 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Alex Theer. I'm the director for Afghanistan and Pakistan here at the Institute. And I know that since you braved not only the rain but the nuclear summit to make it here today, that you are as excited and enthusiastic as I am about the next hour and a half. We have a literally, I think, blockbuster line-up given the authors of best-selling books and publications that are sitting here. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the introductions, but it is always a pleasure and an honor to have Ahmed Rashid here. For those of us who pay attention to the region, his writing and work and insight and wit have been a guide for, I hate to say it, but over two decades. And I doubt there is a person in this room or indeed probably in the sensient English-speaking world who has not at least seen and or read this book, which has been a guide, I think, for a lot of people, probably not the day that it was published, but shortly thereafter, the sales might have been a bit more brisk than Ahmed and the publisher were expecting. But this book on the Taliban, which has provided as good an insight, I think, into the movement as any, has now reached its 10th year. And they've just reissued a second edition that is on sale outside and Ahmed will sign some copies after the event. In addition to Ahmed, we're also thrilled to have here today, I think, two of the best possible commentators we could have asked for. Steve Cole, who many of you know, president of the New America Foundation, New Yorker writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, et cetera, has just returned from Afghanistan, where he is writing a piece, I believe, for The New Yorker about the prospects of political reconciliation. And Elizabeth Rubin, who many of you have also read, has been a contributing writer to The New York Times magazine for many years, has written some of the best and most beautifully written and poetic pieces about the people and places that we've been invading for the last few years. And she has also just returned from Kabul, where she has been looking particularly and writing a story for The New York Times magazine about the impact on women and the role of women in a peace process such as it is in Afghanistan. So the other thing I wanted to mention is that the United States Institute of Peace also has some books that we have for sale outside, including this volume, Reconciliation in Afghanistan, written by Michael Semple, which is a terrific overview of not only recent efforts but indeed efforts over the last few decades to accomplish some form of political reconciliation and why that has failed or succeeded. But what we are going to talk about today, I think, is on the minds of everybody from President Obama, to President Karzai, to President Zidari, General Kayani, and everybody down to the folks on the streets in Afghanistan. And that is, is this war going to end? And if so, how? One of the most popular options for ending war, at least here at the U.S. Institute of Peace, is through a political process that actually has combatants put down their arms and come to terms with each other. This has not been a strategy that has really been pursued thus far in Afghanistan, or at least not successfully in the last few years, but we are on the cusp of a potential change. And I think that we have all been excited and somewhat cautioned by the recent enthusiasm both particularly in Kabul and potentially in Islamabad, although Ahmed will shed light on that, for the prospects of political negotiation in Afghanistan. But there are many, many questions, even if there is enthusiasm, that need to be answered in terms of what this would look like, how this would actually happen, what does an Afghanistan look like that has the Taliban as part of it, and so on. So to shed some light on those questions for the next hour and a half, let me start off with Ahmed Rashid. Well, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here again. I've been coming here for many, many years, and many of you have always turned out and thank you. And it's a great pleasure to be here with Steve Kahl. I was asked once what my new book Descent Into Chaos was like, and I said, you know, it's this kind of Steve Kahl kind of book. So they said, what do you mean? I said, you know, it's everything. You know, it's totally comprehensive. You'll pick up everything that happened. And Elizabeth, I really consider as one of the finest writers in the United States right now. And I hope she does the book one day, which will, I'm sure, be a bestseller. And yes, she is the doyer of invasions, of U.S. invasions, without a doubt. I'm just going to start briefly, but I'm going to concentrate on three things. I've been talking to the Taliban, Pakistan, and the present U.S.-Karzai relationship. Let me just say that, you know, the U.S. military made it very clear with McChrystal's speech in London some months ago about that, and what Petraeus has said, that the U.S. military cannot defeat the Taliban movement on the ground. And there will have to be a political solution to the end of this war. Now, that certainly, I think, coming from the military has now penetrated the whole administration and I think the American consciousness and Western consciousness. And certainly that feeling is very strong in Western Europe and NATO, where many of these countries want to pull out even before there's a peace settlement. The other problem is that the Taliban movement today are still a major threat to Afghanistan and more than that they have now become a role model in the entire region. We have Pakistani Taliban, we have Central Asian Taliban, day after tomorrow we could have Indian Taliban, and if there can be some kind of settlement with the Afghan Taliban, which is the granddaddy of all Taliban, because it is the Afghan Taliban that provide legitimacy because to all the other Taliban, especially the Pakistani Taliban, why? Because the Afghan Taliban say we are fighting a real jihad, which is against foreigners and foreign occupation of our soil, and this is where the real jihad is, so everybody latches on to that legitimacy and claims that we can kill Pakistani soldiers or we can kill Uzbek or Kyrgyz soldiers because we are also part of this grand jihad of Mullah Umar in Afghanistan. So it is incredibly important if you want to stabilize the region and bring these other Taliban down to a level where you can deal with them, that the Afghan Taliban are dealt with in a political fashion. The third problem is Karzai as a reliable partner, which I will talk about later. Now the fourth issue is the consistent failure of the United States to build a viable economy in Afghanistan, and that has led to enormous problems, it has led to the drugs problem of course, it has led to the growth of the Taliban, the very fact that in the main insurgency areas, as the insurgency has grown, governance has become even worse and the local economy has just not flourished. And I think a lot of this goes back to the former Bush administration, where there was no serious attempt to build an indigenous Afghan economy, which meant that you had to put in infrastructure and you had to put in all these things so that you could create rail jobs, not jobs that were generated by donors and by the aid community. And finally, let me just say that with the Obama West Point speech and with the policy as stretched, as mapped out by the President here, and the fact that he gave a date certain for the start of the U.S. withdrawal, July 2011. Now whatever that means, to my mind certainly it doesn't mean that the Americans are about to do what the Soviets did, which is withdrawing three months and then the last soldier crosses the bridge and there's a big hurrah. Certainly the Americans are going to be there for four to five years. But in the region, and in Afghanistan itself, it is assumed that the Americans are now leaving and the end game has started. And with that, of course, has been this flurry of regional activity, which includes not just Pakistan, but India, Iran, and all the countries who want to get back into the act of having an influence in a post-America Afghanistan. Now, let me first deal with talking to the Taliban. Why should we talk to the Taliban? How can, why should the Taliban talk to the Americans or to Karzai? Now, there is a one line of thinking which says, oh no, the Taliban will sit everyone out, they'll wait another 18 months or two years and the Americans will have left and then they'll take Kabul and they'll set up their administration. I just want to counter that with a few arguments. The first is, I think the Taliban are tired and exhausted. For them, don't forget, for you, this has been the longest war in living memories. It's been nine years long, longer than the Second World War. But for them, this has been a war of 30 year war. And I think they're tired and exhausted. Secondly, I think they are extremely fed up of being manipulated by Pakistan and the ISI, and these recent arrests are only part of that. The fact is that the Afghan Taliban leadership has been based in Pakistan since 2001. All their families are there, their extended families are there. And I think they are very fed up with being manipulated. And if I may give you a historical parallel, which you will read in this book, this old Taliban book, that in 2000, the ISI lost complete control of the