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Taliban: 1, ‘Freedom’: 0

During pre-election debates in September last year, Obama said “We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over.” While the first clause was wildly optimistic at best and outright electioneering (the political word for ‘lying’) at worst, the second is true enough. A war is traditionally over when one side loses. In this the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan are united. Everybody lost – some more so than others.

Except the Afghan Taliban. They came out smelling like hateful roses. The Greeks, who certainly thought up a lot of clever metaphors, had two stories that apply here: that of the Hydra, and that of Sisyphus. The Hydra grew two new heads every time one was cut off, an elegant metaphor for a problem that only multiplies every time you face it – as it were – head on.

Sisyphus was a man who stole something or beat up someone or looked at a Greek god funny and was predictably cursed to eternity in the apparently customisable Greek hell, where he pushed a rock to the top of a hill every day, only for it to come crashing down every time. It was an illustration of backbreaking yet ultimately futile labour, and a frighteningly accurate prediction of 90 percent of desk jobs worldwide.

In case you’re not the sharpest knife (or even spoon) in the drawer, the Taliban are the Hydra and everyone else is Sisyphus, if Sisyphus also broke his hand punching the rock every day.

Like pundits across the world, I am exhausted at trying to pretend like I have an informed opinion about this. As Scott Adams rightly pointed out, the opinions page is full of people who feel the world would be a better place if it was run by people who wrote opinion pieces. And normally this is one hundred percent accurate.

We see ourselves as proud armchair philosopher-kings denied their rightful kingship, casually trotting out gem after gem of blinding wisdom that obviously no one in charge ever thought up because we think we are smarter than them. Every insufferably condescending opinion that we must bottle and cork to coexist in normal society without being beaten by wet sandbags pours itself onto the defenceless page.

But let me be the first to admit I have no magic formula ensconced snugly and smugly within my skull as to what to do with either brand of the Taliban.

Let’s start with what I do know: that the Afghan Taliban have won. Don’t even try to argue that point. Don’t bring up the number of their second-in-commands that have been drone-struck (see above: Hydra). Nobody is fazed because Osama bin Laden was killed. The green zone, which is so small it effectively makes Karzai the mayor of Kabul, is laughable.

The reason you hear this trivia so often is because nobody, particularly the US, likes to be a loser. These issues are highlighted because of the desperation to spin something into a facsimile of a victory. Was it worth the decade of war, the eroding of civil liberties across the globe, the Nato deaths, the drone strikes in Pakistan, the sundering of a nation and the destabilising of another? No.

The northern alliance is nowhere to be seen. The Taliban are opening up embassies. The US is courting them to the negotiating table, dropping even the precondition that they reject Al-Qaeda officially (a more profound humiliation, apart from when the US lost to Cuba in baseball, is difficult to imagine), while the Taliban gleefully make a farce of the proceedings to make a point. Although the Afghan Taliban and the TTP are separate entities Pakistan has, in a great twist of irony, become Afghanistan’s strategic depth.

Will the new Taliban in Afghanistan be worse than the old? Quite possibly. Worse, and emboldened. The US has lost its stomach for the war; its cowboys failed to ‘smoke them out’. In the end, like so many before them, they couldn’t take the heat.

It’s a bitter pill, but the quicker we swallow it the quicker we can move on to round two. For the Americans, negotiations and peace talks are simply a way in which to escape with the last shred of their dignity, to walk away before they are carried away.

For us? We have nowhere to run, and we have our own Taliban to contend with. The party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the party in parliament are both gushingly eager to make peace with an enemy that has bled us for so long. These overtures have thus far been rewarded by an onslaught of terrorism and most recently by the brutal killings of foreign tourists and their guide.

I cannot claim to know the future. However, I am perfectly able to read the past: every ceasefire with the TTP has been treated by them like tea-breaks to regroup and discuss strategy and then immediately move on to the next murderous innings in a businesslike fashion. We cannot ideologically coexist with an entity that sees women as animals, life as cheap, modern education and medicine as sins punishable by death. Not yet. We are not so far gone yet.

The TTP differs from the Afghan Taliban now in one more, very major way: it has no stake in society. Despite their victory, if the Afghan Taliban wish to rule across Afghanistan, they will have to strike some balance with other national and regional powers, give some concessions to other ethnicities. In a word, even if from a position of strength, they will have to negotiate.

By contrast, the TTP has no realistic chance of taking and holding cities, nor has it manifested any particular desire to. What is it fighting for? Not land, not against foreign occupation or oppression. It has a convoluted explanation of some mythic golden Islamic caliphate it vaguely wants to establish. But the sad truth is the TTP militants fight because they are fighters, and that’s it. I cannot imagine a scenario where they put down arms to become farmers. They do not seem to dream of peace.

What terms can we offer them that they would accept? What ultimatum can they spit at our feet that we could swallow? Are we damned to be locked in fruitless, endless conflict forever? I don’t know. Nobody, whatever they may say, knows. But we can massage the odds in our favour.

The drone strikes must stop, for the anti-American and anti-establishment talking points they freely give the Taliban. It doesn’t matter how many number twos they’ve killed. This isn’t a video game. You don’t win the round by killing x number of the enemy. You win by achieving your objectives – in this case, security for the nation and the neutralisation of the militant threat. In 10 years of war, in five years of intense drone strikes, how close have you come to either goal? Ask thousands of sundered families across the country that grow, heartbreak by heartbreak, attack by attack, every year.

All support to militants, tacit and otherwise, must stop. After the US abandoned its assets and allies post the Afghan war, elements within the Pakistani state found the discarded weapons irresistible. Untraceable, unpaid, suicidally brave clockwork soldiers wound up by jihad and let loose against the infidels of our choice? Yes, please, with a packet of crisps! Trying to keep these men in reserve over their supposed use in an incredibly hypothetical war with India is like a man who chooses not to seek treatment for cancer in the insane hope that it will eventually infect his neighbourhood rival.

The state must reassert its writ, not only militarily, but in filling all those social and economic holes it has let our people slide into, by giving them a safety net, by promising and delivering a tomorrow that is better than today, by inspiring in them a sense of belonging to a nation that cares for and protects its own.

We must stop our limp-wristed, apologetic, cringing backtracking from every issue that the ultra-right twists into one more vector for eroding the country they never wanted in the first place – beginning with a belated defence of our vulnerable minorities.

We’ve all taken quite a beating. To have any chance in round two, we must, at the very bare minimum, stop sabotaging ourselves over fruitless fantasies.

The writer is a freelance contributor. Email: zaairhussain@gmail.com

Zaair Hussain, "Taliban: 1, ‘Freedom’: 0," The News. 2013-06-29.
Keywords: Political science , International issues , Political issues , Taliban-Afghanistan , Al-Qaeda , Taliban , President Obama , Osama bin Laden , President Karzai , Khyber Pakhtunkhwa , Afghanistan , United States , Pakistan , TTP