[Many of those seminaries were a legacy of American funding of the Islamic insurgency against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal, and after the United States virtually abandoned the region in the 1990s, Mr. Ramslien made a priority of continuing engagement with Pakistani and Afghan religious leaders — which he felt was necessary because in isolation those figures could become more dangerous.]
By
Mujib Mashal
 |
|
Tribal leaders at a hotel
in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2007. They were seeking
to open talks with the
Taliban, one of several overlapping efforts to lure
the militants to the
negotiating table. One track, involving a Norwegian
diplomat and an emissary
from the Taliban’s founder, began the
same year. Credit Musadeq
Sadeq/Associated Press
|
OSLO
— At a corner table of the
Marriott Hotel in Pakistan’s capital, an emissary from the Taliban’s supreme
leader arrived with a message of peace.
It was 2007, as the Afghan Taliban insurgency
was growing bolder. The United States-led international coalition was fixated
on defeating the Taliban militarily, and that mission would only intensify when
President Obama sent in tens of thousands more troops starting in 2009.
But that evening at the Marriott in
Islamabad, the talk was about diplomacy, and there were no Americans in the
room. Alf Arne Ramslien, a senior Norwegian diplomat who had cultivated
relationships and trust within the Taliban for years, was meeting with a
confidant of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the movement’s reclusive founder, who was
directing the insurgency from exile in Pakistan.
The Taliban emissary gave Mr. Ramslien a list
of five names that Mullah Omar had tasked with exploring the possibility of
peace talks. They needed the help of a facilitator, he said, and Mr. Ramslien
was it.
That exchange would initiate an intense,
secretive process that over three years involved two to three meetings a month
between Norwegian diplomats and fugitive Taliban representatives across cities
in Asia and Europe, including Karachi, Bangkok and Oslo.
Astoundingly, the diplomats said they even
had one direct, late-night audience with Mullah Omar himself — years after even
senior Taliban leaders said they had last been in a room with him.
The Norwegian peace track overlapped with
efforts by other countries to bring the Taliban to the table, including the
United States and Saudi Arabia, and for years seemed to be making the most
progress toward bringing the Taliban and Afghan officials together.
But it all eventually fell apart under the
weight of military and intelligence maneuvering and of distrust among a host of
countries who were taking a hand in Afghan affairs. Mr. Ramslien maintains that
Pakistan, in particular, has been a central obstacle to any negotiated peace
with the Taliban.
Now, for the first time, Mr. Ramslien is
laying out some of the behind-the-scenes moments of triumph and setback in the
three years that he helped lead Norway’s efforts to broker peace in
Afghanistan.
His account, in an interview with The New
York Times at his home outside Oslo, is essentially an open plea to his
successors as they try to pick up the pieces and start new peace talks: stay
patient, understand that success often starts with crazy ideas and comes in
unexpected bursts — and that failure can happen regardless of your best
efforts.
Mr. Ramslien shared his story just as
painstaking efforts to negotiate an end to another decades-long conflict in
Colombia seemed to be bringing results, despite a last-minute derailment by a
national referendum vote.
Since 2007, efforts to negotiate an Afghan
peace have had several Colombia moments — promising developments that suddenly
fall apart because of bad timing, bad faith or miscalculation — without
enjoying anywhere near the degree of success.
That is in part because of the complex nature
of a war that has spun out over nearly four decades in its various chapters,
and has been fought or aided by an ever-shifting and conflicting array of
international interests.
For instance, the early Norwegian efforts
were so hushed that they were kept a secret even from the Americans for the
first two years. The Europeans feared that the United States, which had flatly
refused efforts by senior Taliban officials to surrender and reconcile with the
Afghan government in 2001 and 2002, would derail their efforts by targeting any
Taliban emissaries for death or imprisonment.
Today, even as the United States has fully
embraced the idea that political resolution offers the only lasting way out of
the war, the Afghan peace process seems stalled, or at least confused. The
Afghan government held a round of talks in Pakistan in the summer of 2015, but
it fell apart quickly with questions still unanswered about the legitimacy of
the representatives that Pakistani officials had pressured the Taliban to send.
The early Norwegian contacts were maintained
around the personal relationships of Mr. Ramslien, an unconventional diplomat
who had been a Christian missionary in Pakistan in the 1960s. He understood
that the Taliban’s worldview was rooted in religion, and could communicate with
them — and even interpret for them — in Urdu, which he speaks fluently.
During his years as a diplomat in Islamabad,
stretching back to the 1990s, Mr. Ramslien had made an impression not only on
the Taliban government in Afghanistan, but also on the Pakistani madrasas — the
religious schools that gave birth to the Taliban movement and to this day still
fill its ranks with foot soldiers.