Taliban. Partly now, this was due to the fact that al-Qaida had arrived and providing a lot of the funds that the Pakistanis were and the Saudis were providing. But partly, it was because they felt manipulated and they were fed up. And if you remember that time, there were very serious negotiations between the Pakistanis, the Americans and the Taliban to try and get them to hand over bin Laden. And there was a very strong movement within the Taliban at that time. What today you would call moderate Taliban. Although, I dislike that word intensely. But led by Mullah Rabbani, who wanted actually to Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden. And this intensified, of course, after the 9-11 incident and then those weeks leading up to the war. There was a very strong division in the movement. People wanting to give up bin Laden to save their own government and to save the country from a US invasion. So what I'm talking about is nothing new. I mean, negotiations as far as the Taliban are concerned have always been around and have always been an option. Now, so the fourth thing is that if you see all their recent statements, especially of the last six months, they're talking about two or three completely new things. First of all, they seem to have dropped the word jihad from their official sort of lexicon. Now they are calling themselves nationalists and patriots. This is a nationalist struggle for all Afghan patriots to wage war against America and throw America out of Afghanistan. The jihad element has been considerably reduced. Now this is very much, I think, to reach out to a broader section of the public and the population and to also reassure the neighbors that this is not a jihad directed against the neighbors. Secondly, they have hinted quite strongly that one of the key American demands that they would break with bin Laden, they have not said it clearly, but they have hinted at it very strongly that they would be willing to break with all those who are not Afghans and are not part of the Afghan, a future Afghanistan. And thirdly, that they pose no threat to the region and regional countries and neighboring countries as a whole. In other words, they will not harbor terrorists and extremists from Pakistan or Iran or Central Asia or Russia or anywhere else. So there has been a significant change in the language. Now, my really urging is simply the following. The US presently has a policy of supporting reintegration, that is dealing with the foot soldiers and the commanders. But it wants to hold off any ideas of reconciliation until it says it has beaten down the Taliban, which may take six months, it may take 12 months. But what I feel very strongly is, first of all, you can talk and fight at the same time. Insurgencies have ended through, if you remember Vietnam or an island and a host of other places, you can talk and fight at the same time. It's not impossible. Secondly, any negotiations with the Taliban, certainly whether they are between Karzai and the Taliban or between the Americans Karzai and the Taliban, are going to take time. That is the Afghan way. If you think you're going to be able to decide, well, in December we'll decide to have negotiations and the White House will then say, well, now we've beaten down the Taliban and now we're going to start withdrawing in a few months time. I don't think that is really a proper strategy because also by then, the region will have made all its interference very clear and very obvious. Now, so I think the Americans need to take part in negotiations now. All that I've heard about the negotiations that have taken place between Karzai and the Taliban, between the UN and between various other players who have been talking to the Taliban, is that they want to talk to the Americans. They consider Karzai is just a stepping stone to actually talk to the big daddy and to talk to the Americans. So this is a decision that this administration, I think, has to make very quickly. Now, why am I, people in Kabul, especially women friends and some of the NGOs and human rights people are saying, I mean, look at the book you wrote on the Taliban, I mean, why are you becoming now an advocate of the Taliban? Listen, what I want to stress is that if we do not end this war in a decently negotiated fashion with the major powers acting as guarantees for a settlement, we are going to have such a regional conflagration between the neighboring countries for influence and access into Afghanistan. That is, it could very well prompt another civil war in the country. That's what I fear. And secondly, as far as Pakistan is concerned, I want to talk in some detail, Pakistan at the moment is the only country with a game plan. They have a game plan for getting the Americans to accept that all negotiations should run through Islamabad. Now, in my opinion, that would be lethal. It would be lethal for the Afghans and it would be lethal for the region. No Afghan today is prepared to accept a Pakistani dominated settlement in Afghanistan. Whether you're Northern Alliance, whether you're Karzai, whether you're Pashtun in the south and whether you're the Taliban even. I think there would be such a norm. And what is the very strong feeling in Kabul today and across Afghanistan is that the Americans are leaving and they're going to leave us in the hands of the Pakistanis. Now, in other words, now, I'm not saying that's the truth, but that certainly is what many, many Afghans believe. The Americans and NATO are going to be in such a hurry to get out there. And this will be a rehash of what happened in 92 after the fall of Najibullah. That the Americans said, you know, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, you handle this. You know, we're out of here. We're not interested. And then we had, of course, the growth first, Gulbuddin Iqmat Yar. And then we had the Civil War with Masood and Iqmat Yar. And then we had the Taliban. So I think it is incredibly important that and, you know, I highlight Pakistan because I think Pakistan does have a game plan. And I think these arrests, the way they did come at this particular point in time, have created, I don't think they were deliberately done to, you know, I think the Pakistanis were not prepared to have make these arrests now. I think there were many reasons for these arrests which we can go into later. But the arrests of some of these Taliban figures and the creation of a new layer under Mulaoma, two new deputies have been appointed, both extremely hard-line and perhaps very loyal to Pakistan and the ISI. The problem here is that this has let loose a regional mainstream right now. The Indians are deeply worried and deeply concerned. And a bit at sea at the moment. The Indian media is taking the Indian government to task having no policy or strategy in place, putting all their eggs in the Karzai basket, not having any alternatives. The Indians are rushing to the Iranians and to the Russians. They are trying to reforge the alliance that took place in the 90s, which would be an alliance that would be aimed primarily at Pakistan seeking a dominant role in Afghanistan. And it would be aimed also at allowing their proxies, presumably some people amongst the Pashtuns, but also predominantly the Northern Alliance, of having a bigger say and a bigger role and perhaps rejecting any idea of dialogue with the Taliban. So we have a, I think, what I'm seeing certainly is a beginning of a very serious development in the region. And the longer the US delays in having a more comprehensive strategy regarding the Taliban as to exactly what it wants to do, I think we are only going to see an escalatory thing happening. Now, what kind of deal are we talking about? Well, look, I mean, I'm not going to go into the details. But ultimately, if there is a Kabul-Taliban-American, perhaps UN-brokered deal taking in all the interests of the neighboring countries, but not giving one neighboring country a predominant role, there will have to be some new political arrangement. Now, whether this is a coalition government, whether this is a sharing of power, whether this is going to lead to a new law in Jiruga, whether it will lead to Karzai carrying on as an interim president until a new law in Jiruga, whether it will lead to a new interim leader, I'm not going to speculate on the shape or format. But this is certainly, there would have to be an internal political settlement. Secondly, there would have to be also, most importantly, an internal political settlement on the morals of the social system. Now, and clearly, this is where many Afghans are deeply worried. Women, NGOs, human rights groups, the urban elite, this is of immediate concern. And again, I take you back to a historical parallel. I was in Kabul in 96 when the Taliban were entering Kabul. And the panic amongst people in Kabul in 96 who had been living under the Masood, girls were wearing skirts and working and they were in all the NGOs and suddenly the Taliban appeared and everything shut down and everybody started appearing in a burqa. The Afghans have been through this before. I mean, they don't want to see this again. So, again, I don't have any solutions. But what I say is that in any kind of negotiation, I think what is going to be needed is a kind of umbrella or a blanket that you put over all these issues. And the best formulation would be between the Taliban and Kharzai that, look, everything that has happened since 2001, the