Talking With the Taliban by Paul McLeary at Aviation Week's Ares
There's been a lot of talk lately about opening negotiations with the Taliban—or at least trying to pull in the "reconcilables" while continuing to kill the "unreconcilables"—which has created a lot of back and forth in hotbeds for debate about counterinsurgency tactics and procedures, like the Small Wars Journal and Abu Muquwama blogs...
I recently spoke with Nathaniel Fick, a former Marine officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught at the counterinsurgency school in Kabul, and who is currently a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who thinks that negotiating with the Taliban right now is a bad idea. "If we open negotiations with the Taliban right now, we will be doing so from a position of weakness," he says. "The trick for the next administration is to take the tactical and operational and strategic steps to get us into a position of strength where negotiation is an option."
John Nagl, a former army Lieutenant Colonel also at the Center for a New American Security, told me that in the near term, what he sees as most crucial for finding a solution to the Afghan mess is the need for "confidence-building measures between India and Pakistan" that could be very useful in allowing Pakistan to focus more exclusively "on the Taliban insurgency in its midst and the continuing problem of al Qaeda. None of these things by itself is going to turn the tide. A combination of all of them with additional resources has the potential to be enormously helpful."...
Much more at Ares.