Afghan president Hamid Karzai urges West to buy off the Taliban
After giving up on winning victory in Afghanistan by military means, the international community is resorting to the centuries-old method of buying its way out.
In London this week, Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, will launch a British and American-backed plan for “reintegration” of the Taliban and call for international funding to offer jobs and bribes to bring insurgents in from the cold.
The conference, which starts on Thursday, will be the first big international gathering on Afghanistan since President Barack Obama announced his military strategy last month, including a surge of 30,000 American troops.
The aim was to accompany the surge with a new political strategy and ways for the Afghans to provide their own security by setting up local militias, which could include former Taliban. [continued…]
This is the oldest trick in the book for dealing with insurgencies: buy them off. The trick is that the Taliban control all of the country, much like the NLF (“Viet Cong”) in Vietnam circa 1973 and like the NLF they aren’t in it for the money, they just want to see the US and NATO leave. I think people will take the bribe money, use it to buy weapons and supplies, then begin attacking again once enough time passes. When you have a shadow Taliban gov’t. in every province this is a clear sign that the US/NATO has failed to defeat the insurgency and it’s time to either leave outright or scale the number of soldiers down to a training force/backbone for the Afghan Army and police. The US dislikes loosing wars, but it just doesn’t understand that you need political power as well as firepower to just barely suceed against an insurgency.