developments that have happened in the country, we are not going to open up the Pandora's box of the Constitution. If we do that, we're sunk. We're never going to have a settlement. But everything that has happened since 2001, we both sides accept this as progress and development. And if you want to add something Taliban, then we can add, you know, according to everything should be done now, according to Islamic injunctions or something, which is also in the Constitution and has not proved much of a problem. So what I'm trying to say is that if the Taliban want to open up the Constitution and say, you know, no women, no education, no this, no midwifery, no women doctor, all this kind of stuff, then the government turns around and says, well, you open up your Sharia. You want your Sharia, which Sharia? You want Deobandi Sharia? You want Barelvi Sharia? What about the 20% Shias living here? You want Shias Sharia? Which Sharia do you want? So we can open up your Pandora's box, which is also a Pandora's box. So it is much easier for both of us to agree to some kind of social, you know, let's throw an umbrella over all this and not agree to open up all this. Now the key to this is how do the Afghans handle this? And Karzai certainly has not handled it very well so far. The only people seems to be negotiating our family. Now that's hardly a national state run negotiation. You need a negotiating team, which is reflective of the ethnic makeup of Afghanistan. You need a reconciliation with the North and the non-Peshawis. You need somebody from the Northern Alliance as part of the negotiating team. And I would strongly advocate that you need a woman as part of the negotiating team. The Taliban have to hear the point of view of women. And they're not gonna hear it. They should not be hearing it secondhand through parliaments and jirgaz and that. They should be hearing it directly if they're going to be negotiations. So, you know, what you need is a very comprehensive negotiating team from the side of the government, which is showing, even though Karzai himself is so weak and the Taliban don't consider him as very significant, they want to talk to the Americans. In this negotiation, I think Karzai's biggest mistake right now is that he's not reaching out to parliament. If he wants to do reconciliation, he's not reaching out to parliament. He's not reaching out to the North. He's not reaching out to civil society and these social groups which he needs to do to bring them in as part of this process. Maybe this big jirga in April that they're planning to have will do that, except I suspect that it won't be well planned and it probably won't result in the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Now, let me just deal, have I got five minutes? Yeah, give me. Let me just deal with Karzai. Look, the guy has made outrageous statements, no question. The elections were rigged, we all know that. But, you know, somehow, you know, a lot of the media was starting for an assumption that Afghanistan is a democracy. Afghanistan is not a democracy. The elections were being held in the middle of a civil war. Now, they were either going to be rigged or they were going to be completely, you know, they were not going to happen. But, you know, and let me say something else. Everybody, we have known Karzai for nine years. Karzai has not done governance for nine years. What is the assumption of this administration that because the London conference took place and because, you know, people were flying off to Kabul, that suddenly Karzai would do this about turn and would suddenly start doing government? Why hasn't he done governance for nine years? Now, the way to get around this problem is to work around it. And, you know, that's what we're seeing how the U.S. military is doing. That's what McChrystal is doing. They're trying to move in administration, into Marjah, preparing administration in Kandahar. How they're doing this? There's no school of bureaucracy in Kabul. And, of course, this has been the big blame of the West. I mean, why didn't the Americans and the West set up administrative schools which would actually be turning out Afghans now in justice, in law, in bureaucracy, in management, and all this stuff? None of this ever happened in the last nine years. But, so, you work around Karzai. You don't start, you know, I mean, and once you had accepted the results of the elections, once you had accepted that, yes, they were rigged, whatever, but we accept Karzai now as the de facto president because we have a war to fight. We have negotiations to do. You know, we need this Karzai, even if he's a figurehead, whatever. Then, you know, you don't snipe around, you know, at the back. Now, let's, I mean, just take one issue. I think two issues are really riled him up. I think the first issue is Pakistan. Karzai has been threatened now very directly. Karzai was in Islamabad in March. He met the army, the government, et cetera. Karzai has been told very directly that, you know, everything, you want to negotiate with the Taliban. The Taliban are all sitting here. You come through us. But none of this freelancing anymore, that you go and meet them in Saudi Arabia and you go and meet them in the Gulf and, you know, you come through Islamabad and you work through the ISI. Now, I mean, naturally, no Afghan can accept this, you know, or survive. No Afghan can accept this. And this was particularly humiliating and galling to him. And I think he tried to convey this message to Washington, which came just before the strategic dialogue was taking place with Pakistan. And there was nobody willing to listen to him in Washington. And he got even more worked up and frustrated and partly you had that. Now, the other issue of corruption, I mean, you know, I think it really, you know, this administration has been incredibly wise by doing a mea culpa on Pakistan. They have said, you know, we abandoned you. We loved you and aided you when we needed you. And then we ditched you and we've done that about three times. And we, and Hillary went out there and did this big sort of mea culpa and we will not do this again. We are here to stay. We've got Kerry Luger bill. You know, I mean, we are going to support you forever and ever, okay? And that, frankly, went a very long way with the military, with the public, with the media and all the rest of it. Now, if you look at this corruption, who started the corruption in Afghanistan? First of all, you arrived in Afghanistan and you paid off all the warlords. Every single warlord that today we, the American media considers as a human rights abuser was on the CIA payroll. Gerald Doster, Marshall Faheem, Seyaf. I mean, Marshall Faheem is the vice president now. You know, Seyaf, everybody. And there were people also in Karzai's family who were on the CIA payroll. Phase two, the CIA payroll stops paying, but suddenly all these big American bases have to be built and who are the contracts given to to build these American bases to the same warlords? There's a massive amount, you know, the tracking, the haulage, the raw materials, the building, the construction, and then the protection. These warlord militias were all hired as bodyguards and protectors and they set up a new security service. You know, this new sexy trend, which again, the United States has introduced of having these security services, you know. So that was another payoff to the same group of people. And the third payoff, frankly, was, was, was AID. AID was signing huge contracts for money and development for Afghanistan to these big American contractors who didn't have a single person on their board who knew anything about Afghanistan. And what did these guys do in Washington, in the Beltway? They subcontracted out. They subcontracted and subcontracted and subcontracted nine, 10, 12 times. So by the time the money got to the ground, you had about 50% of the money left because everybody was taking 5%. That was perfectly legal. It's not corruption, but that was the way the American system works. So I'm not saying that Americans have been, have, you know, Americans are corrupt or, but I'm saying that your practices of governance introduced enormous amounts of, of, of corruption in Pakistan well before anybody else got into the act. And then of course on top of that, you had drugs and you had the same warlords going into drugs. There was no US, Rumsfeld refused to make a, involve the US military in, in, in, in drugs control. So there was a freebie on drugs. You could, you know, invest, travel, you know, use it, send it, plug it, buy it, whatever. And, and, and finally corruption comes into Afghanistan's own, own system. So I think it is really time that if, if, if you're going to work with Kanzai for 18 months, I think the US needs some kind of mere culpa as to, you know, if you read the Center to Chaos, you'll, you'll understand what the Bush administration didn't do in Afghanistan. But I think we also need to understand what inadvertently American government practices have led to. And by the way, the same thing happened in Iraq. I mean, half these stories coming out of Iraq now saying exactly the same thing, you know, about mismanagement of funding and, you know, all this kind of stuff. So, I would really, you know, like to see, I think America would really enhance its presence enormously with the Afghan's and with the present leadership in Afghanistan if, if they acknowledge the fact. Yes, I