But recent developments in this war suggest that military planners have finally realised the risks of this most dangerous of relationships. Army chief Ashfaq Kayani recently noted that a Taliban society at home and in Afghanistan was not in Pakistan’s interests. In the past, Pakistan supported the Taliban in Afghanistan and its own tribal areas in a quest to achieve “strategic depth” against rival India. Now, Kayani concedes, a stable and friendly Afghanistan is sufficient strategic depth for Pakistan.

This is one of several signs that the military establishment has changed under his stewardship. His promise not to involve the armed forces in public politics as Pervez Musharraf had in the past was borne out by the army’s refusal to support President Asif Ali Zardari’s failed bid to oust Iftikhar Chaudhry, the independent-minded Chief Justice.

Their counter-insurgency capacity has increased from virtual non-existence in 2004 when a new `Pakistan Taliban’ compelled the state to sign a string of ceasefires in the tribal areas to an effective force that has resulted in the capture of important Taliban strongholds along the tribal frontier with Afghanistan.

The difference to years past when military planners heavily patronised the Taliban, says Shuja Nawaz of the Atlantic Council, “is that Pakistan is now facing the spectre of (terrorism by) Taliban groups at home. The immediate enemy is internal now, not India.” In the past two years, about 5000 civilians and 1700 soldiers have been killed.

After Pakistan was compelled to make enemies of the Taliban in 2001, military operations in the lawless frontier with Afghanistan were initially unpopular. Most viewed them as a war pitting fellow Pakistanis and Muslims against each other at the behest of the US. That all began to change as army-led forces showed the resolve to achieve military victory in the Swat valley and adjacent tribal areas. As ordinary Pakistanis were increasingly targeted in the terrorism and security forces took significant casualties, authorities and the media were successful in branding this as Pakistan’s war.

Continued US pressure, tied more than ever to the delivery of billions in civil and military aid, has also played a role. Since last month, Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have facilitated the capture of about half of the senior Afghan Taliban leadership.

These captures have been praised by Washington. But questions remain. How were these senior leaders captured and why now? And will it attempt to eliminate Islamist militants targeting India and Iran, such as Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jundullah, with the same vigour and intent?

These unanswered questions point to the difficult road ahead. Even now, Pakistan’s security establishment feels it must tread a careful line between a belligerent US and the reality that it can’t exert its influence over the entire tribal areas through force alone.

There is a dark side to the military operations, too. In Swat, government rehabilitation efforts have been admirable but in other areas, such as Bajaur and the Waziristans, they have been poor. Security forces have also been implicated in atrocities including the kidnapping and murder of perceived Taliban sympathisers and indiscriminate bombardments that have killed thousands and displaced millions.

Obsessions over India also remain a problem. Although troop levels in the Kashmir region have slightly decreased and both countries have formally recommenced dialogue, observers in Islamabad remain alarmed by India’s growing influence in Afghanistan. India spent close to $US40bn on its armed forces last year, eight times as much Pakistan.

That imbalance means Pakistan cannot totally divorce itself from the Taliban if it is perceived as the only viable ally against Indian influence in Afghanistan once US-led forces leave. It is unclear how these contradictions will resolve themselves. Military success can only provide immediate stability. Maintaining it will require political leadership.

Mustafa Qadri is a journalist based in Pakistan

[This article appeared in The Australian newspaper on Monday March 8, 2010. Url: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/my-enemys-enemy-no-longer-a-friend/story-e6frg6ux-1225837937177]

The most spectacular evidence apparently in support of this claim is the capture last week of the senior most military commander of Taliban forces in Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Only weeks earlier, Pakistan authorities revealed that Hakeemullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistan Taliban, succumbed to injuries from a US drone strike in the tribal areas.

The losses come at a time when the US is spearheading a series of major offensives in the south of Afghanistan, the desolate heartland of the Taliban insurgency that has proved impossible to end in over nine years of conflict.

Already foreign forces claim to have captured the key Taliban stronghold of Marjah. They have also killed at least 17 civilians in two errant missile attacks. The deaths were a “very serious setback” admitted Britain’s senior most soldier, Jock Stirrup.

Policy wonks in Western capitals are hoping that, casualties apart, the string of military successes will force the Taliban to the negotiating table. As former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said in London recently, negotiations must occur from a position of strength.

Notwithstanding such hairy chested pronouncements, it is uncertain whether the Taliban have truly been vanquished.

Although the loss of senior commanders will undoubtedly affect Taliban strategy in the immediate future, similar losses in the past have not affected their overall strength.

When key Taliban commander in Pakistan Nek Mohammad was killed by a US pilotless aircraft in 2004, it eventually paved the way for Beitullah Mehsud his new strategy of increased, high profile suicide bombings throughout Pakistan.

After Beitullah was himself killed by yet another US missile strike, he was replaced by the younger, more abrasive Hakeemullah Mehsud. Hakeemullah was already feared for his virulently sectarian hatred for Shia Muslims – a minority sect of Islam – and strong sympathies for Al Qaeda’s notion of global holy war.

