President Barack Obama acknowledges that the US is not winning the war in Afghanistan. He concedes to the difficulty of the Afghan scene just as he ordered last month the deployment of 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. When asked whether the US is winning the war in that country, his response is a resounding “No.”
He is now considering the possibility of reaching out to moderate elements of the Taliban in that country. This harks back to the strategy used by George W. Bush with the Sunni militias in Iraq. Obama cites the success of the US in separating Iraqi insurgents from the more radical elements of Al-Qaeda in the area. He notes that “there may be comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
When he was still campaigning for the position of president, Obama raised the idea of exploring the possibility of encouraging some elements of the Taliban to collaborate towards solutions for peace. Of course, he was referring to collaboration with fundamentalists who by their very nature of fundamentalism will hardly veer away from their avowed mission.
The president claims that reconciliation could be an important initiative, similar to the tactics employed by Gen. David H. Petraeus in Iraq. “I think [Petraeus] argues that the success in Iraq required reaching out to people he saw as Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Obama said.
The approach may fail in Afghanistan as the situation is more complicated. Obama knows that the country has very poor governance and a history of fierce independence among tribes that have different objectives.
In the meantime, Obama is still at a loss as to how to proceed with his proposed plan. He can never be sure if there are, indeed, moderates among the Taliban.