mean, I'm not excusing Kanzai for anything that he said, but I'm just saying that I think, you know, this works both ways. Lastly, let me just, I think there's a very, I mean, very open here. There's a very strong feeling in the region about the problems that this administration has had in projecting itself. We have the president flying off to Afghanistan without the AFPAC ambassador. So what do all the Afghans think? Well, the AFPAC ambassador, Mr. Richard Holbrook is, it's over, you know, which of course is not true in any way, but, you know, that the two people who should have gone with him, Patreus and Holbrook were not there on the flight. And who was on the flight was the White House. Now, you know, I think there has to be a much better show of unity between the White House. DOD has got a huge team of people working on AFPAC. The State Department is another huge team and many of the, and both these teams are much better equipped and with expertise and knowledge and experience in the field than anybody, frankly, in the White House. And I think there has to be a much better show of unity because what is happening is that the message going out to the region, to Pakistan, to India is that, oh, they're all divided, they're all disunited. We play one against the other. We play, you know, state against DOD, the White House against so-and-so. You know, they're not on one line. They're thoroughly confused. We can run rings around the Americans. And many, many, you know, there are many experts out there, especially coming from my country, who are experts at running rings around the Americans. We've been doing it for the last 60 years, extremely successfully. So let me, you know, let me just sort of end here and say that I think, you know, this administration, much as I support it, and I think it has done incredibly good things for Afghanistan. It's number one on the agenda. It is going for the economy. It is going for the civilian surge. It is conducting a very, you know, a very humane, if you can call it, or productive counterinsurgency strategy. It has certainly changed the parameters from the Bush administration. But the element of leadership and coordination and ascending a message of unity and determination, frankly, that message is not getting out to the region and it's not getting out to the outcomes. And that is what is creating the paranoia in Karifay. And that is also what is creating opportunities that the regional countries are seeing, that, oh, here we can just put our finger in and, you know, there's no American policy anyway and there's no unity in Washington anyway and we can operate. So I think, you know, I would hope that some of these issues need to be resolved before Karifay comes and I hope that there will be a more coherent Afghan policy before the next round of the strategic dialogue with Pakistan. Thank you very much. So, Steve, as a culture inappropriate as it may be, listening to Ahmed always makes me feel like I want to order a stiff drink. So my question to you is, should I order a double? Yeah, probably. Should I say a few things? Yeah, please. Yeah, I'm a little bit constrained because if I had one of those Bluetooth devices, I'd hear my editor at the New Yorker saying, do not disclose or say anything that would be better said or disclosed in the pages of the New Yorker in the next couple of weeks. But because I just got back working on a lot of these questions as well and Kabul and certainly agree with a lot of what Ahmed had to say, virtually all of his framing I think is dead on. So let me just say in a couple of minutes go a little bit further on his description about Pakistan's position and all of this and the consequences of what Ahmed observed, which is that in the region, and I think to some extent in Washington, there is a belief taking hold that Pakistan's longstanding strategic design for Afghanistan is now triumphant. That is to say that the fitful pursuit of what a former Pakistan Army Chief of Staff called strategic depth, though never really achieved and pursued at the expense of many tens of thousands of Afghan lives and at the expense of regional stability, that that vision is still alive. And well, it actually now may be on the verge of being rewarded through this exit strategy. So I think what struck me on this trip is that the fact that this strategic design looks triumphant now has consequences itself, that everyone is reacting to that fact now. It has consequences for Karzai, it has consequences for India, it has consequences for Russia and Iran, it has consequences for the northern minorities in Afghanistan as they think about their position. I wrote down, Ahmed said Pakistan is the only country with a game plan. I think that's right except if you include, if you think about the Northern Alliance as a grouping, half a country anyway, they have a game plan too, they see what's coming. And the consequence of this apparent success that is now going to be played out has a rebound effect with them. So the Northern Alliance controls the NDS, the National Directorate of Security, the Intelligence Service, very well resourced, very well present. They control the Army, they're gonna try to own the police as that gets built up. And I think my impression is they have a very cold eye on the future. They're preparing to defend themselves if the civil war comes. I don't think they wanna provoke it. I think they could accept a form of pluralism and negotiated pluralism in which Kabul is protected, in which their population centers are protected, in which the Hazaras are not overrun by Taliban militias again, in which Afghanistan becomes more federated in sources of influence, and where they could probably even swallow an extent of Pakistani influence in the South and East that they would have resisted five or six years ago. But I don't think anybody believes that's gonna be easy to achieve. And if the alternative comes, they wanna own their, they wanna have a better hand to play in the civil war than they had in the 90s. And I think they will. I think it'll be a brutal war, but they'll be well equipped to fight it and they have a cold eye on that possibility. I think, as Amit described very well, this emergence of Pakistan selling the United States, selling the international community and exit strategy, essentially, which is what I think the Pakistani High Command thinks it's doing. An Afghan friend of mine said, you know, it's a great business model. You guys paid them to build up your enemies, and now they're charging you double to destroy them. And, but this idea of Pakistan emerging as the broker, which it has obviously unnerved Karzai as well, because he's not sure what his play is. Where does his, where does the preservation of his interests, his family, his place in Afghanistan really lie? Could the Pakistanis sell him a preservation strategy while they sell the Americans an exit strategy? These are questions that I don't think he would have taken very seriously a year ago, but they've kind of unnerved him and his court a little bit now. And certainly they have consequences for the Indians. I mean, the Indians have the long view. The Indians are sort of disappointed and concerned that the United States might allow a Pakistani shareholding in Afghanistan that is larger in proportion than they believe Pakistan deserves, or that might even be larger in proportion and is healthy for Afghanistan's long-term stability, but their interest is in Pakistan not blowing up in regional stability, in the prevention of a Taliban revolution in either Pakistan or Afghanistan. And if they have to accept in the medium run an international settlement in Afghanistan that leaves them with little less than they would ideally like, if it is sustainable, I don't think they see interest there in trying to disrupt that. Certainly not now. And then finally, what about the United States? The United States has learned a lot about its position in negotiations with the Pakistan army over the last two or three years. There's been a lot of hard learning about the gap between what is sometimes asserted and what is sometimes done, the complexity of the problem. There's a much less naivete in the American system about their relationship and that's been healthy. It's meant there's a more honest conversation in the strategic dialogue about where people's interests are rather than where their wishes are or their good will might be. And so I think the United States has a colder eyesight on the problem, but even with that, it's going to be tempting to take the expedience of the Pakistani army's offer because if the Pakistani army can deliver the supreme shore, which I'm not at all sure they can, I think they have a long history of overestimating their own ability to perform these situations. But it's going to be tempting to deal with the state of Pakistan rather than the complexity of Afghanistan. And that is something that I think the Pakistani army does recognize correctly, plays to its advantage if they don't overreach. And I think every sign that I hear from coming out of the Pakistan army's thinking is that they actually have a more reasonable sense of what their ask ought to be in an Afghan settlement than they would have had five or 10 years ago. It's not a hegemonic overreach, but I think the fatal flaw in all of this is going to be their relationship with the Taliban, which is more troubled than ever. And they had trouble