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Taliban Fighters Canâ€™t Be Bought Off

30 January 2010 02:17 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Not for Sale: Kabulâ€™s Western allies want to pay Taliban fighters to quit the insurgency. Lots of luck, APA reports quoting Newsweek Journal.
Representatives from nearly 70 countries showed up in London on Jan. 28 for a one-day conference on how to save Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai was there, gamely offering "peace and reconciliation" to all Afghans, "especially" those "who are not a part of Al Qaeda or other terrorist networks." He didnâ€™t mention why the Taliban would accept such an offer while they believe theyâ€™re winning the war. Others at the conference had what they evidently considered more realistic solutionsâ€”such as paying Taliban fighters to quit the insurgency. Participants reportedly pledged some $500 million to support that aim. "You donâ€™t make peace with your friends," said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. True enough. But what if your enemies donâ€™t want peace?
NEWSWEEK reporter Sami Yousafzai laughs at the notion that the Taliban can be bought or bribed. Few journalists, officials, or analysts know the Taliban the way he does. If the leadership, commanders, and subcommanders wanted comfortable lives, he says, they would have made their deals long ago. Instead they stayed committed to their cause even when they were on the run, with barely a hope of survival. Now theyâ€™re back in action across much of the south, east, and west, the provinces surrounding Kabul, and chunks of the north. They used to hope they might reach this point in 15 or 20 years. Theyâ€™ve done it in eight. Many of them see this as proof that God is indeed on their side. The mujahedin warlords who regained power in the 2001 U.S. invasion have grown fabulously wealthy since then. The senior Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani could have done the same. Now he and his fellow Taliban are gunning for those opportunists.
Only a few relatively low-level Taliban commanders and fighters have defected, and they rue the day they did. Most of them now live hand-to-mouth in Kabul, exiled from their home villages. Sami has introduced me to some of them. They only wish they could return to the embrace of Haqqani or Mullah Baradar, the Talibanâ€™s No. 2 leader after Mullah Mohammed Omar, but they know theyâ€™d be killed if they were foolish enough to try. The Taliban donâ€™t give second chances. Even if Karzai and his U.S.-NATO allies offer great gobs of money to defecting Taliban, where could they go with it? They couldnâ€™t go home for fear of being put to death by their former comrades in arms. They wouldnâ€™t want to live in expensive Kabul, where people on the streets would make fun of their country ways, huge black turbans, and kohl eyeliner. They hate everything that Kabul represents: a sinful place of coed schools, dancing, drinking, music, movies, prostitution, and the accumulation of wealth. "Falcons fly with falcons, not with other birds," the Taliban say. In other words, you canâ€™t negotiate and live with secular people.
Karzai and his regime have practically no credibility anyway. No one trusts his promises, and they regard his government as an evil thing, a heretical, apostate regime. More than that, however, Taliban tend to take offense at the very idea of a buyout. As one fighter told Sami indignantly, "You canâ€™t buy my ideology, my religion. Itâ€™s an insult." In terms of defection, the closest thing to a "success" story is the former Taliban commander Mullah Salam. He quit the insurgency two years ago, was allowed to keep most of his men and weapons, and was given the governorship of his home district of Musa Qala, in Helmand province. Nevertheless he lives under constant threat of assassination, and Musa Qala remains a very insecure place.
Most Taliban feel comfortable only in the backcountry villages, where their world view is essentially shared by locals. Thereâ€™s a huge and growing disconnectâ€”social, economic, and perhaps even spiritualâ€”between the cities and the countryside. In villages where the Taliban have a strong presence, there is little or no conflict between Taliban virtues and local customs, from the wearing of long beards to heeding the call for prayer, keeping the sexes separate in public, adhering to Islamic law, and not tolerating crime. Especially in the countryside, most ordinary Pashtuns regard themselves as the big losers in the past eight years of Karzaiâ€™s rule and foreign military presence. As they see it, accurately or not, their ethnic rivalsâ€”the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaraâ€”have received the spoils of the Talibanâ€™s defeat, while Pashtun villages have suffered from official abuse, corruption, neglect, and war.