NATO fighting the wrong battle in
Afghanistan By M K Bhadrakumar
The pre-dawn attack on the Zia-ul-Uloom
madrassa in Pakistan's Bajour tribal region
on Monday killing 80 people, mostly students, is
bound to impact on the course of the Afghan war.
No matter the repeated assertions by Islamabad to
the contrary, widespread suspicions of US
involvement in the attack have arisen.
The
incident offers "proof" to those who clamor for
Pakistan doing "more" that indeed Islamabad is
going the extra league in the "war on terror".
White House spokesman Tony Snow was quick to
lavish praise on President General Pervez
Musharraf for showing
"courage and determination".
If Musharraf is indeed standing in for a
botched-up US military operation, the White House
must owe him one hell of a lot.
But it
doesn't add to his domestic political credibility
to be seen as unwilling to resist, or incapable of
doing so, the US assault on the sovereignty of
Pakistan's borders. Islamabad is to conclude an
agreement on providing "logistical support" for
North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces during
NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer's
first ever visit to Islamabad this month.
In fact, the agreement for transit
facility was sought by NATO some six months ago,
with US backing. Post-Bajour public perceptions of
NATO in Pakistan cannot be favorable. But does
Islamabad have a choice in the matter? Without
Pakistan's support, NATO's extended supply lines
to Afghanistan will run through airspace largely
under Russian control. That is an unbearable
dependence on Moscow's political goodwill -
incompatible with NATO's further expansion into
the territory of the former Soviet republics.
All this makes the umbilical cord tying
Musharraf to the Bush administration that much
more difficult to sever.
Without doubt,
the Taliban will be the main beneficiary in Bajour
as the tribal agencies revert to open war. The
hostility toward foreign occupation of Afghanistan
goes up by a few notches, while the prospects of
any political process built around the
jirga (council), as agreed on at the
trilateral meeting at the White House in
Washington in September of US President George W
Bush, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Musharraf,
recede even further.
Karzai said in
Washington that the jirga would be "a very
efficient way of preventing terrorists from
cross-border activities or from trying to have
sanctuaries". However, the Afghan jirga
comprising some 1,800 delegates proposed to be
held in Jalalabad next month promises to be sheer
fantasy. It may even backfire, as the mood in the
tribal areas hardens.
Also, prospects of
any code of conduct (as agreed in the tribal areas
of North and South Waziristan) between Islamabad
and the tribal leadership in Bajour are now almost
nil. Despite its numerous flaws, Musharraf's
overall approach made sense, and it ought to have
been allowed to work as an experiment, if nothing
else, in pacifying and incrementally restoring the
traditional power structure in the tribal areas.
Therefore, an intriguing question remains
as regards the timing of the attack on Bajour when
Islamabad seemed to have all but wrapped up an
agreement with the tribal leaders from the Mamond
area, where the Zia-ul-Uloom madrassa is
located. Almost everyone in Bajour is convinced
that the missile strikes were launched by the US
military through its pilotless Predator spy plane
with the objective of subverting Islamabad's
imminent peace agreement with militants.
Again, Karzai's recent initiative to reach
out to Pashtun opinion in Pakistan will now fizzle
out, and along with that his overall image of
being a puppet of the US becomes even more
difficult to erase in the Pashtun heartland.
In recent weeks, Karzai directly contacted
Pashtun nationalists from North-West Frontier
Province (NWFP) in Pakistan as part of his
continuing attempt to consolidate a platform of
non-Taliban Pashtun opinion. Karzai's
interlocutors included Asfandyar Wali Khan,
president of Pakistan's Awami National Party, and
Mehmood Khan Achakzai, president of the Pakistan
Oppressed Nations Movement.
Wali Khan
publicly responded that Karzai wrote to him and
then phoned him, and that he was supportive of
Karzai. Khan said: "Right now two forces are
operating in the region. One is promoting war,
hatred and isolation, while the other is trying
for peace and harmony. We are in the latter camp."
Islamabad is sure to resent Karzai's
"undiplomatic" dealings with fellow ethnic-Pashtun
leaders in Pakistan. But after Bajour, even the
anti-Musharraf politicians among the Pashtun
nationalists in NWFP may have a problem in openly
identifying with Karzai's cause.
