We're Going to Have to Kill A Lot of Taliban, Says Expert

Philip Bunnell - Talk Radio News Service

Dr. David Kilcullen told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday that in order to reach the point of reconciliation with insurgents in Afghanistan “we’re going to have to kill a lot of Taliban to get them to negotiate.”

Kilcullen , non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said bluntly that “when governments fight insurgents, they win 80% of the time, however, when governments fight insurgents in other countries, they are victorious 20% of the time.” 

Kilcullen said a government that is fighting insurgents at home has a political need to negotiate. Therefore, Kilcullen asserted that the United States will need to “negotiate from a position of strength,” and that the Taliban must believe that “they will have more to gain from talking to us than continuing to fight.”

Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, agreed with Kilcullen saying that “reconciliation is only possible when insurgents are unsure if they are winning.”

Crocker also criticized the deadline for troop withdrawal in Afghanistan and the effects of publicizing will have on the attitudes of insurgents. While it is very complicated and nuanced, Crocker said he was concerned as to how the Taliban viewed the deadline, stating that they see it “as a date they need to hold out to, then they’ll be ok.”

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, briefly touched on the 90,000 leaked documents regarding the war in Afghanistan from the public whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

“It’s important not to overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents,” said Kerry. “To those of us who have lived through the Pentagon Papers… there is no relationship whatsoever between that event and these documents.”