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of 2 US finally talking to the
enemy By Amir Mir
ISLAMABAD - Almost 10 years down the road
since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the
United States and the subsequent invasion of
Afghanistan in late 2001 by US-led forces,
American military might, from daisy-cutter bombs
to high-tech arms, has acknowledged its failure to
smoke out the Afghan Taliban, compelling
Washington to initiate peace talks with the once
stigmatized and hounded militia to ensure a
negotiated settlement of the conflict.
The
allied forces stationed in Afghanistan realize
that leaving Afghanistan without negotiating with
the Taliban is just not possible. In a potentially
significant step towards paving the way for peace
talks, the United Nations Security Council voted on
June 17 to split a hitherto
joint sanctions blacklist for al-Qaeda and the
Afghan Taliban.
The prime motive behind
the UN move is to send a signal that al-Qaeda and
the Taliban have separate agendas and that the two
groups should not be treated as one anymore.
Without that, it would have been highly
problematic for the US and other foreign powers in
Afghanistan to justify an eventual plan for
cutting a peace deal with the Taliban.
Details of the divided sanctions lists
were contained in two US-drafted resolutions,
which the 15-nation Security Council adopted
unanimously. One resolution established a Taliban
blacklist and the other an al Qaeda blacklist of
individuals facing travel bans and asset freezes.
"The US believes the new sanctions regime
for Afghanistan will serve as an important tool to
promote reconciliation, while isolating
extremists," the American ambassador to the UN,
Susan Rice, said in a statement. She added that
the move sent a clear message to the Taliban that
there was a future for those militants who
separated from al-Qaeda, renounced violence and
abided by the constitution of Afghanistan.
Hardly 24 hours after the UN move, Afghan
President Hamid Karzai acknowledged for the first
time that the US was negotiating a peace agreement
with the Taliban. "Peace talks are going on with
the Afghan Taliban. The foreign military and
especially the United States itself are going
ahead with these negotiations," Karzai told a news
conference in Kabul on June 18.
A day
later, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates conceded
in an interview to CNN that the Barack Obama
administration had made preliminary contacts with
the Afghan Taliban. "We've said all along that a
political outcome is the way most of these wars
end," Gates added.
Well-informed
diplomatic circles in Islamabad say the Obama
administration has resorted to a carrot and stick
policy towards the amir of the Afghan
Taliban, Mullah Omar, which is aimed at persuading
the fugitive extremist leader to agree to a
negotiated settlement.
The diplomatic
circles reminded that soon after Osama bin Laden's
May 2 killing in the Abbottabad area of Pakistan
at the hands of US special forces, there were
reports that American and Pakistani agencies had
begun an intense hunt for Mullah Omar.
International media further claimed that the Obama
administration had made it clear to Pakistan that
American security forces would not hesitate in
carrying out yet another Abbottabad-like raid to
capture or kill Mullah Omar, if he is found on
Pakistani soil.
However, almost seven
weeks after Bin Laden's killing, there are
indications that the peace talks between the US
and the Afghan Taliban are finally gaining
traction, keeping in view the July 2011 timeline
given by Obama for the beginning of the withdrawal
of American troops from war-torn Afghanistan.
Obama is expected to announce this week
how many troops he plans to pull out as part of
the process of handing over all combat operations
against Taliban insurgents to Afghan security
forces by 2014. There are currently about 100,000
US troops in Afghanistan, up from about 34,000
when Obama took office in 2009.
However,
even a cursory glance clearly indicates that the
Taliban, backed by a new breed of volunteers from
Pakistan, are reuniting and expanding their area
of operations in southern and eastern Afghanistan,
which were their former stronghold.
Despite the fall of the Taliban regime in
October 2001, US-led forces have failed to uproot
the Taliban, who are gaining strength with every
passing year. The resurgence of the Taliban
fighters, who melted into the countryside after
the invasion of Afghanistan, has surprised
American military strategists. Bloody suicide
attacks, ambushes, roadside bombs and brazen
assaults on North Atlantic Treaty Organization and
International Security Assistance Force troops in
the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan have
almost become a daily norm.
The command
and control structures of the Taliban are also
intact, even though they have lost top military
commanders like Mullah Dadullah Akhund and Mullah
Akhtar Osmani.
