The fight goes on, militants tell Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - When United States President George W Bush and British Premier Gordon
Brown interacted with their Pakistani and Afghan counterparts on the sidelines
of the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, they expressed
satisfaction for the conflict escalation against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in
the South Asian War theater. (See
Militants shake off Pakistan's grip Asia Times Online, Sep 29.)
This escalation, particularly in Pakistan's tribal agencies, is a gamble based
on the tactics used by the US's chief man in Iraq, General David Petraeus, in
2007. Following a "surge" in the war, the US offered an olive branch to the
militants. This created a
wedge between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi tribal resistance and led to a significant
reduction in the intensity of the resistance.
In Pakistan, there is no sign of this happening. Indeed, the reverse is true.
On Monday, Pakistani security officials warned that the militants battling
Pakistani forces, notably in Bajaur Agency, were obtaining weapons and
reinforcements from across the border in Afghanistan. "The Pakistan-Afghan
border is porous and is now causing trouble for us in Bajaur," a senior
security source in the military told a news briefing in Rawalpindi.
The call to arms to join the militants is reverberating across the tribal areas
in unprecedented fashion and the flames of war from Afghanistan that have
burned for the past seven years could now engulf Pakistan.
This week, the Taliban officially rejected a Saudi Arabian-British backdoor
initiative to strike peace deals with the militants. The charm of Islamabad's
old comrades (veteran jihadis) and official handlers (secret agents) no longer
works with the Taliban.
Back-channel efforts to strike deals with the Taliban and create a wedge
between them and al-Qaeda have been going on since September 11, 2001, (see
US turns to the Taliban Asia Times Online, June 4, 2003).
However, for the first time, the Taliban have reacted very strongly against
such efforts. On Sunday evening, the Taliban issued a press release in Pashto,
followed by one in English:
In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent,
the Most Merciful
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, the lord of all that exists and may
peace and prayers be upon the Messenger of Allah, his family, companions in
entirety.
The mainstream media are reporting about a "peace process" between the Taliban
and the Kabul puppet administration [of President Hamid Karzai] which is being
sponsored by Saudi Arabia and supported by Britain, or that there are
"unprecedented talks" involving a senior ex-Taliban member who is traveling
between Kabul and the alleged bases of the Taliban senior leadership in
Pakistan. The ex-members of the Taliban who have surrendered or who are under
surveillance are not associated with the of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan rejects all these false claims by the enemy,
who is using this propaganda campaign, the aim of this propaganda is to create
an atmosphere of disunity among Muslims in order to weaken the ummah.
Our struggle will be continued until the departure of all foreign troops. Dr
Talib
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
Afghanistan/Kabul
The message is clear: the Taliban and
al-Qaeda are now one and the same and far from being ready to be divided they
are fully geared up to themselves escalate the conflict.
Winning a lost war through Pakistan?
With the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan going from strength to strength,
the Western military and political leadership figured on taking on the Taliban
and al-Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas, where they have strong bases. This
would be followed by peace talks.
The military offensive began last month ago in Agency Bajaur, the smallest of
Pakistan's seven tribal agencies, semi-autonomous ethnic Pashtun regions.
Troops were backed by aerial bombardment, the latter causing hundreds of
thousands of people to be displaced.
And contrary to official claims, the militants have not been routed. Instead,
all Pakistani pro-Taliban militants who had been rivals as well as foreign
fighters have rallied under the command of the Afghan Taliban commander of
Nooristan and Kunar provinces, Qari Ziaur Rahman. (See
A fighter and a financier Asia Times Online, May 23, 2008.) All groups
have accepted Rahman as their commander in chief for the area that spans Kunar,
Nooristan, Bajaur and Mohmand Agency.
The Pakistani media have reported that Rahman's engagement in Bajaur has
reduced Taliban attacks in Kunar. But this is not expected to last long, with
all-out activity expected soon on all fronts.
According to the original plan, Pakistani forces were to make their attack in
Bajaur and US troops across the border in Kunar would block any escape routes.
The Pakistanis followed their side of the plan, but US ground troops were
unable to stop the militants from taking shelter in Kunar.
The fault lay in the plan. Unlike Bajaur, which is relatively developed with a
road network, on the Kunar side there are few passable tracks in the thick
mountain jungles. There are also many caves from which militants and
pro-Taliban villagers could target ground troops.
The Pakistani armed forces took heavy casualties, and despite official claims,
the militants say they have only lost a few dozen men - and Rahman is not one
of them.
Pakistan's strategic quarters now fear a military defeat could set off a chain
reaction into the adjacent troubled Swat Valley, and beyond: there is even talk
of relocating the provincial capital of North-West Frontier Province, Peshawar,
to a non-Pashtun city such as Abbotabad.
At the same time, the low morale of the soldiers and officers is a worrying
factor, especially among the Pashtun military cadre, which forms about 25% of
the army. In one instance, in obvious disregard to directions from military
headquarters, Pakistani border forces and tribals jointly downed a US Predator
drone in the South Waziristan tribal area.
Further, following a clear demand made by Washington last week to President
Asif Ali Zardari, the director general of the powerful Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, has been replaced by Ahmed
Shuja Pasha, who is known for his intimacy with the Americans and anti-Taliban
views. The heads of the external and internal security wings of the ISI have
also been replaced. (This was predicted by Asia Times Online, see
Militancy dogs Pakistan's new president Sep 9, 2008.)
This move will only deepen mistrust of the government as well as pro-American
Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Pervaz Kiani.
Chasing elusive peace deals
The miscalculation over Bajaur means that the second phase of the Pakistan-US
plan - the defeated militants forced into peace deals - has not materialized.
Yet Pakistan and its Western allies have little choice but to go after peace
accords in an attempt to de-escalation the conflict.
Former jihadi leaders who once sat in the Taliban's and al-Qaeda's camp and
retired military officers who are regarded as the real fathers of the Taliban
are now trying to build bridges between the Pakistan military and the Taliban.
The idea, as per Petraeus' Iraq plan, is that once dialogue is successful,
al-Qaeda will be purged from the ranks of the local tribal resistance, with the
latter then being offered a role in mainstream politics.
The chief of the banned Harkatul Mujahadeen, Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, has
been tasked to reach out to pro-Taliban militants in the Mohmand, Bajaur and
Waziristan areas to initiate dialogue between the Taliban and the Pakistani
establishment.
A former ISI official and consul general in Herat in Afghanistan in the
mid-1990s, Amir Sultan, also known as Colonel Imam and regarded as a father of
the Taliban, is another figure who has been shuttling from the tribal areas to
Islamabad in an attempt to end the rift between the armed forces and the
Taliban.
The militants are not responding positively to these efforts. Various militant
commanders have held talks with two pro-Pakistani Taliban figures - Maulana
Jalaluddin Haqqani and Hafiz Gul Bahadur of North Waziristan - and urged them
to sever all backchannel contacts with the Pakistani security forces.
Earlier, in Mohmand Agency, the militants pursued Taliban commander Abdul Wali
to end his impartiality and join hands against the Pakistani armed forces.
A decisive figure could be Haqqani, a veteran mujahideen commander against the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. If he decides to sever his
contacts with Pakistan, the conflict in the country will become dire indeed.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can
be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
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