Page 2 of 2 Bad blood spreads to
Afghanistan's
north By M K Bhadrakumar
unsettled. The violence in the Amu
Darya region was the most horrendous, even by the
tragic standards of those times, as the Taliban
nonchalantly swung northward after capturing Kabul
in 1996.
The first ever attack on German
troops by a suicide bomber in Kunduz town on the
Afghanistan-Tajikistan border on May 19 would also
have alerted leaders such as Dostum. Kunduz is an
extremely sensitive area,
with a sizable (possibly, majority) presence of
Pashtun settlements. Besides the Pashtuns, Uzbek
and Tajik communities live in the area. Former
Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud
(assassinated in 2001) tried in vain to reclaim
the strategic town from the Taliban. As a
stronghold of the Taliban, Kunduz posed a major
challenge during the US invasion in 2001.
The Taliban are evidently adopting a new
strategy. After registering their presence in a
vast swath of land in the south almost up to the
approaches to Kabul city, they are beginning to
commit attacks in the north. From all accounts,
the suicide bomber who attacked the German troops
was a Taliban activist. The attack took place in
the busy market center of Kunduz. Three German
troops were killed; five were wounded seriously
and were airlifted to Cologne for medical
treatment, apart from seven Afghan civilians who
were killed and 13 wounded.
Germany
reassessing Veterans like Dostum will be
apprehensive how long the few hundred young German
male and female conscripts (Germany doesn't have
professional soldiers) scattered on a difficult
terrain from Kunduz in the east almost up to the
sand dunes of Faryab in the west, stretched along
the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan border, will be able to
hold if the Taliban make a determined comeback.
The Germans have been shell-shocked by the
Kunduz attack. A furious debate has begun in
Germany about the Afghan mission, which has never
been popular in public opinion. Will Germany stay
the course? The Bundestag (parliament) will debate
whether to extend the separate military mandates
in Afghanistan: Germany's participation in the
International Security Assistance Force, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization-led forces mandated
by the United Nations Security Council, the
deployment of six German Tornado reconnaissance
aircraft, and the involvement of up to 100 German
special forces in the US-led Operation Enduring
Freedom.
Der Spiegel assessed that Berlin
is mulling its role, and might well decide to
withdraw from Operation Enduring Freedom. The
point is, there is no possibility in sight for
increasing Germany's troop levels if the situation
were to deteriorate on the ground in northern
Afghanistan.
The tensions in the northern
region are building at a time when relations
between Uzbekistan and Western powers remain
frozen. The Amu Darya region has traditionally
been within the sphere of influence of Uzbekistan.
Tashkent has a major role to play if the security
of northern Afghanistan reaches a flashpoint.
Beyond this factor lies the geopolitics of
the "new cold war". Certainly, Russian policies in
the Central Asian region have shifted gear in
recent months in response to the US decision
regarding missile-defense deployments in Russia's
neighboring regions. (Chinese criticism of the US
missile-defense deployments has also become
frequent and focused.)
There are renewed
calls in Kyrgyzstan for the vacation of the US
airbase in Manas. Kyrgyzstan is hosting the annual
summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) in August. An SCO counter-terrorism exercise
is under way in Kyrgyzstan.
Growing
Russian involvement More important, the
summit of the Collective Security Treaty
Organization (CSTO) is scheduled for next month.
Russia visualizes the CSTO as the primary vehicle
of its strategy toward Central Asia's security.
The deteriorating security situation in
Afghanistan is certain to figure on the agenda of
the CSTO summit.
NATO activities in
Afghanistan are under close Russian scrutiny.
Moscow has openly begun voicing criticism of the
US-led NATO policies toward Central Asia. CSTO
secretary general Nikolai Bordyuzha said while on
a visit to Bishkek last week that NATO has been
pursuing a "policy of projecting and consolidating
its military-political presence in the Caucasus
and in Central Asia". He spoke of "external
challenges and risks that undermine stability in
the post-Soviet space", which are emanating out of
the "growing activities of extra-regional
structures, primarily NATO, the European Union and
third countries".
Bordyuzha singled out
Washington's "Greater Central Asia" policy, which
envisages Afghanistan as the hub of the US
strategy toward Central Asia. He criticized this
as an attempt to drive a geopolitical wedge
between regional states on the one hand and Russia
and the CSTO on the other. Bordyuzha said, "This
is an attempt to reorient the Central Asian states
towards cooperation with the United States in a
new format, encompassing, besides the Central
Asian states, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in the
future, India."
Russian Foreign Minister
Segei Lavrov has voiced similar apprehensions.
"NATO is continuing to follow its expansionist
policy and is moving its military infrastructure
closer to our territory," Lavrov said in an
interview recently with German television.
Without doubt, Moscow had the worrisome
security situation in northern Afghanistan in mind
when a delegation of the CSTO visited Kabul in
March. The visit caused great annoyance in
Washington. The US doesn't want Russia to come
anywhere near Kabul. Washington continues to
ignore Russia's three-year-old proposal to have
formal CSTO-NATO coordination on Afghanistan. But
Moscow is lately asserting its regional role.
The Russian Foreign Ministry's major
foreign-policy document approved recently by
President Vladimir Putin made a pointed reference
to the imperative of "de-monopolization of the
political settlement" in Afghanistan. It
underlined the importance of the "enlistment of
all of Afghanistan's neighbors without exception"
in the Afghan settlement. Clearly, the reference
was to the exclusive Washington-London axis that
determines the contours of the Afghan
"settlement".
In the run-up to the CSTO
delegation's visit to Kabul, a Russian Foreign
Ministry spokesman stated in Moscow on March 5,
"In the light of increasing Taliban and al-Qaeda
activities, President Karzai and the Afghan
government have asked Russia to resume supplies of
military equipment."
Russia and the
Central Asian states traditionally depended on
northern Afghanistan's experienced leaders such as
Dostum and Massoud to ensure peace in the Amu
Darya region. Moscow's understanding with Massoud
dated to the early 1980s. That was also the time
when Dostum underwent training in a Soviet
military academy.
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).
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