He is believed to have helped in Al Qaeda’s audacious raid on a CIA base in Afghanistan that killed seven American agents.

Incredibly the bombings inside Pakistan, already a virtual daily occurrence under Beitullah, also increased while Hakeemullah was emir of the Pakistan Taliban.

Yet it was only after the bombing on the CIA base in Afghanistan that the US decided to eliminate Hakeemullah.

In an apparent bout of revenge, it also massively increased its controversial pilotless drone missile strikes in the tribal areas, a powerful military asset with the advantage of killing people far from the scrutinising eyes of journalists.

With him gone, the insurgency appears to have lost its last high profile commander.

The overarching aim of these targeted captures and assassinations is to splinter the insurgency in the hope individual soldiers and commanders can be convinced to lay down their arms.

But the clear message in the recent, violent past suggests that rather than weakening the enemy, this strategy increases their resolve, much as Hitler’s London blitz steeled Britons against the Nazis in the darkest days of the Second World War.

The double irony is that whereas before the Taliban was a complex and disparate organisation – its major branch under Mullah Omar is opposed to foreign armies in Afghanistan, whereas Beitullah and Hakeemullah’s ‘Pakistan Taliban’ seek to overthrow the Pakistan Government – the upscale in attacks against it breeds a unity of purpose: survival.

Recently there have been increased attempts to curb the social alienation that enables the Taliban to recruit foot soldiers from remote, poor regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Dubbed the “civilian surge” it is a welcome step. But this civilian surge will take time and significant political will and cannot match the pace and destructiveness of military operations.

Most ominously of all, however, the tactic of eliminating senior insurgents creates opportunities for militant groups with more radical and internationalist agendas like Al Qaeda to step into the breach.

There was a time, just after the US invasion of Afghanistan in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, when Al Qaeda was totally dependent on Taliban refuges in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas for its survival. But with successive Taliban commanders lost and Pakistan Army encroachment into the tribal areas, the Pakistan Taliban have relied more heavily on Al Qaeda to undertake a string of deadly attacks in the major cities of Lahore, Peshawar and Islamabad.

Something similar could occur in Afghanistan.

There is a clear message in all of this. The tit-for-tat nature of the AfPak conflict where Taliban violence is met with overwhelming force – both of which kill and traumatise innocent civilians – continues to spiral out of control.

Escalating the conflict for the sake of immediate results will create long lasting divisions and animosity. All the while the spectre of international terrorism remains at large.

[This article was originally published in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Unleashed website. Url: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2824406.htm]

The dangerous supply routes through Pakistan that this correspondent reported on last year have become a lifeline for international and national forces in Afghanistan. But, as last month’s London conference on Afghanistan’s future demonstrated, Pakistan is set to play a role that extends far beyond mere logistics.

At the conference, world leaders effectively agreed to begin preparations for an eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan, with responsibility for the country’s governance and security to be handed back to the Afghan authorities over a five-year period starting next year. This in itself would be a major step. But the story that grabbed many of the headlines was one of the ideas being floated to help achieve this security–engaging in dialogue with ‘moderate’ Taliban.

Calls to reach out to these less ideologically-driven members of the insurgency are still understandably sensitive. But a look at the challenges in creating a stable Afghanistan gives some indication as to why such measures are apparently being considered.

At the heart of the US-led drive for stability is its surge of 30,000 troops and an ambitious plan to increase Afghan National Army troops from present levels of about 86,000 to 170,000, and to bolster its police force over the next two years. But meeting these targets will be a formidable challenge. Like the Afghan police forces, the ANA has a high attrition rate, with the US Defence Department noting one in four recruits quit the army last year. Another problem with the army is that few recruits come from the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east where the Taliban are based.

If coalition countries, which are under intense domestic public pressure to withdraw their forces, are going to address this challenge including through holding talks with the Taliban, it makes sense to turn to Pakistan. After all, the country has historical links to key Taliban commanders stretching back to the 1980s and the period after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, when it sought a reliable client regime in Kabul.

Indeed, according to veteran journalist Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan’s army has already approached some commanders in the pro-Afghan Taliban resistance with bases in the lawless tribal areas nominally within Pakistan’s borders. Based on interviews with members of the insurgency, Shahzad claims that Pakistani officials sought assurances that, in the event of a US withdrawal, Pakistan is viewed as a friendly Muslim nation.

‘The key is to return to the traditional tribal setup,’ says North West Frontier Province Gov. Owais Ghani, a veteran Pakistani Pashtun politician who says that gaining the trust of tribal groups is essential. He adds that doing so will mean negotiating a ceasefire with key players such as powerful veteran warlord Gulbadin Hekmatyar. ‘He was paid a big price for protecting Osama, so there’s no reason why he can’t be bought back,’ Ghani says.

Gen. Tariq Khan, current head of the Frontier Corp, a key paramilitary outfit that has been spearheading Pakistan’s counterinsurgency efforts in the tribal areas, concurs that many of those fighting US-led forces have no particular ideological affinity with al-Qaeda, and he says he believes the insurgency is in fact a direct response to the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan.

