Cutting a Deal with Taliban?

Informed Comment Global Affairs

Even as the U.S. has escalated claims that Iran is aiding the Taliban, Iranian diplomats privately warn the U.S. against making a political deal with the Taliban.


Such a deal could constitute a rough Afghan equivalent of U.S. policy in Anbar Province, Iraq. In 2001-2002, the U.S. cooperated with Iran to use the Northern Alliance to occupy the ground vacated by the Taliban and to bolster the authority of the new Afghan administration. While the Northern Alliance's ties to Iran are weaker and more purely pragmatic than those of Iraq's Shi'a leaders, Iran and the U.S. both see them as potential (though unreliable) Iranian assets in Afghanistan. Whether or not the U.S. has in view such a strategic shift toward "moderate" Taliban (I have no direct evidence of it), Iran will surely suspect that it does and react accordingly. In the context of rising tensions with the U.S. over Iraq and Tehran's nuclear program, such political changes could link the two wars even more closely, mostly (as usual) to the detriment of the aspirations of Afghans for a semblance of a normal life after decades of war.


It is worth exploring indications that those currently fighting the Afghan government, NATO, and US in Afghanistan are willing to adopt a national political agenda that could, in principle, be a subject of negotiation. But if Bin Laden's support base among Taliban in the tribal territories of Pakistan continues to grow, and if the Pakistani state continues to disintegrate, the incentives for maximalist positions will grow as well. If tensions between the U.S. and Iran escalate, the result may be reconfigured war rather than peace. And if the U.S. presses on with aggressive opium poppy eradication in southern Afghanistan, efforts at consolidating government authority in the vulnerable areas bordering what Rashid calls Pakistan's "badlands" may collapse.