THE GUARDIAN: Co-opting fighters unlikely to succeed, say critics / Fighters view US overture as sign of weakness
Barack Obama's call for "moderate" Taliban members to be brought in from the cold met with scepticism yesterday from leading Afghan opposition figures, who warned that co-opting fighters would fail as long as Hamid Karzai's government appeared weak and corrupt.
Repeating a successful strategy in Iraq, Obama floated the idea of appealing to Taliban adherents who are alienated by the extremism of al-Qaida fighters and might be prepared to switch sides.
"Part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of al-Qaida in Iraq," Obama said in an interview published yesterday. "There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region."
But opposition figures warned that insurgents groups rarely ceded ground when they thought they were winning.
Ashraf Ghani, a former Afghanistan finance minister, who is to stand as presidential candiate in the elections in August, said: "I don't know of a single peace process that has been successfully negotiated from a position of weakness or stalemate."
A Taliban spokesman, who said that the US president's overture was a sign of weakness, poured cold water on the notion that "moderate" fighters could be easily turned. >>> Jon Boone in Kabul | Monday, March 9, 2009
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