Meanwhile, the reticence on the part of
non-Pashtun groups within Afghanistan in sharing
the grief and anguish of the Pashtuns is becoming
glaring. All that Tajik leader Yunus Qanooni would
say about the massacre of civilians by NATO forces
in the Panjwai district in Kandahar recently was
that "such tragic incidents will be repeated
unless the government establishes a proper
mechanism of cooperation between the local and
foreign forces".
Qanooni has virtually
offered himself as a more efficient collaborator
than Karzai for the hard-pressed Americans - if a
job vacancy arises in Kabul. This level of
opportunism will only accentuate Pashtun
alienation, which in turn makes a political
reconciliation between the Pashtuns and
"Panjshiris" in the near future almost impossible.
Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent to most
observers that a political accommodation of the
Taliban is necessary if enduring peace is to be
established.
Jason Burke, author and
leading expert on international terrorism, wrote
in the London newspaper The Observer last Sunday,
"The Taliban remain a local phenomenon and are not
to be believed to be in close liaison with the
Saudi-born [Osama] bin Laden or his Egyptian-born
associate Ayman al-Zawahiri." Burke quoted French
intelligence sources to the effect that it was
more a case of "ad hoc cooperation" between the
Arabs and some of the major figures in the broad
Taliban movement.
Burke rejected the
commonplace caricaturing of the Taliban as a
progeny of the Pakistani establishment. He said,
"The Pakistani influence on the Taliban strategy
does not surprise many observers. Senior NATO
officials speak privately about 'major Taliban
infrastructure' in the neighboring country, but
Western military intelligence has consistently
underestimated the group's depth and breadth - it
can almost be considered the army of an unofficial
state lying across the Afghan-Pakistani frontier
that has no formal borders but is bound together
by ethnic, linguistic, ideological and political
ties."
It is easy to see what makes
victory over the Taliban almost impossible.
Colonel Oleg Kulakov, a Soviet war veteran who
served for five years in Afghanistan and teaches
at the Russian military academy, recalled a few
days ago that "there was no task the Soviet armed
forces were assigned and failed to carry out.
However, the achievements at the battalion and
brigade level could not be turned into political
success." Almost all war correspondents currently
reporting from Afghanistan agree with the
assessment that battlefield victory is becoming
almost irrelevant.
The British
Broadcasting Corp's David Loyn's brilliant
reportage from the Taliban lines in Helmand
province offers an incisive account of the current
state of play. Loyn, who had known the Taliban in
the 1990s, estimates: first, the Taliban's ouster
in 2001 couldn't obviate the political reality
that the regime enjoyed popularity in many parts
of the country, especially in Pashtun rural areas.
It was popular because it was not corrupt, and it
brought law and order. The Taliban's treatment of
Afghan villagers is marked by "respect and
familiarity". Second, the growing popular support
for the Taliban is for a variety of reasons:
Karzai's government is seen as corrupt and venal;
people are fed up with the breakdown of law and
order and are disenchanted with Afghan
reconstruction; the abysmal poverty of the
overwhelming majority of the people; atrocities by
the occupation forces, etc.
Third, the
Taliban's funding comes from sympathizers,
including governments in Arab states and
collections from mosques around the world. Taliban
fighters are motivated by Afghan nationalism
"fueled by Islam". They picture themselves as the
"heirs of Afghanistan's warrior tradition". Thus,
apart from "tactical links" (such as suicide
bombing), the Taliban do not consider themselves
as part of a worldwide jihad, rather they
visualize that they are an "Afghan solution to an
Afghan problem".
Loyn adds the caveat that
despite the Taliban's access to cash,
communications equipment and weapons, it is
difficult to be categorical whether Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence is behind the new rise
of the Taliban. Apart from the main Taliban
forces, which are under Mullah Omar, a number of
other militias are based in Pakistan's tribal
areas with the ability operate inside Afghanistan.
Loyn concludes that Taliban forces are
unlikely to yield to anything short of the
occupation troops leaving Afghanistan. A way out
would be if they were offered some kind of
power-sharing arrangement.
What stands out
is the imperative need of a political solution to
the Afghan problem. But to quote Loyn, "Given the
way they [Taliban] have been demonized by the
world, I wonder too if the Karzai government would
be willing to make the compromises necessary to
offer them an official role."
