Remember back when the Taliban was evil? Sure you do. George W. Bush used that tough frontier talk of which his speechwriters are so fond, the press swooned and every decent American was made to understand that the Bush administration, unlike its morally rickety predecessor, would never give an inch to such people.
So guess who's negotiating with them now?
Last week a Pakistani jihadi leader told the Asia Times that he had set up a meeting between U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials and Taliban leaders to discuss the seriously deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. At the meeting, held at a Pakistani air-force base, FBI officials floated the possibility that the Taliban might have a role in the future Afghan government on four conditions: that Mullah Omar be removed as leader, that foreign combatants engaged in fighting against U.S. and allied troops be deported, that any captive allied soldiers be released and that Afghans currently living abroad be brought into the government.
Well. The first thing you may be wondering: Why is there a possible role for the Taliban in a future government? Isn't that fellow Hamid Karzai running things, and isn't it all going basically OK? As it turns out, not really and not at all. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush recognized Karzai in the House gallery, along with a then-newly appointed Afghan director of women's concerns. The impression was conveyed that things were under some semblance of control, and the Congress and the media applauded and moved on.
The reality, according to the Asia Times account -- and it practically goes without saying that this report has not filtered its way into the U.S. press -- is an escalating guerilla war in which "small hit-and-run attacks are a daily feature in most parts of the country, while face-to-face skirmishes are common in the former Taliban stronghold around Kandahar in the south."
So the situation is deeply unstable, and in a particular way. Right now, two main factions -- the Karzai-led, pro-U.S. forces, and the Northern Alliance-led troops that tilt toward Russia and Iran -- are competing for control of Kabul. This competition is compounded by the fact that thousands of refugees, many of them former communists, are streaming back into the country. The interim Karzai government will run its course in October, when a new grand council will deliberate on the country's future.
To sum up, then, according to this report, the United States is now willing to consider the Taliban a legitimate player in a reorganization of the government provided it meets the four conditions, three of which aren't particularly onerous (the Taliban already indicated flexibility on these demands, the report said), while the fourth -- the removal of Mullah Omar -- is the sort of thing that can be easily finessed. All for the sake of "stability" and, in a jarring Cold War echo, boxing in the assembling reds.
Three points need to be made here. The first and most obvious has to do with the administration's hypocrisy. This is an old story to people who watch closely and don't believe the hype they read. I recall an incredible episode in the summer of 2002, when the Bush administration, placating the Christian right, moved to block certain progressive United Nations world-health and family-planning initiatives. In doing so, we voted against the rest of the advanced world and against all our major allies. But we voted with Iran, which a few months before had been deemed part of the "axis of evil." It was an amazing circumstance, but unfortunately, most of the public does not watch these things closely, and the Democrats haven't done much to make sure it does. In that particular case the report appeared in The Washington Post, but no Democrat of note said a word about it that I could detect, and it was a one-day story.
Second, we're now seeing -- in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the Israeli-Palestinian tension -- that while frontier talk may sound wonderful, the reality of the world is just a little more complex. Iraq is a mess, and at the current fatality rate, the number of American and coalition soldiers killed after the "victory" will exceed the number killed during the war at about the time most Americans will be heading off to the beach. What's happening in Iran right now is heartening to any "small-d" democrat. While it would certainly be a good thing if the mullahs fall, it would also invite a lot of crowing among the neoconservatives that Paul Wolfowitz was right, that toppling Saddam Hussein did in fact set off a democratic chain reaction. Maybe; but it's not as if Iran is going to go from mullahs on Tuesday to city council elections in time for Friday prayers. There could just as likely be years of turmoil and civil strife in the region. As events are showing us, winning the war is far easier than making sense of the peace. Many warned of this before the Iraq War started, but those warnings -- about dangers that were, at the time, only hypothetical -- didn't have much force. But someday, maybe, those dangers will cease to be merely hypothetical. And at that point talk of good and evil won't be of much use. Slowly but certainly it's beginning to dawn on people that geopolitics is not a cowboy movie.
Which brings us to point No. 3: The more that moral complexity and ambiguity seep into the story line here, the better it is for Democrats. Voters will choose Republicans as long as the public's primary concern is cracking heads. But if the concern becomes addressing complicated situations with no easy answers, they may start to look to Democrats. However, for that to happen, Democrats have to offer a strong alternative vision for how America should operate in the world. They need to argue that America is strong not only because of its might but because of its ideals, and because those ideals have won the world's respect and trust, which the Bush administration has tossed to the four winds in ways that Ronald Reagan never would have dreamed of.
Pair an argument like that with smart and consistent critiques of the administration's manifold domestic-security failures and we may be getting somewhere. Wouldn't it be a jolly irony if, come October 2004, there were indeed a campaign commercial of Bush on that aircraft carrier -- but the commercial was an attack ad by the Democrat?
Michael Tomasky's column appears every Wednesday at TAP Online.
