Al-Qaeda fights back at Afghan
peace bid By Syed Saleem
Shahzad
KARACHI - Similar to US General
David Petraeus' plan of reconciliation with the
Iraqi tribal-based national resistance and
alienation of al-Qaeda, Washington has a
two-pronged approach of political settlement with
"reconcilable" insurgents and all-out war on
radical extremists in the theater of Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
This initiative was given a
fillip this week by both the government in Kabul
and the Taliban, while al-Qaeda, which stands to
lose the
most, is already on the
offensive - as in Osama bin Laden's latest video -
in a bid to re-energize itself to maintain its
support in the Afghan struggle.
A Taliban
spokesman on Tuesday responded that they were
prepared for talks with Kabul after President
Hamid Karzai offered on Sunday to stage
negotiations. "Peace cannot be achieved without
dialogue," Karzai said.
Taliban spokesman
Yousuf Ahmadi was quoted in the media as saying,
"For the sake of national interests ... we are
fully ready for talks with the government." He
added that the Taliban had a "limited" number of
conditions, but he did not explain further.
Let's talk about it Tribal
elders and clerics in Pakistan's North-West
Frontier Province are now active in canvassing for
a jirga (tribal meeting) that would include
the Taliban. These endeavors are backed by both
Pakistan and the United States.
The
lessons of last month's grand "peace jirga"
in Kabul have been learned. While that meeting was
groundbreaking in bringing together hundreds of
tribal elders, clerics and others from Afghanistan
and Pakistan, it was always doomed to be nothing
more than symbolic without the participation of
the Taliban, who were not invited.
The
Taliban realize that jirgas are an Afghan
tradition in which rivals attempt to hammer out
their differences, and there are now high hopes
that once the Taliban and members of Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan sit down
face-to-face with Afghan government officials, the
ice will melt.
Whatever the results of
such jirgas, one thing is sure - the
Taliban's relations with al-Qaeda, which have had
their ups and downs before the present
reconciliation, will deteriorate.
Despite
optimism in Washington and Islamabad over the
latest peace moves, in the meantime there will be
no let-up on the part of coalition troops in
Afghanistan, as they are committed to applying
maximum pressure on the Taliban.
Operations have already been increased in
the southwestern provinces of Kandahar and
Helmand. However, with the number of casualties
rising, most member countries want to see tangible
results, such as the Canadians, who are engaged in
operations in Kandahar, the second-toughest area
after Helmand.
Six years since the US-led
invasion of Afghanistan, there is also war fatigue
in the militant camp, as well as among the
population. The indigenous segment of the Afghan
resistance, drawn from the tribes, especially
wants to see results.
Men want to get back
to their fields and to the routines of life. The
tribes of southern Afghanistan want dominance in
the central government and prosperity in the
Pashtun heartland. And they don't mind whether the
Taliban achieve this target through the bullet,
the ballot or the jirga - they just want
results in the near future.
The Taliban
are aware of this, and that the tribals are not
ideologically motivated to fight an indefinite
battle. This is one of the factors in their
willingness for talks with Kabul.
An
alert al-Qaeda For the al-Qaeda ideologues
sitting in Iraq and the Pakistani tribal areas,
they face a situation similar to the one they now
have in Iraq.
Four years ago, after Saddam
Hussein fell, al-Qaeda saw the opportunity to grab
the resistance by the scruff of the neck and
transform it from a low-level guerrilla war into a
real "surge" against the US military.
Al-Qaeda's calculated strikes at the nerve
center of the US-Shi'ite alliance abruptly
sharpened the round edges of the resistance and
stoked the fires of sectarian strife. In the
atmosphere of intense insecurity that resulted,
many common Iraqi people lost their impartiality,
joined the resistance and helped al-Qaeda by
providing bases and logistics. Al-Qaeda emerged as
a leader of Iraqi resistance.
The
situation has changed over the past months,
though, as the US has been relentless in pursuing
al-Qaeda and courting Iraqi tribes, which are
turning their backs on al-Qaeda. Many top al-Qaeda
commanders have been assassinated by tribals and
they are increasingly calling for al-Qaeda to
leave and allow the Iraqi national resistance to
fight its own battle.
In Pakistan,
al-Qaeda adopted a similar approach in North
Waziristan and South Waziristan in 2005 by
breaking the natural alliance between Pakistani
militants and tribals on the one side and the
Pakistan army on the other. The result was the
establishment of the Islamic State of North
Waziristan and the Islamic State of South
Waziristan, with al-Qaeda as a key player in both.
But under relentless pressure from the US
to crack down on foreign militants in Pakistan,
Islamabad was able to drive a wedge between locals
and al-Qaeda. This culminated in January in the
Pakistani Taliban massacre of hundreds of Uzbek
militants and the expulsion of al-Qaeda commanders
from the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. They
have since been able to re-establish themselves.
(See The Pakistani road to German
terror, Asia Times Online, September
7.)
Osama bin Laden's videotape can be
seen in this context. Al-Qaeda has lost its
supremacy in Iraq, and risks being sidelined in
Afghanistan and Pakistan should the nascent peace
process take hold.
Bin Laden's appearance
is a powerful reminder that al-Qaeda is still the
leader in the global resistance. One can expect a
"surge" in al-Qaeda's activities in Afghanistan
and Pakistan in an effort to justify this tag and
reclaim the resistance movements.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia
Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be
reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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