Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS WHO ARE THE TALIBAN? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Edward Stourton Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Innes Bowen BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 22.03.10 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 28.03.10 2130-2200 CD Number: Duration: 27.39 Taking part in order of appearance: Ahmed Rashid Pakistani Writer Professor Malcolm Chalmers Royal United Services Institute Sam Zarifi Asia Pacific Director, Amnesty International Thomas Ruttig Former UN Political Director, Kabul Alex Van Linschote Dutch Writer Michael Semple Regional specialist on Afghanistan and Pakistan Felix Kuehn Writer Horia Mosadiq Afghanistan Researcher, Amnesty International STOURTON: A few days ago, the UN’s former envoy to Afghanistan made this startling admission to the BBC: EIDE: 1: Of course I met Taliban leaders during the time I was in Afghanistan. I believe that talks are long overdue. And had we really engaged in them some time ago, then we could have come further than we are today. STOURTON: Kai Eide, was until recently the UN’s most senior representative in Afghanistan. He was confirming what many had long suspected: that behind the headlines about the military surge to drive out the Taliban, Western diplomats have been engaged in secret negotiations to give the Taliban a role in the running of Afghanistan. But could Britain and its allies really contemplate giving power back to the people who provided a haven for the plotters behind 9/11 – the people who have been blowing up British soldiers with their IEDs and sending suicide bombers to bring terror to the streets of Kabul? Professor Malcolm Chalmers knows Whitehall as well as Kai Eide knows the Taliban. CHALMERS: I think certainly in the British government, there is a considerable appetite for looking at the possibilities for reconciliation, for providing a role for even the most senior Taliban leaders in Afghan politics. STOURTON: Policy makers in Washington and especially London are now debating a negotiated end to the conflict more seriously than ever before. Earlier this month the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, floated the idea publicly in a big speech on Afghanistan in the United States. MILIBAND NEWS ACTUALITY: The idea of political engagement with those who would directly or indirectly attack our troops is very difficult indeed, and we have no more right to betray our own values than those of the Afghan people who pray that the Taliban will never come back. But dialogue is not appeasement and political space is not the same as veto power or domination. STOURTON: The Foreign Office planned the speech to open a new agenda. It includes much more than trying to turn a few disgruntled Taliban foot soldiers. It means recognising that peace in Afghanistan can only come if the Taliban are given some sort of role in running the country. That will involve confronting choices that are bound to raise questions about why we went into Afghanistan in the first place, and whether the sacrifices that so many have made there have been worthwhile. Sam Zarifi is Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director. ZARIFI: What’s on the table? What will be bartered away? Will there be a notion that in areas under the Taliban’s control, they will be able to impose their harsh interpretation of Islamic law and they will be able to impose their judiciaries; that they will be able to keep women out of the public sphere; that they will be able to engage in torture, public beheading, public floggings of people? STOURTON: To reach this point western policy makers have had to swallow hard and admit some big mistakes in the past. They have also had to reassess who the Taliban are and what they stand for. Because in 2001 it was possible to dismiss the Taliban as a freakish irrelevance, an unpleasant curiosity that could be safely kicked into the dustbin of history. I made it to Kabul in the aftermath of the fall of the capital in November that year, and it felt like a city waking up after a long nightmare. The idea that the Taliban might return was as unimaginable then as the proposition that Taliban leaders might one day hand over Al Qaeda leaders to America seems today. Thomas Ruttig, a former East German diplomat, was the UN’s political director in Kabul in the run- up to the defeat of the Taliban in 2001. He recites a litany of missed opportunities which allowed the Taliban to re-invent themselves in a way that even they can scarcely have dreamed of. RUTTIG: That movement was defeated, had politically delegitimized itself amongst Afghans to a large extent. So the Taliban became again taliban with a small ‘t’ and went to the villages and were wondering what would happen to them and in general to Afghanistan. STOURTON: What did happen to turn them back into a force? RUTTIG: That had a lot to do with mistakes the international community did, and it started with the Bonn Agreement on Afghanistan and first of all also the implementation of the Bonn Agreement and the enormous political pressure from the US who wanted to have a very centralised system, an Afghanistan tailored towards the person of President Hamid Karzai. And then there was two slow rollouts of the international troops. The troops only got to the southern provinces, the heartland of the Taliban, in 2006 virtually. Up to then, Afghans saw already the promised democratisation and reintegration did not work; that a lot of corrupt people came back into the government; that the warlords had come back in the government, supported by the West who used them as allies against the Taliban. And then the Taliban again started representing people in the south because there was no middle ground between the warlords on one side and the Taliban on the other side. There was no middle ground. And these kind of civilian political forces which exist in Afghanistan - pro-democratic, intellectual, secular (without them saying that they are secular because that’s a bit dangerous in Afghanistan) - they were not supported, they were not involved. STOURTON: The Bonn conference of December 2001, held in the aftermath of the American-backed Northern Alliance victory, was hailed as a diplomatic triumph at the time. A road map for drawing up a constitution was agreed and the groundwork for elections was laid. But the Taliban were excluded from the conference altogether. Bonn no longer looks like a triumph but a disaster - a peace settlement imposed by the victors, and the source of many of the problems in Afghanistan today. Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute. CHALMERS: It wasn’t a reconciliation between the different groups in Afghanistan. And in retrospect many people argue that that was a lost opportunity; that if they had involved the Taliban in the negotiations at Bonn, then some elements would not have been prepared to take part and there would have been conditions in relation to breaking ties with Al Qaeda and so on. If elements of the Taliban had been included, more elements of the Taliban had been included in the initial government, and if Pakistan had been brought on board during that process, then there would have been a different trajectory. STOURTON: I know we always say hindsight’s a wonderful thing, but it is extraordinary in the light of the way that the Bonn conference was treated at the time, isn’t it? It was regarded as an enormous and remarkable success, an amazing way to bring peace to this country. CHALMERS: We have to remember in 2001, this was after a number of quite successful interventions by the West - in Bosnia, in Kosovo, Sierra Leone - where it appeared that it was possible to achieve a military victory, to build a new state, to exclude those who were clearly pariahs. But this was I think a very different situation and we didn’t appreciate the magnitude of what had been taken on. We were looking too much at the previous five years rather than the previous two or three hundred years. STOURTON: It is now common currency among policy makers in Washington and London that Iraq distracted attention from Afghanistan, sucking away both resources and political focus. When British troops went into Helmand in 2006, they very quickly learnt what a formidable force the Taliban had become while we weren’t watching. But what has happened since then is even more startling. Traditionally the Taliban have been concentrated in southern Afghanistan because it’s a movement rooted in the Pashtuns who live there. No longer. The Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid is widely acknowledged as an expert on the Taliban. RASHID: Well you know certainly in the last two years, we’ve seen a huge expansion of the insurgency in Afghanistan by the Taliban. In 2006 and 7, they were confined to the south and the east of the country - the Pashtun belt, and most of the Taliban are Pashtuns. But what we’ve seen over the last two years, there’s been a huge expansion into northern Afghanistan, into the provinces bordering central Asia, as well as western Afghanistan and Herat, in the provinces bordering Iran and Turkmenistan, which really means now that they’re a countrywide movement. STOURTON: It is also increasingly difficult to claim that the Taliban are some kind of aberration - a fanatical ideological movement which has erupted out of nowhere without popular support. In a city like Kandahar, the movement’s real home, the Taliban are woven into the fabric of society. The Dutch writer Alex van Linschote lives in Kandahar, and with his colleague Felix Kuehn has helped a top former Taliban to write a revealing autobiography, getting very close to the movement in the process. VAN LINSCHOTE: The lines are far more blurred than the usual way we talk about it would suggest. We talk about the Taliban, the government, the people as if these are three independent entities; whereas all three are one and none in some respects. We have government members who have implicit understandings with Talibs in that area; you have governors or district chiefs who are in conversation with their Taliban shadow counterparts. Most people will have some kind of connection at least to the Taliban Movement - if only as a survival strategy. People talk to other members of society in order to get things done. If your car gets stolen in a certain district which is controlled by the Taliban, you go to the Talib representative and he’ll help you get it back maybe. STOURTON: So the logic of talking to the Taliban is compelling; they have become too powerful to be beaten into submission, and they’ve established themselves as a genuine political force. But what about the timing? Is the moment propitious? Ahmed Rashid thinks it is. RASHID: A lot of the Afghan Taliban are very tired. They have been fighting for the last nine years, and of course the wars in Afghanistan have gone on for thirty years. They are very tired. Many of them have become dependent on Pakistan and the intelligence services in Pakistan, which have been micro-managing them to a large extent. And they’re fed up with that, I think. Many of them want to get their families back into Afghanistan, away from Pakistan. I think, thirdly, many of the sensible Taliban realise that they have made their point in the sense that you know they are now running a lot of the countryside across Afghanistan, but they can never take the cities. They can’t go much beyond where they are now. They can certainly carry out more suicide attacks and wreak more devastation; but because of the Western firepower that’s concentrated in the urban areas, they can’t move forward much more. STOURTON: If that analysis is right, it surely follows that NATO should go on fighting