Transition is not the only alternative to a decisive victory. An intervening power might consider negotiations instead. Donald Wittman, writing in 1979 in the wake of the end of the Vietnam conflict, developed a rational bargaining model to explain how adversaries reach a negotiated settlement.1 States, he argues, tend to begin a war with high expected utility—that the war will yield favorable results.2 As the war progresses, combatants gain information about relative strengths and weaknesses and the likelihood of success.3 Political scientist Harrison Wagner argues that war is not a contest to disarm one another, but a bargaining process in which states use force or the threat of force to influence others.4 Wars thus tend to stop short of one side destroying the other.5
Demands from external actors for cease-fires and negotiations, however, may go unheeded until the war settles into a stalemate. I. William Zartman argues that even if the substance of proposed solutions to the conflict might be mutually acceptable, the right timing is equally necessary. A “mutually hurting stalemate” occurs when the parties cannot escalate to victory, the deadlock is painful to both parties (though not necessarily equally hurtful), and they both decide to seek a way out.6 Provided a way out is perceived to be available and acceptable, the conflict is ripe for a negotiated outcome.7
How does this apply to interventions against insurgencies? The scholarship tends to focus on conventional wars with uniformed military forces that fight to win, lose, or draw. An irregular war that includes an intervening power has a different dynamic. At first, bargaining opportunities are likely limited.8 If the insurgency seeks to bargain, but the host nation rejects, the rebels must surrender or fight for survival. The military contest is asymmetrical. The insurgent, being the militarily weaker party, generally avoids decisive battles. Guerrilla warfare aims to exhaust the stronger party.9 The insurgency may lose every pitched battle, but that is not necessarily relevant to the outcome. An insurgent’s strength grows with increased tangible support from the population and external actors. The insurgency’s political and social efforts seek to improve local control. Military actions keep the group relevant and undermine the government’s ability to maintain security. A sustainable insurgency has the potential to get stronger over time, especially if the government is predatory and exclusionary.
The intervening power and host nation may escalate the conflict, but the insurgency has a chance of succeeding if it survives with tangible support intact. Once the intervening power tires of the war and begins to withdraw, the rebels can play for time. The intervening power might be more open to negotiations at this point, but these could be less appealing to the insurgency. The latter will probably seek to maximize their leverage before exploring talks. They are likely better off waiting until after the withdrawal of foreign forces to test the host nation’s government fighting on its own. The insurgency could be willing to negotiate concessions over the external power’s departure, but not to end the conflict.10 The United States, for example, negotiated with North Vietnam to withdraw from South Vietnam, and the Soviets negotiated with the United States and Pakistan to withdraw from Afghanistan.11
What if the external power elects to stay indefinitely, but just at a much lower level? The models offered by Wittman, Wagner, and Zartman can become helpful again.12 As the intervening force reaches its sustainable level, the insurgency will likely seek to maximize battlefield gains. Once each side perceives that the costs of further advances outweigh the benefits, a mutually hurting stalemate may set in. In such cases, negotiations could begin when the situation is ripe. The challenge for an intervening power is to make its commitment to indefinite presence seem credible to the insurgency, which is easier to do at the beginning of the conflict.
Negotiations with an insurgency, however, are likely to include credible commitment challenges. During the Northern Ireland conflict, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) was not going to be strong enough to win an outright victory or force the British military and police to leave the island. Similarly, the sustainability of the PIRA’s local and external support made decisive victory over them highly unlikely.13 Credible commitment challenges, significant differences of opinion within each party, and audience costs impeded negotiations. Nonetheless, secret talks persisted and eventually produced the Good Friday Agreement.14
The intended path toward a negotiated outcome may also play an important role. The very deliberate process in Northern Ireland stands in contrast to more hasty efforts to broker peace deals in other cases. Insurgencies and civil wars damage the fabric and cohesion of a society. Peace deals in a low-trust environment, even if struck, are likely to be short-lived and destabilizing.15 The Peshawar (1992) and Islamabad (1993) Accords were efforts to create power-sharing deals among major Afghan mujahideen factions. They failed and set the stage for the Afghan civil war that would bring al Qaeda to Afghanistan and the Taliban to power.16
These kinds of bargaining asymmetries and challenges suggest that the ability to fall back from decisive victory to a negotiated settlement could be less available for intervening powers in irregular conflicts than in classic conventional wars.
Why did reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan fail? Former Holbrooke senior advisor Vali Nasr argues that the White House was “too skittish to try it.” Still, he does not discuss why Obama was reluctant to put his eggs in the reconciliation basket.17 Thomas Waldman, in a paper examining the intellectual history of reconciliation, suggests that the military was too closed-minded.18 Afghanistan expert and former Pentagon senior advisor Sarah Chayes counters that this is too facile.19 As we will discuss later, the Pentagon supported reconciliation in theory, but leaders had different notions of it. The same was true of the State Department, the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) office, and the White House.
Political scientists and Afghanistan experts Dobbins and Malkasian blame all US government parties for “a failure to initiate a peace process at the peak of US leverage, as NATO troops were retaking large swaths of the Taliban’s heartland in Kandahar, Helmand, and nearby provinces.”20 These arguments do not explore the reasons why the US and Afghan governments, the Taliban, Pakistan, and others preferred to continue fighting an inconclusive war rather than negotiate an end to it.