He also believes that it is inevitable that the Taliban will play some role in Kabul’s political future. ‘(The Afghan Taliban) will keep fighting until they find a way back into power,’ he says.

Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar has publicly ruled out negotiations with US-led forces until all foreign troops leave Afghanistan, a demand he has made ever since US forces invaded in late 2001. However, with the US building a massive new embassy in Kabul and an extensive network of military bases, it is questionable whether they do in fact intend to ever leave the country entirely.

But either way, there’s anecdotal evidence to suggest that Mullah Omar is actually more flexible than his rhetoric indicates.

According to Sultan Amir Tarar, the retired Pakistan military spy chief considered Omar’s mentor when the Taliban was patronised by Pakistan in the 1990s, he is ready to talk. Since last year, media reports have suggested that Omar has indicated the possibility of a renegotiation of the national constitution with other Afghan leaders (the Taliban considers the current one illegitimate owing to Western involvement in its drafting). Another demand is the integration of ethnic Pashtun Taliban forces into the Tajik-dominated Afghan National Army. But most significant of all was Omar’s statement last November during the Muslim holy festival of Eid, that a future Taliban government would not pose a threat to neighbouring countries, a clear suggestion that al-Qaeda would no longer be welcome.

For Pakistan, this has made disarming the Afghan Taliban within its borders even less appealing than it already was. For a start, Pakistani security forces have had to rely heavily on pro-Afghan Taliban commanders in North and South Waziristan to capture the main sanctuaries of the Pakistani Taliban. Unlike its Afghan cousin, the Pakistan Taliban movement has sought to overthrow the Pakistan state, an existential threat to Pakistan that has meant current operations have been aimed at eliminating this branch. Even so, the Army, which is co-ordinating operations (although much of it has been undertaken by the paramilitary Frontier Corp) has chosen not to expand the fighting into neighbouring tribal areas such as North Waziristan and other areas of the South, arguing any such a move would be highly destabilising. According to senior spokesperson Gen. Athar Abbas, Pakistan is looking to consolidate its gains in those two regions rather than open new fronts, because security forces are already ‘overstretched.’

Gen Tariq Khan, one of Pakistan’s most experienced field commanders and currently Inspector General of the paramilitary Frontier Corp, which has been heavily involved in counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban, echoes those concerns. In Afghanistan, US-led forces are expected to engage the Taliban in an attempt to force them to the negotiating table. If and when that occurs, Khan argues, it will be difficult for Pakistan to retain the sensitive ceasefires that enable access to strategic regions of the tribal areas and ensure that the Afghan Taliban don’t join the insurgency in Pakistan. ‘Pakistan can’t fight on all fronts [at once],’ Khan says.

Yet such calls have created much consternation among US planners who still have reservations about Pakistan’s resolve to eliminate the Taliban and al-Qaeda aligned groups within its borders. The United States has scaled up its missile strikes on suspected militant strikes. In its largest strike to date, drone aircraft fired 19 missiles at a village in North Waziristan in an attempt to kill Sirajuddin Haqqani, operational commander of the powerful pro-Taliban Haqqani network. Once an anti-Soviet mujahedeen on the CIA payroll, Sirajuddin’s father Jalaluddin was a key ally of Pakistan during the 1990s when it was scouting for a proxy to exert influence over Afghanistan.

Retired intelligence officials in Islamabad told The Diplomat that Pakistan has continued to maintain contact with the Haqqanis, but it has only limited influence over them. Shuja Nawaz, author of the seminal text on the Pakistan Army and a long-time military insider, agrees with that assessment. But Western officials remain deeply suspicious of lingering Pakistani links to Haqqani and other members of ‘the big three’ of the Afghan Taliban–Mullah Omar and Gulbaddin Hekmatyar.

This month, US Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair told the US Congress that Pakistan’s conduct of military operations against the Taliban were praiseworthy. But the Obama Administration has continued to pressure Pakistani leaders to widen their efforts to include the senior leadership of the Afghan Taliban, known as the Quetta Shura because it is believed to be based in the capital of the large and remote province of Balochistan.

Last December, Pakistan Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar finally admitted that Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura did actually exist after several years of Pakistani officials denying any knowledge of the Afghan Taliban leadership’s whereabouts. Yet Mukhtar’s glib assurance following the admission, when he stated that the Shura had been ‘taken on’ by security forces and no longer posed a threat, gave Washington little confidence that Pakistan was finally, truly cracking down on the leaders of the Afghan insurgency.

Careful Balancing Act

Already fighting a politically sensitive war that makes much of the population feel their government has become ‘a US puppet,’ as several local newspapers describe it, Pakistan’s security establishment feels it must tread a careful line between a belligerent United States and the on-the-ground reality that it can’t exert its influence over the entire tribal areas through force alone.