delivering the Taliban in any meaningful way to their own interests in the 90s. Now delivering them to international interests, I think they may feel that they have leverage. They certainly do have sources of leverage because of the presence of Taliban and families and passports and so forth in the Pakistani system, where they could really bring that into a negotiation. I'm sort of doubtful. That's only one element of a very multi-sided negotiating picture, but those are some impressions that I have from talking about that particular angle. Elizabeth, since 2001, even if it was evidently not the reason we went into Afghanistan, our narrative about Afghanistan has been embroidered by democracy, women's rights, liberation, which was obviously very different from what we were doing or saying in the 1990s when none of those things were part of U.S. foreign policy. Where does that lead us when we put a cold eye on our future in Afghanistan? Well, I think, you know, Ahmed was making a joke before about how his friends see him selling, wanting to bring the Taliban back to Afghanistan. And one of the prices, of course, of all of this and the people who were making that joke were women in Afghanistan is, you know, in 2002 there was a lot of skepticism about this 25% women in the parliament. And a lot of people, including myself, were saying things like, well, you know, the drug lords can't run because they're disqualified, so they'll just put their wives up. And that did happen. But what also happened is that because you had 25% of the parliamentarians were women, it meant that the men had to make deals with women. And they had to sit in the same room as women. They had to get to know the women parliamentarians to get their cases heard on a provincial level. And this may seem kind of, yeah, so what, you know, it's not gonna have deep political changes, but it is having deep cultural changes. Just a brief encounter with Fauzi Akufi, who's one of the most prominent parliamentarians in Afghanistan now. She's a woman from Badakshan, whose brothers were pulling down her posters when she was running because they didn't want her running. And now they're selling her posters for so much money in Badakshan because she's such a star. And I was with her on New Year's, which is March 21st. We were coming back from a picnic. And the roads are very, very crowded in Afghanistan. There's tons of traffic. There's too many people living in Kabul. And there was a group of militia in a pickup truck in front of us who stopped our car from moving. And in front of them was a white SUV, which is what most of the big wigs travel around in. And so, you know, Fauzi Akufi said to her driver to get out and fight with them. And so he did, he got out and he started shouting at them and they were pulling their guns on us. And Fauzi Akufi's two daughters were in the back of the car, crying and screaming saying, no mom, because obviously they've seen this before. And so, she then got on the phone. And she got on the phone with the police chief of the district. She got on the phone with the minister of interior. She got on the phone. And what she wanted to convey was not just that there was a bunch of, and she was looking for the license plate on the militia's cars. Not just that there were a bunch of hooligans, you know, harassing the public. But who was the guy with the tinted windows in front of him? Because Karzai had just, he'd decreed that there would be no more tinted windows on any cars. And it was like, everyone sort of thought, wow, Karzai's ruling. People were really excited. This was one of the few laws that people took seriously. And the police were all over the streets, stopping cars and peeling off the, you know, that tint from the windows or confiscating the cars if they couldn't. And this guy still had his tinted windows. And so she said, I wanna know who is he? Why is he so important? And so then the car, they, you know, they kept traveling. And she told her driver, follow them. And these guys are pointing their guns at our car. We have nothing. And so she followed them all the way to the guy's house. And they come in, there's huge gates, you know, and they slam the gates in front of the SUV so that we can't get in. And she gets out of the car. Who lives here? And I have been with many men with a lot of guns. I've never seen them act like this. You know, where they're chasing somebody down to find out who's threatening them. And it turned out it was a guy who used to be in the Ministry of Interior, one of the big hunches at the Ministry of Interior who was in charge of the kidnapping rings in Kabul. And so she found out who it was. He called her an hour later and said, I'm very sorry, Ms. Koofe. And, you know, yes, you're right. We hadn't gotten around to fixing the windows. And, you know, she does this all the time. And you don't see the men doing this. And her point was simply that, you know, nobody else is gonna stop these warlords because everybody, many of the other men are warlords. And we have gotten a position through this sort of fake 25%. But it's under threat right now. There's a new law being put into the Constitution, something like if there's a woman's seat that's vacant, it can wait till the next round. Karzai put four women up for cabinet positions. He didn't support any of them. He didn't ask anybody to support them. They didn't pay, which is one of the ways you get a cabinet position. And so they didn't, none of them were appointed in the cabinet. A lot of women fear that when the Taliban, and I say when, because it's likely that these guys will have some role in the government, that when they come back, if it's left to Karzai, there will be no protection for the Constitution because Karzai actually doesn't care about women's rights. As he said many times, look, it's not the time, his wife has never been seen in public. She's never made a statement. She has small little round tables of a few women for lunch at his house. And it's sort of, it's the only success actually that the US has had in Afghanistan, that and the press. And I think to some extent this administration seems to fear talking too verbally or vocally about it because there's an attempt to distance themselves from the Bush administration, which promoted women as this kind of ridiculous, it did get a bit ridiculous. They were always pulling out women, I mean girls who were going to school and using the numbers of girls going to schools, evidence of success and ignoring what was obviously a growing Taliban threat in the country. And so there has been some attempt to distance that policy. And I think it's a huge mistake because unless the US safeguards that in these negotiations and insists that a US, that an Afghan woman be present in the negotiations, nobody's gonna do it. Certainly the Afghan men are not gonna do it. Maybe Stanak Zai who is now sort of in charge of the logistics of the peace jerker that's coming up. But I do think that that's one of the things that the US has to do and it's in this, in these negotiations and certainly the Pakistanis are not gonna do it. Let me start off with a question for all of you. Ahmad sort of briefly touched on it in the beginning, but I think it requires a little bit more examination because it's certainly the most perplexing thing to me. Which is about what the Taliban get out of negotiations and what they would settle for. We went through a period from 1994 to 2001 seeing a number of different Taliban negotiations. Obviously nothing exactly like this, but we maybe know a little something about the Taliban and how they negotiate and what they negotiate for. And I think that the one thing that we have seen consistently is a failure to compromise. There was never a compromise at the end of the day that the Taliban were willing to agree to. And part of that has to do with their brand. Because what is the Taliban brand if they join a government that's headed by Hamid Karzai? What is the Taliban brand if they sit down with the Americans to talk? Does it just dissolve? Would they not, as was evidenced in 2001, although that was a very odd brief period, would they rather not sit and fight to whatever end than to come in to this government and essentially give up their platform, which is, I would call, a mixture of this sort of, their vision of Sharia combined with expelling the external invaders? You see, I think the most important lesson that a person I will have rather than learned is that if we waited out at that cease power, we'll be treated just like we were in the 19th. We'll be ostracized, alienated. There'll be no money, there'll be no aid. The international community will screw us. And in two years, there'll be a revolt against us like there was in the late 19th. So I think what they are seeing that the option to cease power in this international vacuum where we'll be supported by Pakistan and maybe one or two Gulf states is not an option anymore. We've tried that and we lost. So for heaven's sake, let's latch on to somebody like Karzai who is weak, who's ineffective, but we can make a coalition with him. We will get international aid. We will continue getting international support, et cetera. And then either, of course, what is unanswered is that then do the Taliban settle down and become like what some of the Hisb-Islami people have become today, which is that they work through parliament or they form a political party or whatever. Or