Afghan Battle Lines Become Blurred
By M K Bhadrakumar
19 May, 2007
Asia Times OnlineNew fault lines have appeared on the Afghan chessboard. While the "international community" kept watch on the obscure lawless borderlands of Pakistan's tribal agencies for the Taliban's spring offensive, templates of the war began to shift - almost unnoticed.
Things are not going to be the same again. The war is transforming. Adversarial lines are being redrawn. The enemy's contours have changed. Front lines are being abandoned. In another six to eight weeks, hot, dry winds will have arrived, bearing fine, yellow dust that envelops everything, making appearances even more deceptive. No one will be able then to tell with certitude who is the enemy.
Looking back, the ground began to shift on New Year's Eve, when the lower chamber of the Afghan Parliament passed a bill that would grant amnesty to all Afghans involved in any war crimes during the past quarter-century. The resolution said, "In order to bring reconciliation among various strata in the society, all those political and belligerent sides that were involved one way or the other during the two and a half decades of war will not be prosecuted legally and judicially."
The quarter-century covered the entire period from the Saur Revolution in the spring of 1978 through the bloody years of the Soviet intervention, through the riotous mujahideen rule and the senseless civil war that followed, all the way to the Taliban takeover in Kabul in 1996 until the ouster of that regime in the autumn of 2001.
For the first time, Afghans spoke out that they no longer held the United States in awe. At a single stroke, the December 31 amnesty move deprived the US of the one weapon that it wielded for blackmailing the "warlords" into submission - powerful leaders of the Northern Alliance groups, the mujhideen field commanders, and petty local thugs alike.
The prospect of a war-crime tribunal was held like a Damocles' sword over any recalcitrant Afghan political personality - be it Burhanuddin Rabbani, Yunous Qanooni, Rashid Dostum or Rasool Sayyaf. In the able hands of former US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, it did wonders while ensuring Hamid Karzai's election as president and in consolidating US dominance in Afghanistan.
What was astonishing was that the amnesty bill covered even Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Clearly, an Afghan "revolt" was afoot against the existing political order imposed by the US. Implicitly, it called into question the raison d'etre of the war, since the largest group in the mujahideen-dominated 249-member lower house of Parliament consists of the elected members of Hezb-e-Islami besides a sizable number of former Taliban figures (such as Mullah Abdul Salam Rocketti) who act as the Taliban's political wing in Kabul.
A lot of homework had obviously gone into the initiative. Afghan leaders, with their native wisdom, estimated that the war was going nowhere and that the chance of "victory" by the US, which was never good, had probably passed. They saw ahead that the superpower, which arrived full of hubris, might well depart humbled. They wished to be on call when the time came.
Of course, it was apparent to anyone that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a divided house and that the United States' old European allies didn't share its apparent intention to turn Afghanistan into a client state under a NATO flag from where US power projection into the Persian Gulf and the Middle East and South Asia and Central Asia would become possible.
Most important, Afghans estimated that as in Iraq, dialogue would become unavoidable, and a regional solution involving Afghanistan's neighbors might become necessary. They were deeply skeptical whether Washington would stay the course. They could hear the Taliban's distant drums approaching Kabul's city gates.
The amnesty move unleashed a wave of political activism in the subsequent few weeks, leading to the formation of the new United Front early last month. The platform of the United Front is interesting. It calls for a parliamentary form of government; it wants to deprive the president of the power to appoint provincial governors (who should be elected officials instead); it demands changes in the electoral laws from the present so-called non-transferable system to a proportional system, etc. It speaks of dialogue, reconciliation and power-sharing.
But evidently the United Front is bent on cornering Karzai in a typical Afghan way - incrementally but relentlessly, until his political nerves give way and his US support becomes redundant. It is harshly critical of the Karzai government's ineptitude and corruption, and it draws attention to the great suffering of the Afghan people.
In the sphere of foreign affairs, the United Front vaguely seeks "coordination" with the foreign forces present in Afghanistan, and leaves it at that for the present. Significantly, it calls for the official recognition of the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan - known as the Durand Line.
At first glance, the United Front lineup resembles erstwhile Northern Alliance - Burhanuddin Rabbani, Mohammed Fahim, Yunous Qanooni, Abdullah, Ismail Khan, and Rashid Dostum. But curiously, the United Front also includes two top Khalqi leaders from the communist era - members of the politburo of the Afghan Communist Party, General Nur al-Haq Olumi and General Mohammad Gulabzoi.
They were close associates of former defense minister General Shahnawaz Tanai, another top Khalqi leader, who staged an abortive coup attempt in March 1990 against the government in Kabul with the help of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and eventually fled to Pakistan seeking asylum.
Khalqis, who are drawn from the Pashtun tribes, have had a strong nexus with the Taliban over the years. Tanai, who is based in Pakistan, used to provide the Taliban with a skilled cadre of military officers, who flew the Taliban's "air force", drove their tanks and manned their heavy artillery, absolving the need of Pakistani regulars except in very selective roles. In the recent years, he has been a visitor to Kabul.
Therefore, questions arise. Is a far-reaching restructuring of the Taliban going on? Mullah Dadullah's killing seems part of the process. It does seem that Hekmatyar and the mujahideen/Khalqi elements within the Taliban are slouching toward mainstream politics in Kabul. A sidelining of the extremist, "jihadist" elements by ISI could be under way.
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf could be acting, finally. Hekmatyar has certainly positioned himself somewhere in the vicinity of the United Front. He is almost visible. Mullah Dadullah's killing no doubt strengthens him. Equally, Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani (who is second only to Taliban supreme Mullah Omar) too has a mujahideen pedigree. Also, Haqqani and Hekmatyar go back a long way. In the Afghan jihad of the early 1980s, Haqqani was a camp follower of Professor Rasool Sayyaf (one of the prime movers, incidentally, of the amnesty move in Parliament).
