book should be mandatory reading for students, scholars and practitioners who focus on Afghanistan, Soviet diplomatic/military history, American foreign policy, or even on International Relations in general.

Anyways, I’m currently teaching and researching at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. I teach a class on ‘Politics and Security in Central Asia’ for 30 MA students. Teaching just one class gives me time for my research, which is on the “Afghanistan factor” in Central Asia. Basically, does Afghanistan matter to the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia? It’s a security-centric study, and I hope to dedicate the next two years to it. I want to include a detailed social and historical context for the study, and that takes time.

I’m heading back to Australia at the end of this semester and then on to Tajikistan, hopefully for 6 months. I’ll be in Dushanbe for a two month stint and then on to the southern Vakhsh Valley near the Afghan border. After that, I’m not sure. But all my applications for postdoctoral fellowships for fall 2012 include research project proposals geared towards connecting Afghanistan to Central Asia.

My first publication on this theme should be out by next spring, and be focused on northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the IMU, Russia and the US in Central Asia, etc… In other publication news, I turned some old background work on secondary sources into a historical comparative study. The article is “in press,” but it’s available for download:

“State-building, migration and economic development on the frontiers of northern Afghanistan and southern Tajikistan,” Journal of Eurasian Studies. Download PDF.

My future publications will obviously be much more oriented to current issues… However, I’m also working on some long term projects: a book on the Uzbeks (Uzbekistan and Uzbeks outside the country) with a co-author and a book on Tajikistan post-independence. I know, I know – pity the poor publisher that has to read drafts of those books. Hopefully any future book on Afghanistan and Central Asia will be somewhat more marketable.

As for Afghanistan, my focus is strongly back on the north…. like it was six years ago.

Nothing else to say. So here’s a picture of Kyrgyzstan from a recent road trip:

The OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (my current home) has two fellowship positions open for teaching macroeconomics and microeconomics (minimum requirement to teach is a Master’s degree) There will be plenty of time on the side to work on your own research (and the language of instruction is English). Announcement info here:

TWO Teaching and Research Fellowships – OSCE Academy (PDF)

Furthermore, applications are open for scholarships for the Master of Arts in Economic Governance and Development Programme (2012-2013). Scholarships are available for Central Asian and Afghan students. More info here.

Contact info can be found in the link and PDF above. Don’t send me any messages, as I’m not involved in these two programs.

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A Brief History of Negotiating with the Taliban

October 24, 2008.

Should the Afghan government and the international community seek a negotiated settlement with the insurgency? Recently it seems that every second newspaper op-ed on Afghanistan carries the message that negotiating with the Taliban is the best or only option to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan. So I would like to provide the historical context for any potential negotiations with the leadership of the Taliban, particularly its habitual pattern of negotiating in bad faith.

We’ll limit this discussion to domestic and Pakistan-involved negotiations. The ongoing amnesty/reconciliation program whereby Talibs renounce violence and quit the insurgency was openly approved by US senators Bill Frist and Mel Martinez two years ago and recently endorsed by General Petraeus. That’s no secret. In an earlier post I discussed that program as well as the exploratory talks (not negotiations) in Mecca between Afghan government representatives and representatives/proxies for as of yet undefined insurgent groups (rumor mill says Quetta Shura and Hizb-i Islami Hekmatyar, but no mention of Haqqanis or ISI). So, we’ll delimit discussion to commitments made by the Taliban leadership, and their failure to honor them, a pattern that potential negotiators should keep in mind when considering making concessions in exchange for any promise from the Taliban (I’ll skip Hizb in this analysis).

During the 1990s the international community learned quickly that negotiating with the Taliban was anything but straightforward. The negotiations between the Taliban and the UN, NGOs and other members of the international community are well known as having generally been a frustrating and unproductive exercise in futility. Consider Osama bin Laden’s pre-2001 quote: “Our Jihad has two targets. One is America and the other is the Foreign Ministry of the Taliban.”[1] Those were the people with whom the international community often negotiated (and later pointed out as the “moderate” Taliban). The Foreign Ministry of the Taliban was not exactly known as an influential entity. As that is already well known, I’ll address my comments to domestic political negotiations with the Taliban leadership prior to 2001.

