The head of the British army, General Sir David Richards, and the head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, were asked in separate interviews over the weekend about the notion of talking to the Taliban as part of Britain and America’s exit strategy from Afghanistan. Their answers were so different that they point to potentially the biggest policy rift between London and Washington in a decade.
“There’s always been a point at which you start to negotiate, probably through proxies in the first instance,” Sir David told BBC radio yesterday. “I think there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be looking at that sort of thing pretty soon.”
On the very same day, Leon Panetta put the opposite view on the Taliban. “We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation, where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce Al Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society,” the CIA chief told the ABC network.
London and Washington do agree at least that the military campaign must continue so that, in the words of General Richards, “they don’t think that we are giving up.” But unlike the British, the Americans appear to be clinging to the increasingly bizarre notion of inflicting a strategic defeat on the Taliban before talks can begin.
Listen to Mr Panetta: “my view is that with regards to reconciliation, unless they are convinced that the United States is going to win and that they are going to be defeated, I think it’s very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that’s going to be meaningful.”
In his own diplomatic fashion, General Richards said precisely the opposite; that he was “less certain” the Taliban would ever be cornered to the point of “some sense of strategic defeat”.
Talking to your enemy is not exactly a new idea, but the fact that Britain’s most senior soldier is endorsing it, at the very moment when Britain’s war dead surpasses the three hundred mark, provides the latest clue to military and government thinking on the major foreign policy issue of our time.
From talking to Whitehall officials, my sense is that those who do nothing but think about Afghanistan have concluded that talking to the Taliban must happen as soon as possible, because the military strategy- retooled by General Stanley McChrystal last year and implemented this summer – is producing disappointing results. I think General Richards knows this, and that his supposedly “private view” is being aired now as a very deliberate and public warning to the United States that they must engage, as Britain is, with the idea of a negotiated retreat – though of course nobody will couch it in these terms.
Whitehall’s Afghan experts have taken a long hard look on what “reconciliation” in Afghanistan means; “a long hard scrub” was how one official described it to me. Not just how to define reconciliation, but how to return the Taliban to the political fold without being accused of defeat or appeasement, not least by the relatives of Britain’s war dead.
There is broad agreement that Afghanistan – in the shape of President Karzai – must take the lead in talking to the Taliban, and reports over the weekend suggest he is doing just that. There is also shared concern that Pakistan’s repeated attempts to negotiate could allow Islamabad to dictate the terms of any regional peace.
And if there is a rift with Washington looming on this issue, it is because London doesn’t want co-authorship of another foreign policy disaster and to repeat the mistakes of the past. Contrast Afghanistan in 2010 with Iraq during the Tony Blair years, when Britain went along with some terrible military and foreign policy decisions which Britain did not necessarily agree with. Post Iraq, there is perhaps not surprisingly more of a determination to speak out, to air our differences with Washington in public as well as private. The comments by Sir David Richards on talking to the Taliban are a striking example.
The firing of General Stanley McChrystal last week reminded us that British and American forces fall under the same command – and that therefore coalition policy on Afghanistan is supposedly joined at the hip. Yet the comments by the head of the British army and the head of the CIA expose differences at the heart of this alliance.
It is tempting to dismiss such differences as healthy debate between friends, or “work in progress”. Except that British and American soldiers are dying at an alarming rate. So how high you set the bar on talking to the Taliban, who does it and how quickly you do it, could hardly be more important.