Talking to the Taliban has failed before

Obama's call to peel off Taliban 'moderates' has been happening at a local level for several years – and it hasn't worked


President Barack Obama's latest statements on strategy for Afghanistan are full of good sense. "We are not winning," he has admitted, something that has been patently obvious to anyone who has spent any time in the country in recent years. He could have added too that the US and its allies are not losing either. Instead there is just a vicious stalemate, a trial of patience as much as a trial of force, in which those Afghans caught in the crossfire – figuratively, or increasingly literally – are the losers.

With this stalemate various factors external to the immediate battle for control over terrain (the west's major metric) or the population (the measure by which the Taliban measure their success) gain greater significance. There is the regional situation. Can we expect a significant improvement on the Pakistani side of Afghanistan's eastern and southern border in the near future? There is the question of domestic support for the war in the west. Are Europeans and Americans going to allow their political leaders to commit men and money to the war indefinitely? There is the crucial internal question: are we likely to see a major improvement in terms of governance in Afghanistan in the near future too? The answer to all these questions is probably no.

Obama's team is aware of all these problems. One area they think they can make an immediate difference in is military strategy and military-political strategy within Afghanistan. It is therefore inevitable that the surge in Iraq is looked to for inspiration, not least because it is seen to have brought quick results.

The surge involved more troops, of course, but also a new strategy, carefully constructed by men like General David Petraeus himself and his key adviser, David Kilcullen, an Australian former army officer and political anthropologist. It was based on getting troops out of bases and among communities and on understanding what drove the insurgents and giving them reasons for stopping fighting.

In Afghanistan in recent years I have been repeatedly struck by the extreme isolation of western forces from the people they are supposed to protect. From desert camps like the British Bastion in Helmand or Kandahar air force base – enormous constructions in the middle of nowhere – troops effectively conduct intermittent raids into enemy territory. Changing this will be difficult but a new strategy will require it. As Kilcullen notes in his recently published book, The Accidental Guerilla, the aim must be to "protect the population", not just win land.

This, of course, the Taliban understood years ago. Their strategy was multi-layered – social, political, cultural and military. Combat actions usually came after lengthy groundwork building parallel administrations in target areas, as I found when reporting from Wardak province in August last year.

The Petraeus-Kilcullen approach, and they are far from the first to have thought of it, involves "disaggregating" the Taliban and al-Qaida. The first element is to peel off the Taliban from the international militants who pose the most serious threat to the west. The second is to break up the Taliban themselves by peeling off "moderates". This is what Obama was talking about in his most recent interview.

Again, such initiatives are not new. They have been happening at a local level for several years and the Afghan government has tried, with the Saudis co-ordinating, to bring so-called moderate Taliban to the negotiating table. But this has not worked on a general scale for two main reasons. First, those Taliban who are willing to meet and talk have little influence. Second, because those who do have influence feel, possibly rightly, that they are winning at the moment, and thus have no need to compromise. At a local level there have been some small successes, but that's it.

The real problem currently is that the Taliban has been able to appropriate the role of defenders of the culture, religion and political interests of the Pashtun rural conservative constituency in the south and east of the country. The gaping hole in the western strategy in Afghanistan is the lack of a political vehicle that would allow this constituency to feel their interests were represented in Kabul, and thus that they could enter the political process and stop supporting the fighters. In Vietnam and Algeria military battles were won, but the fundamental lack of legitimacy at the heart of the political setup undermined all other efforts. Obama did not talk about this particular very thorny problem.