[News] 94% of Kandaharis Support Negotiations With the Taliban

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/porter04192010.html
April 19, 2010


94 Percent of Kandaharis Support Negotiations With the Taliban


Kandahar Campaign Doomed Before It Begins?

By GARETH PORTER

An opinion survey of Afghanistan's Kandahar 
province funded by the U.S. Army has revealed 
that 94 percent of respondents support 
negotiating with the Taliban over military 
confrontation with the insurgent group and 85 
percent regard the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers".

The survey, conducted by a private U.S. 
contractor last December, covered Kandahar City 
and other districts in the province into which 
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is planning to 
introduce more troops in the biggest operation of 
the entire war. Those districts include 
Arghandab, Zhari, rural Kandahar and Panjwayi.

Afghan interviewers conducted the survey only in 
areas which were not under Taliban control.

The decisive rejection of the use of foreign 
troops against the Taliban by the population in 
Kandahar casts further doubt on the fundamental 
premise of the Kandahar campaign, scheduled to 
begin in June, that the population and tribal 
elders in those districts would welcome a 
U.S.-NATO troop presence to expel the Taliban.

That assumption was dealt a serious blow at a 
meeting on Apr. 4 at which tribal elders from all 
over Kandahar told President Hamid Karzai they 
were not happy with the planned military operation.

An unclassified report on the opinion survey was 
published in March by Glevum Associates, a 
Washington-based "strategic communications" 
company under contract for the Human Terrain 
Systems programme in Afghanistan. A link to the 
report was first provided by the website Danger 
Room which reported the survey Apr. 16.

Ninety-one percent of the respondents supported 
the convening of a "Loya Jirga", or "grand 
assembly" of leaders as a way of ending the 
conflict, with 54 percent "strongly" supporting 
it, and 37 percent "somewhat" supporting it. That 
figure appears to reflect support for President 
Karzai's proposal for a "peace Jirga" in which 
the Taliban would be invited to participate.

The degree to which the population in the 
districts where McChrystal plans to send troops 
rejects military confrontation and believes in a 
peaceful negotiated settlement is suggested by a 
revealing vignette recounted by Time magazine's 
Joe Klein in the Apr. 15 issue.

Klein accompanied U.S. Army Captain Jeremiah 
Ellis when he visited a 17-year-old boy in Zhari 
district whose house Ellis wanted to use an 
observation post. When Ellis asked the boy how he 
thought the war would end, he answered, "Whenever 
you guys get out from here, things will get 
better. The elders will sit down with the 
Taliban, and the Taliban will lay down their arms."

The Kandahar offensive seems likely to dramatise 
the contrast between the U.S. insistence on a 
military approach to the Taliban control of large 
parts of southern Afghanistan and the 
overwhelming preference of the Pashtun population 
for initiating peace negotiations with the Taliban as Karzai has proposed.

Ironically, highlighting that contradiction in 
the coming months could encourage President 
Barack Obama to support Karzai's effort to begin 
negotiations with the Taliban now rather than 
waiting until mid-2011, as the U.S. military has 
been advocating since last December.

Obama told a meeting of his "war cabinet" last 
month that it might be time to start negotiations 
with the Taliban, but Defence Secretary Robert 
Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have 
opposed any move toward negotiations until Gen. 
McChrystal is able to demonstrate clear success in weakening the Taliban.

The Taliban ruling council has taken advantage of 
the recent evidence of contradictions between 
Pashtuns in Kandahar and the U.S. military over 
the Kandahar offensive by signaling in an 
interview with The Sunday Times of London that 
Taliban leader Mullah Omar is prepared to engage 
in "sincere and honest" talks.

In a meeting in an unidentified 
Taliban-controlled area of Afghanistan reported 
Sunday, two Taliban officials told the newspaper 
that Omar's aims were now limited to the return 
of sharia (Islamic law), the expulsion of 
foreigners and the restoration of security. It 
was the first major signal of interest in 
negotiations since the arrest of Mullah Omar's 
second in command, Mullah Baradar, in late January.

The report of the Glevum survey revealed that 
more people in Kandahar regard checkpoints 
maintained by the Afghan National Army (ANA) and 
Afghan National Police (ANP) and ANA and ANP 
vehicles as the biggest threat to their security 
while traveling than identified either Taliban 
roadside bombs or Taliban checkpoints as the main threat.

Fifty-eight percent of the respondents in the 
survey said the biggest threat to their security 
while traveling were the ANA and ANP checkpoints 
on the road, and 56 percent said ANA/ANP vehicles 
were the biggest threat. Only 44 percent 
identified roadside bombs as the biggest threat – 
the same percentage of respondents who regard 
convoys of the International Security Assistance 
Force – the NATO command under Gen. McChrystal – 
as the primary threat to their security.

Only 37 percent of the respondents regarded 
Taliban checkpoints as the main threat to their security.

In Kandahar City, the main target of the coming 
U.S. military offensive in Kandahar, the gap 
between perceptions of threats to travel security 
from government forces and from the Taliban is even wider.

Sixty-five percent of the respondents in Kandahar 
City said they regard ANA/ANP checkpoints as the 
main threat to their security, whereas roadside 
bombs are the main problem for 42 percent of the respondents.

The survey supports the U.S. military's suspicion 
that the transgressions of local officials of the 
Afghan government, who are linked mainly to 
President Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, 
the head of the Kandahar province council and the 
main warlord in the province, have pushed the 
population into the arms of the Taliban.

An overwhelming 84 percent of the respondents 
agreed that corruption is the main cause of the 
conflict, and two-thirds agreed that government 
corruption "makes us look elsewhere". That 
language used in the questionnaire was obviously 
intended to allow respondents to hint that they 
were supporting the Taliban insurgents in 
response to the corruption, without saying so explicitly.

More than half the respondents (53 percent) 
endorsed the statement that the Taliban are "incorruptible".

"Corruption" is a term that is often understood 
to include not only demands for payments for 
services and passage through checkpoints but 
violence by police against innocent civilians.

The form of government corruption that has been 
exploited most successfully by the Taliban in 
Kandahar is the threat to destroy opium crops if 
the farmers do not pay a large bribe. The survey 
did not ask any questions about opium growing and 
Afghan attitudes toward the government and the 
Taliban, although that was one of the key 
questions that Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the head of 
intelligence for Gen. McChrystal, had sought clarification of.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and 
journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising 
in U.S. national security policy. The paperback 
edition of his latest book, 
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>Perils 
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to 
War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.




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