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Interview: Broader Approach Needed to Resolve Afghanistan Crisis

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Barnett R. Rubin, Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, Center on International Cooperation of NYU
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org

November 19, 2008

Barnett R. Rubin, a leading expert on Afghanistan, says to spur a political settlement there the United States should reach out to other parties such as Pakistan, Russia, India, and Iran and even support dialogue with Taliban insurgents willing to cut ties with al-Qaeda. As to dealing with the Taliban, Rubin says, "I think what you have now is some dialogue, mostly indirect and a little bit direct, between the Afghan government, some foreign governments, and the various forms of leadership of the insurgency, which is not a negotiation."

You've co-authored a very interesting piece in Foreign Affairs that calls for broadening the approach for resolving the crisis in Afghanistan and the neighboring areas. Could you summarize what you would like to see happen in that part of the world?

Basically, what we advocate is revisiting the politics of Afghanistan. On the one hand, we advocate something which has started by reaching out to the insurgents including the Taliban to see to what extent they would be willing to join an Afghan political process and cut their ties with al-Qaeda. The United States should talk to them, or the Afghan government should talk to them. Second, we really need to work on the interests of the regional powers and other great powers in the region because they have the capacity to destabilize or accelerate Afghanistan's destabilization.

We call for a multilateral approach to Pakistan, which had been totally lacking, but which is now starting. After we wrote the article, the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, convened a meeting of a group called the Friends of Pakistan during the UN General Assembly, which is very similar to the contact group that we recommended in the article.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.