From the New York Times:
updated 9/27/2010 3:49:08 PM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — The top American commander in Afghanistan said Monday that senior Taliban leaders had reached out to President Hamid Karzai in the context of early efforts to start reconciliation discussions that could pave the way to end the fighting in Afghanistan.
For months, efforts at reconciliation have been stalled at every level, and this is the first explicit public suggestion that there is extensive behind-the-scenes activity between insurgents and the Afghan government.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, in a meeting with reporters after a tour of the Detention Facility in Parwan, where American forces detain Afghans they suspect of supporting the insurgency, said there were efforts by Taliban to establish contact with senior members of the Afghan government.
“There are very high-level Taliban leaders who have sought to reach out to the highest levels of the Afghan government, and they have done that,” General Petraeus said…
Full story
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39384567/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/
Petraeus, the great self-promoter! There must be some personal advantage for him in this timing since the Taliban have been willing to talk for quite some time now, and have been consistently rebuffed until now. This is somewhat reminiscent of Petraeus’s supposed great “breakthrough” with the so-called “Sunni insurgents” in Iraq, who as early as 2004 began approaching the American occupiers for assistance and cooperation in fighting foreign and other religious extremists who were trying to take over their towns and villages. The Americans turned them away time and again until 2007 when Petraeus supposedly got the brilliantly innovative idea of enlisting them as part of the strategy for The Surge (TM).
Everything Petraeus does is about self aggrandizement.
That is very interesting. Staying in the field must be becoming a drag for a guy who was CentCom commander and could schmooze with Congress. A strategy of self-aggrandizement succeeded in getting him a demotion. Now he is willing to be the general who “lost Afghanistan”?
It all worked very well for him until he apparently got a bit carried away with himself and went too far.
He somehow managed to garner an image of brilliant success from what was, in fact, serial failures in Iraq. The supposed success of The Surge (TM) in Iraq had little to do with any great military strategy on his part, but was more a matter of coincidence since by the time The Surge (TM) began a number of factors were coinciding that had nothing to do with what the U.S. military was and was not doing. In any case, even now conditions in Iraq are overall considerably worse than they were before the U.S. aggression began. As for Iraq’s “newborn democracy” (or is it a toddler by now?) – yeah, right!
Despite Petraeus’s newfound upbeat support of negotiations with the “Taliban”, the Salafi Taliban has apparently said that it will not enter into negotiations.
The negotiations exercise apparently is trying to bring the Karzai government, the Northern Alliance, and anti-American mujahaddin into political talks.
Unfortunately, it looks more like Sunni Awakening than actual talks toward a political settlement that would enable/force US troops to leave.
It’s all about “perception management” which by any honest name would be called deceit. And just as it was with Iraq, most of the decisions made, and virtually all of what is publicized and how it is publicized in war are more about domestic politics than they are about war strategy.