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2 AFGHANISTAN'S HIGHWAY TO
HELL The winter of the Taliban's
content By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KABUL - Like two snowmen trapped immobile
in winter's grip, NATO-led forces and the
Taliban-led insurgency eye each other icily,
watching and waiting for the thaw that will allow
them to renew what both believe could be the
decisive battle for control of Afghanistan.
As soon as the snow starts to melt within
a few months, Afghanistan will be locked in a
titanic battle that will initially be centered
along the key artery running across the south of
the country from Herat in the west, through
Kandahar and on to the
capital Kabul in the east.
This will become the highway to hell, or,
if the
Taliban win, the highway to the paradise on Earth
that they promise for the country.
With
the onset of winter last year, both sides had time
to reconsider their positions, especially in view
of the Taliban's most successful spring offensive
since being ousted in 2001. About 4,000 people
died last year, a fourfold increase over the
previous year.
In southwestern
Afghanistan, the Taliban emerged powerful and
confident, both on the political and military
fronts, clearly no longer the timid rats hiding in
mountain holes from where they would come out
randomly and try to bite their enemies.
All the same, the Taliban failed to force
the withdrawal of any of the 31,000 North Atlantic
Treaty Organization troops in the country,
something the alliance calls "a failure". The
Taliban response is that last year was just a
"warm-up". This year will be for real, they say.
Where they stand Through the
eyes of the US and NATO, the accepted view of the
Taliban, given their initial performance in the
field, was of a bunch of poorly organized troops
whose only hope was to increase the number of
their recruits, who in turn would become cannon
fodder. This all changed last year in the
southwest when the Taliban, after being rejected
by the masses, were asked down from the mountains
to join in with the population. This provided the
Taliban with essential grassroots support and
logistics.
At this point, the Taliban
abandoned their one-dimensional guerrilla tactics
and developed a two-pronged strategy. On the one
hand, militants would seize the main access points
around Kandahar - the former Taliban spiritual
headquarters in the province of the same name -
and on the other, Taliban leaders would foment a
popular armed uprising aimed at joining with the
militants in the capture of Kandahar.
This
is what happened in the mid-1990s when the Taliban
emerged and seized power in the chaos following
the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989: once the
southwest was secured, eastern Afghanistan
followed, and the two regions combined for the
final assault on Kabul.
NATO commanders
are now taking this possibility seriously, so much
so that they see a foreign hand behind the
planning - Pakistan or, more specifically, retired
Pakistani army personnel.
One example,
which was handed over to Islamabad by NATO,
involved a prominent retired officer and former
Pakistani diplomat who met with top Taliban
commander Mullah Akhtar Osmani in Helmand
province, only 10 days before Osmani was killed
last month in a NATO air strike. In a protest
note, it was claimed that Pakistani intelligence
services were using retired officers to support
the Taliban.
Be that as it might, the
brains behind the Taliban's war is a veteran
Afghan mujahideen commander against the Soviets,
Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani. He organized the
Taliban to keep NATO forces engaged across
Afghanistan through guerrilla raids, the use of
improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks,
while at the same time steadily beefing up the
Taliban's presence in carefully picked corridors
for use in the battle for Kandahar.
Too
quick off the mark From September through
November last year, the Tagab Valley northeast of
Kabul fell into the hands of the Hezb-e-Islami
Afghanistan (HIA) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the
mercurial mujahid with political ambitions who for
now is fighting alongside the Taliban against NATO
forces.
To the south of Kabul, the Musay
Valley became a focal point for fighters loyal to
the Taliban and the HIA. On the grand chessboard
of Afghanistan, these were tactical moves aimed as
backup for a mass mobilization of Taliban troops.
Meanwhile, the Taliban increased their
presence along the corridors from Kandahar to
Herat and Kandahar to Kabul. Altogether, thousands
of men were ready to flood into Kandahar and
Kabul. All they were waiting for was
reinforcements in northern Afghanistan.
In
October, Commander Gholam Hossain of Bamyan, a
Shi'ite, had traveled to Baghran in Helmand
province and, along with another Shi'ite commander
from northern Afghanistan, had promised that as
soon as the Taliban launched their mass attack,
they would join forces and provide as much
logistical support as possible from the north.
But leading Taliban commanders wavered,
believing they needed more men. They wanted to
wait until March. With the date uncertain, men
began to drift from key pockets, and the moment
was lost.
NATO takes heart "Everything turned out to be Taliban rhetoric
as they failed to seize Kandahar and Kabul,
despite their tall claims," NATO spokesman Mark
Laity told Asia Times Online at the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in
Kabul.
"It is a fact that the Taliban
cannot fight any decisive battle against NATO.
They just cannot stand against the military
strength of NATO forces. At the end of 2006, the
Taliban tried to capture some strategic points and
tried to carry out a conventional sort of warfare
against NATO forces, but when NATO carried out
operations, they could not withstand," Laity said.
"NATO carried out operations in southwest
Afghanistan, such as Baaz Tsuka [in the Zari and
Panjwai districts, south of Kandahar on either
side of the Arghandab River], and there were
cleanup
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if the
Taliban win, the highway to the paradise on Earth
that they promise for the country. 
