Rising security threat in Afghan north
By Abdul Latif Sahak
BALKH - Earlier this year, bus driver Ustad Toryalai was able to drive round
the clock along the highway from Kabul to Mazar-e Sharif in northern
Afghanistan. The road, a key north-south supply route, was busy day and night
with travelers, businessmen and international aid workers.
For the past six months, however, Toryalai has not dared to drive at night for
fear of attack. Even during the day, he finds that many passengers are no
longer willing to risk the journey.
"I used to make 1,500 [US] dollars a month, but that's now fallen to half that
amount because people only like to travel during in the daytime, and they don't
carry commercial goods with them," he said.
"The police patrol the highways during the day, but at night it's
either the Taliban or else hijackers passing themselves off as the Taliban; it
isn't clear which."
The problems Toryalai describes reflect a wider pattern of deteriorating
security across parts of northern Afghanistan previously considered relatively
safe, or at least free of Taliban activity.
Local officials blame the infiltration of insurgents into northern areas over
recent months, aggravated by inadequate security provision on the ground. In
addition, attacks targeting Pashtun communities and grinding poverty are
combining to produce local recruits for the Taliban.
"The insurgents have come under pressure in the southern provinces, so they
have turned to the north," Daud Daud, commander of Afghan National Police's
Pamir 303 Zone, which covers the north and northeast of the country, told the
Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).
Daud said the situation was critical in Kunduz, Takhar, Baghlan, Balkh, Jowzjan
and Faryab provinces, and in the remaining northern provinces - Badakhshan,
Sar-e Pol and Samangan - the Taliban also had a foothold.
Attacks in Daud's zone of responsibility in the past month alone have resulted
in 30 casualties among Afghan army troops and the police, and dozens more among
civilians and aid workers.
Daud noted that coordination was poor between Afghan security forces and the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led international troops, but said this was
being addressed.
In a recent speech, Atta Mohammad Nur, the governor of Balkh province, said
that whereas last year there were security concerns in only a few villages,
they now existed all across the province. Things were so bad that insurgent
activity had spread to the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif, despite the presence of
120,000 soldiers of the Afghan army, 6,000 Americans and 5,000 Germans.
He complained that his earlier warnings that security was getting worse had
fallen on deaf ears. There was no coordinated plan to root out the insurgents,
he said, and local police were undermanned and badly equipped, and did not
receive the back-up they needed from the army.
"Police numbers are low at village and district levels, and they have
poorer-quality weapons than the Taliban," he said. "The records for northern
provinces show that there's just one policeman for every one or two villages,
whereas it's likely there are dozens of Taliban in some of these villages."
Although he warned that conditions in the north could become even worse than in
southern Afghanistan if these trends continued, and called for more Afghan
security forces to be deployed, Nur said he opposed an increase in
international troops in the region.
"In my view, if more foreign forces were present, their operations and
bombardments would aggravate the rising security problems," he said.
Other northern provinces are similarly affected.
Ibrahim, a merchant who trades in oil in the northwestern Faryab province and
lives in Andkhoy district, on the border with Turkmenistan, said the Taliban
now operated unhindered in the area and were recruiting many local young men.
"A few nights ago, the Taliban took me out of a car and questioned me," he
said. "As soon as I told them I'm a businessman, they released me."
Faryab's governor Abdul Haq Shafaq acknowledges that the insurgents are active
in most districts of the province, but said they were confined to launching
sporadic guerilla attacks as they were unable to engage Afghan security forces
in open combat.
Shafaq agreed that recruitment was on the increase, adding that "the reason for
this is poverty and unemployment, which leads people to try to earn some money
by joining the Taliban".
Faryab police chief Brigadier-General Abdul Khalil Andarabi told IWPR that his
men were critically short of resources, and urgently needed assistance from the
Afghan Interior Ministry.
"We're short of police and we are making serious efforts to integrate the arbakai
[locally-raised militia] into the province's police framework," he said. "The
Interior Ministry needs to increase the number of police we have here; it's a
pressing concern."
General Faiz Mohammad, who is in charge of implementing the Afghan government's
National Development Strategy in the north, said that in addition to Afghan
Taliban, there were also members of the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan, IMU.
The IMU originated in Central Asia in the 1990s, but relocated to Afghanistan
and Pakistan as a close ally of the Taliban. Over the past year, the group,
whose core is ethnic Uzbek rather than Pashtun, has been relocating combatants
to northern Afghanistan, where it strengthens the Taliban's potential to carry
out attacks. The IMU may also have designs on the neighboring Central Asian
republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
General Josef Blotz, spokesman for the NATO-led International Security
Assistance Force, ISAF, has painted a similar picture, telling reporters that
the Taliban and the Uzbek militants had become more active in the north where
there were fewer international troops.
Like Blotz, Major-General Hans-Werner Fritz, the ISAF regional commander for
northern Afghanistan, says new counter-insurgency operations are planned in the
region. He says operations will be led by Afghan troops with support from their
foreign allies.
Other observers say northern Afghanistan has become fertile ground for
insurgent activity because of the aggressive action of armed factions in the
region, often targeting the Pashtun minority.
Political expert Mohammad Wakil said the Taliban had won recruits among local
people who felt unprotected from the paramilitary groups Jamiat-e Islami and
Junbesh-e Melli, dominant in northeastern and northwestern provinces,
respectively.
The armed wings of these factions, which date from the 1980s, were supposed to
have been disbanded and disarmed in a United Nations-sponsored program after
2001.
But Wakil said a spate of politically-motivated killings of supporters of other
political groups had never been properly investigated, he said, noting that
both Jamiat and Junbesh had members in the institutions of government.
"Recent years have seen unpublicized incidents involving the killing of members
of other parties ... and of tribal elders, especially Pashtuns, yet no one has
been arrested for these assassinations," he said. "These acts have roused the
anger of other parties and ethnic groups, who have begun cooperating with the
insurgents by providing them with refuge and support."
An elder of the Ishaqzai, a Pashtun tribe in Balkh province, who asked not to
be identified, said that since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, more than 100
tribal elders had been killed for ethnic and political reasons.
Failure to address these crimes created feelings of resentment and a desire for
revenge, he said. "When your brother or close relative is killed, and they are
completely innocent and you know who the murderer is, would you remain silent?"
he asked. "Definitely not - never. That's the position many of those who are
now helping the Taliban found themselves in."
The Ishaqzai elder concluded, "If the government assisted in arresting the
murderers, these people would certainly support it. This is the government's
fault - because of some murderers, they have lost people's confidence."
Abdul Latif Sahak is an IWPR-trained reporter in Balkh.
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