Afghanistan Analysis: After Rabbani's Death, A New Plan is Needed (Rondeaux)

The last time I met with Burhanuddin Rabbani, he had just taken up his post as head of Afghanistan's High Peace Council. He was looking unusually fit and energized and was in a jocular mood, his dark eyes laughing as he regaled his visitors with witty appraisals of Afghanistan's nascent peace process. President Hamid Karzai had taken his time in announcing the names of the High Peace Council members, officially announcing them in October 2010, and less than a month later Rabbani was already complaining that the Karzai administration had been dragging its feet on establishing an office for the council.

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Afghanistan: Obama Administration "Has Accelerated Direct Talks with Taliban" (DeYoung)

The administration has accelerated direct talks with the Taliban, initiated several months ago, that U.S. officials say they hope will enable President Obama to report progress toward a settlement of the Afghanistan war when he announces troop withdrawals in July.

A senior Afghan official said a U.S. representative attended at least three meetings in Qatar and Germany, one as recently as “eight or nine days ago,” with a Taliban official considered close to Mohammad Omar, the group’s leader.

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Afghanistan: The Top 10 Myths of 2010 (Cole)

Myth: There has been significant progress in tamping down the insurgency in Afghanistan.”

Reality: A recent National Intelligence Estimate by 16 intelligence agencies found no progress. It warned that large swathes of the country were at risk of falling to the Taliban and that they still had safe havens in Pakistan, with the Pakistani government complicit. The UN says there were over 6000 civilian casualties of war in Afghanistan in the first 10 months of 2010, a 20% increase over the same period in 2009. Also, 701 US and NATO troops have been killed this year, compared to 521 last year, a 25% increase. There were typically over 1000 insurgent attacks per month in Afghanistan this year, often twice as many per month as in 2009, recalling the guerrilla war in Iraq in 2005.

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Afghanistan Special: How the US Kills Its Allies and Helps a New Taliban Generation (Fitzgerald)

Certainly, the killing of Sahib Jan and the rise of a new generation of more militant Taliban  both point to a severe lack of "granular understanding of local circumstances". What is curious is that American officials and observers have been talking about granular understanding in Afghanistan for years. The author of the Times piece, Scott Atran, is an anthropologist, and it was anthropologists such as Montgomery McFate and David Kilcullen who advocated aid to intelligence-gathering by sending social scientists to map the "human terrain" in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Four years into the "human terrain systems" programme, why is it still possible for special forces to target a "reconciled" Taliban? Why is ISAF inadvertently killing off those Taliban with whom it is possible to negotiate?

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