While the government of President General
Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan continues to claim it
is making frantic efforts to uproot the al-Qaeda
network from the troubled Waziristan region
bordering Afghanistan, the Hamid Karzai government
in Kabul has repeatedly questioned Islamabad's
willingness to effectively eliminate the
Taliban-backed insurgents operating from the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border and attacking the
US-led allied forces in Afghanistan.
There
has been unrest in the Waziristan region and other
tribal areas for almost three years, amid clashes
and military actions between foreign fighters and
the Pakistan army. Operations have
been carried out and it has
subsequently been announced by the Pakistan
government that these have been "successfully"
wound up. Quite clearly, however, militant
activity has not been eliminated; indeed there are
reports of al-Qaeda and Taliban militants
re-grouping in the area.
While Islamabad
strongly denies Taliban and al-Qaeda infiltration
into Afghanistan from the Pakistani side, the
Karzai government insists that the infiltration is
actually being orchestrated from the Pakistani
border area. Not long ago, it was the South
Waziristan Tribal Agency that used to hog the
media limelight on account of the military
operation there against local and foreign
militants.
Now the focus of attention has
shifted to the neighboring North Waziristan
region. It was South Waziristan that first became
the hub of Taliban and al-Qaeda rebels, but after
the Pakistan's grand operation to hunt down
militants in this area, the wanted men slipped
away into the North Waziristan tribal region after
losing their hideouts.
Pakistani military
authorities claimed there were 500-600 foreign
militants in the South Waziristan area when army
operations first started in early 2004. Of them,
some 400 have either been killed or captured,
according to the army, while a remaining 200 still
"stranded" in North Waziristan are now using the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border strip as their base to
launch midnight guerilla attacks against the
US-led allied forces in Afghanistan, creating
trouble for Karzai, and also embarrassing the most
trusted US ally in its "war on terror" -
Musharraf.
The Pakistan army has now
shifted the focus of its anti-terrorist operations
from Wana in South Waziristan to Miranshah in
North Waziristan. Despite official claims to have
largely contained insurgents in the two tribal
agencies, the North Waziristan area continues to
pose a serious challenge, and has become a
stronger base for al-Qaeda and Taliban militants
on the run, due to presence of a large number of
religious seminaries in the area and because an
estimated 70% of the local population supports the
jihadis.
Since early 2005, the army has
killed and arrested hundreds of foreign militants
and their local facilitators in North Waziristan.
The events in Waziristan continue to make
international headlines due to the strong Western
belief that defeating militants in these
borderlands would inflict a deadly blow on
al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies. American
intelligence operatives stationed in Pakistan
believe that Osama bin Laden and some of the top
al-Qaeda figures are hiding somewhere in the
mountain recesses of the region. For US-led
coalition troops operating across the border in
Afghanistan, effective Pakistani military
operation in Waziristan holds the key to
facilitating their job and saving lives in the
battle against al-Qaeda and Taliban.
For
the time being, the situation in the Waziristan
region is deteriorating fast, despite official
claims to the contrary by Pakistani authorities.
Between August 15 and September 15, alone, over
100 persons have reportedly been killed in armed
clashes in North Waziristan between militants and
the army. The bodies of 25 persons, mostly
Pakistanis, were recently recovered inside
Pakistani territory in North Waziristan after they
were reported to have been killed in a missile
strike and bombing raids by American warplanes.
This was blatant US transgression into Pakistani
soil, but American, Afghan and Pakistani
authorities have all justified the action by
alleging that the victims had taken part in an
attack on a US base in Afghanistan's Paktika
province, and were trying to flee across the
border to Pakistan.
The Afghan government
has accused Islamabad from time to time of turning
a blind eye to the infiltration from Pakistan's
tribal areas into Afghanistan and the high command
of the US-led allied forces even suspects some
official complicity between the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) and the Taliban and al-Qaeda
remnants, as attacks intensified in the runup to
the September 18 parliamentary elections in
Afghanistan.
As soon as the election
schedule was announced, the Taliban started
issuing threats to kill election workers,
candidates and voters, ostensibly to sabotage the
polling process. In a nation that has been plagued
by armed conflicts, the elections for the Wolesi
Jirga - the lower house of the Afghani parliament,
with 249 seats, 68 of which are reserved for women
- is of extraordinary political significance. For
the first time in the history of Afghanistan, a
legislative body is being created. Karzai, elected
as president in October 2004 with US backing, has
been governing Afghanistan via a de facto
self-given authority since the creation of an
interim administration in December of 2001.
Since early 2005, the Taliban and their
al-Qaeda aides, backed by new volunteers from
Pakistan, have been reuniting and expanding their
area of operations in the southern and eastern
parts of Afghanistan, which were their former
stronghold. Despite the fall of the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan in October 2001, the US-led allied
forces have failed to uproot the Taliban and
al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan who have
regrouped and are reorganizing their resistance.
With ample funds from the opium trade, the
Taliban-led resistance has the funds to finance
its struggle against the allied forces. The
Taliban are reported to be buying more
sophisticated arms, and Russian and Chinese-made
surface-to-air missiles in particular are flowing
into Afghanistan in increasing numbers, giving an
added dimension to the Taliban's fighting
capabilities.
Don't fence me in ... These trends have provided repeated
opportunities to the Bush administration to push
Pakistan to do more to curb the activities of
militants operating along the 2,500 kilometer and
porous border with Afghanistan.
It was in
response to such persistent accusations that
Musharraf suggested in New York on September 12
that the Pakistan-Afghanistan border be fenced to
prevent cross-border infiltration. He was of the
view that, besides addressing the Afghan
government's concerns, the fencing would also help
block the entry of Afghan refugees into Pakistan.
