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NATO Fighting The Wrong
Battle In Afghanistan

By M K Bhadrakumar

06 November, 2006
Asia Times Online

The pre-dawn attack on the Zia-ul-Uloom madrassa in Pakistan's Bajour tribal region on Monday killing 80 people, mostly students, is bound to impact on the course of the Afghan war. No matter the repeated assertions by Islamabad to the contrary, widespread suspicions of US involvement in the attack have arisen.

The incident offers "proof" to those who clamor for Pakistan doing "more" that indeed Islamabad is going the extra league in the "war on terror". White House spokesman Tony Snow was quick to lavish praise on President General Pervez Musharraf for showing
"courage and determination". If Musharraf is indeed standing in for a botched-up US military operation, the White House must owe him one hell of a lot.

But it doesn't add to his domestic political credibility to be seen as unwilling to resist, or incapable of doing so, the US assault on the sovereignty of Pakistan's borders. Islamabad is to conclude an agreement on providing "logistical support" for North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces during NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer's first ever visit to Islamabad this month.

In fact, the agreement for transit facility was sought by NATO some six months ago, with US backing. Post-Bajour public perceptions of NATO in Pakistan cannot be favorable. But does Islamabad have a choice in the matter? Without Pakistan's support, NATO's extended supply lines to Afghanistan will run through airspace largely under Russian control. That is an unbearable dependence on Moscow's political goodwill - incompatible with NATO's further expansion into the territory of the former Soviet republics.

All this makes the umbilical cord tying Musharraf to the Bush administration that much more difficult to sever.

Without doubt, the Taliban will be the main beneficiary in Bajour as the tribal agencies revert to open war. The hostility toward foreign occupation of Afghanistan goes up by a few notches, while the prospects of any political process built around the jirga (council), as agreed on at the trilateral meeting at the White House in Washington in September of US President George W Bush, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Musharraf, recede even further.

Karzai said in Washington that the jirga would be "a very efficient way of preventing terrorists from cross-border activities or from trying to have sanctuaries". However, the Afghan jirga comprising some 1,800 delegates proposed to be held in Jalalabad next month promises to be sheer fantasy. It may even backfire, as the mood in the tribal areas hardens.

Also, prospects of any code of conduct (as agreed in the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan) between Islamabad and the tribal leadership in Bajour are now almost nil. Despite its numerous flaws, Musharraf's overall approach made sense, and it ought to have been allowed to work as an experiment, if nothing else, in pacifying and incrementally restoring the traditional power structure in the tribal areas.

Therefore, an intriguing question remains as regards the timing of the attack on Bajour when Islamabad seemed to have all but wrapped up an agreement with the tribal leaders from the Mamond area, where the Zia-ul-Uloom madrassa is located. Almost everyone in Bajour is convinced that the missile strikes were launched by the US military through its pilotless Predator spy plane with the objective of subverting Islamabad's imminent peace agreement with militants.

Again, Karzai's recent initiative to reach out to Pashtun opinion in Pakistan will now fizzle out, and along with that his overall image of being a puppet of the US becomes even more difficult to erase in the Pashtun heartland.

In recent weeks, Karzai directly contacted Pashtun nationalists from North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan as part of his continuing attempt to consolidate a platform of non-Taliban Pashtun opinion. Karzai's interlocutors included Asfandyar Wali Khan, president of Pakistan's Awami National Party, and Mehmood Khan Achakzai, president of the Pakistan Oppressed Nations Movement.

Wali Khan publicly responded that Karzai wrote to him and then phoned him, and that he was supportive of Karzai. Khan said: "Right now two forces are operating in the region. One is promoting war, hatred and isolation, while the other is trying for peace and harmony. We are in the latter camp." Islamabad is sure to resent Karzai's "undiplomatic" dealings with fellow ethnic-Pashtun leaders in Pakistan. But after Bajour, even the anti-Musharraf politicians among the Pashtun nationalists in NWFP may have a problem in openly identifying with Karzai's cause.