Evidently
the NATO strategy of spreading goodwill from
isolated "inkspots" is plain unrealistic. The
Taliban have demonstrated their control over a
wide region. They are confident and well armed. As
Loyn narrated, "When we stopped for the night,
they [Taliban] broke into groups to eat in
different houses in a village. They demand and get
food and shelter wherever they stop ... Thousands
of young men now see them as a resistance force
against international troops who have had five
years and are not seen to have delivered results.
Driving around the region during the next day with
a local commander, Mahmud Khan, was a little like
visiting villages in Britain might be with a
popular local politician. He knew everybody and
stopped often to chat."
That is why the
Afghan war is not just a matter of US or NATO
troop levels. The crisis forms several concentric
circles. At the center lies the problem of a
non-functioning, corrupt government that doesn't
command respect because it lacks real popular
support. Around it, an entire crisis area has
developed in terms of weak authority, warlordism,
breakdown of law and order, rampant opium trade,
etc. This, in turn, provides a fertile ground to
the Taliban's resurgence, which is inevitable
regardless of whether or not Pakistani officials
are turning a blind eye to Taliban activity in
their territory. These are wrapped up with a
fourth ring, namely the growing resentment among
Afghans (and Pakistanis) about the continued
foreign occupation of their country.
Equally, while international attention
remains riveted on the southern and eastern
regions, it is often overlooked that the northern
and western regions also remain fragile. Not many
realize that the "political settlement" in these
non-Pashtun regions is a legacy of the formidable
Zalmay Khalilzad (currently US ambassador in
Baghdad) during his term in Kabul as President
George W Bush's special envoy.
Khalilzad
is an extraordinary alchemist. According to media
reports, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has
been the latest politician to realize this. Maliki
apparently aired his grievance to Bush in a
telephone conversation last week that Khalilzad
was behaving like a viceroy instead of a diplomat
in Baghdad. He complained: "The US ambassador is
not [former US overseer of Iraq L Paul] Bremer. He
doesn't have a free rein to do what he likes.
Khalilzad must not behave like Bremer, but rather
like an ambassador."
The point is,
Khalilzad's Bremer-like penchant for ruling the
Afghans through self-administered decrees may come
to haunt the mild-mannered, highly amiable,
consensual Karzai. A few weeks ago, supporters of
Uzbek leader Rashid Dostum became involved in
bloody clashes with the forces of his old enemy,
Abdul Malik, in the remote northern province of
Faryab. This is a blood feud going back a decade
or more, and shows how simmering tensions lie just
below the surface.
If Dostum and Malik are
coming out of the woodwork, Karzai may have a
tricky time ahead. In comparison, the factional
fighting 10 days ago in western Afghanistan has
all the subtleties of a Persian puzzle. In the
Shindand district south of the city of Herat,
close to the Iranian border and where a
strategically important air base of NATO is
located (an invaluable asset in the staging of any
US military strike against Iran), the local
strongman Amanullah Khan was killed, ostensibly in
clashes with the forces of another Pashtun
commander, Arbab Bashir.
Bashir's son was
taking revenge for his father's death at the hands
of Amanullah Khan in an earlier encounter. This
was apparently a case of a blood feud involving
two Pashtun tribes - the Barekzai and Noorzai. But
Arbab Bashir has also kept close links with
legendary commander Ismail Khan, who still wields
considerable influence in the region despite his
removal from power as governor of Herat by
Khalilzad in August 2004.
Geopolitics no
doubt played a role in Ismail Khan's sacking two
years ago after clashes instigated by Amanullah at
the best of the US. Given his close ties with
Iran, as long as he remained in power in Herat,
the US couldn't establish total control over
Shindand Air Base.
But now it is a new
ball game for Ismail Khan - Khalilzad is gone,
Karzai is weak and the Afghan bazaar is full of
talk about Americans wanting to cut and run from
Afghanistan.
It is difficult to foretell
where commanders like Dostum or Ismail Khan or
Malik will stand if push comes to a shove in
Afghanistan. Dostum is an ethnic Uzbek, Ismail
Khan is an ethnic Tajik, Malik is only
half-Pashtun, but that didn't prevent them from
occasionally collaborating with the Taliban and
mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar during the
1990s.
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 2006 Asia
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