The murder by Pakistan Taliban militants this month of eight people, including three US soldiers, three schoolgirls and a Pakistani soldier in the Lower Dir region highlights the continued sensitivity of Pakistan’s special relationship with the superpower. Although the United States had been discreetly giving Pakistani security forces counterinsurgency training under the Bush administration, the deaths of the soldiers represents the first public acknowledgment that US forces have indeed extended the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. The fact that it was disclosed through an act of terrorism has added further grist to the national rumour mill that sees hidden US hands in the violence and political turmoil gripping the country.

And in Pakistani eyes, at least, India adds a further complication to the mix. Although India has slightly reduced its troop levels in the disputed Kashmir region and spoken of a willingness to recommence dialogue with Pakistan, observers in Islamabad have been alarmed by its growing influence in Afghanistan.

In addition, intelligence officials are convinced that India has been involved in the spate of terrorism that has rocked most of Pakistan’s major cities and is co-ordinating these efforts through a string of secret bases along the border in Afghanistan. Regardless of the veracity of such claims, it is common knowledge the Afghan Government has developed close links with India, particularly in trade and development, closer ties reflected in a recent poll that found that 71 percent of Afghans surveyed felt India was playing the most favourable role in their country.

This wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by Pakistan’s leadership. In a series of public briefings, the usually media shy Chief of the Pakistan Army, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, reiterated that India remained Pakistan’s primary ‘concern’ at least until the dispute over Kashmir was resolved.

Prominent TV journalist Talat Hussain says Kayani’s stance is not just posturing. ‘You have to understand, India has increased its clout in Afghanistan… [Pakistan] still faces a hostile army in Kashmir [and] much of the insurgency in the tribal areas has been removed,’ Hussain told The Diplomat. ‘If America leaves Afghanistan [other foreign powers] will fill the power vacuum.’

For Pakistani planners, that means supporting whatever power will minimise Indian influence over Afghanistan. ‘We want strategic depth in Afghanistan,’ Kayani said. ‘But we don’t want to control it.’

Yet in truth, Pakistan lacks the capacity to control Afghanistan, even if it wanted to. Like everyone else, its leaders are still taking this battle one day at a time.

[This article originally appeared in The Diplomat magazine. Url: http://www.the-diplomat.com/001f1281_r.aspx?artid=393]

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 February 2010 08.00 GMT

Memory spans are short in modern politics, but even by those standards the relative ease with which the discourse on Afghanistan has shifted from fighting the Taliban to negotiating with them is remarkable.

Even more incredible is our collective refusal to admit the obvious. The Taliban are stronger than ever because the US chose a heavy-handed, unilateral military response to the 9/11 attacks. What’s more, the insurgency is now more ideologically aligned with al-Qaida than ever before. Thanks to bin Laden’s network, the Taliban have changed from rag-tag army to deadly insurgency and, most ominous of all, they believe they are more than a match for the world’s only superpower.

Some will say that the climate following the deadly attacks on the US nearly nine years ago made it impossible to take the more nuanced approach now being attempted. Diplomacy back in 2001 was left to the Taliban. As the US began its carpet bombardment of Afghanistan, however, Mullah Omar expressed a willingness to hand bin Laden over provided the US gave evidence of his culpability. Any extradition, he added, would have to be to a neutral country and not the US.

The offer was flatly rejected in October 2001, along with an earlier suggestion to try bin Laden in a domestic or international tribunal. It is impossible to judge in hindsight the veracity or practicality of these overtures. But as US-led foreign and Afghan forces meander through an increasingly violent and destabilising war that has killed thousands of Afghans and hundreds of foreign nationals, including 253 British soldiers, the decision to favour unilateral war over diplomacy has proved disastrous.

The Afghan war is also a political liability for foreign governments embroiled in it. A majority of voters in most countries involved in the International Assistance Force for Afghanistan, including Britain, want their troops to return home. Western planners have realised that there can be no hope of a withdrawal in the foreseeable future unless there is dialogue with the Taliban.

This is no simple task. On the one hand, negotiating with the Taliban is a victory for realism. They may represent one of the most fanatical and oppressive streams of Islam, but the Taliban are now the dominant social movement in Afghanistan’s Pashtun population, the country’s largest ethnic group who inhabit the regions of the south and east – major frontlines in the current conflict. Support for the Taliban among Pashtuns, far from universal before 2001, has increased because the US and its allies decided to invade their country.

But these facts should not detract from other truths. There can be no doubt that the Taliban and the warlords backing the pro-US regime in Kabul pose a long-term threat to the development of Afghanistan, particularly for its women and minorities. New research suggests that support for the Taliban is based not on ideology but social ties, cultural affinities and the hope that the insurgents can improve living conditions more than President Karzai’s hopelessly corrupt administration.

Karzai is a product of the US decision to unilaterally invade Afghanistan. Along with resentment towards the US for installing the Karzai regime, however, many Afghans are also openly hostile to regional powers, especially Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, for promoting conflict in their country even after the Soviets left in 1989. Interestingly, Afghans view India more favourably than any other foreign presence in their country – up to 71% of them according to one recent opinion poll – including the UN. It cannot be a coincidence that there are no Indian soldiers in Afghanistan. India has invested billions of dollars in developing the country’s civil infrastructure. India’s involvement in Afghanistan is not an act of charity and it has a long history of supporting former Northern Allies warlords widely implicated in atrocities. But in post-2001 Afghanistan, the soft power of Indian development assistance has accrued enormous goodwill.

