The Washington Post reports that US strategy in Afghanistan includes bribing Taliban foot-soldiers not to fight:

Britain and Japan have agreed to head an international fund, expected to total up to $500 million over the next five years, as part of a broad plan to help lure Taliban fighters away from the insurgency with the promise of jobs, protection against retaliation, and the removal of their names from lists of U.S. and NATO targets.

Bernard Finel focuses on the likely futility of this approach:

…what is the long-term here?  You out-compete the Taliban financially for the loyalty of apolitical fighters. Then what? The reality is that this creates a durable political economy that supports violence and warfare. There is going to be an entire class of people whose well-being depends on continued payments, and who have the ability to extort more money simply by turning back to violence. This is the institutionalization of an extortion scheme.

Exactly. This is going to turn into a game where people join the Taliban just so they can get a payment not to fight. In fact, one would probably only need to threaten to join the Taliban to get into the program. This is going to create an endless supply of people who want handouts.

Moreover, the whole program seems rather pointless. People will only join the program if they believe the US and its allies will be able to defeat the Taliban. If they do not, they have very little incentive to join it. Since the success of the program directly hinges on whether people believe the US can win, why start it? Why not spend the time and money trying to win the war?

I can see some logic of the program because it is likely to weaken the Taliban in the short-term by making it difficult for them to recruit. If it was in the context of a broader, coherent, and credible strategy to defeat the Taliban, I suppose I could support it. But as this article demonstrates, its not clear this is the strategy and even if it were, Pakistan’s opposition to it means the likelihood of defeating the Taliban is very low. On the other hand, if our policy is to negotiate with “moderate” Taliban (whatever that means), it seems to me we do not need the jobs program. In fact, using the lure of jobs might give the Taliban an incentive to negotiate.

I agree with Les Gelb:

McChrystal and the others’ hope is that the United States will be able to outbid the Taliban leadership for the services of some of these fighters. It’s also clear that neither President Karzai nor the Americans will know if this gambit will work until it is tried, and until they see that these fighters do not return to the Taliban’s fold in six months’ to a year’s time.

(Deep sigh) It’s quite sad that 8 years into this war we are still trying to find out what works and what does not. Extrapolating from this means that the US is more likely to defeat the Taliban (or negotiate a successful end to the war) by luck than by strategy.