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Musharraf and his
Taliban 'pals'
By Kaushik
Kapisthalam
The signs are unmistakable:
America's "war on terror" is in jeopardy in
Afghanistan, although the locus of the renewed
Taliban-led efforts seems to be across the border
in Pakistan.
Playing favorites
US and other Western government officials have
always been lavish in their praise of Pakistan's
President General Pervez Musharraf. Indeed,
Musharraf's supposed about-turn on supporting the
Taliban after the September 11 attacks is now
accepted without question. Most Taliban emerged
from madrassas (seminaries) in Pakistan.
However, it has always been a reality that
Musharraf has treated the Taliban differently than
he did al-Qaeda. For instance, even though
Pakistan has arrested and handed over to the US
many senior al-Qaeda leaders, not a single senior
Taliban commander has been handed over by Pakistan
to either the US or the Afghan government.
It is an open secret in Pakistan that
virtually the entire leadership of the Taliban
military hierarchy lives and operates out of the
city of Quetta, which is the capital of Pakistan's
Balochistan province. Since the fall of the
Taliban in Kabul in late 2001, Western and
Pakistani reporters have been able to interview
Taliban commanders and other leading figures well
inside Pakistan, especially around Quetta. Despite
the documented facts, the Pakistan government has
always flatly denied the presence of Taliban
commanders in Quetta, or elsewhere inside Pakistan
for that matter.
Afghan
anger
The Afghan government led by
President Hamid Karzai has for some time been
angry at the role of Pakistan in the recent
resurgence of the Taliban. In the run-up to the
Afghan presidential elections last year, Karzai
complained about Taliban bases inside Pakistan to
US President George W Bush. In the days that
followed, Bush reportedly had a quiet conversation
with Musharraf, asking him to look into Taliban
activity emanating from Quetta. The Taliban
attacks ended almost immediately.
The
outgoing US ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad,
was a staunch critic of Pakistan's support for the
Taliban. However, his anger was especially evident
when he excoriated Pakistan a few weeks ago after
a Pakistani television network was able to
interview a Taliban commander named Mullah Usmani.
Khalilzad questioned Pakistan's sincerity and
wondered how a television network was able to talk
to a Taliban commander even as Pakistani officials
denied a Taliban presence in the country. What was
left unsaid was that the US government soon came
to know that Mullah Usmani gave the interview not
from the tribal areas of Pakistan on the border
with Afghanistan, but from the port city of
Karachi.
To add substance to the
allegations, Anis, the Afghan government daily,
noted in its June 23 issue that Taliban were
openly living in the Kachlogh and Pashtunabad
regions of Quetta, and based their military
presence in those regions. The report quoted
people who recently visited Quetta and adjoining
areas. The government-sponsored daily then went on
to claim that senior Taliban leaders lived in
residential blocks belonging to the Pakistani army
in a place called Choni, which "is a military base
and training center for the Pakistani army".
Taliban commanders were being ferried inside
Pakistan by the Inter-Services Intelligence
directorate (ISI), the report added.
Pakistan's fears
Ahmed Rashid,
a noted expert on the Taliban, recently commented
that behind Pakistan's continuing sponsorship of
the Taliban and their destabilization efforts in
Afghanistan lies a fear of India. During the
Taliban years after they came into power in 1996,
Pakistan essentially shut out other countries from
Afghanistan. However, since the Taliban were
deposed, India has moved into Afghanistan in a big
way, with sponsorship of massive reconstruction
projects, such as building key roads,
hydroelectric facilities, schools and hospitals.
While this may not seem dangerous to most
observers, Pakistan's ruling elite have always
taught themselves to see a sinister plot behind
every Indian effort and the idea of an Indian
presence on their Western borders accentuates
Pakistani fears.
Pakistan's Urdu
newspapers, whose content is tightly controlled by
the government and intelligence agencies,
routinely publish stories of "Indian agents" being
involved in the separatist violence in
Balochistan, and even the sectarian attacks deep
inside Pakistan. Pakistan's military commanders
and other leaders have also continued to point the
finger at Indian "consulates" in the Afghan towns
of Kandahar and Jalalabad as the source of
troubles between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These
fears, which many believe are unfounded, are used
as a basis by the Pakistani establishment to
justify continued support to the Taliban.
However, not many in Pakistan acknowledge
what some see as extraordinary efforts by the US
to accommodate Pakistani concerns in Afghanistan.
To begin with, the US had pressed the Karzai
government to restrict its security ties with
India. The US also allowed Pakistan to veto a
possible Indian military presence in Afghanistan,
even though Indian troops there could have
relieved the US of a tremendous burden, given the
global American military deployment. American
diplomats also pressured Karzai to curtail the
power of former Northern Alliance elements, many
of whom have been sidelined since 2004. This was
done solely to assuage Pakistani concerns.
After the Afghan presidential election
last year, the US negotiated a deal between the
Karzai government and Pakistan under which former
Taliban leaders would receive amnesty and be given
roles in the government if they surrendered and
renounced violence. For its part, Pakistan was
supposed to hand over senior hardcore Taliban
commanders to the Afghan government. However, when
the time came for Pakistan to live up to its end
of the bargain, the Musharraf government reneged.
One former Western diplomat commented to Asia
Times Online, "The Paks got greedy. They have
figured that they need not settle for partial
influence in Kabul when they can use the Talibs to
control most of Afghanistan." The Pakistanis
simply did not want to see a strong central
government in Kabul, the diplomat added.
Musharraf's promise
Western
leaders tout Musharraf's speech to Pakistanis a
couple of days after September 11, in which he
justified his decision to join the US side against
jihadis. But few seem to recall that Musharraf
made another less publicized speech on September
19, 2001 in Urdu, Pakistan's national language, in
which he made it clear that he would do everything
within his power to make sure that the Taliban
emerged unharmed in the "war on terror". While the
English-language speech was for Western
consumption, the Urdu speech was meant to assuage
his countrymen regarding the Taliban. Whether the
US wants to admit it or not, it is patent now that
Musharraf has kept that particular promise to
protect the Taliban.
In a speech to the
Australian Press Club in June this year, Musharraf
justified Pakistan's support for the Taliban and
insinuated that the US was to blame for September
11 because of its refusal to engage the Taliban
regime before that event. To some, this was proof
that the Pakistani establishment still felt that
supporting the Taliban was in Pakistan's
interests.
The former Western diplomat
added that many in US military circles were deeply
unhappy about Pakistan's role. The recent killing
of US Navy special forces operatives and the
downing of a US helicopter in northern Kunar
province of Afghanistan were the handiwork not of
the Taliban but of militiamen loyal to Afghan
warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, according to the
diplomat. Hekmatyar, who was based in Iran during
the Taliban rule over Kabul, had now teamed up
with Taliban commander Jalauddin Haqqani, both of
whom were currently under the protection of the
ISI, he said.
Musharraf and the Pakistani
military establishment are unlikely to end their
sponsorship of the Taliban, regardless of what the
Afghan government or the coalition field
commanders in Afghanistan may say or do. Some
experts feel that it may be time for Bush to
remind Musharraf that Pakistan can either be with
the Taliban, or with the US - a choice that
Musharraf supposedly made in favor of the latter
soon after September 11. Without such pressure,
however, it seems certain that America's Afghan
project is inexorably heading towards disaster.
Kaushik Kapisthalam is a
freelance defense and strategic affairs analyst
based in the United States. He can be reached
at contact@kapisthalam.com
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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