Disarming Conflict

  A recent gathering of the Oslo Forum, an annual assembly of conflict mediators, was reportedly[i] reminded that peace agreements are not simply negotiated, signed, and implemented, in that chronological order. Mediation and negotiation are as intrinsic to the implementation of an agreement as they are to reaching agreement in the first place.

Elizabeth Cousens of the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, cosponsor of the Oslo Forum along with the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, identified a range of post-agreement issues that require ongoing negotiation.[ii] In some cases, agreement on particularly difficult issues is deliberately set aside for future work. Disagreements can emerge over interpretations of aspects of the original accord. New issues arise as circumstances change.

Cousens rightly offers the Taliban of Afghanistan as a case in point when she notes that a common source of unresolved issues after a peace agreement has been signed is the failure to be fully inclusive in the original negotiation. And when, like the Taliban, the excluded parties develop the wherewithal to undermine the accord, there is little option but to deal with those disaffected outsiders.

And dealing with determined outsiders that can claim a significant constituency and that take up arms rarely means defeating them on the battlefield.   A review of 80 conflicts in the period 1990 to 2007 concluded that only 7.5 percent ended in a military victory (and not always by Government forces). Roughly a third ended through negotiation and another 20 percent were on their way to being resolved through a negotiation process. The remaining 40 percent were still unresolved.[iii] 

In Afghanistan, the main reason for excluding the Taliban from the original peace agreement worked out through the Bonn process of the late 2001 and 2002 was the assumption that they had been thoroughly defeated and they no longer had a credible constituency in Afghanistan. Now, not only do the Taliban have a serious constituency, they also have the means to challenge the status quo. Despite the presence of a major international force fighting them along side the Government, their defeat is not imminent; there is no evidence that the counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan’s south and east will become part of the 7.5 percent of conflicts that end in military victory by one side or the other. Engagement and negotiation are the only realistic option.

At the same time, much has changed in Afghanistan since 2002 and it is not credible to assume that engaging the Taliban or their sympathizers means dealing with them as they were in 2001.

In a May visit to Kabul, a conversation with a Taliban cleric (sympathetic to the Taliban but seemingly more closely linked to the Pashtun-dominated political movement Hizb-i Islami-Hekmatyar) elicited strong, and predictable, condemnations of the American presence and the conduct of American forces in Afghanistan. At the same, the cleric strongly rejected Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s demand that all foreign forces leave Afghanistan. Withdrawal, he said, would send Afghanistan into a new level of war that would not be easy to end. He said the old Taliban-Northern Alliance conflict would immediately escalate into much more generalized fighting, and he feared that the Taliban and Hizb-i Islami forces would not have the capacity to prevail in a civil war with Northern Alliance groups (though he did not doubt their capacity or resolve to continue the fight).

New negotiations are needed for multiple reasons. Key Afghan stakeholders were excluded from the 2001-2002 peace process; conditions have changed markedly since then, including the marked military ascendance of the marginalized; there is no basis for assuming that the real interests and positions advocated by those same marginalized are known or are the same as those articulated by any one particular leader.

To get to the bottom of what the insurgents want requires talking. And, according to mediation experts, negotiations and renegotiations are an accepted, and expected, part of the follow-up to and implementation of peace accords. New negotiations in Afghanistan would not be out of the ordinary and Canada should stop resisting them and start preparing for them.