The reclusive Taliban
amir is alive and fully functional and has
been sending instructions from his hideout in
Pakistan to his field commanders through
audio-tapes, letters and verbal messages.
In July 2004 the international media first
reported Mullah Omar's presence in Quetta, the
capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province. This
information was apparently gleaned by the Afghan
interrogators of Mullah Sakhi Mujahid, a close
aide of the amir.
On
February 25, 2006, Karzai handed over intelligence
to Islamabad indicating that Mullah Omar and his
key associates were hiding in Pakistan. Almost a
month later, Abdullah Abdullah, then the Afghan
foreign minister, said he had shared with
Islamabad credible intelligence about Mullah
Omar's whereabouts. When the Pervez Musharraf
regime rejected the Afghan information as
outdated, Abdullah countered that his government
wouldn't have handed over information it did not
believe in. Abdullah said most of the Taliban
leaders who were actively instigating terror in
Afghanistan were operating from Pakistan.
Almost six months later, on September 23,
2006, Karzai said Mullah Omar and Bin Laden were
both in Pakistan, charging that Islamabad's
support for militants had made Afghanistan
unstable.
Addressing the US-based Council
on Foreign Relations, Karzai said the Taliban
leader was for sure in Pakistan, adding,
"Pakistani President Musharraf knows it, and I
know it ... He is truly there." Commenting on the
whereabouts of Bin Laden, Karzai said, "If I told
you he was in Pakistan, President Pervez
Musharraf, my friend, would be mad at me. But if I
said he was in Afghanistan, that would not be
true."
In a veiled reference to Musharraf
and his alleged support of militants, Karzai said
some in the region were definitely using extremism
as an instrument of policy to maintain political
power. Karzai's claim about Bin Laden's presence
has already been proven true.
On September
9, 2006, CNN ran an exclusive report about the
whereabouts of Mullah Omar, stating that the
one-eyed Taliban leader was living in Pakistan,
though not in the same area where Bin Laden was
thought to be.
Quoting US intelligence
sources, the report said: "The Taliban leader is
hiding in Quetta or its environs." On January 17,
2007, Afghan intelligence released a video in
which a captured Taliban spokesman confessed that
Mullah Omar was hiding in Quetta under the
protection of the Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI).
Afghan agents had arrested Abul Haq
Haqi, a former Taliban spokesman known to the
media as Doctor Mohammad Hanif, in the eastern
province of Nangarhar. He confirmed that he was
picked up after he had entered Afghanistan from
Pakistan and that he had come to the country on a
mission after seeing his amir. He was
further quoted as telling his interrogators that
Mullah Omar was running a shadow government from
Quetta, complete with military, religious and
cultural councils.
However, on November
21, 2009, British newspaper The Sunday Times
claimed that in the face of the allegations about
the presence of the Taliban leaders in Quetta,
they were moving to the volatile port city of
Karachi, where it would be impossible for the
Americans to target them with the help of their
drones.
On December 1, 2009, Newsweek
magazine reported that Karachi was the safest
place for them in Pakistan, as they would not
attract attention by keeping a low profile and not
fomenting violence. Therefore, Newsweek claimed,
the Taliban leadership was steadily migrating from
Balochistan to Karachi "where, well out of
America's reach, they can operate more freely".
The February 2010 arrest of the Taliban's
number two, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Karachi
first gave credence to American claims that Mullah
Omar had already shifted his base from Quetta to
Karachi, considering it a much safer place.
Karachi's large Pashtun population, around 3.5
million, could be relied on to protect the
Taliban, who mostly belong to the same ethnic
group.
In January 2011, international
media reports claimed that Mullah Omar had
suffered a massive heart attack, following which
he was taken to a Karachi hospital (by
intelligence sleuths) to be treated for several
days. But as usual, the Pakistani Foreign Office
strongly refuted these reports as baseless, in the
same manner it used to deny reports about Bin
Laden's presence in Pakistan.
On May 23,
almost three weeks after Bin Laden's killing, the
Afghan private television station TOLO reported
that the Taliban's supreme leader had been killed
while traveling from Quetta to the North
Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan.
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