Comments
carl,
Thanks, I overlooked that very interesting paper by Turcan.
Dayuhan,
Your point of addressing local grievances to remove a pool of recruits from the insurgency is in line with what I was arguing. I think the view that merely providing protection from the Taliban will win Afghans to the side of the government is a bogus idea. In many cases, they're neither happy with Taliban nor GIRoA. In those instances, low-level negotiations that reconcile governance desires of the communities with the capabilities and authority demands of the district/municipal/provincial government would be a better tactic.
I've often wondered about this, especially when the issue of reform in Kabul and negotiation with Taliban leaders comes up. I haven't enough experience with Afghanistan to know, but I do have a lot of time on the ground in other decentralized tribal societies. In the ones I'm familiar with, events and policies in the capitol mean absolutely nothing; local issues mean everything.
The area where I live was a hotbed of insurgency through the 1980s. Once the local grievances were resolved the local populace divorced itself from the national insurgent movement that it had once supported, and settled down, depriving the national insurgency of a major theater of operation and a major source of capable recruits. Every case is different, but there might be a lesson there.
Always worth knowing why the other side is shooting at you... not the leaders, but the guys actually doing the shooting in any given place at any given time. If those reasons can be taken away, it may not mean winning the war, but it may bring more peace to that corner of the war... and if enough corners see their grievances resolved, and enough shooters stop shooting, there can be a real difference in the war overall.
This paper was interesting to me because its' take on negotiation was completely at odds with what you would expect. It advocates negotiations at very local levels to alleviate local grievances because the author thinks those are what really drive the conflict. He advises against the grand negotiations in the neutral capitol the State Dept. types are so fond of because he feels those favor the big wigs on both sides, not the man in the village.
This paper and Metin Turcan's paper "Simply a Nirvan Fallacy" really complement each other.