NEW YORK: It may or may not be coincidental, but as US President Barack Obama's military offensive in Afghanistan gets underway, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has at long last embarked on a serious effort at national reconciliation. The prime focus of this process is to find some means to reintegrate at least parts of the Taliban into society and into productive activities. In order to qualify for reintegration, members of the Taliban will need to lay down their weapons, renounce their connection with Al Qaeda, and agree to respect Afghan laws. This policy change is a necessary parallel to the military action now taking place. It is also a belated recognition that the "development as usual policies followed in Afghanistan up to now have failed. Indeed, as has been painfully demonstrated, the old policies were never going to be enough to galvanize Afghan public support, particularly for a new military "surge. Eight years ago, Afghanistan embarked on four distinct transitions: a security transition away from violence and insecurity; a political transition toward a society based on participatory government and the rule of law; a social transition from tribal and ethnic confrontations toward national reconciliation; and an economic transition to transform a war-torn and unstable economy into a viable one in which people can make a decent and legal living. Because economic reconstruction takes place amid this multi-pronged transition, what has been happening in Afghanistan is fundamentally different from normal development processes. The current Afghan situation reflects the failure until now to make national reconciliation - rather than optimal development policies - the bedrock priority of the government and the international community. War-torn countries that have embarked on transitions of this type since the end of the Cold War have a dismal record: roughly half revert to conflict within a few years. Of the other half, most end up highly aid-dependent - indeed an unsustainable position in the present financial context. Afghanistan has an infamous record on both grounds: it has reverted to conflict, and it is not being weaned off its high aid-dependence. El Salvador, following the end of its civil war, managed to avoid reverting to conflict or becoming aid-dependent, owing mainly to its emphasis on efforts to reintegrate former combatants from both sides and other war-affected people into the national security forces, the political process, or economically productive activities. The "arms-for-land program that the Salvadoran government pursued was the main venue for productive reintegration, providing beneficiaries with a viable livelihood and a stake, however tiny, in the country's wealth. Because the main short-term challenge in any transition to peace is national reconciliation, the political objective of peace should prevail at all times over the economic or financial objective of development if the two ever clash, as they often do. Peace-related activities - particularly reintegration and other reconciliation programs - need to be given priority in budget allocations. Failure to do so has proved a major factor in countries' relapse into war, because, in the absence of peace, there can be no sustainable development. So success in Afghanistan demands reintegration of the Taliban. This requires careful planning, bold and innovative solutions for inducing the Taliban to give up their arms, and a commitment to "stay the course with the right policies, possibly for many years. But reintegration will require a carrot-and-stick approach. Incentives probably can be found to induce a large number of the rank and file to abandon the insurgency and join the Afghan armed forces or police, play a role in local politics, join the national civil service, or find agricultural or other private-sector employment. Cash payments should be minimized to immediate short-term needs, but an active policy of job creation urgently needs to be implemented. The situation regarding Taliban commanders is, however, more problematic. The rewards will have to be larger, as they were in the case of the Salvadoran programs for FMLN commanders. In the case of Afghanistan, it may also require a sharp reduction in Taliban financing from drug-related activities, as well as targeted military operations to destroy insurgency hideouts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Two serious problems make reconciliation in Afghanistan particularly challenging. First, the Karzai government must overcome credibility issues related to the broken promises it made in the past to former Taliban who laid down their weapons. Second, the $140 million pledged by donors at the London Conference for the Peace and Reintegration Trust Fund is blatantly insufficient for effective reintegration. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, the economic price of establishing peace is large, but it is indeed a good investment. That investment would save thousands of lives, and it would be a pittance compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the international community in military and peacekeeping expenditures since the so-called "war on terror began in 2001. Graciana del Castillo is Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University and the author of Rebuilding War-Torn States. This commentary is published by Daily News Egypt in collaboration with Project Syndicate, (www.project-syndicate.org).