do they make a grab for power once they're inside the tent? Now, I think, my intimation is that the Taliban today realized a big mistake they made in the 90s, which was they let down the Afghan people. And they couldn't provide the Afghan people with food and jobs or anything. And alone, they can't do it again. And I think that's the biggest impetus for them to join some kind of coalition. Yeah, I would just add that, obviously the Taliban are not a monolith. So one of the mysteries that confronts negotiators is how do you reach Taliban who have attitudes like what Ahmed described, who are in a position to separate themselves from those who don't? And even more complexly, how do you create conditions in which ISI shifts from disciplining Pakistan-based Taliban to fight, to disciplining Pakistan-based Taliban to negotiate? And now if you achieve both of those conditions, you might or might not have Mullah Omar in the room anymore. I'm not sure about that. I don't think anybody in the Taliban movement quite knows how to locate him in this. But you clearly are elements of the Supreme Shura who have the attitude that Ahmed describes. And when they step out, they sometimes get disciplined. And so you'd have to create an environment for them. Secondly, I think what's in it for them is what Ahmed describes, which is political participation and the benefits thereof. If you go around Kabul now, Hizbiz mostly in the government, and only Gulbadan and his crowd are out, those who are in are really quite comfortable. They're living in South Kabul in the neighborhoods of $500,000 new homes. They have seats in parliament and privileges and access to the rentier economy of wartime Afghanistan. And there's been talk, I think, for years of trying to get elements of the Taliban to essentially convert into a GUI of Afghanistan and sort of organize along the Hizbiz kind of model. However, there clearly is still going on inside the movement or the groupings of the Taliban a discourse about whether, I agree that moderate extremist is terrible terminology for talking about the Taliban. But I think there is evidence, as best I can get at it, of discourse between those who want to continue fighting and those who don't, those who believe that they're called to seize power in the name of God and those who believe that they can share power and still would serve the people of Afghanistan. That argument is going on and obviously there's diversity of view on display, not just horizontally, that is to say the difference between Haqqani country and quite a Shura country, but also generationally, there's as older senior commanders are either taken off the field or retire themselves into politics. There are younger Taliban coming up who are described anyway as being less cognizant about the political track, less interested. Was there any comment? On why they would negotiate? I mean, I guess I would just say to reiterate is I don't see why they would do anything unless Pakistan doesn't give them sanctuary anymore. I mean, you know, 100, I think there were the 120 Helmandi Taliban when they fled Marjah, were taking refuge in a mosque outside of Islamabad living there and they don't need to negotiate unless Pakistan says you can't, you're not going to be here anymore. Do you buy the line that the Taliban have moderated their views? A lot of people have said that they've moderated their views towards women in schools and things like that. Is there any sense that that's real? No. I don't see any, no. So I'm going to take questions and unfortunately our roving microphones are broken but I don't want people kind of rushing to the mic so I'm going to call on people and if you could then come up to the microphone to ask a question here in the back. Just here on the sides. And if you could say your name and organization you're representing, if any. Good afternoon. My name is Fatima Yubin. I work with the Open Society Institute. I have a question for all of you about the day after and I have a tremendous reluctance to see any of the political actors in Afghanistan as benign accepting all of the mistakes of the Bush administration and the international effort since 2001 I'm not willing to accept that you say okay I made mistakes and Karzai says he makes mistakes and we go on. So accepting the idea that negotiations have to happen and I do believe it, I think that this could go on for quite some time without any end but accepting the idea that there have to be negotiations what kind of a state are we trying to build in Afghanistan? Well I think it's a great question and I think part of the problem with this sort of fashion of strategic reconciliation talks is that it draws a lot of the time, energy, resources, and talent that is available to address that challenge away toward a more expedient discussion about strategic reconciliation that may or may not prove stable for the reasons you suggest. I would assume that policymakers would answer your question by saying the end state is for Afghans to negotiate in an atmosphere of plural inclusion for them to define a better compact than they've been able in the circumstances they've found themselves to create since Bond but within their own constitutional and national traditions that date back through a pretty stable run in the 20th century and that that negotiation ought to be facilitated alongside any strategic international negotiation involving exiled insurgents. The problem is that the government of President Karzai as Ahmed said during his talk has shown no interest in governance for nine years and you still have a very rigid top-down system of appointees that has fostered a lack of accountability, a lack of resiliency in Afghanistan at so many levels and I think there is a kind of collective exhaustion about that failure that is creeping into international opinion as well. The opportunity to initiate a much more complicated sub-district reform, political reform, constitutional reform process has more or less been abandoned as unworkable for now and so you get, you have the potential of having reconciliation at a top level and a substitute for that and leaving something on top of unstable ground. I mean I hope that's not too pessimistic but when you have the diversity of abusive political personalities that you have embedded in the system now it's a little bit discouraging. I mean you've all been talking in your work to American policy makers, do you think there is an emerging American vision of the Afghan state going forward? No, unfortunately there are competing, well there are competing visions that are not necessarily compatible, that's the problem. No one has been challenged to square the circle with the visions that include still an aspiration for a kind of nation-building true 360 to a more kind of counter-surgency and doctrine influenced, we'll fix it one district at a time, clear hold, build, transfer and we have 80 critical districts and we'll fix those by improvising to those that would just, who are already looking at the exit and listening to Pakistan's idea about what the Afghan end state should be or other negotiating partners really trying to negotiate an end state at a peace table in exile rather than building it on the ground. So all those visions are alive now, they're not necessarily compatible but the system hasn't sort of forced a resolution. I think if the U.S. was to enter into the Tiger's ring and declare that it was ready to negotiate with the Taliban, I think that would really unleash a response from the Europeans, the United Nations, the Americans, think tanks in the region, a great debate about precisely what this lady, the question she asked and that would be very productive. At the moment you get a sense that everything is on hold and everything unfortunately is now, NATO will not talk to the Taliban unless the Americans decide, the Brits have been urging the Americans to start talking to the Taliban, they're kind of waiting for this administration to make some kind of political decision and I think once that political decision is made there could be a lot of very productive debate with the Afghans, by foreign powers, etc. about what the end state could look like. Not to speak of the Taliban probably being able to be part of that debate. I think the real issue is that what the bond agreement failed to do was to include the losers in the 2001 war in any way and what the early policies of the Bush administration were and especially the US military in 2002-2003 that by and large they tended to treat all Pashtuns as the enemy and that led to further alienation of the south and the east and made the insurgency when it appeared in 2003 much easier and it took a very long time for the US army to understand and to learn that all Pashtuns are not the enemy and that it took a very long learning curve to do this and you now are reaching a stage where you come to the end game of that where you have those Pashtuns who were not included in the bond agreement in other words the Taliban have to be included now in some kind of larger agreement and I can only hope that once that decision is taken there would be a flowering of ideas and debate and discussion about these issues at the moment there's nothing because everybody is on hold I would just add one thing to that which is that everybody all the Pashtuns are our enemies except for the few that are our friends and I think that to some extent what we did do inadvertently