Early on the Taliban had shown an apparent eagerness to talk. They had negotiated at the individual level and taken many Khalqi communists into the fold. Hekmatyar, an opponent of the Taliban at the time, claimed that 1600 Khalqis had joined the Taliban, making them a large employer of “reformed” radical communists. The number may be exaggerated, but the presence of Khalqis was well known. However, the Taliban had very short term plans for them: they were needed for their technical military expertise. By 1998 that was no longer required (in my view, because Pakistan ISI officers had replaced them) and they were discarded.[2] The Taliban certainly did not negotiate in good faith with these men at the individual level, a common tactic of marginalizing or discarding short term allies that is by no means confined to Afghanistan.

Speaking of former communists (but not Khalqis), Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek leader of Junbesh, was already wary of the Taliban because of their execution of the former communist leader Najibullah when they captured Kabul.[3] This had a strong effect on him, as it foreshadowed what could be his fate if he surrendered or was captured.[4] The Taliban confirmed these suspicions when they conferred death sentences on Ahmed Shah Massoud, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Dostum.[5] This was at odds with the Pakistani leadership’s strategy at the time to have Dostum remain in control over the north, with minimal Taliban authority over the area, in order to placate Russia and the Central Asian states.[6] However, Pakistan’s attempts in 1995 and 1996 to persuade their Taliban clients to allow Dostum his continued autonomy in the north were a failure, as they refused any suggestion of sharing power there.[7] As a result, Dostum joined Massoud, Rabbani, Karim Khalili, and others in an anti-Taliban alliance known in the Western media as the Northern Alliance.[8]

However, one Uzbek leader, Dostum’s second-in-command Abdul Malik, was persuaded to cooperate with the Taliban. This occurred after he had received guarantees from Pakistan, who sent in ISI officers and diplomats to Mazar to settle the final terms of an agreement (Malik was also motivated by the belief, shared by many, that Dostum was behind his brother’s assassination). The Taliban promised to put Malik in power in the north, until elections could be held, in return for his cooperation. He complied and allowed Taliban troops to go through his defensive positions and into Mazar, the de facto capital of the north, causing Dostum to flee the country.

The terms offered to Malik were never implemented. The Taliban reneged on their agreement almost immediately, and the power-sharing quickly morphed into an unconditional surrender. The Taliban refused to share power with Malik and instead attempted to assign him the minor post of Deputy Foreign Minister (see bin Laden’s quote above). The Taliban did all this despite Pakistani attempts to persuade them to at least renegotiate, if not honor, their agreement. Everything in Mazar fell apart when the Taliban attempted to disarm Hazara militiamen, who knew, based on the previous treatment of Shia Hazaras, what to expect. The short version goes like this: Hazaras fight back, Uzbeks join in, Dostum returns, Taliban heavily defeated, Taliban return the next year, Taliban orgy of rape, murder and torture. The end result for Malik was the destruction of his forces and exile in Iran.[9]

This incident was an obvious final warning to any leader who thought that the Taliban would negotiate in good faith. Massoud took all this into account and never entertained Taliban overtures up until his assassination by al Qaeda.

Tragically for one leader, this lesson had been learned several years earlier during the battle for Kabul. In 1995 Massoud’s forces attacked the Hazara Hizb-i Wahdat positions, resulting in the Shia cleric and political leader Abdul Ali Mazari meeting with and attempting negotiations with the Taliban who were then advancing from the south. While Mazari was a guest or guest-turned-prisoner (depending on the version) of the Taliban, the Akbari faction of Wahdat showed that it was in no mood to surrender its positions and the Taliban had to engage a number of Wahdat militiamen as it entered the city. The sources vary on the story at this point but most agree that the Hazara Shia leader Mazari was killed while in the custody of the Taliban. Either you believe that the elderly Shia cleric was summarily executed, killed while attempting a Rambo-style escape or, as others maintain, you believe that Mazari was put on a helicopter bound for Kandahar, then thrown out when at a sufficient height.[10]

What lessons does this hold for any prospective negotiations today? The Taliban leadership, if one can speak of a single entity (which one really can’t these days), does not feel the need to negotiate honestly with Shia “heretics”, former communist “atheists” and “hypocrite” mujahideen. I think it is safe to put foreign “infidels” and Afghan government “puppets” in that same category. And, most definitely, the Pakistani government has a horrible record of guaranteeing anything in regards to the Taliban.