An extensive survey carried out by the Asia Foundation last year found that the central thing on Afghan minds is not the Taliban or the US, but access to education and employment for both men and women. And as Khalid Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, points out, poverty is a far greater cause of death in Afghanistan than war.

In the rush to end our participation in the Afghan war it is important to remind ourselves that what Afghanistan needs is not an end to foreign involvement but an acceptance that it was a victim of the international community’s collective interference long before bin Laden plotted the 9/11 attacks.

Talking to the Taliban should not mean appeasing extremists in exchange for a quick withdrawal. Rather, solving this morally ambiguous conflict will require a commitment to engage with all Afghans over a long period of time.

Getting out of Afghanistan won’t be cheap. Mustafa Qadri takes a look at the West’s new hope for a solution to its Afghanistan problem

After much anticipation, Western leaders have finally put some meat on their previously bare-bones proposals for stabilising Afghanistan over the next few years. The short story is that President Obama is sticking to the plan he outlined in his speech at West Point last year, whereby he intends to hand responsibility for the country’s governance and security back to the Afghan authorities over a five-year period starting from 2011.

That is a polite way of saying that he hopes the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which includes around 2000 Australian service personnel, will be out of the country by 2016.

Whether or not the force’s leadership continues to see that as realistic or desirable is another matter, but a few signals of how this may actually unfold were revealed at the major international conference on the Afghan situation that was held in London last week. The conference identified three main aims: improve governance and delivery of aid; improve security by beefing up Afghan forces, escalating the US-led war and trying to win the support of Taliban militants; and increasing the involvement of neighbouring countries in this process.

In a significant change, conference attendees agreed to give Afghan authorities direct control of half of all aid flagged for the country. With the corruption-mired regime of President Karzai holding the reins however, governance issues are likely to remain a big problem. For his part, Karzai has promised more robust institutional oversight of his government and the funding it receives from abroad, including the set-up of an anti-corruption unit and tribunal. To be sure, the guiding hand of foreign bureaucrats will assist him in this attempt. For political and practical reasons, Karzai’s international backers cannot afford a repeat of last year’s farcical elections that saw the great political survivor returned as President amid widespread vote rigging.

From next year the ISAF hopes to expand the Afghan National Army (ANA) from around 100,000 to 170,000 troops, but meeting that target will be a challenge. Like the Afghan police forces, the ANA has a high attrition rate: according to US Defence Department statistics, one in four recruits quit the army last year. Another problem with the army is that it is dominated by ethnic Tajiks throughout its upper and lower ranks. Given that the Tajiks are fierce historical rivals of the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the Taliban emerged and in whose territories most of the conflict has been waged, there are serious doubts as to the ANA’s ability to provide unity, and not just security, for Afghanistan.

The new policy strategy will also seek to attract lower and middle rank Taliban members, and potentially even senior warlords, away from the insurgency to fight either in or alongside ANA forces. A fund of up to US$500 million has been proposed for this purpose including AUD$25 million from Australia. A further US$1.5 billion is already available to US commanders to fund overtures to Afghan militants although little is known about it. It is possible the US will use these funds to woo the most powerful Taliban commanders although any such move could be too politically explosive to disclose publicly.

President Karzai has offered to integrate key Taliban commanders into the formal political set up of Afghanistan. Officially, the US has been cool on this proposal. Like all other governments involved with Afghanistan, the Obama Administration wants to avoid accusations from its domestic political opponents that it is appeasing extremists. Nevertheless, policy wonks and elite observers have for at least the past two years accepted that negotiations with the Taliban are inevitable. Privately, some on the US side are looking favourably at this approach because it could open the way towards an exit strategy.

There are practical reasons to support a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. These insurgents are, as President Karzai remarked recently, “sons of the Afghan soil”. The aversion many people have toward their oppressive social precepts cannot erase the fact that the Taliban is now the most organised political movement within the Pashtun community, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the dominant force in the countries south and east.

Geostrategically, the idea of talking to the Taliban has gained traction ever since the final year of the Bush White House in 2008. Like previous empires, the US has realised that it cannot achieve a straightforward military victory in Afghanistan, partly due to that country’s size and remoteness, and partly due to the widespread popular resistance to foreign military presences in the country. Although difficult to quantify, a raft of recent research suggests that most rank-and-file members of the Taliban fight not for religious reasons but to defend against foreign occupation of their homeland, or because they feel that the Taliban are a more effective and legitimate authority than the highly corrupt and ineffectual regime of President Hamid Karzai, a regime that is almost totally dependent on foreign assistance for its survival.

