Page 2 of 2 Opium clouds before an
Afghan
storm By Philip Smucker
al-Qaeda's own equally stunning
revival in Pakistan. The symbiosis has been years
in the making. A nascent al-Qaeda capitalized on
the Taliban's own success in the late 1990s when
the religious zealots seized control of
Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden's organization used
the Taliban's own power base to launch his vision
of a global jihad, which included dozens of
training camps that served jihadis from around the
world.
The Taliban have made some
unexpected strides on the public
relations front. Analysts put
this down to the militant religious movement's
ability to capitalize on the failures of the
Karzai regime.
"The Taliban's comeback is
one of the greatest examples I can think of [of] a
ruling regime snatching defeat from the jaws of
victory," said Saad Mohseni, an Australian-Afghan
journalist and the owner of Afghanistan's largest
private media conglomerate. "The Taliban [are]
engaged in more of a rescue mission than anything
else. They are admired for providing security."
But other analysts believe the Taliban
should be given far more credit for their own real
successes in the sphere of Afghan public opinion.
A movement that once mangled its own media
operations is now regularly featured in the
independent Afghan media for its press statements
and military gains - so much so that officials
from the government of US-backed Karzai now
threaten to muzzle the free press in their own
country for being - in part - too sympathetic
toward "the enemy".
The Taliban's military
chief and local media star, Dadullah, who
personally oversees the same kinds of showmanship
beheadings of foreigners and locals made infamous
by al-Qaeda in Iraq's dead leader, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, puts on a tough, defiant face that is
admired by some and despised by others.
Taliban leaders frame their actions and
arguments against what they say is a far more
brutal US-led "global war on terror". The Taliban,
mimicking al-Qaeda's own websites and
video-production wing, Al-Sahab, now produce daily
news pieces covering events in Afghanistan and the
Muslim world and slick videotapes that depict the
lives of young militants in religious schools and
in al-Qaeda-led training camps inside Afghanistan
and in neighboring Pakistan.
Despite the
Taliban's growing "globalization", the
Afghan-centric nature of the fight in the trenches
remains very much the same. Afghan security
officials working in the Taliban's operational
heartland say they rarely catch foreign militants
dead or alive in the insurgency's ranks. That is
because the actual foot soldiers fighting in
Afghanistan are almost all still Afghans or
Pakistani Pashtuns (ethnic brethren divided by the
British Raj-imposed Durand Line).
Even
suicide bombers, once a rarity and carefully
selected from outside the region, are increasingly
originating in South Asia, say senior Afghan
intelligence officials.
NATO planners,
particularly the British in Helmand, are aware of
the Taliban's machinations. Dealing with them is
another trick entirely. Helmand province is now a
nexus for both Taliban and NATO operations. A
drive past poppy fields on freshly paved roads is
a race to dodge NATO-Taliban firefights as well as
avoid kidnappings that have left journalists and
drivers beheaded in recent weeks.
Unarmed
Taliban fighters can be seen in the fields
assisting villagers as they scrape oozing opium
paste from the buds of poppy flowers. The
estimated US$3 billion opium and heroin trade is
heavily taxed, say residents. Government
eradicators, who appear to have surrendered to the
inevitability of this year's predicted bumper
crop, demanded stiff fees for not destroying the
crop several weeks ago. In addition, Afghan
landowners with poppy fields just outside the
ancient city of Lashkar Gah say they are paying a
zakat, or religious tax, to Taliban
insurgents, which is used to support the movement
and buy arms.
So in addition to massive
support from al-Qaeda's strengthened base across
the border in Pakistan, including financial ties
inside leading Sunni states bordering the Persian
Gulf, al-Qaeda is financially sound on the ground
in Afghanistan.
Cracking the nexus of
drugs and terror amounts to fighting two wars at
once. "The Taliban's Tier 2 members, mostly
farmers and villagers, [are] usually doing it for
the money," said Lieutenant-Colonel Charlie Mayo,
the NATO spokesman in Helmand province. "We don't
really want to fight Tier 2 - if we don't have to.
If we are able to push the Tier 1 out, we can
provide breathing space for economic development
without Taliban intimidation."
But
distinguishing the hardened ideologues from mere
poppy farmers with Kalashnikovs is easier said
than done. Helmand's provincial police chief, Nabi
Jan Mulla Kheal, said he now favors the US
government's own efforts to persuade NATO allies
to allow Taliban-controlled poppy fields to be
eradicated by chemicals sprayed from the air. But
other Afghan officials as well as locals in the
capital, Lashkar Gah, say aerial spraying would
only drive more poor Afghans into the waiting arms
of the Taliban.
Philip Smucker
is a commentator and journalist based in South
Asia and the Middle East. He is the author of
Al-Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the
Media on Terror's Trail (2004).
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