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NATO's shadow over South
Asia
By B Raman
The North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is due to take over
the command of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan this summer. When this
happens, it will be the first NATO operation out of
Europe since its creation. Under a mandate of the United
Nations, the ISAF, created in December, 2001, is
responsible for the security of Kabul and its
neighborhood. US forces, assisted by units from their
allies, have assumed the responsibility for security and
for the search of the remains of al-Qaeda and the
Taliban in southern and eastern Afghanistan bordering
Pakistan.
While denying that this could amount
to a formal NATO operation, Yves Brodeur, a NATO
spokesman, has been quoted in the media as saying, "The
ISAF commander will be chosen by NATO's top military
commander. Strategic coordination, command and control
will be exercised by NATO through SHAPE [the Supreme
Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe]. Neither ISAF nor
the mission will change. What is going to change is the
means by which the international community meets its
commitment [in Afghanistan]."
The ISAF currently
comprises about 4,600 troops from nearly 30 countries,
including about 2,500 German and 600 Dutch soldiers and
assists the Afghan authorities in maintaining security
in Kabul. It has been reported that Germany, which
presently exercises the leadership of the ISAF under a
rotational system and whose leadership term ends in
August, had proposed that NATO take over the leadership
on a date to be decided by it. France and Belgium, which
were initially opposed to this, are since reported to
have agreed.
A French official at NATO
headquarters in Brussels has been quoted as saying, "We
are not planting the NATO flag in Afghanistan. NATO is
anxious to avoid changing the perception in Kabul of
what ISAF is." Another unnamed official said, "What we
don't want to do is to give the impression that NATO is
going to lead the mission. It is first of all an ISAF
mission under the aegis of the UN. All we are doing is
providing the structure."
According to Brodeur,
George Robertson, the NATO chief, has informed UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan of the alliance decision.
NATO, which has already been providing logistical
support to the ISAF, has reportedly asked its military
experts to study how the alliance could "maximize" its
role in Afghanistan.
NATO has thus quietly made
a backdoor entry into a region which is of strategic
concern to India, Russia, China, Iran and the Central
Asian Republics and unilaterally assumed the leadership
of a UN force without the matter being discussed in the
UN and without the member states of the UN outside
Europe, who have been supporting the coalition waging
the so-called "war against terrorism", being consulted,
either formally or informally, in the matter.
It
is not known whether Pakistan was consulted. It is also
not known whether the agreement of the Hamid Karzai
government in Kabul was sought and, if so, how the
Northern Alliance, which is an important constituent of
the government, agreed to it.
In articles
written after the US-led military operation started in
Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, I expressed my concern
over the US projecting the coalition's operation against
the Taliban and al-Qaeda as a war against terrorism with
the total emphasis on the military aspect of the
operation instead of as a counter-terrorism operation. I
am also concerned with the way the rest of the world,
India and other Asian countries in particular, had
accepted such a projection without carefully examining
its implications.
By saying that "what is going
to change is the means by which the international
community meets its commitment [in Afghanistan]", NATO
has projected its unilateral decision as the decision of
the international community, even though the majority of
the member nations of the international community are
not members of the NATO. They have been confronted with
a fait accompli.
This decision has come at a
time when there are indications of a steady
deterioration in the internal security situation in
Afghanistan. Members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, now
operating from sanctuaries in Pakistan's North-West
Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally-Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA) with the apparent connivance of
Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment, have
staged a comeback in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan
adjoining the Pakistani border. They have been joined in
their operations by the Hizbe Islami of Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar.
Karzai's writ continues to be
confined to Kabul and his army, raised with Western
assistance, is unlikely to be in a position to provide
effective protection, even in Kabul, for months, if not
for years, to come. He is not yet sure of the loyalty of
his own security forces and police to him and continues
to depend on US special forces for his personal
security.
US forces operating in southern and
eastern Afghanistan have been unable to neutralize the
Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants and the newly-inducted
jihadis of Hekmatyar. The security situation has been
made worse by the depredations of the various warlords
and narcotics barons of the 1980s vintage, who were
inducted into the area by the US in the hope of using
them and their sources and their knowledge of the
topography of the area in its hunt for bin Laden and
others.
They have been wreaking havoc in the
region and have ignored with contempt the repeated
warnings of Karzai of strong action against them.
Well-informed sources say that junior- and middle-level
US officers in the field feel that they would never be
able to deal effectively with the situation so long as
the Pakistan army does not take effective action against
the sanctuaries in its territory and as long as the
Pentagon and the State Department do not allow them to
exercise the right of hot pursuit into Pakistani
territory to destroy the terrorist infrastructure there.
The frustration of the US field officers in this
regard became evident after an incident involving a US
patrol and the Waziristan Scouts of the Pakistan army
towards the end of last December. While the US field
officers were vocal in their criticism of the Pakistani
security forces and asserted their right of hot pursuit
if they were attacked from the Pakistani side, the
Pentagon and the State Department in Washington played
down the incident, hushed their field officers with
difficulty and reassured President General Pervez
Musharraf that there was no question of the US forces
exercising any right of hot pursuit into Pakistani
territory.
