Interview with the Taliban

The New York Times has a fas­ci­nat­ing story today. It’s an inter­view with a Tal­iban logis­tics tac­ti­cian the Times has been work­ing on for six months. He finally spills the beans on the Tal­iban plans for Pak­istan and Afghanistan, the strate­gies they will use and what they fear.

He was clued into the Petraeus doc­trine, used to good effect in Iraq, and the plans to apply it to Afghanistan.

“I know of the Petraeus exper­i­ment there,” he said. “But we know our Afghans. They will take the money from Petraeus, but they will not be on his side. There are so many peo­ple work­ing with the Afghans and the Amer­i­cans who are on their pay­roll, but they inform us, sell us weapons.”

Like­wise, he knew the­o­ries of turn­ing the Amer­i­cans’ mil­i­tary advan­tage against them. “The Amer­i­cans can­not take con­trol of the vil­lages,” he said. “In order to expel us they will have to resort to aer­ial bomb­ing, and then they will have more civil­ian casualties.”

Whether the Afghan Army will be able to have a pres­ence in the vil­lages remains to be seen, but the cur­rent out­look isn’t so great.

The var­i­ous mil­i­tant groups — a col­lec­tion of tak­firi and jihadist move­ments lumped under the “tal­iban” umbrella — are dis­tant from the Arabs of al Qaeda, but they have great respect for them. “They have a global agenda, they have a big design,” he said. The Taliban’s goal is more nar­row. “Cap­tur­ing Afghanistan is not an al Qaeda mis­sion,” he said. “It’s a Tal­iban mis­sion. We will be con­tent in cap­tur­ing Afghanistan and throw­ing the Amer­i­cans out.”

This brings up David Kilcullen’s “acci­den­tal guerilla” phe­nom­e­non and its pos­si­ble appli­ca­tion to Afghanistan. If there are dif­fer­ences between the goals and designs of al Qaeda and the Tal­iban, per­haps there’s some lever­age in there for the U.S. and NATO. But it’s going to take some seri­ous fight­ing before there can be seri­ous talk­ing — and this sum­mer will see a lot of the former.

UPDATE: Upon fur­ther reflec­tion and read­ing, I’m fas­ci­nated by the ques­tions that come up next after this interview. The guy obvi­ously saw value in talk­ing with the Times. Why? I can guess that there was a bit of dis­in­for­ma­tion being sowed.

I’m par­tic­u­larly curi­ous about his atti­tude toward the drones. One the one hand he said the air strikes would cause civil­ian casu­al­ties in Afghanistan and drive peo­ple in the Taliban’s arms. On the other, he goes out of his way to say how effec­tive they are. I won­der if he’s try­ing to fur­ther bait the U.S. into a counter-productive course of action with drone strikes. Indeed, even Kil­cullen has called for an end to the drone strikes.

“I real­ize that they do dam­age to the Al Qaeda lead­er­ship,” he told the House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee. But that, he said, was not enough to jus­tify the pro­gram. “Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda lead­ers using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pak­istani civil­ians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpop­u­lar. They are deeply aggra­vat­ing to the pop­u­la­tion. And they’ve given rise to a feel­ing of anger that coa­lesces the pop­u­la­tion around the extrem­ists and leads to spikes of extrem­ism. … The cur­rent path that we are on is lead­ing us to loss of Pak­istani gov­ern­ment con­trol over its own population.”

He said much the same thing at a con­fer­ence I attended three weeks ago in D.C.

In talk­ing to school kids in South Waziris­tan, he said, he dis­cov­ered that strikes by Amer­i­can drones had become so com­mon and seem­ingly hap­haz­ard that the kids had a run­ning game of whose school would be blown up by the next air strike. That means the soci­ety feels under siege, and all al Qaeda and Tehrik-i-Taliban have to do is present them­selves as the defender of soci­ety in order to turn peo­ple to their side. At the same time, the strikes are so suc­cess­ful, that they’re dri­ving the mil­i­tants to other safe havens. The enemy is bleed­ing out into the rest of Pak­istan. “I think it might be time to think if we’re doing our­selves a dis­ser­vice with these drone strikes,” he mused. You think?