Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports that the White House believes the killing of Osama bin Laden will help us on two fronts:
The Obama administration is seeking to use the killing of Osama bin Laden to accelerate a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and hasten the end of the Afghanistan war, according to U.S. officials involved in war policy.
“Bin Laden’s death is the beginning of the endgame in Afghanistan,” said a senior administration official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations. “It changes everything.” Another senior official involved in Afghanistan policy said the killing “presents an opportunity for reconciliation that didn’t exist before.” Those officials and others have engaged in urgent discussions and strategy sessions over the past two days about how to leverage the death into a spark that ignites peace talks.
….U.S. officials expressed hope on Tuesday that Pakistan’s failure to find bin Laden — or its possible complicity in sheltering him — could lead Islamabad to adopt a softer position on Afghan reconciliation. They think that Pakistani officials, who have interfered with peace efforts in the past, have an opportunity to play a more constructive role. “Our hope is that they are so embarrassed by this that they try to save face by trying to help their neighbor,” one U.S. official said.
It’s hard to tell if this is wishful thinking or not. If you’d asked me point blank, I would have guessed that in the short term bin Laden’s death would motivate the Taliban to fight even more furiously and motivate the Pakistanis to redouble their support and pull away from the United States. Embarrassment doesn’t usually cause people to back down, and in any case, Pakistan’s primary goal of keeping Afghanistan out of the orbit of India hasn’t changed a whit. If anything, it might seem even more urgent now.
But this is just a wild guess. Hopefully Obama’s foreign policy boffins have a better read on this than I do.
