Afghanistan: War without end

Afghanistan: War without end
There is a clear and pressing need to end the monumental folly of prosecuting a 
war in Afghanistan
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	* Editorial
	* The Guardian, Thursday 7 October 2010
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There is a clear and pressing need to end the monumental folly of prosecuting a 
war in Afghanistan. It is spreading in intensity into the tribal areas 
of Pakistan and could yet rattle a weak civilian government in Islamabad to 
bits. To persuade themselves that they are prevailing, the US, Britain and their 
allies maintain the illusion that they are building the capacity of the Afghan 
state, when that claim is being routinely undermined by corrupt elections and a 
president in Hamid Karzai who packs his administration with his relatives. 
Belief in the nation-building project has collapsed. The bar of success is being 
lowered.
The war has become both a magnet for, and training ground of, no less than two 
generations of jihadis, each more determined than the last. It is the rallying 
cause for terrorist acts against civilian targets across the world. Enormous 
military resources are being devoted to fighting theTaliban on both sides of the 
border – there are 140,000 Pakistan military in the tribal areas alone. Yet all 
that has been accomplished is a larger battlefield and a more intense battle. 
The Pentagon's initial optimism that a surge of US troops would push the Taliban 
out of Helmand and Kandahar has faded, even before troop levels have peaked. 
Everyone knows that this conflict can only end in a negotiated solution, but no 
one yet can imagine it happening.
It is against this background that we reveal today that talks have been taking 
place with the Haqqani network, a group based in North Waziristan and one of the 
most feared insurgents in Afghanistan. This is separate from the report in 
the Washington Post that Karzai has been holding secret high-level talks with 
the Quetta Shura, the Afghan Taliban organisation based in Pakistan, about a 
comprehensive settlement. But taken together there is now credible evidence of a 
desire in Washington as well as in Kabul to address the leadership of the main 
Taliban groups, to reconcile the so‑called irreconcilables, and not rely on a 
policy of removing them.
It is not clear who is forcing whom to the negotiating table. It is assumed that 
the Taliban are propelled by a surge of drone strikes and by the desire of an 
older generation of fighters who know the benefits of peace to negotiate a deal, 
before they lose control altogether to radical Islamists. But too much also is 
unknown – how far these talks have gone, and whether indeed they present a 
viable alternative to the Taliban strategy of waiting the Americans out. For 
there is a third and more potent enemy that the US faces. It is chaos, the 
inability to stick to one course of action and to bend competing actors to that 
end. The war could continue simply because its momentum is now unstoppable.