Why talk with the Pakistani Taliban?

The backdrop for the recent discussions on the usefulness of engaging in talks with the Taliban is that in February 2014 the Nawaz Sharif-led government in Pakistan appointed a negotiation team to engage in peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban. The government’s team comprised of journalists, a former ambassador and a retired major. The Pakistani Taliban’s umbrella organization, the Tehrike Taliban Pakistan (TTP) appointed representatives among aged religious clerics, well-known from their appearances on the Pakistani political stage for decades. But the talks were suspended shortly after they began due to a Taliban attack on the Frontier Corps in the Northwest of Pakistan, and when the Pakistani army reacted with surgical strikes into the troubled area of North Waziristan it all reasserted the widespread skepticism about the usefulness of engaging in talks.

The indirect representation of both the government and the Taliban in the negotiation teams along with the failure of a handful of previous peace deals with the militants and the continued violence have all been used as arguments against the usefulness of pursuing peace talks. The most polemic of the arguments against the recent attempts to approach the Taliban have further framed the issue as one of showing weakness and giving into terrorist demands.

Yet, there are good reasons for the Pakistani government to keep engaging in peace talks, even if they fail, fail again and only show minor signs of progress or confidence building. The debate becomes very bogus when talking to the Taliban is polemically framed as a matter of surrender. The very point of negotiating a peace deal is to enter into a give-and-take situation and with a wise strategy it is potentially possible to take more than you give, and even to transform hardened attitudes into more moldable positions. That is the art of diplomacy and diplomatic history testifies to the fruitfulness of transforming the dynamics of conflictual situations through brokers. Pushing for peace talks does not necessarily reflect a blue-eyed approach to the Taliban movement, their edgy demands, or their potentially shady strategies behind embracing talks. It can also be about taking advantage of a momentum to transform the conflict dynamics. The indirect representation of the Taliban can prove to be an advantage in this regard since the clerics who are appointed by the Taliban as their representatives are in a unique position to convince them to fight their ideological battle within the realm of ordinary politics. Three of the four brokers on the Taliban side have been active through the parliamentarian system in Pakistan, and have promoted their agenda of more sharia in Pakistan through legitimate democratic channels.

Pursuing talks is often contrasted to the option of having a large-scale military operation that seeks to eliminate the main leadership of the Pakistani Taliban movement. There are current speculations about whether a military operation in North Waziristan is underway. Whether or not the speculations are in place, there is no doubt that it won’t lead to the complete elimination of the Pakistani Taliban movement that one might hope for. The Pakistani Taliban comprises of a myriad of organizations that are no longer concentrated in the Tribal Areas. The many different organizations that identify with the Taliban have developed a considerable presence in cities like Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta, and over the past years the outdated perception that the Taliban is a sole Pashtun movement has been challenged by the emergence of the Punjabi and Sindhi Taliban. The notion that a military operation in Waziristan will flush out the Taliban seems like a mission impossible and disregards some of the main reasons why the Pakistani Taliban gained ground in the first place. Most probably it would make things worse, as it happened after the military’s intrusion into the tribal areas in 2003 and 2004, and as it happened after the 2007 military siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad. New factions arose, and observers today have a hard time keeping up with the number of new Taliban affiliated movements that counted around 40 in 2007 when the TTP was established and today, according to a Pakistani think-tank monitoring the development, seemingly comprises hundreds.

At the same time, it is important to remember that ongoing violence is not an ultimate argument against the potential success of peace talks. If we look at examples from other countries, we learn that a peace process with insurgent groups often takes place simultaneously with ongoing violence, and that it is rare that the initialization of peace talks immediately means ceasefire. When Nepal's bloody, decade-long civil war ended in 2006 with the signing of a peace deal between Maoist guerrillas, it happened after 14,000 lives were claimed in the war. The Maoist guerrillas did not disarm immediately but a new Maoist party arose to contest elections, gradually transforming the situation. The same was true for the more recent peace deal between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Philippine government. The final peace deal was many years underway, and came after a lot of failures and decades of war leading to the loss of more than 100,000 people. The point is that nobody is saying that the road to a more bulletproof peace deal than those we have witnessed earlier will be clear of rocks.

There is no doubt that the fragmented nature of the Taliban movement in Pakistan, its many factions and complex hierarchy structure is a challenge when it comes to choosing a conversation partner, who would actually have an impact on a considerable number of insurgents in case an agreement is signed. This time, however, the talks represented the first ever bridgehead to the TTP as such and was therefore an important milestone in the history of negotiations attempts. Earlier peace talks with the Taliban took place either before the TTP was established as an umbrella movement, with isolated local commanders, or with provincial government representatives or army representatives as conversations partners.

If we look at the experience within Pakistan, not all previous attempts to negotiate with the Taliban have proved to be a failure. There have been informal peace agreements, which have been more successful than the formal ones. One of these has been with the North Waziristan-based commander Hafiz Gul Bahadar, who is mainly focused on Afghanistan. Bahadar’s faction has basically agreed that in exchange for not attacking Pakistani interests, Islamabad will not target Bahadar. There have also been reports that the Pakistani army has made peace deals with factions in the Bajaur agency and militant outlets in the Khyber agency. So sometimes it proves to be more successful if the peace efforts are kept out of the media limelight because they then avoid drawing attention by spoilers.

For counterinsurgency strategists there is also something to gain from potential peace deals, even partial peace deals isolating few factions. It can reduce the battleground for the army, and sort out the good (negotiation-friendly) from the so-called bad and ugly Taliban. The main challenge for near future peace talks is however that the initialization of the peace process in Pakistan collides with the unfolding of the American endgame in Afghanistan. The last thing the US would wish for while preparing its narrative of departure from Afghanistan is that a peace deal between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban leads the Pakistani Taliban to concentrate their energy on messing up the story in Afghanistan. A potential challenge for the nascent peace process with the Taliban in Pakistan is hence – putting it diplomatically – the spillover of the interests of great powers into Pakistan: A challenge that seems to be particularly troublesome at this particular point in history.

This comment is a revised excerpt of an article published in the March 2014 edition of the Indian Diplomatist Magazine.