Many of those seminaries were a legacy of
American funding of the Islamic insurgency against the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal, and after the United States virtually
abandoned the region in the 1990s, Mr. Ramslien made a priority of continuing
engagement with Pakistani and Afghan religious leaders — which he felt was
necessary because in isolation those figures could become more dangerous.
With those credentials, it was Mr. Ramslien
the Taliban approached in 2007 when they were looking for a go-between.
The initial contacts with the Taliban came
with enormous risks for both sides. Norway was “dealing with an illegal armed
group that was not only listed by the United Nations as a terrorist group, but
was also in direct conflict with a NATO force that included Norwegian troops,”
according to a recent report by a high-ranking commission on Norway’s 15-year
involvement in Afghanistan.
The Taliban risked arrest by breaking United
Nations travel restrictions, while holding meetings inside Pakistan would bring
further scrutiny from a potential spoiler: the country’s powerful military
Inter-Services Intelligence service — the ISI — which was protecting the
Taliban in their Pakistani havens. Al Qaeda, too, wasn’t happy about the
Taliban projecting an image of independence.
“They knew they had to make the ISI happy,”
Mr. Ramslien said of the Taliban. “Then, at the same time, play another game
totally independently.”
Early efforts by Mr. Ramslien and his
Norwegian colleagues were focused on helping the Taliban, a rural military
group with little political sophistication, come up with a set of cohesive
demands for a meeting with the Afghan government.
And they made progress on that front, Mr.
Ramslien said. In May 2008, the Taliban agreed to meet Afghan government
representatives. After a brief delay, delegations from both parties arrived in
Oslo in November, staying in the same area and, according to the Norwegian
report, even in the same hotel.
But hours before the sides were to meet,
there was a bombshell. A delegation member’s house outside Quetta had been
blown up, killing the Talib’s brother and wounding his wife, Mr. Ramslien said.
Everyone took it as a warning against trying to pursue talks.
“We had finished breakfast, and the next step
was to meet,” Mr. Ramslien recalled. “They collapsed, you know, they were
crying, they were shocked.”
The meeting was called off, and Mr. Ramslien
accompanied the Taliban delegation back to Dubai in a private jet.
The efforts would soon resume again, and the
secret discussions were aided in part, Mr. Ramslien said, by the election of
President Obama. The Taliban felt optimistic about the president’s policy of
seeking a new opening with the Muslim world, as he laid it out in a speech in
Cairo.
In March 2009, the Taliban even arranged for
the Norwegian diplomats to meet their reclusive leader, Mullah Omar, Mr.
Ramslien said. Mr. Ramslien and two senior diplomats who came from Oslo were
picked up at night and driven in circles before they pulled up to a compound,
which Mr. Ramslien believes was probably outside the city of Karachi.
During the two-hour meeting, Mullah Omar —
and Mr. Ramslien said he firmly believed it was indeed the Taliban founder he
was meeting, after having spoken with him twice on the phone — reaffirmed a
desire to seek talks.
“He was definitely very sick. He was sitting
cross-legged. He was thick, quite thick — I did not expect that,” Mr. Ramslien
said. “We knew that he had severe diabetes problems. We knew that he had kidney
problems. And his talk was slurred.”
Later, President Obama’s agreeing to a
military surge of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, in Mr. Ramslien’s view,
was a significant setback to the process. His Taliban interlocutors said they
were now forced to fight: “If they are bombing us from above, we will bomb them
from below,” was how Mr. Ramslien characterized the Taliban’s attitude then.
Publicly, the Taliban insisted that they
would never negotiate with the Afghan government while there was a single
foreign soldier in the country. But Mr. Ramslien believed that was never an
immutable demand, and his view is borne out by Taliban figures who were also
involved in the process.
In Mr. Ramslien’s view, a far bigger obstacle
was continuous obstruction by Pakistani officials who viewed the Taliban as a
bargaining chip.
In February 2010, the highest-level
conversation yet was scheduled to take place between the Afghan government and
six Taliban members, including the movement’s deputy leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani
Baradar. Days before the talks, Mullah Baradar was arrested by Pakistan,
effectively ending that process and making it clear to the Norwegians who the
real spoiler was.
“It became difficult to continue negotiations
because of opposition not only within the Taliban itself, but also from Al
Qaeda, and even more important, from ISI,” the Norwegian government report
says. “The ISI’s position was made clear by the arrest of Mullah Baradar.”
Mr. Ramslien lost hope, moving on to take his
final posting as ambassador to Nepal before retiring from the service.
Years later, as others are steadily working
to revive the hope for a negotiated settlement, officials are still stuck on
the question of Pakistan’s involvement, with some coming to believe that
despite the risks of alienating Pakistan, it may be time to approach the
Taliban through other channels.
