Advisers to President Obama are reportedly split over whether the US should try to bribe moderate elements in the Taliban to defect.
It is certainly true that many Afghans joined the various mujhaddin factions and later the Taliban because the offered a pay packet - in a country where aid agencies are the largest employers and often the only ones offering a living wage.
However, history tells us that bribery can never provide a lasting solution to 'the Afghan problem' as local people call it. Neither can it provide President Obama with his desired exit strategy from Afghanistan. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the British colonial administration pursued a similar policy in the tribal areas between what is now the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan (NWFP) and what in 1895 became the border of Afghanistan. The Pushtun (Pathan) tribes were given muwajib - an 'allowance' to live peacefully. They accepted the allowance, then a year or so later rose up against the government until they received another allowance...!
Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of the North West Frontier before independence summed up the failure of this policy in his book The Pathans saying:
'...the first payment might be made, and the general atmosphere of good-will would seem to promise a perpetual peace. It was hardly ever so.' (page 349).
In fact, one of the major reasons that the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the Afghan border of Pakistan are now a haven for elements of the Taliban and possibly al-Qaeda results from the historic failure of this British policy, which left the tribal areas largely a law unto themselves.
It must be remembered that the Taliban are a predominately Pustun (Pathan) group. Many of the perceived 'moderates' are in fact former commanders of various mujahaddin groups that the Taliban bribed to defect to them. That is how the Taliban won most of their battles - prior to the western military intervention after 9/11. In fact, the history of the last 20 years or so of fighting in Afghanistan has been marked by commanders of various factions switching sides before major battles in order to secure their own political power and wealth. As such any attempt to bribe what are perceived to be 'moderate' Taliban leaders would simply create temporary allegiances of convenience and loyalty to the highest bidder among warlords. Bribery cannot create lasting peace in Afghanistan. It can only re-create the situation that kept the fighting between different Afghan factions going for far too many years to the destruction of the one of the most proud and hospitable peoples in the world.