The post-December assurances given by
Musharraf of stricter action to prevent the Taliban,
al-Qaeda and the Hizbe Islami from using Pakistani
territory to step up their activities in Afghanistan
have not been realized. Among the major recent incidents
are:
Four foreigners, including a worker of the
International Committee of the Red Cross in Oruzgan
province, were killed in different incidents in March.
The last of these incidents took place in the last week
of March, when an Italian tourist was shot dead by
suspected Taliban elements in the southern Afghan
province of Zabul.
Two members of the US Special Forces were killed in
an ambush near the Pakistan border on March 29.
On April 10, ten Afghan troops were killed when
suspected Taliban cadres fired rockets on two Khost
airports. At least 15 rockets landed on the airports
where Afghan troops are camped. The attack was carried
out at dawn from mountain ranges on the Pak-Afghan
border and the attackers managed to flee into Pakistan.
The incident followed the US attack on Baghdad and
reportedly resulted in a lightning visit to Kabul by
General Tommy Franks, Commander of US Central Command,
from his headquarters in Doha, to discuss the security
situation in Afghanistan with his officers.The fact that
despite his preoccupation with the war in Iraq, he found
it necessary to visit Kabul indicated the seriousness of
the US concerns over the deteriorating situation.
On April 12, an Italian patrol in the vicinity of
Khost had two hand grenades thrown at it. No casualties
were reported.
A cousin and another relative of Kandahar’s
governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, were killed by suspected
Taliban militants in the Pakistani border town of Chaman
on April 13, while his brother, Sharif Sherzai, was also
injured. "Pakistan’s hand is behind this event,"
Sherzai’s spokesman, Khalid Pashtun, said. He accused
Pakistan of backing the re-emergence of the Taliban.
After the incident, some officers of the Afghan army
tried to cross into Pakistan to arrest the Taliban
attackers, but the Pakistani border security officials
prevented them from doing so. They also refused to
arrest the Taliban attackers and hand them over to the
Afghan officials.
On April 13, an Afghan, two Pakistanis and a Yemeni,
all suspected to be belonging to bin Laden's
International Islamic Front, were killed in a massive
blast as they were unloading explosives at a house in
Khost. According to General Khial Baz Khan, the Khost
military commander, the Afghan used to work for the
Taliban's intelligence agency. Khan said that after the
blast, the security forces recovered a large quantity of
weapons and explosives from the house. In another
incident the same day, four people were killed in Karwan
Sarui, six kilometers east of Khost, when their car -
packed with explosives for an apparent terrorist attack
- blew up by accident. The same night, a suspected
landmine exploded in east Kabul, at a spot one kilometer
away from the US embassy.
Earlier, on April 1,
Philip Reeker, a spokesman for the US State Department
in Washington, issued a statement expressing concern
about the increase in security incidents directed at US
forces in Afghanistan, aid agencies and other
foreigners. In another statement the next day, the
department renewed its existing travel warning for
Afghanistan, urging US citizens not to travel to the
country because Taliban holdouts as well as members of
al-Qaeda remained active.
On April 11, Hakim
Taniwal, the governor of Khost, warned in a press
interview that the dregs of the Taliban were regrouping
in an effort to step up anti-government militancy. "The
reality is that there are increased Taliban-related
security incidents compared to the past," he said. His
officials said that recently two Taliban fighters and
two government soldiers died in a gun battle in the
Zhawara District of the province.
There have
been at least two serious incidents in northern
Afghanistan involving rival elements of the Northern
Alliance, one supporting General Rashid Dostum, the
Deputy Defense Minister, and the other opposed to him.
In the first incident on April 10,17 people, mostly
soldiers, were killed. In the second incident on April
15, three were killed.
In a statement issued
from Brussels on April 14, the foreign ministers of the
European Union countries said that security in
Afghanistan remained a major concern.
Towards
the end of March, US forces undertook a special combing
operation codenamed OP Valiant Strike to smoke out
Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Hizbe Islami in the areas
adjoining the Pakistan border. The fact that incidents
continued to take place even after this indicated that
the operation was not successful.
While US
officials continue to maintain that the recent increase
in incidents was expected with the onset of spring and
that, hence, there was no special cause for alarm,
Afghan officials posted in the area say that a situation
similar to what had prevailed in the 1980s is slowly
developing in the area and that unless the US is able to
neutralize the terrorist infrastructure in adjoining
Pakistani territory, history is likely to repeat itself.
B Raman is Additional Secretary (ret),
Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, and presently
director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former
member of the National Security Advisory Board of the
Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also
head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research
& Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence
agency, from 1988 to August, 1994. (©2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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