Bringing an insurgency to a negotiated conclusion has been historically difficult. Political Scientist James D. Fearon argued in 2007 that only 16 percent of the 55 civil wars fought since 1955 came to a negotiated end.21 Chris Paul and his coauthors at RAND found that only 19 of 71 conflicts against insurgencies since World War II resulted in “mixed outcomes,” where neither side wins outright, and both make significant concessions to end the conflict; in other words, a mere 27 percent.22 Fearon notes that, for the most part, the low rate of negotiated outcomes is not due to a lack of effort. “Negotiations on power-sharing are common in the midst of civil wars, as are failed attempts, often with the help of outside intervention by states or international institutions, to implement such agreements.” Such efforts usually fail, Fearon observes, due to mutually reinforcing fears: “combatants are afraid that the other side will use force to grab power and at the same time are tempted to use force to grab power themselves.”23 This problem creates a type of prisoner’s dilemma in which both parties might recognize the benefits of peace, but do not trust the other party enough to take the risk to stop fighting. A third-party enforcer might make the sides abide by an agreement temporarily, but unless the warring parties build sufficient trust, the power-sharing arrangement is likely to fall apart.24
Scholars and Afghanistan experts have diverse opinions about reconciliation.25 Some academics, civil society advocates, and most Afghan elites associated with the former Northern Alliance believed the Taliban to be irreconcilable.26 They argued that any talks with the group would be akin to negotiating with terrorists, and inevitably would result in trampling of human rights and legitimizing the use of terrorism as a political weapon. Non-Pashtun elites feared that a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban would shortchange them. Some scholars cautioned about the Taliban’s tendency to use negotiations as a stalling tactic.27 A presumption of Taliban irreconcilability reflected the views of the Bush administration, particularly in the early years.28
From 2008 to 2011, an increasing chorus of experts and diplomats encouraged a political solution to the conflict. Most came to this conclusion due to the intractable nature of the conflict and the unlikely prospects of a clear military victory.29 British SRAP Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles was a consistent advocate since at least 2009. His advocacy up to that point kept reconciliation in the conversation with the United States, but he had been unsuccessful in getting the Obama administration to make it a priority.30 The Afghanistan Study Group argued in 2010 that “the US should fast-track a peace process designed to decentralize power within Afghanistan and encourage a power-sharing balance among the principal parties.”31 By 2009, senior US commanders began to note that there was no military solution to the conflict.32 Other experts viewed reconciliation as necessary for the endgame but believed that the surge needed time to place more pressure on the Taliban.33 In this view, Taliban leaders would begin to opt out of the insurgency and into the political and constitutional fabric of Afghanistan.
Those supporting a negotiated outcome had to contend with the fact that neither the Afghan government nor the Taliban was willing to enter talks. Powerful constituencies in both actors believed that they could—or must—win outright. A reconciliation process needed to bring these internal groups along. With the conflict in Afghanistan raging for over 30 years by 2010, anxieties and hatreds were intense. As a veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process said to me, “Ninety percent of the negotiations is with your base, not with your adversaries.”34 The Taliban, moreover, knew they could play for time. Obama’s announcement of a drawdown timeline meant that the Taliban simply needed to wait until July 2011 for the pressure to begin to ease.
Third-party actors complicated matters, creating an even broader prisoner’s dilemma problem.35 The reconciliation models that envisioned a Taliban capitulation required Pakistan to turn against the insurgent group. A loss of sanctuary in Pakistan, plus intense military pressure in Afghanistan, would have made the Taliban highly vulnerable to outright defeat.36 The United States had proven unable thus far to motivate Pakistan to act against the Afghan Taliban. Pakistan had no interest in forcing the Taliban to negotiate.37 China would not compel Pakistan to turn against the group.38 India was unlikely to support a power-sharing arrangement that might put their traditional Afghan allies out of power and draw Afghanistan into Pakistan’s orbit.
A reconciliation effort in Afghanistan had to face these challenges. The conditions in early 2010 were not yet ripe for negotiations to end the conflict. To bring this about required the Taliban and Afghan government and their backers to believe that neither side was likely to win outright, that the benefit of future military gains was not worth the cost, and that a path toward a peace process was compelling enough to overcome the status quo.39 To bring about a peace process, the United States would have needed to modify its strategy from transition-and-withdraw to a negotiated outcome. The Obama administration declined to do so, and thus had little bargaining leverage with the Afghan government, the Taliban, and Pakistan.
Reconciliation never gained sufficient traction because it could not pass the credibility bar with Obama’s National Security Council (NSC). Advocates for a negotiated settlement needed to outline a practical path toward a peace process that protected American interests. The game plan had to be sufficiently compelling to overcome the administration’s status quo bias, fears of Taliban deceit, and the backlash the president was likely to encounter by negotiating with an al Qaeda-allied Taliban.
The absence of a conceptual apparatus for war termination within the US government made these problems even harder, undermining communication and interagency cooperation. Obama’s focus on transition-and-withdraw, moreover, eroded American leverage and limited the incentives for serious negotiations. A drawdown timeline, General Petraeus reflected, “tells the enemy that he just has to hang on for a certain period and then the pressure will be less. In a contest of wills, that matters.”40 Lack of vision and strategy for reconciliation, poor coordination, and sloppy execution reinforced these obstacles and friction points, dooming the effort to failure and Afghanistan to greater violence. Success might have been a long shot, as two former SRAPs have argued.41 Self-imposed problems, however, made the odds far steeper than they needed to be. “The United States and Afghan governments,” Lute observes, “squandered their best opportunity to advance reconciliation.”42