Police work and negotiations

All snark aside, I was struck by something when I read Steve Coll's take on the arrest of Baradar.

Why would Pakistan move decisively against Afghan Taliban leadership now? The Times suggests that Pakistani generals under the lame-duck Army chief, General Ashraf Kiyani, are coming around to the view that they require a national-security doctrine that does not involve sheltering the Afghan Taliban. Perhaps. There are certainly new debates inside the Pakistani military and civilian establishment about such a change of course.

I would guess at a more subtle motivation, one that might suggest a favorable pattern now emerging in the Obama Administration’s and Central Command’s approach to Pakistan’s role in the Afghan conflict. Over the last few months, by multiple means, the United States and its allies have been seeking to persuade Pakistan that it can best achieve its legitimate security goals in Afghanistan through political negotiations, rather than through the promotion of endless (and futile) Taliban guerrilla violence—and that the United States will respect and accommodate Pakistan’s agenda in such talks. Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban, especially in recent years, was always best understood as a military lever to promote political accommodations of Pakistan in Kabul. Baradar, however, has defiantly refused to participate in such political strategies, as he indicated in an e-mail interview he gave to Newsweek last year. The more the Taliban’s leaders enjoying sanctuary in Karachi or Quetta refuse to lash themselves to Pakistani political strategy, the more vulnerable they become to a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

If, through a combination of pressure and enticement, Pakistan and the United States can draw sections of the Taliban into peaceful negotiations, while incarcerating those who refuse to participate, it will produce a sweeping change in the war. With enough momentum, such a strategy would also increase the incentives for Pakistan and Taliban elements to betray Al Qaeda’s top leaders. It’s been a while since there has been unadulterated good news out of Pakistan. Today there is.

I can't say what, ultimately, is our current strategy for defeating the Taliban, but it appears to be a combination of stepped up military strikes like the one we're seeing this week in Marja, Afghanistan; drone attacks on Taliban leadership inside Pakistan; quietly laying enticements for Taliban leaders willing to consider a political settlement; intense, old fashioned intelligence work by the CIA; and, if Coll is correct, quiet negotiations with Pakistani leadership to make it clear that it's in their best security interests to find a political settlement as well.

That kind of stuff isn't spectacular to watch. It tends to involve stuff the previous administration didn't care much for, such as dogged police work, often frustrating diplomacy, and of course negotiatin' with the those we call our enemies. Case in point, if a Taliban leader had been arrested during that administration, there would have been a race to the podium to see who could announce this breakthrough, exposing the capture instead of quietly going out and capturing more.

And it struck me, terrorists and the Right in this country share many traits. The need for women to be subservient is one of them, but another is the need for symbolism and spectacle. Terrorists need to create high-visibility attacks against low-strategic targets. Our friends on the Right need the specter of torture and the symbolism of military commissions as opposed to civilian criminal courts. For both, this has been a pas de deux on the world stage. Finally, at least in Afghanistan, perhaps we're eschewing the showy and getting it done.