The proposed fence would start from the point of
convergence of the frontiers of Pakistan, Iran and
Afghanistan and extend right up to Pakistan's
border with the Chinese territory of Xinjiang,
passing on the way the Wakham Corridor where the
Hindu Kush and the Pamirs meet. The barrier would
obviously be a miracle of engineering if it ever
materialized.
The border fencing idea may
sound good at first glance, but it is weighed down
by enormous negatives. First, the cost: the
Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline, which would be
only about 1,120 kilometers long, is estimated to
cost $7.2 billion; the fence would just be a
humble fence, but its 2,500 kilometers wouldn't
come too much cheaper because of the forbidding
terrain involved. Secondly, this may not succeed
in stopping the flow of determined militants or
even the traditional two-way traffic of tribals
from either side for trade, marriages and other
interaction.
Thirdly, the biggest fly in
the ointment can be sighted in a statement by an
Afghan government official on September 1 that,
before accepting any such idea, the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border, which has been the
cause of much friction in the past between the two
neighbors, be demarcated. Since the British
demarcated the Durand Line - as the border between
British India and Afghanistan (which split the
Pashtun tribes between the two countries) - it
remains a bone of contention, with Kabul clinging
to irredentist claims that the Pashtun belt on the
Pakistani side belongs to Afghanistan. The border
fencing proposal, consequently, is unlikely to
fly.
The situation in Afghanistan has been
deteriorating since the beginning of 2005. Nearly
150 US troops have been killed there since the US
intervention commenced in October 2001, some 50 of
them between January-August this year. About
17,000 American troops are in Afghanistan battling
a Taliban-led insurgency focused on the south and
east, and training the new Afghan army. Increasing
numbers of better-trained, better-equipped and
better-led Taliban cadres operating from
sanctuaries in Pakistan have stepped up their
hit-and-run raids into southern and eastern
Afghanistan to demoralize the newly-raised Afghan
army and police in the hope of inducing
large-scale desertions.
The Taliban
resistance has apparently chosen the Zabul, Spin
Boldak and Hilmand areas to re-establish its lost
control and revive their authority. These
districts are located in mountainous terrain which
best serves a guerilla campaign and also leads to
safe routes across the Durand Line, which exists
only on the map. Dozens of villages are actually
located on the line itself, part in Afghanistan
and part in Pakistan. The Pakistani tribal areas
thus provide natural strategic depth to the
Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.
Though
Pakistan denies these reports, the Washington Post
splashed a detailed news report on August 21,
along with the pictures of a captured 28-year old
Pakistani by the name of Sher Ali, vowing to "go
to do jihad again and again" when the opportunity
came, and providing details about a terrorist camp
in Mansehra. The interview by the newspaper
correspondent, N C Aizenman, reportedly took place
in Kabul. Sher Ali told the Washington Post that
he attended a 20-day weapons training course at a
secret mountain camp in North West Frontier
province. Sher Ali was captured by Afghan police
in July shortly after crossing into Kunar
province.
Sher Ali's story offers a
glimpse of what Afghan authorities charge is a
shadowy Pakistani network that continues to fuel
the insurgency with fresh recruits as fast as the
American and the Afghan forces kill or capture
their predecessors. The Afghan government's
allegations gained further credibility with the
August 7 statement of the opposition leader in
Pakistan's National Assembly, Maulana Fazalur
Rehman, often called the "father of the Taliban",
who told newsmen at Lahore that the Pakistan
government was deceiving the US and the West by
helping militants freely enter Afghanistan from
Waziristan: "The Government should give the
identity of the infiltrators and its motives for
helping them enter Afghanistan. They must also
give the nation the identities of the men being
moved from Waziristan to militant camps in
Mansehra. The rulers are not only trying to
deceive the US and the West, but also hoodwinking
the entire nation."
Rehman further stated,
"We ask the rulers to reveal the identity of the
people being transported to Afghanistan from
Waziristan via Kaali Sarak in private vehicles;
tell who is supervising their trouble-free entry
into Afghanistan and reasons for their
infiltration. The government would have to decide
whether it wanted to support jihadis or close down
their camps. We will have to openly tell the world
whether we want to support jihadis or crack down
on them. We can't afford to be hypocritical any
more."
These are the factors that make
Karzai accuse Musharraf of treating the Taliban
differently from al-Qaeda. Karzai has pointed out,
further, that even though Pakistan has arrested
and handed over to the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation half a dozen senior al-Qaeda
leaders, not a single senior Taliban commander has
been captured and extradited to Afghanistan. And
it remains an open secret in Pakistan that the top
leadership of the Taliban military hierarchy lives
and operates out of Pakistan's Quetta and Peshawar
cities, even today.
The Afghan
government's official newspaper, Anis, claimed
recently that many key Taliban commanders are
openly living in the Kachlogh and Pashtunabad
regions of Balochistan's capital - Quetta, and
have based their military presence in these areas.
The daily stated that some of the Taliban
commanders being ferried by the ISI are sheltered
in the residential blocks belonging to the
Pakistan army cantonment in Peshawar.
Significantly, North West Frontier and Balochistan
provinces are governed by the Muttahida
Majlis-e-Amal, a fundamentalist alliance with
close links to the Taliban.
With these
details in mind, the Taliban resistance is
expected to gain further strength until and unless
the Pakistani establishment, which wants to keep
the Taliban alive in the hope of using them to
retrieve Islamabad's lost influence in
Afghanistan, eventually decides otherwise.
Amir Mir, senior Pakistani
journalist affiliated with the Karachi-based
monthly, Newsline.