In much the same vein, Taliban leader Mullah Omar has publicly ruled out negotiations with US-led forces until all foreign troops leave Afghanistan, a demand he has made ever since US forces invaded in late 2001. However, with the US building a massive new embassy in Kabul and an extensive network of military bases, it is questionable whether they do in fact intend to ever leave the country entirely.

That may militate against an end to hostilities in the foreseeable future, but there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Mullah Omar is more flexible than his rhetoric suggests. According to some media reports, Omar has flagged the possibility of a renegotiation of the national constitution with other Afghan leaders — the Taliban considers the current one illegitimate owing to Western involvement in its drafting. Another demand is the integration of ethnic Pashtun Taliban forces into the Tajik-dominated Afghan National Army.

Most significant of all, however, was Omar’s statement last November during the Muslim holy festival of Eid, that a future Taliban government would not pose a threat to neighbouring countries, a clear suggestion that al Qaeda would no longer be welcome.

Subtle as it is, comments such as these have reverberated loudly in Washington and Brussels, headquarters of the NATO alliance that is running ISAF. They are seen as significant developments, given the Taliban’s reputation for refusing to compromise on its core principles.

In truth, however, foreign leaders are desperate to end a conflict that looks unwinnable. As nearly every country fighting in Afghanistan is doing so in spite of majority opposition to the war at home, their presence in this devastated Central Asian nation has become a massive political liability for many governments.

That is why another aim of the London Conference was to increase the involvement of Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries in its stabilisation, but apart from confirmed US allies India and Pakistan, key regional powers China and Russia took a back seat at the negotiations. Iran, another one of Afghanistan’s pivotal neighbours, did not even send a delegation to the London conference, saying the event was only being held “to increase military presence in Afghanistan, and does not deal fundamentally with Afghan woes nor count on regional capacities to resolve the problems”.

Perhaps that was too harsh a rebuke but the fact remains that, despite attempts to move from conflict to conciliation, the US is still calling the shots and it is still looking for a military solution.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2010/02/01/afghanistan-exit-fee

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 December 2009 16:00 GMT

There is more to President Obama’s policy shift in central Asia than more boots in Afghanistan. For Pakistan it represents an escalation of US drone strikes in the tribal areas and continued pressure on its army to immediately engage the Taliban and al-Qaida despite the practical complexities of the task.

The fundamental problem for Pakistan is that Obama’s acceleration of the war against the Taliban has been calculated largely on the basis of domestic US political demands and not those of the region, let alone Pakistan. Already under intense pressure at home from the financial crisis and the unpopularity of the US presence in Afghanistan, Obama must deliver some semblance of victory before he bids for a second term as commander-in-chief in 2012.

The strange paradox of US policy for “AfPak”, however, is that the troop surge represents the storm before the calm. No matter what the rhetoric at West Point was, the message from the Obama administration is that the US will leave Afghanistan in the foreseeable future.

According to the veteran journalist Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan’s army has already approached key commanders in the pro-Afghan Taliban resistance to ensure that, in the event of a US withdrawal, Pakistan is viewed as a friendly Muslim nation. Not entirely coincidentally, last month the Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Omar rejected the latest call for peace talks from the president, Hamid Karzai. Well aware that time is on his side, Omar has consistently refused negotiations until all foreign armies have left Afghanistan.

For Pakistan, this makes disarming the Afghan Taliban within its borders even less appealing than it already was. For starters, Pakistan security forces have had to extensively rely on pro-Afghan Taliban commanders in North and South Waziristan to capture the main sanctuaries of the Hakeemullah Mehsud-led Pakistani Taliban.

Unlike its Afghan cousin, the Pakistan Taliban movement seeks to overthrow the Pakistan state. Because it is an existential threat to Pakistan, current operations are aimed at eliminating this branch of the Taliban.

Once the boosted US-led force engages the Taliban and its allies in Afghanistan it will be difficult for Pakistan to retain the sensitive ceasefires that enable access to strategic regions of the tribal areas and ensures that the Afghan Taliban do not join Mehsud’s insurgency in Pakistan. “Pakistan cannot fight on all fronts [at once],” explains Tariq Khan, inspector general of the Frontier Corp, the country’s key paramilitary outfit in the tribal areas.

Pakistan has been confronted with some sobering realities. Many of the Pakistan Taliban’s fighters and key commanders like Mehsud have fled their hideouts and are still at large. The violence has escalated; almost every one of Pakistan’s major cities has been rocked by devastating bombings that have claimed about 500 lives in two months, even though the Afghan Taliban has not been directly involved in the violence.

The terrifying truth is that in the absence of social and political solutions, no amount of police sleuthing or security checkpoints will ever prevent a committed foe with many thousands of young suicide bombers from transforming the suburbs of Pakistan into a warzone. If the Afghan Taliban were to join the fray it would be an even bigger massacre.

Despite this, Washington has continued to press Pakistan to escalate its ground offensives with apparent ignorance or reckless indifference to the consequences for Pakistan.

