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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