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Ryan Crocker’s reluctance to negotiate with Taliban recounted in Afghan report

Former Ambassador to the Middle East Ryan Crocker speaks at a forum on the Middle East at the Jepson Center on Gonzaga University’s campus in December. Interviews conducted with Crocker as part of the Lessons Learned project formed the foundation of an extensive and damning report on the war in Afghanistan published recently in the Washington Post. (Colin Mulvany / The Spokesman-Review)
By Megan Rowe meganr@spokesman.com(509) 459-5382

The Washington Post on Monday published more than 2,000 pages of government documents centering on the war in Afghanistan and what went wrong.

Ryan Crocker, a Spokane native who served as ambassador in the Middle East during six presidential administrations, was interviewed in 2016 for “Lessons Learned,” a project conducted through the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

“Lessons Learned” was meant to be exactly that – a collection of information to gauge what went wrong in the war in Afghanistan. Through his interviews, Crocker detailed his initial impression of Afghanistan when he was sent there in 2002 to set up the embassy, his reticence about building infrastructure, his opposition to negotiating with the Taliban, as well as communications between himself and leaders in Pakistan, specifically Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who was Pakistan’s intelligence chief.

At the beginning of the interview, Dr. Candace Rondeaux informed Crocker that if he wanted to go off the record, he should note as such.

“Yes, there’s not much point in doing this, if it’s not on the record,” Crocker responded.

One aspect where Crocker differed from some in the intelligence community was the idea of negotiating with the Taliban.

“(Then Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai) was just incensed over that whole thing, and eventually we stood down on that,” Crocker said. “You know, it really took Secretary (Hillary) Clinton herself, to get a hold of it, and then of course, it re-emerged in subsequent years to, you know, the Taliban deal.”

Crocker said in the report that he never believed negotiations with the Taliban would be fruitful, and that “I felt, at the most, it might be possible to chip away individual Taliban figures and bring them over to the government side, but that would be an incremental issue.”

Crocker faulted the United States for some of the corruption in Afghanistan, because the U.S. put so much money into a system that could not handle it.

“Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption,” he said.