According to media reports, the CIA has decided to expand drone strikes deeper into the tribal areas and the province of Baluchistan – a larger and more restive and remote region of Pakistan than the tribal areas. Any such expansion will no doubt greatly destabilise Pakistan as the insurgents push deeper into the country to avoid being hit and intense hostility to the drone strikes reaches fever pitch.

When Pakistan recaptured the scenic Swat Valley from the Taliban between May and August, western capitals lauded its resolve to finally defeat extremism. As soon as that and other battles had been waged and won, however, Pakistan was publicly cajoled by Washington, and occasionally London, for not accelerating the war even further. For so many Pakistanis, whether members of the elite or not, it all feels like a giant game that Pakistan can never actually win.

]]> http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/pakistan-is-losing-this-great-game/feed/ 0 http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/should-he-stay-or-should-he-go/ http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/should-he-stay-or-should-he-go/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:13:02 +0000 mustafa http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/?p=586

A troop surge AND a withdrawal by July 2011? Despite the fuss, Obama’s Afghanistan speech marks very little in the way of new policy, writes Mustafa Qadri

“Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” Those were President Obama’s confident words as he announced a major US troop surge into Afghanistan earlier this week.

The US may have entered Afghanistan to clean out what was believed to be the key haven for the international terrorist network known as al Qaeda. But in the intervening eight years, America’s main opponents in the deserts and towns of Afghanistan have been the young men of rural Kandahar, Uruzgan, Helmand and so many other areas fighting not for global jihad but for independence from foreign interference. There are key differences between the war in Afghanistan and that in Vietnam — but a lack of a broad-based popular insurgency is not one of them.

Just as his predecessor George W Bush finally chose to shift from nation-building to exit strategy in Iraq, so too has Obama, who has promised to begin bringing American troops home from Afghanistan by around July 2011. Essentially, Obama’s prescriptions for Afghanistan augur more of the same. Although the US military chief in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, had requested 40,000 more soldiers, the Obama Administration’s approval of 30,000 troops — with NATO allies expected to provide a further 5000 — signals broad ongoing approval for the Pentagon’s approach to the problem.

This suggests that the US believes the only way out of Afghanistan is via a major escalation in military operations. The decision was taken in spite of the enormous financial challenge it will present to an ailing American economy still spiralling into debt. According to US government estimates, each one of the new soldiers will cost US$1 million per year — or a staggering US$30 billion in total. The US already spends US$3.6 billion per month in Afghanistan.

For the first time, US planners have hinted that they intend to leave the country. It remains unclear, however, whether this is a genuine pledge or merely an attempt to placate voters in the US and allied countries who are increasingly opposed to sending their soldiers to fight and die in a distant, alien land.

Media speculation about the significance of Obama’s Afghan troop surge announcement this week has been intense but, in spite of the huge sums of money and lives involved, there is little to suggest a major shift in policy — rather, it looks a lot like an escalation of America’s military power. This is not limited to Afghanistan.

People in neighbouring Pakistan have understandably reacted to the US troop surge with trepidation. There are very real fears that the surge will lead to increased violence along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The CIA is eager to push drone strikes into Balochistan, a larger and even more remote and restive region of Pakistan than the tribal areas where most Taliban militants are based. An extension of drone strikes to Balochistan, already highly unpopular among Pakistanis, would heavily destabilise the already troubled South Asian nation.

Although Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar is believed to be based in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, and many rank and file Afghan Taliban use the north of the province as a place to prepare for and rest from attacks inside Afghanistan, Balochistan has not hitherto been a frontline in this conflict. Extending drone strikes into the area will undoubtedly push Taliban forces deeper into Pakistan, inviting more strikes and further destabilising a country already struggling to fight a complex war within its territory.

It doesn’t help that most Pakistanis are extremely hostile to the United States and remain sceptical about the need to combat Islamist extremism within their borders. Conservative military, religious and political elements within Pakistan will find much to fuel anti-American sentiment in such a situation.

No awareness of this hostility was conveyed in Obama’s speech announcing the troop surge. In fact, the President’s rhetoric was so heavily larded with familiar mythologies that, if taken at face value, one could easily have imagined that the eight destructive years of American unilateralism were just a bad dream.

For example, the President reiterated the claim that the US is driven not by the imperial urge for conquest but instead by the impulse to spread freedom and democracy. The US, he added, has no interest in occupying Afghanistan. All the while, in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the US continues to construct massive military bases and diplomatic enclaves that suggest it intends to have a permanent presence in both countries.

The rhetoric of nation building in the Middle East has been unceremoniously dropped in favour of the development of a viable security state. But even this new goal is implausible.

In order that foreign troops may leave Afghanistan by 2011, the ill-equipped and undisciplined Afghan National Army will have to be transformed into an effective fighting force within 18 months. This will be a very difficult task — one rendered perhaps impossible by the fact that the army is heavily dominated by ethnic Tajiks with whom the Pashtun populations of the south have a fierce rivalry. Even if more Pashtuns and members of Afghanistan’s other ethnic groups are recruited into the Army, it will take significant time and resources to turn them into a force that can provide security to the country.