Meanwhile, the reticence on the part of non-Pashtun groups within Afghanistan in sharing the grief and anguish of the Pashtuns is becoming glaring. All that Tajik leader Yunus Qanooni would say about the massacre of civilians by NATO forces in the Panjwai district in Kandahar recently was that "such tragic incidents will be repeated unless the government establishes a proper mechanism of cooperation between the local and foreign forces".

Qanooni has virtually offered himself as a more efficient collaborator than Karzai for the hard-pressed Americans - if a job vacancy arises in Kabul. This level of opportunism will only accentuate Pashtun alienation, which in turn makes a political reconciliation between the Pashtuns and "Panjshiris" in the near future almost impossible. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent to most observers that a political accommodation of the Taliban is necessary if enduring peace is to be established.

Jason Burke, author and leading expert on international terrorism, wrote in the London newspaper The Observer last Sunday, "The Taliban remain a local phenomenon and are not to be believed to be in close liaison with the Saudi-born [Osama] bin Laden or his Egyptian-born associate Ayman al-Zawahiri." Burke quoted French intelligence sources to the effect that it was more a case of "ad hoc cooperation" between the Arabs and some of the major figures in the broad Taliban movement.

Burke rejected the commonplace caricaturing of the Taliban as a progeny of the Pakistani establishment. He said, "The Pakistani influence on the Taliban strategy does not surprise many observers. Senior NATO officials speak privately about 'major Taliban infrastructure' in the neighboring country, but Western military intelligence has consistently underestimated the group's depth and breadth - it can almost be considered the army of an unofficial state lying across the Afghan-Pakistani frontier that has no formal borders but is bound together by ethnic, linguistic, ideological and political ties."

It is easy to see what makes victory over the Taliban almost impossible. Colonel Oleg Kulakov, a Soviet war veteran who served for five years in Afghanistan and teaches at the Russian military academy, recalled a few days ago that "there was no task the Soviet armed forces were assigned and failed to carry out. However, the achievements at the battalion and brigade level could not be turned into political success." Almost all war correspondents currently reporting from Afghanistan agree with the assessment that battlefield victory is becoming almost irrelevant.

The British Broadcasting Corp's David Loyn's brilliant reportage from the Taliban lines in Helmand province offers an incisive account of the current state of play. Loyn, who had known the Taliban in the 1990s, estimates: first, the Taliban's ouster in 2001 couldn't obviate the political reality that the regime enjoyed popularity in many parts of the country, especially in Pashtun rural areas. It was popular because it was not corrupt, and it brought law and order. The Taliban's treatment of Afghan villagers is marked by "respect and familiarity". Second, the growing popular support for the Taliban is for a variety of reasons: Karzai's government is seen as corrupt and venal; people are fed up with the breakdown of law and order and are disenchanted with Afghan reconstruction; the abysmal poverty of the overwhelming majority of the people; atrocities by the occupation forces, etc.

Third, the Taliban's funding comes from sympathizers, including governments in Arab states and collections from mosques around the world. Taliban fighters are motivated by Afghan nationalism "fueled by Islam". They picture themselves as the "heirs of Afghanistan's warrior tradition". Thus, apart from "tactical links" (such as suicide bombing), the Taliban do not consider themselves as part of a worldwide jihad, rather they visualize that they are an "Afghan solution to an Afghan problem".

Loyn adds the caveat that despite the Taliban's access to cash, communications equipment and weapons, it is difficult to be categorical whether Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence is behind the new rise of the Taliban. Apart from the main Taliban forces, which are under Mullah Omar, a number of other militias are based in Pakistan's tribal areas with the ability operate inside Afghanistan.

Loyn concludes that Taliban forces are unlikely to yield to anything short of the occupation troops leaving Afghanistan. A way out would be if they were offered some kind of power-sharing arrangement.

What stands out is the imperative need of a political solution to the Afghan problem. But to quote Loyn, "Given the way they [Taliban] have been demonized by the world, I wonder too if the Karzai government would be willing to make the compromises necessary to offer them an official role."

