What to make of the news that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar"”one of the most vicious of Afghanistan's militants, a former close associate of Osama Bin Laden, and a high-ranking figure on the U.S. list of "specially designated global terrorists""”has offered a 15-point peace plan to President Hamid Karzai?
On one hand, Hekmatyar's faction, Hizb-i-Islami (the Islamic Party), is just the sort of insurgency group that U.S. commanders hope to turn against the Taliban and in support of Karzai's government.
On the other hand, Hekmatyar himself has been so virulently anti-American, so actively opposed to Karzai's rule (his group attempted to assassinate the president in 2002), and"”even by Taliban standards"”so bloodthirsty in his methods that the overture must be taken with at least three cups of salt.
On yet another hand (and Afghan politics are so down-the-rabbit-hole complicated that a half-dozen or so hands are needed to canvass the possibilities), if it turns out that Hekmatyar cannot really be flipped"”if his overture proves to be nothing but a power grab"”then it raises doubts about the prospects for the entire U.S. war strategy.
As far back as October 2008, Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, said, in a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation, "You have to talk to enemies." In the latter stages of the Iraq war, he noted, "we sat down with some of those who were shooting at us" as "an explicit part of our campaign." (This led to the "Anbar Awakening" and the alliance between U.S. soldiers and Sunni tribesmen to defeat the common enemy of al-Qaida in Iraq.) The Afghanistan war would be settled only through a similar process. "This is how you end these kinds of conflicts," Petraeus said. There is "no alternative to reconciliation."
However, as he and others have since stressed, there are enemies and enemies. The main targets of co-optation in Afghanistan are the tribal fighters who"”in the words of David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency adviser"”"are motivated by local interests, or by desire for monetary gain, or by a desire for revenge because of something that we've done, rather than because they support the political agenda of the Taliban." Kilcullen estimates that 90 percent of so-called Taliban fall into these apolitical categories"”and can therefore be won over.
The enemies who probably can't be swayed"”who can only be ousted, killed, or captured (as many recently have been)"”are the al-Qaida warriors and hard-core Taliban fundamentalists, like Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and "� well, a short time ago one might have said Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
In this respect, though, Hekmatyar enjoys an ambiguous, or at least uncertain, status, which is why his peace ventures haven't been dismissed out of hand.
His 15-point plan, reported in the press on Wednesday, marks the first formal peace offering from any major insurgency group. But Hekmatyar's deputies have been talking informally with Afghan and U.S. officials for nearly a year.
Hekmatyar first emerged as possibly the most radical of the Islamist parties that made up the anti-Soviet mujahideen in the 1980s. For several years, he was a favorite among the CIA agents who were funneling them arms and other aid. After the Soviets were ousted, he served as Afghanistan's prime minister twice, both times briefly, but wound up on the wrong side of an intensely violent power struggle"”in which his forces inflicted enormous damage on Kabul, killing many civilians. When the Taliban took over, they ousted him from Kabul, and he went into exile in Iran (which kicked him out in 2002 for criticizing Tehran's support of the Northern Alliance guerrillas who, along with U.S. forces, toppled the Taliban after the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes).
The ins and outs of his subsequent betrayals and allegiances form a long and mazelike saga (for details, see here and here), but the point is that he has long had a rocky relationship with the Taliban"”and with their sponsors in Pakistan's intelligence service.
U.S. intelligence analysts and officers on the ground are working overtime to unravel this tangled web and to figure out just who Hekmatyar is this time around. Is he allied with, or alienated from, the Taliban and al-Qaida? Could he serve as a useful wedge between those two ultimate enemies and other potentially pliable insurgency groups? Can he be trusted to hold some high-level post in Karzai's government (almost certainly one of his aims) without conniving to topple the regime and rip up the Afghan Constitution (a deep and justifiable concern)?
The prospects are enticing enough to keep talks going, but no more than that for now.
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