even if negotiations begin. But here the waters get muddied - because there are other, equally keen, observers of the Afghan scene who argue that the current American and British strategy is counter-productive, and that more fighting makes the prospect of a political solution more remote. Thomas Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. RUTTIG: We do not have something like a moderate faction within the Taliban. That’s also a misconception. The party you would talk to is the leadership of the Taliban Movement - Mullah Omar and his people - and here the US comes in with a military search which started early 2009 and was taken as a declaration of war, and now the operations in Marja and the announced one for Kandahar are again declarations of war. Military pressure would have worked in 2003, 2004, 2005 when the Taliban were still weak, but they’re now they’re very much entrenched in many areas of Afghanistan and military pressure – will create whether we declare our intention to avoid it or not of more civilian casualties and that will drive more into the arms of the Taliban. STOURTON: It’s very interesting that you have that interpretation because there is an alternative one - as I’m sure you’re aware - which is that you have to combine a willingness to talk with pressure; and there are those who believe that actually precisely because of the surge, because of the arrests, the Taliban are more willing to talk now than they have been before. But you think that’s profoundly mistaken? RUTTIG: Yeah, I think that military pressure will not bring the Taliban to the negotiation table. People who know the Taliban Afghans who are in contact with them – say forget about it. There will be no talks and then comes the arrest of the Taliban leaders by Pakistan in Pakistan of those who had shown signs of being ready to talk. STOURTON: Those arrests of senior Taliban leaders by the Pakistani authorities were criticised last week by the UN’s former envoy to Afghanistan Kai Eide. He claims to have been in negotiations with those authorised by the Taliban’s leader himself, Mullah Omar. And he believes that talks could have helped bring the insurgency to an end, had those leaders still been free. But the fighting still continues and the longer it goes on the greater the risk of turning people away from western troops and into the arms of the Taliban. Thomas Ruttig understands the local languages and talks to ordinary Afghans. RUTTIG: You have a lot of people who just feel uneasy about troops kicking in their doors and driving like hell through the streets. You should sit in a taxi in Afghanistan on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar, which I have done many times; and the convoy comes of Americans, and every Afghan driver knows - to the right-hand side, stop there, don’t move, don’t get too close. And then you should hear them talking. They have it up to here. STOURTON: It is all too easy for western leaders to muddy the waters further. When President Obama announced his surge in troop numbers last year, he also gave a date for drawing the numbers down - no doubt with an eye to the American electoral calendar. A message which was intended to reassure American voters was of course also heard in Afghanistan. Michael Semple used to work for the European Union in Afghanistan until he was expelled from the country for establishing contact with the Taliban in December 2007. SEMPLE: I think the reality is that quite a few of the Taliban involved in the insurgency have misread the speech to think that disengagement is imminent; and really if they keep their heads down, somehow sort of stay on the battlefield but avoid getting killed, that they will you know win out in a year and a half. Some of them certainly have been encouraged to think that, and they’ve got plenty of propagandists on their own side who are encouraging them in that. However, the impression I get from quite a few of the (I call them the pragmatic Taliban) is that they say quite clearly that we know that even if the US runs down its own military, it’s got sufficient stakes in this and that it will have a say in what happens next and it will be backing whoever stays in Kabul after they eventually wind down their forces. STOURTON: The first really concrete sign of the new thinking came at this year’s London Conference. The Afghan government was promised a wad of cash by its international backers to bribe disaffected Taliban back into mainstream Afghan life. Here’s President Karzai speaking in London in January. PRESIDENT KARZAI: The offer of talks to the Taliban goes to those who are not part of Al Qaeda, are other terrorist networks who have accepted the Afghan constitution, who will accept the Afghan constitution and who’ll return to a normal, peaceful life in Afghanistan in accordance with Afghan constitution - benefiting from it as all other Afghan citizens do. STOURTON: This is talking to the Taliban as a tactic in an ongoing war - not as a strategy for lasting peace. But are there Taliban fighters who can be tempted to give up? Felix Kuehn, the other half of the eccentrically courageous writing duo who live in Kandahar. KUEHN: The fighters on the ground, really we’re talking about a whole range of different local grievances from having a huge amount of unemployed young people for whom it is probably something to do on the weekend, as stupid as it might sound; to people who have very strong grievances against the foreign forces and the Afghan government who see these as an opposition, who might have suffered a personal loss in the last few years because of the ongoing conflict and who blame the Afghan government. We have all sorts of different motivations when it comes to southern Afghanistan. SEGUE: SEMPLE: One of the mistakes that people make is that they only think hierarchically like this - that there are the less