Negotiating with the Taliban naturally displeases Afghanistan's non-Pashtun minorities

WSJ front-pager on how Karzai is losing support from Afghanistan's minorities due to his desire to reach out and co-opt the Taliban.  This is seen as the equivalent of reaching out to the Sunnis in Iraq during the similar surge.

Naturally, the non-Pashtun fear any accommodation will allow the Taliban a long-term path for returning to power.

A rep of the Hazara (the Shiia in this equation; a similarly sized Hazara popultion exists in Iran) puts it this way:

We feel betrayed by the president . . . It seems that what President Karzai pursues now is the Talibanization of Afghanistan. The only difference between him and the Taliban is that he sits in the presidential palace and the Taliban sit in the mountains.

This is part of why I think the fracturing of Afghanistan is inevitable: to bring the Taliban back into the fold is to admit they own the south, and once you do that, the rest of the minorities will either want the same or will seek to do battle at some point in the future.  But with damn near everybody saying the military defeat of the Taliban is impossible, it's hard to see how you get any peace without co-opting them.

In the end, the minorities fear that the endgame as currently imagined leads to a resumed fight that the Taliban has a good chance of winning seems far from hyperbolic.

So a divided Afghanistan (however we maintain the fiction of unity) seems in the works.  The only question is who is the external guarantor.  We seem to be choosing Pakistan, ignoring the alternative of India-Iran-Russia, and I don't see how that doesn't buy us a return visit, because we've been down this path before.

So it feels like a catch-22:  don't include the Taliban and you have a truncated state, but include them and you get a divided state with the most likely unifier being the Taliban--again.

Comments

[stuart abrams]

The "minorities" of Afghanistan are, collectively, a majority. The Pashtun, while being the largest single ethnic group, is still only about 40% of the population.
Whatever the US does, the reality is that the regional powers are involved in Afghanistan. Pakistan is closely aligned with the Pashtun and upon a US departure, Pakistan would support a return of the Taliban, just as Pakistan supported the Taliban prior to the US invasion. However, there is no way that the Taliban could unite Afghanistan, any more than the Taliban was able to unite the country before 2002. The non-Pashtun peoples would resist the power of the Taliban, again, just as they did by forming the Northern Alliance prior to 2002. And to counter Pakistani support for the Taliban, the non-Pashtun peoples would look to support from the other regional powers - again, just as the Northern Alliance did prior to 2002. The Tajiks would look to India for support, the Hazara would look to Iran (liberals who seem so eager to get out of Afghanistan yesterday regardless of the consequences should be reminded of the Taliban genocide against the Shiite Hazara in 1998), and the Uzbeks and the Turkmen would look to Turkey and/or Russia. So again, the reality is that the regional powers are involved in Afghanistan no matter what the US does.