As for contemporary negotiations, I’ve already offered my skepticism and gone into the details, as have Troy at Abu Muqawama and Josh Foust at Registan. You could also look to Pakistan’s negotiations with their Taliban to gauge what the “Taliban’s” strategy may be. Christine Fair’s excerpted opinion:

Pakistani negotiations with the Taliban have been “ratifications of defeat on the ground.” Without “any ability to verify” Taliban compliance. They were a joke, a separate peace, legitimizing Taliban leaders. In the tribal areas, “the so-called jirgas often held up as a pathway to peace have been fundamentally eviscerated” and replaced by religious and Taliban figures. “I’m dubious, especially in the tribal areas,” that negotiating with the Taliban in Pakistan could be productive, “since their goals are antithetical to the state.”

Most pundits advocating a negotiated political compromise never get beyond merely stating that this conflict cannot be won and therefore a political solution with the Taliban is required. The hypothetical details of any prospective arrangement are very rarely provided. An antedote to these superficial statements can be found in a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid. They advocate, as part of a broader diplomatic initiative, “a political solution with as much of the Afghan and Pakistani insurgencies as possible, offering political inclusion…” But they are cautious about propsective negotiations and any “guarantees” that may be offered:

The guarantees these interlocutors now envisage are far from those required, and Afghanistan will need international forces for security assistance even if the current war subsides. But such questions can provide a framework for discussion.

The entire article is required reading, as the analysis offers many qualifications. The most important, beyond the “guarantees,” deal with the relationship with al Qaeda and the Taliban’s “retrograde social policies.” Clearly Rubin and Rashid are advocating cautious negotiations with elements of the insurgency. But many questions still remain. Some of which were discussed by Josh Foust. The technical details and “what abouts?” still need to be filled in.

The Taliban (Afghan and Pakistani) pattern of behavior will hopefully be in the mind of any negotiator who finds himself opposite a Taliban representative claiming to deliver on the ground in Afghanistan. Assuming those at the negotiating table can actually make their field commanders comply with the political leaderships’ decisions, the Afghan government/coalition would be foolish to offer too much up front.

At the moment there is great speculation about exploratory talks and negotiations, up to and including a comprehensive negotiated settlement. Beyond the issue of the Taliban’s history of neglecting to deliver on agreed terms is this question: why would a force on the rise negotiate honestly and seriously with a force that still appears to be on the decline? I don’t believe in assigning a rigid pattern of behavior to any social/historical entity and then expecting predictions based on that to be completely accurate. Variables, sometimes unseen, can change. However, the recurring pattern of the Taliban failing to honor agreements should instil wariness in any potential negotiator.

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1. Wahid Muzhda, quoted in Robert D. Crews (2008), ‘Moderate Taliban?’, in The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan. Robert D Crews and Amin Tarzi (eds.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 238.

2. Larry Goodson (2001), Afghanistan ’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban, Seattle : University of Washington Press , p. 120.

3.William Maley (1998), ‘Interpreting the Taliban’, in William Maley (ed.) Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban, New York: New York University Press, pp. 10-11.

4. Rieck, Andreas (1997), ‘Afghanistan’s Taliban: An Islamic Revolution of the Pashtuns’, in Orient, Vol. 38, No. 1, p. 137; Sreedhar, Mahendra and Ved (1998), Afghan Turmoil, New Delhi: Himalayan Books, p. 59.

5. Ahmed Rashid (2000), Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, New Haven , CT: Yale University Press, p. 50.

6. Maley, op. cit., pp. 10-11.

7. Ahmed Rashid (1998) ‘Pakistan and the Taliban’, in William Maley (ed.), Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistand and the Taliban, New York: New York University Press, p. 82.

8. Rashid (2000), op. cit., pp. 52-3; Sreedhar, Mahendra and Ved (1998), op. cit., p. 59.

9. Rashid (2000), op. cit., pp. 57-63; Amin Saikal (1998), ‘Afghanistan’s Ethnic Conflict’, Survival, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 114-126., p. 120; Maley (1998), op. cit., p. 11; Angelo Rasanayagam (2003), Afghanistan : A Modern History, London: I.B. Tauris, p. 153; Sreedhar et al (1998), p. 39. See also Human Rights Watch: The Massacre in Mazar-i Sharif.

10. Peter Marsden (2001), Afghanistan : Minorities, Conflict and the Search for Peace, London: Minority Rights Group International , p. 23; Saikal (1998), op. cit., p. 34; Rashid, op. cit., p. 35; Anthony Davis (1998), ‘How the Taliban became a Military Force’, in William Maley (ed.), Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban, New York: New York University Press, pp.56-58.