Talking to the Taliban With the Wrong Assumptions: The Conundrum of Afghan Peace
Moh. Sayed Madadi
June 5, 2019
In his 1995 memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara boiled down the American failure in Vietnam to one important factor: America’s inability to fully grasp the complexity of its adversaries and the environment in which they operated. He wrote: “[t]he basic lesson is: understand your opponent…[w]e don’t understand the Bosnians, we don’t understand the Chinese and we don’t really understand the Iranians.â€
Little has changed in the quarter-century since McNamara’s reflection. After 18 years of fighting in Afghanistan, the United States is diving into a peace process based on false assumptions about its primary adversary, the Afghan Taliban. Namely, U.S. policymakers are assuming that the Taliban fight simply for political power, rather than for a rigid ideology, and that they operate through unified command and control. Based on these premises, America seeks to negotiate a power-sharing settlement with the group’s leadership to bring an end to the violence. But these dangerously flawed assumptions about the adversary could set Afghanistan on a course toward an even deadlier conflict.
https://warontherocks.com/2019/06/talking-to-the-taliban-with-the-wrong-assumptions-the-conundrum-of-afghan-peace/
