Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign - Sherard Cowper-Coles

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Volunteers, we should look at experimenting with more territorial regiments in the Afghan Army, on the model of the British or Indian Armies. The principle would be unity through diversity, as any ceremonial gathering of British soldiers with all their different dress uniforms suggests. I always thought that the 1st Battalion The Helmandi Rangers, wearing some sort of local dress, might be more willing to garrison the Province than a mixed but predominantly Tajik unit of a homogenised Afghan National Army on a Soviet or American model. But, whatever shape the Afghan security forces take, the key point is that they can only help underpin a political settlement, they cannot deliver it – at least not an acceptable one.

      The third area on which the British Embassy started to do some serious thinking in the summer of 2007 was what we then called reconciliation. By that we meant efforts to bring over at local or tactical level insurgents, either individually or in small groups. Our analysis made much of the different strands in the insurgency. Many of those we were fighting were said to be motivated more by greed than by ideology. There were the ‘ten-dollar-a-day Taliban’, paid to fight; the ‘have-a-go Taliban’, opportunistically joining the insurgency in order to secure material advantage for themselves; and the ‘farmboy Taliban’, who harvested their crops by day and fought by night. On the basis more of wishful thinking than of any detailed understanding of the insurgency, we expressed the view that, given the right carrots on offer from the Afghan authorities, many or even most of the insurgents would change sides.

      The papers on this that we sent to London, and Lashkar Gah, and then to Washington, excited much interest. Everyone knew that all insurgencies that ended satisfactorily did so through a political deal of some kind. Patriotic Afghans knew this too, and, with our support, some of them started to put out feelers.

      But we were naive in expecting reconciliation to occur on any significant scale in the absence of an overarching political process leading to a new political settlement. Just as the fighters of ZANU-PF would not have come in from the Rhodesian bush in 1980 without the political umbrella of a Lancaster House settlement, so large numbers of Afghan insurgents would not come in, and will not come in, until they can do so as part of a wider peace process. Of course, there may be local deals. And individuals, and individual groups, may change sides. But little will happen on the wholesale scale we need without the larger political framework.

      Only later did we distinguish between what we later called reintegration (bringing over lower-level fighters) and reconciliation (deals with more senior Taliban commanders). And many of us underestimated the extent to which the insurgency was driven by ideas as opposed to more mercenary motives: much the same eclectic blend of fundamentalist Islam, conservatism, nationalism and xenophobia that had propelled the anti-Soviet insurgency. And ideas had to be fought with ideas. But our instinct – that the problem was in essence political, and needed to be treated politically – was right.

      Chapter 8

      The Great Game – Round Four

      As I had already discovered, one subject always came up in every conversation with President Karzai: Pakistan. Like many of his fellow countrymen, Karzai was convinced that the source of many or most of his country’s troubles was Pakistan in general, and the Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) in particular. He believed that Pakistan had never accepted the removal of the Taliban – Pakistan’s proxies – from power, and was striving by every means it could to restore the status quo ante. Karzai saw a Pakistani hand almost everywhere and in almost everything.

      Worse than this, he believed that Britain was in league with Pakistan. Time and again he accused me of being too sympathetic to Pakistan, and of working for a government that was colluding secretly with Pakistan to control Afghanistan. He was convinced that SIS had especially close ties to Pakistan and operated in Afghanistan on Pakistan’s behalf. The President’s initially good relationship with General David Richards had been damaged when, towards the end of his nine-month tour as ISAF commander in 2006–7, Richards had travelled to Pakistan and returned seemingly more sympathetic to Pakistani views than Karzai had found acceptable. For President Karzai, Pakistan was a binary issue: either one was with Afghanistan, and against Pakistan, or vice versa: the middle was excluded.

      Thus, in my first few meetings with President Karzai, he always steered the conversation round to Pakistan. His eyes narrowing, his voice lowering, he would ask me detailed questions about Pakistani politics – a subject which, thankfully, I understood even less then than I do today. As with many other visitors, I was being subjected to a thinly disguised viva voce examination on my soundness. Karzai’s particular bête noire was President Musharraf. He had bad memories of the way President Bush had brought him and Musharraf together for what had apparently been a frosty trilateral dinner at the White House in September 2006. He never had much rapport with the Pakistani military. I suspect too that an element in his distaste for many Pakistani officers of the old school was his own rather ascetic Islamism (he neither smokes nor drinks, and his wife keeps purdah).

      Sometimes President Karzai would become emotional about Pakistan, and about the need to reunite the Pashtuns/Pathans on both sides of the Durand Line. The Line was named after the senior official in the Foreign Department of the Government of India, a diplomat called Sir Mortimer Durand, who in 1893 had overseen the demarcation of what was supposed to be the border between Afghanistan and British India. The Line ran along the high peaks of the ranges separating the Indus Valley from the Afghan lands to the west. In doing so, it had cut in two the Pashtun tribal confederations in those mountains. Afghanistan has never recognised the Line as its eastern border.

      Once, getting very excited, President Karzai told me that, if Musharraf did not accede to some particular demand (I forget what), he, Karzai, would personally head a Pashtun march on the Attock bridge across the Indus (the jumping-off point for many invasions in the other direction) and lead an attack into the Punjab itself. In this he was reverting, albeit briefly, to the Pashtunistan irredentism which Mohammed Daoud had adopted as prime minister and then president of Afghanistan. Like all his predecessors, Karzai believed that for him officially to recognise the border would amount to committing political suicide with his Pashtun base.

      Despite this, I believed then, and believe now, that any serious effort to stabilise Afghanistan has to include a perspective or process leading to recognition of the Durand Line as Afghanistan’s eastern border. As with the recognition of the inner Irish border, the aim should be to establish the Durand Line as the international frontier de jure just at the point when it had become de facto irrelevant, thanks to the creation of what I liked to call an economic Pashtunistan. There were, or should have been, parallels with post-war reconciliation between France and Germany, and with the Schuman Plan for binding their two economies together.

      With all that history in mind, I thought that there should be a massive international effort to connect the Pashtun tribal areas in the mountains on both sides of the Durand Line with each other and with the outside world, and to develop them economically, socially and politically. Infrastructure should be established to support and acknowledge the reality that the border was already an open one. The tribespeople of, say, the Afghan province of Khost were in most ways closer to their brethren in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal

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