On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, Chris Doss wrote:
> I'm not sure WHY the US doesn't try to come to some kind of arrangement
> with the Taliban.
"Some arrangement" is inevitable if there is to be any success along the current path; no (non-genocidal) guerilla war comes to a peaceful end without negotiation (unless you just withdraw, which I'm all for in this case). But if by "some arrangement" you mean "like Russia has with Kadyrov" I think the answer is the US can't do that because we haven't had a long basically colonial relation with Afghanistan the way Russia has had with Chechnya. That's what creates a Kadyrov, a man of two worlds, the army and the clans, whom the Russians can really trust and who can really get things done. If Afghanistan was in Hawaii maybe we could.
Also I should point out that Russia couldn't do this in Afghanistan either because Afghanistan is like a half dozen Chechnyas sewn together, and Russia didn't have this relation to most of them. But the Russian relation to General Rashid Dostum in Mazar-e-Sharif IMHO was very comparable to their present relation to Kadyrov. That place was peaceful for 18 years, during the entire Russia vs. the Mujhadeen war. Dostum was famously, legendarily cruel and because of it his territory was so peaceful that young women could attend Balkh university, the only functioning university in the country in those days, and do it in miniskirts. It was very much like Grozny today.
But that didn't help the Russians much in Afghanistan because that was the only corner where they could pursue that strategy. And they could do it there because it was the Uzbek corner, a nation they had a long internal colonial relation with.
The US doesn't have a corner like that. And if we did it wouldn't help us any more than it helped the Russians.
Michael