The Afghanistan conferences

ARIF AYUB
In the past few weeks there have been a plethora of conferences on Afghanistan starting with Islamabad, Dubai, Istanbul and finally London. This flurry of activity was bas-ically aimed at providing international support for the new US policy on Afghanistan. The change vindicates Pakistan’s position taken even before the war started, when President Musharraf told President Bush that the ‘good’ Taliban needed to be brought aboard any new political dispensation in order to maintain a balanced ethnic composition in the new government. The bad Taliban were defined as those who were unw-illing to break with Al-Qaeda. The old British definition of a good Afghan still remains a classic; as someone who shoots at you only during the night. Good and bad being relative terms it was obvious there would be some disagreement over this analysis. However the US in its hubris and in the typical wild west syndrome decided that the only good Taliban were dead Taliban.
This response was also an indication of how casually the US treats the views of Pakistan. Later after doing exactly the opposite of the policies sug-gested by Pakistan, the US blamed Pakistan as the scapegoat for the failure of these policies. Now after nine years of fruitless efforts the US has realised its war aims were too ambitious and it needs some sort of political settlement with the reconcilable Taliban. While this is a good change in policy the implementation of this policy is not going to be as easy as it sounds.
Firstly, the Taliban being an ideological movement are not given to rational or realistic thinking and it would be difficult to bring some degree of moderation or pragmatism in their policies, particularly when the US troop withdrawal timetable is being seen by the-m as a sign of victory. According to US intelligence as quo-ted by CNN, security incidents have reached 500 a week in the second half of 2009, and 300 a week in the slow winter mon-ths, while there are shadow Taliban governors in 33 out of 35 provinces. The recent attacks on Kabul and Lashk-argah are also an indication of the deteriorating security situation.