The Alliance of Self-Deception: Success Can Only Come in Afghanistan If We Talk to the Radicals

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A man like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, for example, needs to have some kind of political anchor in Kabul in the future -- even if that would be tantamount to self-castigation for the West. Hekmatyar is a typical representative of the elite that left Kabul University in the 1960s and founded Islamist parties and, under the repressive rule of the king's nephew, Mohammed Daud, were forced to flee to Pakistan in 1974. This is the year Islamists define as the start of the long civil war. After Najibullah was toppled, Hekmatyar was among those who reduced Kabul to rubble.

Hekmatyar is now living in hiding, but he still has his fighters, especially in the southeast. He has been prompt in his statements in recent days, with an astonishingly moderate position: He says he's open to peace talks with the Afghan government. But he is also calling for foreign troops to withdraw and for new presidential elections. From Hekmatyar's words, it sounds as if he is distancing himself from the Taliban, which earlier this week rejected Karzai's reconciliation program, lock, stock and barrel. "The government will not succeed, with the help of money, in dividing and weakening the Taliban," a Taliban spokesman said.

But this just shows how helpless the West is in just dealing with the word "Taliban." It's a term that politicians like to use because it eliminates the need to scrutinize the anti-Kabul front more closely. The reality, however, is very heterogeneous. Hekmatyar, for example, was never a Talib. In fact he was driven out of the country for a second time by the radicalized religion students in 1996. But when the Western alliance marched into Afghnistan in 2001, even those who once fought against each other had a shared goal: To force the foreigners out of their country again. The fact that people like Hektmatyar (and later the warlords of the Northern Alliance) were not bestowed with any influence under Karzai is what led to the current, catastrophic, security situation.

Reconciliation is good, but the question is with whom? Shutting out the real voices behind the insurgency, as German politicians are fond of proposing, is absurd.

There Is No Military Solution

The proposal to officially divide government power in Kabul isn't new. The Russians already tried that back in 1989. Moscow's foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, flew to Islamabad to forge a coalition between Najibullah's communists and the mujahedeen. The American and Pakistani secret services, the CIA and ISI, rejected rejected it; they wanted to finish the war against the Russians. Shevardnadze was deeply angered, according to former Taliban ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef's autobiography, "My Life with the Taliban."

The question remains what the West promises itself from this new "policy of reconciliation".

Firstly: It is clear that the situation cannot be solved militarily; every troop surge is pointless. The new Taliban strategy is a victory for common sense, the country will be returned to the Afghans. The West can only assist this process. Furthermore, the West shouldn't exit in a mad rush: that would only cause another bloody civil war with all its bloody reckonings. Incidentally, that would be a war which, presumably, the Taliban would lose.

Secondly: If the West actually does manage to withdraw from Afghanistan one day and we still haven't built the nationwide girl's schools we so urgently desired in our naivety, and the women of Mazar-e-Sharif or Kandahar are still wearing the burqa -- then it is no real drama. The veil requirement was already lifted once in the past in Afghanistan and the school system was also reformed. All that happened during the reforms at the start of the 1960s. But those reforms failed -- which just goes to show that Afghanistan is quickly overwhelmed by rapid modernization.

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• Part 1: Success Can Only Come in Afghanistan If We Talk to the Radicals
• Part 2: A Lack of Girl's Schools? Women Wearing the Burqa? That's Not Really Drama