is create a bit of a Pashtun civil war because we gave everything over to Karzai and a few families and they controlled for a long time everything, all the drugs, all the trucking they took over everything all of the contracts just as you were saying before all the contracts from the US military and a lot of what the fighting started out about was a power struggle there were old feuds there were old political feuds tribal feuds and we continued to stick our finger in it then we sort of got smart about it but still today there are incidents happening all through the Pashtun areas where we get bad information from one tribe or another and we act on it militarily and so to some extent what needs to be solved is some kind of power sharing particularly in the Pashtun areas which is where the civil war is I think one senior American official said the other day that one of the most difficult elements next steps of the campaign is going to be to dislodge the Karzai's from Kandahar Hi, Masood Aziz from Afghanistan I thank you again for another insightful assessment of the region during your talk you spoke about your concern about the Pakistani side the army taking back over the agenda on the negotiation by arresting some of the Taliban leader and you think you said that's a serious issue if you can talk about that fact and what do you mean by that or why are you concerned about it in the context of this negotiation process in my opinion I don't see a possible negotiation process that would actually work with that the Pakistani side the Pakistani army side giving up on protecting the Taliban generally speaking I'm not sure if I agree with Steve it's not as much about delivering the Taliban it's about giving up on this overall agenda of no longer supporting the Taliban longer term not in the short term you may have some negotiation process but in the longer term that is based on the strategic issue the view of the army against India etc is that even possible in the long term Pakistan holds a lot of the cards at the moment and as Elizabeth said for example even the decision not to give sanctuary to the Taliban as a means of getting them out and on to the negotiating table Pakistan would extract a very heavy price both from the Americans and from the Afghans I don't know what price it would be but it would be a big price there would be a secondary price for actually getting the Taliban to agree to some negotiation would that price be American recognition of Pakistan's nuclear program which it wants very much for example or would it be getting the Indians out of Kabul if that is at all possible I don't think it is possible so what I'm trying to say is that Pakistan holds a lot of the cards and the longer that the simply the longer the US delays its policy I think those cards are going to be strengthened and strengthened over time what it doesn't have is concrete allies the Saudis are not interested this time the Saudis are utterly had it with al-Qaeda and all this extremism they have not in fact they as you know they had they sponsored secret negotiations in Saudi Arabia without telling the ISI and the ISI were very upset with that for good reasons first time that the ISI and the Saudi intelligence have not worked together so Pakistan is holding a lot of the cards but it is also friendless in that sense because none of the other reasons the traditional allies the Gulf states Saudi Arabia etc China is an open question where would China lie in this thing would it go with the Pakistani formula or it has a limited it wants to extract the minerals from Afghanistan what would suit it I don't know but you know I think the biggest thing is at the moment that we are holding a lot of cards but those cards are very shaky because they depend on international acquiescence to those cards and I don't see that coming because the regional countries are going to be lobbying the US just as much as the Pakistanis are and I don't think the US is going to spoil its relationship with India or with the growing relationship with Russia the whole dilemmas in Central Asia just to satisfy all these Pakistanis and the cards that it sold Thank you I'm Scott Worden with the Afghanistan program here at USIP I wanted to ask a question or two related questions about the parliament you mentioned that one of the things that might have provoked anger and the reaction by Karzai was pressure from Pakistan I wondered myself looking at this how much of a role parliament's rejection first of many of his cabinet nominees and then rejection of his electoral law also contributed to him feeling squeezed between pressures from allies and I guess pressures from Pakistan but also pressures from his own government or the other half of the government so I wanted to know for any of you do you think that parliament's rejecting of several Karzai initiatives is a significant factor and does that signal that there might be more of a balance of power within the Afghan government that might be positive and secondly going forward when we talk about reconciliation at the top level obviously a lot of the warlords went into parliament and that was part of an agreed political accommodation is the parliament also a tool for the reconciliation with the insurgency or the Taliban and if so I would just point out that we have a candidate nomination process coming up in a couple weeks if the schedule maintains and if they need the parliament to fill some seats with some Taliban as part of the accommodation the timing needs to be worked out so that the negotiations can take place before the door to the parliament is closed Scott Worden was also one of the three international commissioners on the electoral complaints commission that may have caused President Karzai some agita in the last few months Well I think President Karzai has reason to feel insecure he isn't sure where his allies are he's not sure who's with him and who's against him he doesn't fully trust the United States he knows the history with Pakistan he thought he had a stable geopolitical environment in which he was supported by a great power and a rising great power in the United States and India now he's not quite sure where he stands he's getting a lot of grief about arrangements in his family and political strategies that were tolerated without comment for a long while he feels insecure now the parliament's acting up and that just exacerbates his isolation I mean it might be the parliament's finally doing something like the job it was elected to do but one of the consequences of this sense of insecurity and the recent events in parliament is that it may affect the attitude of those around President Karzai who are looking to September and trying to fix the parliament so that he can have a more quiet sort of end of his presidential term and if they feel that they need to pull in southern delegations that are more reliable than the parliament they have now you could tempt them into another game of chicken with the international community over those elections I think a lot of that has been going on I think that it's kind of hard to locate the president in some of these discussions with his campaign team about how ruthless they're going to be or how many chances they're going to take with the international community but you can see the president is clearly involved in that process and on the reconciliation track I just say you know the parliament has already been an element of reconciliation if you count his if you count the groups that came in notional Taliban groups that used to be Harika and Muhammad Nabi that group that came in a few years back they're all sitting in parliament that's an effective vehicle that has actually been a pretty good confidence building measure in Taliban circles sends a signal the president actually delivered on what he said he'd do he made his senators, he gave his cars we have nice houses it works Toyota's it's a mixed signal I think I would just you know I mean what Steve said about the parliament being already that is what's going on with the parliament you know and you do have parliamentarians who are connected to the Taliban you know when Holbrook made that unfortunate comment that every passion of the Taliban and their family to some extent it's true and so these families are huge and so I think the parliament is already involved in the process and they will all be represented they'll all be at the Jirga certainly so that's all I would say let me just you raise the peace Jirga and we haven't really talked about it so three weeks away 1300 Afghans but not the opposition at least not publicly are coming to discuss something but three weeks away nobody exactly knows what that is what the outcome is likely to be I'm curious if you have thoughts about what the peace Jirga might yield and whether there's a plan that we haven't yet seen from Karzai's team that's going to pull it together in some way that they can walk out of it with feeling emboldened politically well it's you know it's first of all to lay out a plan for the reintegration of Taliban foot soldiers and commanders and set up a system of you know compensation and reeducation whatever whatever with this fund that the Americans are going to set up so and there's been input into this from the Japanese and from the Americans and various potential donors of this compensation fund the second thing I guess it will do to work out some kind of Karzai will be keen to get