EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, ENGLAND

            

 

Talking to the Taliban: Less than meets the eye

If real negotiations took place, they would allow Barack Obama and David Cameron to claim that a peace process exists

Our report today that Britain and America are pressing for UN sanctions against 18 former senior members of the Taliban to be lifted is encouraging news. In opposing the troop surge in Afghanistan, we have argued that this long war will only come to an end with a political settlement which will involve some role for the Taliban in the future government of the country. Such talks require, at the very least, a neutral venue to which representatives can travel back and forth in safety. The first direct meetings between US officials and the Taliban have already taken place in Qatar and Germany. Delisting 18 individuals – and hopefully dozens of others – from UN sanctions, which prevent them from travelling or holding bank accounts, is essential if the Taliban is to establish a political office in Turkey, Turkmenistan or Qatar, all of which have offered to host one.

However – and here come the caveats – there is always less than meets the eye when it comes to claims of talks with the Taliban. Contacts were initiated years ago, only to be severed by Hamid Karzai when he threw the two officials involved out of the country. Now that senior officials of the government in Kabul are involved in a series of exchanges with Taliban representatives, including those of the Haqqani network, Karzai claims ownership of the process. But this, again, is not the whole story. The timing of these leaks is not coincidental. With no signs of a breakthrough in a war which costs $112bn a year, and faced with increasing scepticism at home that a military-led campaign will ever yield a result, western politicians are desperate to talk up the prospect of talks. If real negotiations took place, they would allow Barack Obama and David Cameron, both of whom will announce the start of troop withdrawals next month, to claim prematurely that a peace process exists. With a conference in Bonn at the end of the year, a US presidential election next year, and the deadline of 2014 rapidly approaching, when all international combat operations are supposed to end, Mr Obama is under pressure to show that he has found a way of ending American involvement in this war. Talks with the Taliban would allow him to claim that the big green exit sign is in sight.

Job done? Well, not quite. If the aim of this strategy is simply devolution, a handover of the daily battle to Afghan proxies in the hope that the Pashtun insurgency will one day fragment and fizzle, this is delusion on a grand scale and doomed to failure. Why would senior members travel back to Afghanistan when Pakistan and Saudi Arabia still exist, the former as a permanent safe haven and the latter as a steady financier? And how can talks take place that do not include the involvement of either? What certainty is there that the UN is delisting the right Taliban representatives, and not simply yesterday's people? If we can be confident of anything that has happened in the past 10 years, it is the Taliban's ability to replace one generation of commanders with another, even more committed than the last and less squeamish about causing mass civilian casualities. The current strategy of decapitating the Taliban through drone strikes in Pakistan and enticing lower-level fighters to come in from the cold across the border shows no signs of dealing with the core of the conflict. It will not address the need for a new political settlement for Afghanistan linked to the departure of all foreign troops.

There are shifts in position, such as the hint that the US would see the severing of contacts between the Taliban and al-Qaida as part of a settlement, rather than a precondition of it. If they are to be genuine, talks would involve a reversal of current strategy rather than a continuation of it. One sign that talks were succeeding would be the ending of drone strikes in Pakistan. None of this will be easy, nor will it correspond to the timetable of a US election. Unfortunately, it is difficult not to conclude that this is the primary motive for them.

North Sea oil: Trading blows with Mr Osborne

Ever since the tax raid on oil and gas producers, the energy industry and the Treasury have been at loggerheads

In the great battle of the North Sea, no side is deserving of one's entire sympathy. Ever since George Osborne launched his tax raid on oil and gas producers in his March budget, the energy industry and the Treasury have been at loggerheads. And yet neither side is in the right. In carrying out its threat yesterday to mothball a giant gas field in Morecambe Bay, Centrica is obviously making more than a business decision – it is making a stab at gesture politics.

As its adroit use of the media over the past month indicates, the utility is broadcasting a clear message: if government messes with the energy-tax playing field, Centrica executives will simply take their ball away. If an individual did that, HM Revenue and Customs would come down on him like a pile of brown envelopes – and rightly so. Similarly, when the CBI director general sends a letter to the chancellor warning him that "companies have global opportunities for investment" and that higher taxes will send them overseas – and then angles to get said missive in yesterday's FT, he too is acting politically. He is also contradicting the calls from his organisation for more state investment in educating workers – investment which is presumably to be funded from higher taxes. In both cases, what is going on is a display of pinstriped muscle – an attempt to wheedle, lobby and finally intimidate government from making whatever decisions it feels are necessary in the national rather than sectional interest.

All that said, Mr Osborne has not acquitted himself especially well. The chancellor claimed the justification for jacking up the supplementary charge on North Sea output from 20% to 32% was to pay for a penny cut in fuel duty. The politics were clear and must have seemed clever: Big Oil should pay for little motorists. But it was a bad move on three counts. First, gas is not the same as oil – the link the chancellor made was largely rhetorical. Second, it was a waste of tax money, frittering away most of an extra £2bn a year to make a lunge for drivers' affections. Had he used the money to invest in North Sea renewables, Mr Osborne would have been on safer, and certainly higher, ground. Finally, this measure was sprung on the industry without consultation – and any chancellor who wants to see what happens to those should ask Alistair Darling about how he had to beat a retreat from the barons of private equity.

What a contrast this makes from the Treasury's kid-gloves approach to the City. There, the bank levy was watered down to make sure it did not raise too much money. Energy executives are campaigning hard now – but when it comes to lobbying they evidently have a lot to learn from bankers.

 

In praise of… the unquantifiable

It says something about our culture if the only way to make the nightingale's song heard is to contort it into national income

"Nature hates calculators," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, but that won't stop the number-crunchers. Inspired by a worthy desire to ensure public policy respects the natural world, the National Ecosystem Assessment yesterday delivered a 2,000-page report totting up the economic contribution of woodlands, coasts and open spaces. There are of course gaping holes in GDP as a gauge of the good life, but it says more about our rotten culture than it does about economics if the only way to make the nightingale's song heard in Whitehall is to contort it into national income. Is it really more helpful to put a £1.5bn price tag on inland waterways than to read Walt Whitman musing that "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars"? What is the more persuasive argument to run against sprawling development: the NEA's £430m valuation of pollinating insects, or Wordsworth's tribute to "These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild"? Shakespeare found "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones", while Einstein promised understanding would come from looking deep into nature. These authorities, not export earnings, convey the real worth of our fields and woods. As for our duties as stewards for our children, Wordsworth makes the point – "pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food / for future years" – without recourse to discount rates. It is high time to draw a distinction between what can be counted, and what truly counts.