So many negotiations, so many leaders

So let's recap: on Friday former UN representative to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, told the BBC that he had been in contact with key Taliban leaders since last spring, but that the recent arrest of Taliban leaders in Pakistan had closed an important secret channel of communications.
In particular, he claimed that the arrest of Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Barodar in Pakistan was aimed at disrupting the negotiations.
Then on Friday, Mr Eide's former deputy, Peter Galbraith, with whom he had a very public bust-up over the UN's lack of action over election fraud last September, came out to say that Eide was exaggerating his own role:
"He was not meeting with senior Taliban leaders," said Galbraith, who was Eide's close friend until Eide fired him for raising questions about the massive election fraud perpetrated by President Hamid Karzai's government last September. "He's greatly exaggerating."
Galbraith added that he was aware of the meetings mentioned by Eide but did not participate in them and that they were with lower-level people who may or may not have had ties to the Taliban.
"The meetings were not particularly often and it was never clear where these people stood and what their connections were to the Taliban," he said, suggesting they might have been disgruntled former Taliban associates.
Galbraith also rejected Eide's contention that the recent arrests of Afghan Taliban leaders by the Pakistani military was the reason the talks broke down, as Eide claims.
Also on Friday, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, came out against Eide, saying that he was "extremely gratified" by the arrest of Mullah Barodar and other key Taliban leaders. He said the arrests brought “more pressure” on the Taliban than before and the move was “good for the military operation” in Afghanistan.
At the same time, Dawn newspaper reported that an official Taliban spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousaf Ahmadi, also denied that Eide had been involved in meaningful negotiations:
“We don’t know what objective Mr Eide wants to achieve by telling such lies. The Taliban held no negotiations with Kai Eide or any other UN official,” said Ahmadi.
Asked if the Taliban had held talks with Saudi Arabia or any other country, the spokesman said: “No, there is no change in our stance.”
The Afghan Islamic Press is also reporting that Agha Jan Motasim, Mullah Omar's son-in-law, who was also arrested in Pakistan recently, had been dismissed by the Taliban seven months ago for holding talks without permission from the leadership. The agency said it had been told that Agha Mutasim held no post in the Taliban at the time of his arrest in Karachi last month.
So what is going on?
Is it possibile that there are numerous contacts taking place? The Taliban elements that had been meeting secretly with Eide seems to be the least important and that is why everyone has dismissed his claims as exaggerated.
But the Barodar group is much more significant. Mutasim was part of this group and the fact that he was thrown out of the Taliban - despite his close connection to Mullah Omar - must mean that his role in negotiations had been discovered and disapproved of by the leadership. And then it would have only been a matter of time before the hardliners realised that there was a faction around Barodar that was open to discussions with Karzai. Once discovered, then clearly their lives would be in danger.
In this context it makes sense for the Pakistani authorities to 'arrest' them - and protect their lives. They will undoubtedly have a role to play in the near future.
Holbrooke is right to say that the remaining Taliban leadership - now dispersed and finding it hard to communicate - will be under much more pressure than before, particularly as the Coalition military campaign continues to gather pace in Helmand and Kandahar.
US military planners are clearly happy with the way things are at present. They want the Taliban to be as weak as possible before negotiations begin. That is why they are now intent on driving Taliban fighters from towns like Marjah and also securing Kandahar. They are also doing their utmost to break the back of the Islamists in Pakistan's tribal areas by hitting them with drone missiles at every opportunity.
And the results are showing. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan is now almost leaderless and reduced to conducting bloody bombings that kill more civilians than soldiers, while al-Qaeda's ranks have been severely weakened with the killing of a number of very experienced operatives in recent raids. At the same time there are signs that Pakistan's love affair with extreme Islam is beginning to wane. On Saturday, for example, around 700 Pashtun tribesmen gathered in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and pledged themselves to destroy the militants plagueing their lands.
Negotiations will come, but not just yet.

Who will benefit from re-run of Presidential election?

Who will benefit from the re-run of the Presidential elections in Afghanistan? No-one except the the insurgents is my guess. The whole election process is now mired by corruption allegations and has left President Karzai looking like a spiv, willing to do a deal with anyone who will give him a vote.
Even before the voting began, Karzai had brought disrepute on himself by doing deals with warlords and local power brokers in order to win votes. Worst of all, he allowed General Dostum to return to the country from exile in Turkey in order to garner the votes of his Uzbek and Turcoman followers. This was despite the fact that there is a strong possibility war crimes charges will be brought against the General over his treatment of Taliban prisoners in late 2001.
Nor is it only the present incumbent who looks bad. So too does the United Nations, whose top officials were clearly divided on whether or not another election should take place. In September Peter Galbraith, the deputy head of the UN Mission, abruptly left the country after refusing to take part in what he called "a cover-up" of fraud.
Galbraith, son of the great American economist and a former US ambassador to Croatia, said that before the 20 August election, he wanted to take steps to minimise fraud by eliminating "ghost" polling stations in Taliban-held territory - but his boss, Norwegian Mr Kai Eide, rejected the proposal.
During the election, the UN collected data on fraud - but Mr Eide ordered that it not be shared with the Election Complaints Commission, he said. And after the election, Mr Eide objected to Mr Galbraith's insistence that the Independent Election Commission stick to its published anti-fraud criteria, he added.
"I was not prepared to be complicit in a cover-up or in an effort to downplay the fraud that took place. I felt we had to face squarely the fraud that took place. Kai downplayed the fraud."
A few weeks later and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the dismissal of Mr Galbraith "in the best interest of the mission". Galbraith's account of the whole mess is horrifying.
Soon after that one of the two Afghans on a UN-backed commission looking into vote fraud in the election resigned, citing interference by foreigners. Maulavi Mustafa Barakzai alleged that the three foreigners on the panel — one American, one Canadian and one Dutch national— were “making all decisions on their own” without consultation. The complaints commission rejected the allegation.
Now that it has finally been decided to hold another election, it begs the question of whether or not Mr Galbraith should be reinstated (and Mr Eide sacked), as everything he said was true and the UN is now doing what he said they should do. Either way, the likelihood is that the turn-out will be crushingly low and that Karzai will win, to limp on as a damaged president.
Surely it would have been more sensible to persuade Karzai to share power with Abdullah Abdullah, his rival, and call off the second ballot?
Already Mullah Omar's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IOA) is gloating over the likely confusion of a second ballot. Yesterday it issued a statement:
"It is now clear as the broad daylight that the August 20 elections in Afghanistan was readily ludicrous and preposterous which caused more shame and disgrace to the surrogate regime in Kabul. Only a minuscule numbers of voters participated in the polling from among the 30 million Afghans. Still the elections were fraught with fraud, ballot stuffing and corruption.
"A great number of Afghans observed a complete boycott. It is still a matter of extreme shame for the supporters of the sham democracy, that they were merely able to announce the results after the passage of two months."
Hard to argue with that. The statement goes on:
"If the Americans and their allies had not their goals and hidden agenda, they would not have blocked the way of the election results from being declared soon. But they did not achieve what they wanted to achieve as a result of the elections.
"This is why they are themselves sacrificing the so-called democracy, which they are supposed to build. By doing so, they have manifested that they are abiding by the rules and the slogans as long as they correspond with their interests. Otherwise, they are not bound by any rule."
That is exactly how it appears to many people in Afghanistan, who will say that the West only supports democracy when it gives the right result.