Wednesday, October 13, 2010
US Supports Afghanistan Talks with Taliban
The New York Times reports that the US is supporting Afghan-Taliban talks (story here). Remember that a reservation point is determined by (among other things) the estimate of your probability of victory. Does US willingness to engage the Taliban in talks signal a downward adjustment in p(win) for the US? How will the Taliban (or Afghani government) take read this signal? What will it mean for the conflict?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Is the willingness of these mid-level Taliban commanders to meet a signal of their own downward adjustment as the article indicates in the final paragraphs?
ReplyDeletehere is a follow up article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/world/asia/15afghan.html?hp
“You’ve got to put pressure on the networks to get them to start thinking about alternatives to fighting,” said a senior NATO officer in Kabul. “We are not at the tipping point yet.”
It does appear that the plans are to coerce the Taliban into negotiations.
Though we have already gone over the effectiveness of Air raids and bombings in coercion.
The follow up article that Kyle posted (which I was actually about to post myself) is about as close to being exactly what we have been talking about in class as you can get. Bombings are meant to increase e(costs) to get the Taliban to offer up more pie than they have been willing to. And, since we have read Pape, we know what these bombing campaigns need to be targeting in order to have a chance at success.
ReplyDelete