Afghan President Hamid Karzai has long championed the idea of reconciliation with the Taliban as a key way to tamp down the growing insurgency in Afghanistan. The Bush administration generally opposed the idea, but President Barack Obama stressed reconciliation with more moderate elements of the Taliban when he presented the new U.S. strategy Friday.
"In a country with extreme poverty that has been at war for decades, there will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies," Obama said.
The reconciliation proposal is the most novel part of the new plan, which is focused mostly on increasing the scale of ongoing initiatives
- promising 4,000 additional troops to train the Afghan army, hundreds more civilian specialists to help Afghanistan rebuild and billions of dollars in civilian aid to neighboring Pakistan.
"In this strategy, the most important issue is Taliban reconciliation and peace talks as President Obama mentioned in his speech," Karzai told a news conference Saturday.
Obama focused on reaching out to Taliban militants who have chosen to fight because they need the money or were coerced by others. However, he said there is "an uncompromising core of the Taliban" that must be met with force and defeated. The plan singles out Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and other top members.
The issue of who is targeted for reconciliation could become a source of friction between the U.S. and Afghanistan because Karzai has signaled a greater willingness to talk to hardcore militants
- even extending an offer to the Taliban leader.
There has already been tension between Karzai and the Obama administration over several other issues, including civilian deaths caused by international forces and corruption within the Afghan government. Both sides will have to overcome these tensions to make the new U.S. strategy effective.
Karzai praised Obama's focus on countering militant sanctuaries in Pakistan, a key part of the administration's goal of disrupting and defeating al-Qaida and its allies who have made a comeback following the fall of the Taliban in 2001. U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government, but many of the militants fled south and east into Pakistan where they have been launching cross-border attacks against Afghan and international forces alongside al-Qaida.
The U.S. and Afghanistan have repeatedly urged Pakistan to crack down on militants in its territory. The Pakistani government has pledged to do so, but many Afghan and Western officials suspect officers within the country's spy agency of supporting the Taliban, which Pakistan helped bring to power in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Obama's comments Friday indicated the U.S. would step up pressure on Pakistan by making aid to the country conditional on its anti-terrorism effort, one of the reasons Karzai said the new strategy was "better than we were expecting."
"It is exactly what the Afghan people were hoping for and we were seeking," he said.
Obama has also pledged to send an additional 17,000 combat troops to fight militants in southern and eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.