Evidently the NATO strategy of spreading goodwill from isolated "inkspots" is plain unrealistic. The Taliban have demonstrated their control over a wide region. They are confident and well armed. As Loyn narrated, "When we stopped for the night, they [Taliban] broke into groups to eat in different houses in a village. They demand and get food and shelter wherever they stop ... Thousands of young men now see them as a resistance force against international troops who have had five years and are not seen to have delivered results. Driving around the region during the next day with a local commander, Mahmud Khan, was a little like visiting villages in Britain might be with a popular local politician. He knew everybody and stopped often to chat."

That is why the Afghan war is not just a matter of US or NATO troop levels. The crisis forms several concentric circles. At the center lies the problem of a non-functioning, corrupt government that doesn't command respect because it lacks real popular support. Around it, an entire crisis area has developed in terms of weak authority, warlordism, breakdown of law and order, rampant opium trade, etc. This, in turn, provides a fertile ground to the Taliban's resurgence, which is inevitable regardless of whether or not Pakistani officials are turning a blind eye to Taliban activity in their territory. These are wrapped up with a fourth ring, namely the growing resentment among Afghans (and Pakistanis) about the continued foreign occupation of their country.

Equally, while international attention remains riveted on the southern and eastern regions, it is often overlooked that the northern and western regions also remain fragile. Not many realize that the "political settlement" in these non-Pashtun regions is a legacy of the formidable Zalmay Khalilzad (currently US ambassador in Baghdad) during his term in Kabul as President George W Bush's special envoy.

Khalilzad is an extraordinary alchemist. According to media reports, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been the latest politician to realize this. Maliki apparently aired his grievance to Bush in a telephone conversation last week that Khalilzad was behaving like a viceroy instead of a diplomat in Baghdad. He complained: "The US ambassador is not [former US overseer of Iraq L Paul] Bremer. He doesn't have a free rein to do what he likes. Khalilzad must not behave like Bremer, but rather like an ambassador."

The point is, Khalilzad's Bremer-like penchant for ruling the Afghans through self-administered decrees may come to haunt the mild-mannered, highly amiable, consensual Karzai. A few weeks ago, supporters of Uzbek leader Rashid Dostum became involved in bloody clashes with the forces of his old enemy, Abdul Malik, in the remote northern province of Faryab. This is a blood feud going back a decade or more, and shows how simmering tensions lie just below the surface.

If Dostum and Malik are coming out of the woodwork, Karzai may have a tricky time ahead. In comparison, the factional fighting 10 days ago in western Afghanistan has all the subtleties of a Persian puzzle. In the Shindand district south of the city of Herat, close to the Iranian border and where a strategically important air base of NATO is located (an invaluable asset in the staging of any US military strike against Iran), the local strongman Amanullah Khan was killed, ostensibly in clashes with the forces of another Pashtun commander, Arbab Bashir.

Bashir's son was taking revenge for his father's death at the hands of Amanullah Khan in an earlier encounter. This was apparently a case of a blood feud involving two Pashtun tribes - the Barekzai and Noorzai. But Arbab Bashir has also kept close links with legendary commander Ismail Khan, who still wields considerable influence in the region despite his removal from power as governor of Herat by Khalilzad in August 2004.

Geopolitics no doubt played a role in Ismail Khan's sacking two years ago after clashes instigated by Amanullah at the best of the US. Given his close ties with Iran, as long as he remained in power in Herat, the US couldn't establish total control over Shindand Air Base.

But now it is a new ball game for Ismail Khan - Khalilzad is gone, Karzai is weak and the Afghan bazaar is full of talk about Americans wanting to cut and run from Afghanistan.

It is difficult to foretell where commanders like Dostum or Ismail Khan or Malik will stand if push comes to a shove in Afghanistan. Dostum is an ethnic Uzbek, Ismail Khan is an ethnic Tajik, Malik is only half-Pashtun, but that didn't prevent them from occasionally collaborating with the Taliban and mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar during the 1990s.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.

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