a consensus opinion from the Jirga to go ahead with negotiations with the Taliban leadership now I think that that consensus if it is given should be tempered with a lot of these things that I talked about earlier you know you should have a team you should have a strategy you should not be doing it with your brothers you know it should include women and North and all this kind of thing and it should be manipulated there frankly I believe this Jirga is far too early it's totally relevant at this point in time and this Jirga should have followed an international acceptance of dialogue with the Taliban and it would have made life I think you know it would have made this much more sense to have a Jirga after that the fact that Karzai will not do governance and instead of doing governance in the world really well look I'm going to try and reconcile with the Taliban I'm not doing governance and you know I don't think this is a very positive message to say so I think the Jirga is going to end up in a very limited fashion and eventually the real action will start when the Americans decide that they want to talk to the Taliban I think that's right there's sort of a gap in the design of this Jirga between the hopes of the Americans on the one hand and the thinking and plans of President Karzai on the other the Americans wanted this Jirga to be a step forward in their bottom up emphasizing reintegration strategy that was linked to the counterinsurgency campaign that would gradually win defectors of maybe 20 or 25% of field of Taliban commanders and soldiers so that a year from now we'd be in this mythical or at least a sought after position of strength to consider high level negotiations with the Taliban and so the purpose of the Jirga was to create a national compact by which such reintegration could be pursued province to province by governor and district governors and sub district governors in their circumstances but with principles that would also be consonant with eventual strategic negotiations with the Taliban but this would do so they I think they kind of drew that up handed over President Karzai and he looked at and put in a desk drawer basically it doesn't really fit with where he wants to be in leading this political track now we'll see maybe he'll bring forward some version of that after the Jirga but he certainly has not followed the script that London wrote for him he has been handling it in a more ad hoc way I think just protecting his political position trying to figure out where he wants to end up using the Jirga to ratify whatever that is in his mind after it's over right back to you I'm Dane Sosnicki, I'm from the Center of the Study of President and Congress Mr. Rashid I was wondering if you could further explain your thoughts if you had any on what the Obama administration the United States should do specifically to show Karzai regional players and even our European allies that the United States is here to stay past this July 2011 deadline we're going to be here for the long term and that everyone needs to accept that unfortunately I think whatever you say now nobody's going to believe you quite frankly because you shot the bolt and Gates and Clinton and everyone tried to sort of backtrack it and back to I think the perception in the region is just that and it's being further fueled of course by NATO the fact that the Dutch are probably leaving the Canadians are probably leaving and other countries will start thinking about exits also very soon unfortunately I think that was a huge mistake it sent very wrong messages to the Afghans at a very critical time and to the region what closer to the date I think the fact that you will announce new that you could announce new programs of development and reconstruction and clearing new areas of the Taliban etc which would prove that you are staying on before beyond July but right now I don't think there's very much you can do you can say it I mean people have said it until they're blue in the face and it's not going to make a difference in the region or among South Koreans I'm curious how does that square with what we heard from President Karzai reportedly last week as well as a Taliban statement that of course this is a ruse that Americans are in Afghanistan for strategic ends that will keep them there in their bases for decades to come a real strand of thinking not so much no one will take the bait back here gentlemen in the blue shirt I'm Gareth Porter I write for Interpress Service and I'd like to come back to the question of the evidence for whether the Taliban leadership is a. united about the question of negotiating and b. you know if they are united you know maybe I should start the other way around are the Taliban leaders committed to negotiating or are they divided on that question it seems if I understand what the panelists have said that Amit Rashid believes that they are committed now to a policy of negotiating as I understood what Steve said you think they're divided there's no clear consensus at this point on that and I'd particularly like to know how the people on the panel are interpreting the fact that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan website appears to have been sending these signals about negotiating specifically on the providing of a legal guarantee about no meddling and whether that in fact is compatible with the idea that there's a divided sure on this certainly I am not of the opinion that Mullah brother would have been negotiating and had earned the wrath of the ICI condemned Mullah brother as an American student three months before he was directing he was accused of taking money from the CIA privately so there was already and he wouldn't you know this wouldn't have happened there had been these negotiations between brothers and the Karzai camp and perhaps other people now I think Mullah brother was too senior too too senior too respected too critical to the whole Taliban logistical operation in southern Afghanistan too critical to the creation of commanders and leaders of the Taliban etc. he was not a rogue this was not done as part of a rogue strategy this was done with the consensual but let me clear up one thing what they are exploring are not negotiations they are exploring talks about talks they are exploring the possible we are having talks as to whether talks can take place so we had a very early stage nobody has discussed any of the terms and conditions that we are talking about here these are talks about talks and so talks about talks is not a threat we can deny it as the Taliban have every day they deny it, they say this is all western propaganda and all the rest of it they do not so I think it is they are interested in exploring this idea about talks about talks and if this had been a rogue operation I don't think Mullah brother would have been there I would just add one thing which is that the fact that Hizbi Islami leaders who are deputies that they were in Kabul staying at this arena the reason they came part of the reason they came is they don't want to be left out of a deal so to some extent they were afraid that had they stayed and waited they would be irrelevant and I think it was again that they came so openly they were meeting with the press every day they were meeting every European and American they went to all the embassies and Hizbi Islami and Hizbi Islami do have connections as well to the ISI we have time for one more question and my name is David Dixon I am with LaRouche PAC and I just wanted to bring up the issue of the massive growth of opium since President Obama came into office he and Ambassador Holbrook have made it clear that we have gone completely off of any eradication of opium but I think it is somewhat preposterous to think that we could have any political solution with a narco state which is what we currently face there have been proposals made especially by the Russians Viktor Ivanov made a proposal at the Russian NATO summit for a joint action at complete eradication but my question is since I mean I am of the opinion that we have to go back to eradication would any of you propose to President Obama be our policy to deal with that final question how do you deal with the scourge of opium I think the policy is the right one at the moment I think the U.S. military is now taking part in interdiction and trying to break up transport etc. and catch the chemicals and the raw material as it leaves the country I don't think in the midst of a counter in the midst of an offensive you can antagonize the whole population by starting eradication this would really not be productive it's far better that you accept this crop you try and catch this crop you let the farmer get paid whatever and catch this crop and then catch this crop before it leaves the country and then prepare for next year where you can put inputs investment in agriculture so that they start growing something else and a proper plan any final comments well I feel guilty for having corralled some of the finest journalistic minds in the world into one place for a little while but please join me in thanking our speakers for this tremendous opportunity and let me make note as you go out that there are books for sale both by the U.S. Institute of Peace including one on American negotiating behavior if you want to learn how we're going to behave on our side of the table and Ahmed's book in the main lobby where he will also be signing copies thank you