The mystery deepens insofar as Hekmatyar also has a strong "Iran connection", having spent five years in exile in Mashhad after the Taliban takeover in Kabul in 1996. The big question is whether Iran would countenance a Taliban organization that is cleansed of murderers of monstrous ferocity like Mullah Dadullah (or rabidly obscurantist extremists like Mullah Omar) entering mainstream Afghan politics.
Arguably, it might. At any rate, almost on the heels of the consultations in Pakistan by Ambassador Ronald Neumann, US special envoy on Afghanistan, early this week, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki arrived in Islamabad on Thursday. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is due to visit Kabul in June. Musharraf's close confidant, Railway Minister Sheikh Rashid, was received by Ahmadinejad in Tehran early this week.
While Mullah Dadullah's killing might have dealt a significant blow to the Taliban insurgency, Iran will still be cautious about the Taliban's command structure. Iran will also factor the growing anti-American sentiments among the Afghans. But Iran cannot be missing the point that it has indeed become a meaningful interlocutor for the US with respect to Afghan situation - just as over the future of Iraq.
The Afghan bazaar perceives that Ahmed Zia Massoud (brother of Ahmed Shah Massoud and vice president in the Karzai government) is the leading figure in the United Front. Some say Massoud staged a putsch against Karzai. There is bound to be speculation about ascendancy of Russian influence. Moscow went on a publicity binge over the visit by the delegation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization to Kabul on March 9-13. But these are early days.
What cannot be overlooked is that Russia and Iran are not quite on the same page. The acrimony over the Bushehr nuclear power plant has taken a toll. Ahmadinejad's public criticism of Russian policies while on a visit to the United Arab Emirates last week underscored that the trust deficit is real.
The alignments remain fluid. Qanooni, who is close to Tehran, is keeping a low profile. "Ustad" Rabbani is doing the talking. He is a great bridge-builder. Meanwhile, Karzai alleges that the United Front is "supported by foreign embassies". Indeed, the Front includes personalities who kept links in the 1980s and '90s with Moscow, Central Asian capitals or Tehran.
The United Front has rattled Karzai (and Washington). Karzai wouldn't like the initiative to slip into the hands of the United Front. The Senate, which is dominated by his nominees, passed its own resolution on May 8 calling on the government to hold direct talks with the resurgent Taliban and other opposition forces - "direct negotiations with the concerned Afghan sides in the country".
The Senate resolution also sought that in the meantime, NATO military operations against the Taliban should cease. It said, "If the need arises for an operation, it should be carried out with the coordination of the national army and police and in consultation with the government of Afghanistan."
This partly aims at assuaging Afghan public opinion, which is incensed over Karzai's inability to protect the people from the excesses perpetrated by the trigger-happy US forces. Meanwhile, the lower house of Parliament has raised the ante by exercising its constitutional prerogative to sack Karzai's close confidant, Dadfar Spanta, pinning responsibility for the recent deportation of 52,000 Afghan refugees from Iran. Karzai promptly questioned the legality of the move.
To be sure, Karzai is coming under multiple pressures. On the one hand, there are the incipient moves by political opponents eroding his credibility and authority. On the other hand, the "international community" has become critical of him. At a high-level conference in Brussels on April 28, Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the United Nations in Bill Clinton's administration, said Karzai government had "lost momentum" and transparency and was alienating its erstwhile supporters.
He added that Karzai was "walking away from democracy"; that NATO was successful in containing the Taliban but the Karzai government's bad performance was rejuvenating the Taliban's support; that there had been a "massive waste" of US and European money in Afghanistan because of very poor coordination of the aid effort; and that Karzai was losing his authority.
Holbrooke harshly reprimanded Karzai: "We don't want to see in Kabul the kind of political chaos which in Baghdad is destroying the coalition effort."
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who was present, shared Holbrooke's concerns. Given Scheffer's record of parroting US thought processes, Karzai would have felt exasperated. Indeed, within a week of the conference in Brussels, Scheffer headed for Islamabad, accompanied by the United States' supreme commander in NATO, where he and Musharraf pledged new anti-Taliban efforts.
Scheffer said in Islamabad, "It is my strong opinion that the final answer in Afghanistan will not be a military one and cannot be a military one. The final answer in Afghanistan is called reconstruction, development and nation-building."
The new buzzword is an "integrated approach" in Afghanistan. But no one has fleshed it out. There is an Afghan opinion building up over the imperative of an intra-Afghan dialogue leading to genuine power-sharing. But the US and NATO pretend they aren't seeing the groundswell of opinion.
Their emphasis is on the existential challenge posed by Afghan war to NATO's global role. They look over the Afghan ridge toward the new cold-war horizon. Meanwhile, the US is inexorably losing its monopoly over conflict resolution in Afghanistan. And regional powers include some that are against the open-ended presence of NATO forces.
It may turn out that the real "tipping point" is not over the Taliban's much-awaited spring offensive (which may not even happen), but if regional powers begin seriously to exploit the political rifts in Afghanistan for undermining the NATO strategy.
Not surprisingly, Washington shudders to think of any "regime change" in Islamabad in the present circumstances, no matter the political turmoil within Pakistan. As Scheffer put it in Islamabad on May 8 during the first ever visit to Pakistan by a NATO secretary general, NATO and Pakistan find themselves in the "same boat", and should seek an enduring, mutually beneficial partnership that goes beyond the "war against terror". And who else could hold the Pakistani end of the bargain better than Musharraf?
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 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.)
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