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On the precipice in
Afghanistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - The United States military is now
engaged in its largest operation against insurgents in
Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001,
involving the deployment of 2,000 of the 11,500 US-led
troops in the country to violence-plagued sections of
the east and south.
The offensive is codenamed
Operation Avalanche, which carries with it the
unfortunate connotation that the country is heading for
a precipitous slide into complete chaos. And all the
indicators point that way.
On Tuesday, United
Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan presented his
report on Afghanistan, and warned that international
efforts to rebuild the country may fail unless the
security situation improves. He called for better
protection for UN and relief workers and another
international meeting to boost financial and political
support for Afghanistan. Another aid worker was killed
this week, the second in a month.
Annan warned
that the lack of security was hindering what he called
the "critical political process" - an apparent reference
to Afghanistan's meeting this week to adopt a new
constitution. The grand council, or loya jirga,
was to open meetings in Kabul on Wednesday. But it has
been delayed until at least Saturday because delegates
face delays in traveling to the capital.
Also on
Tuesday, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay
Khalilzad, speaking in the heavily fortressed embassy in
central Kabul, warned of more attacks by the Taliban and
its "terrorist" allies in the coming days. "We
anticipate that they will try to be more active to go
after loya jirga-related activities and the
loya jirga itself." Khalilzad said that "fighters
of the Taliban, the al-Qaeda network and their allied
Hezb-i-Islami would target a major US-funded road
project in south Afghanistan, which is expected for
completion later this month".
Asia Times Online
sources within Afghanistan confirm that the resistance
has established many pockets of power in rural areas,
including in strategic locations in the villages and
towns close to Kabul, including Logar, Ghazni, Jalalabad
and Mezana.
As reported before in Asia Times
Online, the real engine behind the resistance is the
legendary guerrilla fighter from the days of the jihad
against the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and former
Afghan prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of
the Hezb-i-Islami. Insiders say that his immediate
short-term objective is to play havoc with the loya
jirga program.
The loya jirga, a
traditional gathering of tribal, provincial and ethnic
representatives which debates events of national
importance, will bring together 500 elected
representatives for several weeks to discuss and ratify
the country's new constitution ahead of national
elections planned for next year.
The resistance
strategy appears to be coherent and well coordinated,
and it has gathered considerable momentum. The loya
jirga gatherings in the past have been opposed by
all Islamic Afghan parties, including the
Jamiat-i-Islami (now the largest and leading component
of Northern Alliance that forms the backbone of the
government in Kabul ), the Ittahad-i-Islami (part of the
Northern Alliance) , the Hezb-i-Islami led by Hekmatyar
and the Hezb-i-Islami led by Moulvi Yunus Khalis. Their
opposition was based on charges that such councils were
undemocratic and non-Islamic.
Over the past
days, pamphlets and night messages - a traditional
method of disseminating information in Afghanistan -
have been distributed, mostly signed by Hekmatyar in
Jalalabad and Kunar, and by Mullah Omar, the Taliban
leader, in Kandahar, Khost and Paktia. Hekmatyar himself
has been active in holding talks with different tribal
leaders and warlords to thrash out strategies to win
broader support in the country.
On the other
side of the fence, the coalition forces are acutely
aware of the growing resistance, which threatens to
undermine all of their gains since the ouster of the
Taliban in December 2001. Operation Avalanche was
launched in direct response to this.
State-run
Kabul Television said that US-led and Afghan forces had
wounded two militants and detained 15 in the Sayed Karam
district of the southern province of Paktika and
discovered caches of artillery and mortar ammunition. It
gave no other details. However, the offensive could not
have got off to a worse start than the bungled attack on
the weekend in which nine children were killed by a US
air strike on the village of Petaw in the southern
province of Ghazni.
A US military spokesman said
that the strike by A-10 "tankbuster" aircraft firing
30mm high-explosive and incendiary rounds had been
carefully planned to kill a "known terrorist".
"Unfortunately, when we got there, we found the bodies
of nine children and one adult man."
Such
incidents play right into the hands of the resistance,
and a man such as Hekmatyar is certain to make as much
capital as he can from it. In addition, he is using all
of the capital that he gained as a mujahideen, when his
name was known throughout the country and he had a large
following. Many of these people, although they have
ostensibly switched sides and joined the Northern
Alliance, still maintain strong allegiance to the
"Engineer" as he is known from his days at the
Engineering University in Kabul as a fiery student
leader. He is also rare in that he commands support
among different ethnic communities.
In Kandahar
- the former spiritual capital of the Taliban - Zabul,
Paktia and Paktika, the resistance is led by Taliban
commanders. But despite having a very strong support
base among the masses, the resistance is still at this
stage a guerrilla movement. In Jalalabad, Kunar and
Logar, where Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami is calling the
shots, the resistance has more of a political, mass
movement color as local warlords, tribal chiefs and
ordinary citizens are more directly involved. As a
result, resistance supply lines for arms, food and human
resources have been been established in these regions.
Significantly, these areas are not far from
Kabul.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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