It is a sobering and depressing picture. There are no easy solutions. But escalating an unwinnable war is the worst option of all.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/12/04/escalation-or-withdrawal-afghanistan

In the Pakistani army’s offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan, the line between victims and villains remains unclear

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 16.30 BST

The Pakistan army’s invasion of the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan this week brings few surprises. For years observers in Washington and Brussels have been pressing for an assault on this scale. The army says its aims in Operation Rah-e-Nijat (“Road out of Misery”) are to finally eliminate the main sanctuary for the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan and, according to army chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the foreign and local “elements” that given them succour.

The army has fought several wars in Waziristan over the past five years – only on each occasion to be given a bloody nose and compelled to sign ceasefires that emboldened the Pakistani Taliban.

Naturally, there is more to this situation than immediately meets the eye. For independent observers such as journalists and aid organisations, gaining an accurate picture of events on the ground is not easy. Like the armies of Israel and Sri Lanka earlier this year, the Pakistan army has prevented journalists and other independent observers from travelling into the affected areas. According to its public relations office, 78 militants and seven members of the security forces have been killed. In contrast, Taliban spokesperson Azam Tariq made the unlikely claim that only one of their fighters had been killed thus far.

The truth looks to be another victim of this latest battle, and sadly there are plenty of those. More than 200,000 have fled the fighting in scenes reminiscent of earlier army operations in the Swat valley and Bajaur tribal agency in the north. “The mass migration is causing big problems for the people [of towns immediately outside Waziristan like Tank and Dera Ismail Khan],” explains senior local aid consultant Dr Marwat. Given that the total population of South Waziristan is at most 700,000, this is a massive dislocation.

Since July last year much of South Waziristan has also been laid waste by daily ground and air bombardments by US and Pakistani forces. Already 12 civilians have been reportedly been killed while fleeing the war zone. Although the army claims to have gone to great lengths not to harm civilians, in the past there have been many reports of civilians being killed and subsequently described as terrorists. In Swat, it is believed that up to 90% of those killed were civilians. Whether they will perish in similar numbers in Waziristan remains unclear.

Less uncertain are the divisions among the insurgents. Rifts between the Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud and warlord allies of the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar have been exploited by Pakistan’s security agencies. An agreement was reached last Saturday under which members of the Ahmedzai clan (one of eight major clans of the Wazir tribe that dominates North and South Waziristan), under the control of warlords Haji Nazir and Gul Bahadur, will support army troops against forces loyal to Hakimullah, himself from the Mahsud clan. In return the army will limit its attacks on areas under their control.

The agreement, reached in secret and passed over by most major news outlets, has army commanders confident of speedy success in the Waziristan operation. It also suggests that Pakistan has not severed contact with Afghan Taliban forces. In truth, it has little other option at present and Washington’s protestations will count for little unless and until the army feels it has regained influence over this lawless frontier region.

Still the question remains, once the guns have been silenced will Pakistan take steps to cleanse the tribal areas of the extremist poison? Perhaps such questions are premature. The battle still rages and Waziristan is an insurgent’s dream. Being remote and with its dense foliage, craggy mountains and limited infrastructure, it has proved an ideal stronghold for local Taliban.

“The terrain is much more difficult than [that Pakistan forces encountered] in Swat,” says Mansur Mahsud of the Fata Research Centre, who is himself from South Waziristan. Unlike Swat, which was part of Pakistan proper and close to major cities, Mansur adds, Waziristan is surrounded by other hostile tribal areas and there is much local support for warlords such as Hakimullah who hail from this region. The Pakistan Taliban movement was born here in 2007, although even before then jihadi groups throughout the tribal areas and North West Frontier Province invoked the Taliban label in their battle against the Pakistan state.

That the Waziristans sit immediately on the porous border with Afghanistan makes them a perfect launching pad for Taliban forces into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Along with remote Balochistan, the Waziristans are the least integrated parts of Pakistan and tribalism and terrorism have proven excellent foils for populations mired in poverty and deprivation. It is important to remember that as the rush to celebrate the liquidation of hitherto mysterious Taliban commanders ensues.

You cannot help wondering, though, if all of this is a giant “drama” – as one American businessman with investments in the oil fields of the tribal areas told me recently. Local and foreign observers wonder why the army is not invading Bahawalpur or Dera Ghazi Khan in the heart of the Punjab, where young men are daily recruited into the jihad.

Most ominous of all is the spectre of increased attacks in Pakistan’s major urban centres. Terrorism is a weapon of the weak, and the Taliban know of only one way to respond: through high-profile violence that will claim many innocent lives. As the Taliban loses its grip on the ideological and political framework of the Islamist insurgency in Pakistan, however, new outfits, particularly those drawn upon sectarian lines, can be expected to fill the breach. The attack on army headquarters by the anti-Shia Jaish Mohammad last week may be a signal of this disturbing trend.

Once again these are sobering times for Pakistan. In few countries can the line between victims and villains be so unclear.

[Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/20/pakistan-army-offensive-taliban-waziristan]