Name: The Taliban: Dealing, Not Dealing, But Judging - Shadowproof
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The Taliban: Dealing, Not Dealing, But Judging - Shadowproof

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For some funtime reading to close out #McClusterfuck Day, you really want to , the man who brought you . (.) It’s ostensibly a paper about the prospects for negotiations between Karzai and the Taliban through the prism of analyzing the Taliban’s command structure. The short answer there is Not Good.Not only do the Taliban see themselves as having “successfully counteracted the military surge,” but the Taliban would require a fundamentally different structure for incorporation into any form of coalition government with Karzai.&nbsp;“In the existing presidential system,” Giustozzi writes, “Karzai could undo any appointment as&nbsp;he wishes, offering no guarantee to the Taliban that a deal would be respected&nbsp;in the medium and long-term.” There are even more concerns — the insufficiently Islamic constitution, the abundance of anti-Taliban elements in the security forces — and they’re enough to render negotiations pretty much DOA, absent some Big Exogenous Event. That could be the Pakistanis forcing the Taliban to deal. Or, “if the Taliban were to be weakened substantially in another round of&nbsp;fighting, they probably would become more accommodating in their demands,&nbsp;but it seems premature to speculate about this at this stage.” Judicious.Since negotiations are unlikely to save NATO’s ass, it makes sense to look at the sources of Taliban strength. And there, Giustozzi generally finds the Taliban in a more perilous and weakened position than is commonly assumed in the Washington debate. They’re unpopular and not legitimate. They don’t provide social services, and increasingly are accommodating themselves to post-Taliban social structures like the educational system they rejected for years. But here’s one space where the Taliban really do outcompete the Karzai government, and it’s an absolutely crucial one:Except for minor efforts by the Taliban in the education and health sectors, consisting of attempts to provide some health care in remote areas and to improve the quality of some madrassas, their civilian administration practically boiled down to the establishment of a separate judiciary. As of late 2008, a Taliban-appointed judiciary operated only in the two dozen districts where they were confident of their territorial control; a Taliban-appointed judge&nbsp;would have been at great risk in any area where the Kabul government was strong or the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were conducting Operation Enduring Freedom. In other areas where the Taliban operated, but were not in full control, they usually invited the population to refer to specific Qazis (religious judges) that were acknowledged to be respectable and strict enough. Because of the collapse of the state judiciary, the population in general seemed to appreciate this option; in the province of Ghazni in 2008, for example, not a single case was being brought to the state judiciary anymore.Many villagers might have seen the Taliban-sponsored judges as just part of the customary law system that, according to some surveys, attracted 80 percent of the cases even before the current conflict began. In some tribal areas, the Taliban even sponsored the recourse to tribal law—certainly an innovation from their point of view, as they had opposed the practice when they were in power in Kabul. This sponsorship of independent judges implied some risk for&nbsp;the Taliban, in the absence of any real capacity for supervising their work; the Taliban-sponsored judges in Ghazni were reported eventually to have become as corrupt as the state ones, with significant damage to the image of the movement of Mullah Omar. By and large, however, the provision of judicial services and dispute resolution by the Taliban, whether through trained judges or through the Taliban field commanders, proved to be a winning card for the insurgents.That’s their strength, and Giustozzi assesses it to be rather brittle. So maybe — just maybe — if U.S. governance advisory efforts shifted to a greater emphasis on getting Karzai to set up dispute-resolution mechanisms out in the provinces and districts, the relevance of the Taliban might erode. It would be parallel to the shift in development focus from big reconstruction projects to immediate-impact agricultural stimulus. Don’t go so much for governing as much as for erecting a legitimate mechanism to get two neighbors to agree on where the boundary between their land ought to be drawn.The Taliban don’t have to be good at what they do. They just have to be better than Karzai. By the same token, if Karzai can do better than barely-uncorrupt Taliban judges, that — alongside agricultural development and, yes, increased levels of security for Afghan civilians — might be able to change the Taliban’s calculation about whether and how to deal. It’s not always the violent confrontation that proves to be the most effective. If Karzai views reconciling to governing, however, then he’ll be met with rejection and a bloody stalemate will likely continue.Shadowproof is a financially independent news organization. All of our funding comes from small donations made by readers like you.We use your donations to hire freelance writers and cover our operating costs. Monthly membership subscriptions give us the stability we need to make plans while ensuring our organization does not depend on grants or major funders. If you like what you read, support our writers with a donation today.&nbsp;

For some funtime reading to close out #McClusterfuck Day, you really want to , the man who brought you . (.) It’s ostensibly a paper about the prospects for negotiations between Karzai and the Taliban through the prism of analyzing the Taliban’s command structure. The short answer there is Not Good.Not only do the Taliban see themselves as having “successfully counteracted the military surge,” but the Taliban would require a fundamentally different structure for incorporation into any form of coalition government with Karzai.&nbsp;“In the existing presidential system,” Giustozzi writes,...

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Spencer Ackerman

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The Taliban: Dealing, Not Dealing, But Judging - Shadowproof

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