Page 1 of
2 Opium clouds before an Afghan
storm By Philip Smucker
LASHKAR GAH, Helmand province - Both the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Taliban
have promised the world major military offensives
in southern Afghanistan. The NATO-led alliance is
sending thousands of soldiers into the fray to
preempt the Taliban Ghazwatul Badr uprising that
has been announced with a centurion call for
thousands of fighters and suicide bombers to ready
their ammunition belts.
Yet although
Afghanistan is well into its balmy spring, the
battlefield in southern
Afghanistan has entered a twilight zone of
cloak-and-dagger assassinations with only limited
clashes.
The poppy harvest is only now
ending, and growing doubts about Afghanistan's
future have infested the parched valleys and high
mountains passes. The Taliban have not gone on a
blazing warpath, and that makes everyone a little
more nervous.
In the latest political
development, the upper chamber of the Afghan
Parliament (Meshrano Jirga, or House of Elders)
voted this week to begin dialogue with Taliban
fighters to persuade them to accept the Afghan
government.
A draft law says a distinction
should be made among Afghan Taliban, Pakistani
Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. It also seeks an
end to military operations by foreign forces
unless they come under attack or have first
consulted the Afghan National Army.
The
bill still has to be passed by the Wolesi Jirga
(People's Assembly), the lower house of
Parliament, and signed by President Hamid Karzai
before becoming law. Similar approaches to the
Taliban have failed in the past. The move follows
a law providing an amnesty from war crimes
committed over nearly three decades of civil war.
Meanwhile, as the time-bomb ticks toward
more fighting, the rag-tag Afghan insurgency is
fast morphing into a 21st-century guerrilla
movement.
Born out of the ashes of civil
war and the US Central Intelligence Agency's
unrefined efforts to stimulate a jihad against the
Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Taliban are
significantly changed from their days in power
across Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.
More than anything, the once-xenophobic,
home-grown movement is now a part of a global
jihad. Operatives inside and outside the country
mix and match battlefield tactics and information
strategy to fit the moment.
Announcing the
Taliban's "full contacts" with the larger struggle
in Iraq last year, one of the Taliban's senior
field commanders, Mullah Dadullah, stated, "We are
united against the infidel - we are in the same
trench." Dadullah later announced that he had sent
some of his own foot soldiers to fight in Iraq.
Leading analysts of global terrorism
believe that the Afghan "exchanges" are
value-added capabilities in the realm of both
"hearts and minds" and fighting skills.
The transformation of the Taliban provides
a study in how a local insurgency has re-emerged
as a force for al-Qaeda's global interests.
Western diplomats and Afghan experts monitoring
the Taliban contend that it is increasingly
difficult to differentiate between the
international and the local aspects of the
insurgency. "The Taliban [movement] is now a
part of an internationalized jihad," said Waheed
Mujda, an Afghan writer who served as a deputy
minister in the Taliban's government between 1997
and 2001 and later wrote a tell-all book about the
movement.
"The largest contributing factor
to this internationalization has been the US
attack on Iraq and a growing sense that Muslims
across the Islamic world are fighting the same
aggressor, the US and its allies. The Taliban's
war has now moved outside the boundaries of
Afghanistan and is part of a global struggle."
Videos from training camps inside
Afghanistan and also in Pakistan suggest that
al-Qaeda's trusted Arabs have resumed their
venerated roles as military trainers for the
Taliban. But apart from numerous cameo appearances
in joint al-Qaeda-Taliban training videos, these
senior al-Qaeda figures remain almost invisible on
the battlefield, according to Afghan security and
intelligence officials.
Afghan and other
Islamic militants travel clandestinely among
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq and also "wave" to
one another over the Internet. In one recent
video, Abu Laith al-Libbi, a senior Libyan trainer
for the Taliban in Afghanistan, sends a message of
encouragement to Iraqi insurgents from a training
base in Kunar province. His work in Afghanistan
and his close affiliation with al-Qaeda operatives
in Iraq suggest strong cross-pollination between
anti-American insurgencies in the two countries.
Taliban tactics, which as late as last
spring involved wild frontal attacks with hundreds
of fighters on US and allied positions, have
further morphed to fit al-Qaeda's vision of a
successful jihad: spelling a notable and new
preference for suicide bombing, improvised
explosive devices, and assassinations of key
figures, with a stress on "NATO collaborators".
The Taliban's re-emergence as a formidable
foe in the sphere of public opinion and on the
battlefield in Afghanistan has paralleled
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