important Taliban and the middle Taliban and the high Taliban and the leadership. STOURTON: Michael Semple - who has many years of experience of dealing with the Taliban. SEMPLE: Actually it’s more of a conglomeration. Several different groups who’ve got you know quite different origins have come together, and each one of those groups has got its own hierarchy of the foot soldiers and the men who command a couple of dozen and the leadership. Rather than thinking that it’s an onion which has got several different layers on it, it’s a bit more like frogspawn. STOURTON: Think about trying to hold onto frogspawn for a minute or two and you get the point; small wonder that western governments have been wrestling with the problem of how to approach the Taliban. The big and controversial leap is the proposition that talks need to go beyond an attempt to seduce lower ranking fighters who can be bought - that they need to involve people like the Taliban leader Mullah Omar who were accorded the highest ranking in the demonology of the Bush Administration after the horrors of 9/11. Professor Malcolm Chalmers has been at the heart of policy making in Whitehall and remains close to government thinking. CHALMERS: I think reconciliation can take place on a number of different levels and it’s important to have ways of providing employment to the foot soldiers, people who might be tempted to join the Taliban for monetary reasons or indeed for reasons connected with local grievances. But I think it’s an illusion to think that the Taliban can be dramatically weakened simply by measures at that level. It also requires measures to win over those who are the main organisers who provide the logistics, provide the overall direction of the movement. STOURTON: What’s your sense of the thinking here in Whitehall where we’re sitting, and in the United States in Washington on this question in government circles? CHALMERS: I think certainly in the British government, there is a considerable appetite for looking at the possibilities for reconciliation, for providing a role for even the most senior Taliban leaders in Afghan politics at a local level and even at the national level, providing the links with Al Qaeda are broken. The bottom line for both the United States and the United Kingdom is - and the reason why we went into Afghanistan in the first place - is to stop Afghanistan or indeed Pakistan being used as a safe haven for international terrorism. So the red line for the US and the UK would be a breaking of that link. STOURTON: Would the Taliban be willing to break that link? If they wouldn’t, it is difficult to see how any negotiation could get underway. But Michael Semple thinks the omens are good. SEMPLE: The feedback that I get from people quite close to the leadership is that they are well aware that a sine qua non for any accommodation involving the international community would be a break of the links with Al Qaeda. The ones who I think would be you know supportive of a deal claim that now it’s a sort of relationship of convenience, it’s pragmatism, there’s no option but that they realise that they will have to extricate themselves from Al Qaeda. There are some parts of the insurgency where you know Al Qaeda frankly is not terribly engaged at the moment; there are some parts where it’s closely engaged, and they’re likely to take rather different positions on any imminent deal SEGUE: RASHID: There’s no doubt that the Afghan Taliban have benefited enormously from the expertise of Al Qaeda - money, training. STOURTON: Ahmed Rashid has been observing the Taliban/Al Qaeda relationship since its earliest days. RASHID: Taliban commanders have been to Iraq to learn the latest tactics. They brought back all these new tactics of IEDs, mine warfare, ambushes and suicide bombings from Iraq. Now how would the Taliban actually demonstrate to the West that they have broken with Al Qaeda? Well actually one of the only ways they could actively demonstrate it would be to go after Al Qaeda themselves. In other words give Western intelligence, the Afghan intelligence, give them information about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda because certainly the Taliban leaders know more about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and other such leaders of Al Qaeda than perhaps anyone else. Now of course that’s an enormously big step for the Taliban to take and we don’t even know if that’s going to be possible. STOURTON: Everyone we spoke to agreed that if there is to be an agreement with the Taliban, the mistakes of the Bonn conference will have to be avoided. Another peace settlement imposed by the victors won’t hold. Michael Semple. SEMPLE: If it were to look like defeat, it wouldn’t work, which is why it’s very important the way that it’s handled. There are many of these positions which if they announce themselves, then it’s not a defeat; it’s a new stage, it’s an advance. STOURTON: So if the Taliban are to get something back in the give and take of negotiation, what could it be? And will it involve accommodating the rigidly conservative social agenda that was such a hallmark of Taliban rule? Horia Mosadiq is an Afghani who now works for Amnesty International in London. She has just returned from a field trip to Afghanistan. MOSADIQ: I get the sense from many Afghan women on the ground that what they have gained, they don’t want to lose it under any circumstances. And simply they see that their rights and their gains are being somehow put into compromise when the Afghan government and international community talks about the negotiation with the Taliban, and they simply ask this question that what does it mean because the whole legitimacy of war on terror was to liberate Afghan women and this was one of the reasons that international community invaded Afghanistan and they overthrown the government of Taliban. STOURTON: That view has a powerful supporter in the person of the American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. I understand she regards defending women’s rights as a pre-condition for any talks with the Taliban. Here she is at the London Conference a couple of months ago. CLINTON: I also believe very strongly, as is apparent in what I say about this issue, that women have to be involved at every step of the way in this process. To that end, I unveiled our Women’s Action Plan. It includes initiatives focused on women’s security; women’s leadership in the public and private sector; women’s access to judicial institutions, education and health services; women’s ability to take advantage of economic opportunities, especially in the agricultural sector. STOURTON: Because the strategy of opening a conversation with the Taliban is so early in its infancy, it is very difficult to say how flexible they might be on questions like women’s rights. Felix Kuehn says the signs are encouraging. KUEHN: The Taliban have shown in recent years a great adaptation in what they’re doing with their tactics. They used to be extremely brutal with commanders like Mullah Dadulla (ph) who mostly used a stick and very little of the carrot and went into villages decapitating dozens of people. What we hear these days a lot is actually the local Taliban commanders rolling back a couple of the very, very strict rules or policies they had in the past concerning beards, music and television. I think when it comes to southern Afghanistan in general, there is always room for talk and negotiation. STOURTON: But Sam Zarifi of Amnesty International argues that the Taliban are, if anything, more repressive than they have ever been. ZARIFI: The Taliban came to power in the mid-1990s with the claim that they were harsh but honest. They banned the narcotics trade. Many people in Kabul and around Afghanistan spoke about how under the Taliban they could open their shops. They felt safe about their women. Women were completely restricted, but at least they weren’t being raped, which is the situation we had with the civil war. But we don’t hear that very much anymore about the new Taliban. If they had an attractiveness in the 90s, which was that they were the rule of law alternative, I think they’ve lost that. Certainly almost all of the Afghans that I’ve spoken with, and that Amnesty International have spoken with throughout the country, speak about the new Taliban as a force of chaos effectively. STOURTON: No one expects the strategy of talking to the Taliban will deliver a swift end to Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan. Even the most optimistic assessment of the way things might develop involves a long period of delicate flirtation while more of our young men and women are killed and wounded. And even if it works, it won’t be a simple negotiation. Everyone in the region will want a say in any final settlement - especially Pakistan, with its long history as the main foreign sponsor of the Taliban. Ahmed Rashid has followed the relationship closely from his base in Lahore RASHID: Pakistan’s role would be critical, partly because they do control the Afghan Taliban leadership. But there are many problems associated with this. I don’t think the Kabul government will like this very much. There’s a lot of anger and frustration with Pakistan. I don’t think the Taliban will like this. I don’t think the non-Pashtuns in northern Afghanistan, who have to come round to talks - and so far are very much opposed to any kind of dialogue with the Taliban - they will be opposed to any Pakistani role, as will of course other neighbouring countries: India, Iran. So these talks are not going to be easy. It’s going to be a multi-dimensional kind of dialogue with many of the neighbouring states putting in their two bits worth. STOURTON: It is very easy to shy away from the complexity of negotiations with the Taliban and to conclude that it is an unrealistic course. But public pressure to find a way of bringing the troops home is growing here and in the United States. Professor Chalmers believes a negotiated settlement is possible without compromising the objectives that took us into Afghanistan in the first place. But getting to that point raises some delicate issues. STOURTON: Do you think it becomes difficult to ask troops to go on fighting in the circumstances where we all know that at the end of the process there’s going to be a reconciliation with the group that are fighting, particularly fighting such a very brutal war with such a high chance of getting killed or injured? And indeed whether it’s reasonable to ask the country to go on supporting a government that’s asking its troops to do that? CHALMERS: I think there are two fundamental objectives that we have set ourselves in Afghanistan, which are indeed linked. One is to stop Afghanistan returning to be a safe haven for international terrorism, which is directly linked to our national interest; and the second, to give the Afghan people a chance to develop economically and to build peace and prosperity after a period of decades of civil war. If you can achieve those objectives by incorporating somewhere large elements of the Taliban, then that’s fine. In the whole history of counterinsurgency over the years, time and again, there has been reconciliation with those who we’ve been fighting with. There are not a few examples of British colonial history where the people we are fighting one year, five or ten years later ended up being the president with whom we had cordial, diplomatic relations. STOURTON: Might Mullah Omar one day be elected as President Omar and perhaps even be welcomed here on a state visit? If you find that a difficult concept to grapple with, it merely underlines what a long road this is likely to be. But the first few steps along it are already being taken. .