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With all eyes on what comes in the wake of the London conference on Afghanistan and the accelerating engagement of the Afghan Taliban in talks about talks, our own problems with the Taliban and how we talk to them bear scrutiny. Perhaps the most pressing question is not what there is to talk about, but who to talk to? The Pakistan Taliban are far from being a homogenous or even harmonious entity. There are a number of groups arranged around charismatic individuals or held together by family relationships. The boundaries of these groups are sometimes fluid and always permeable. Conflicts arise such as that recently reported in Bajaur Agency where one group is said to have replaced local Taliban chief Maulana Faqir Mohammad with Maulana Mohammad Jamal (Maulvi Dadullah). Maulana Faqir was the deputy chief of the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and a close associate of Baitullah Mehsud. The supporters of each side claim that there are no differences between them and that all is sweetness and light. It clearly isn’t. In microcosm this illustrates the difficulty of deciding who to talk to – because no individual member of any Taliban group speaks for the others and even those under the banner of the TTP are more of a collectivity than a unified party.
Differentiating between Afghan Taliban (broadly the Haqqani group) and the Pakistan Taliban is more than just difficult. There is a degree of inter-changeability between the two, and the blurred boundaries will do little to ease the process of dialogue. The de-linking of five senior Afghan Taliban figures from sanctions this week also complicate things – they are ‘old’ Taliban from the time when they were the de-facto rulers of Afghanistan and the ‘new’ Taliban on both sides of the border may not see them as appropriate representatives. The younger generation that have matured post-9/11 in Pakistan have a distinctly different local agenda to the Afghan Taliban with whom not all of them share common cause. Consider then our experience of deals done with the Taliban in the past – not one of them has ever moved to full implementation and all of them have quickly collapsed in a welter of recrimination and bloodshed. The Afghan Taliban may be war-weary, and the meeting between Kai Eide of the United Nations and members of the shadowy Quetta Shura in Dubai during early January is perhaps a harbinger of peace; but the Pakistan Taliban are far from war-weary, have plenty of fight left in them and show little inclination for meaningful talks. It may be right to talk to the Taliban, but the Pakistan Taliban talk with many tongues and our problem is deciding which one(s) to listen to. |
Mohammed Abbasi 