Mustafa Qadri

Last Updated: Nov 23, 2010

Over the weekend the leaders of Nato unanimously agreed to start withdrawing from Afghanistan by 2014. Timed so as not to clash with the expected re-election bid of the US president Barack Obama in 2012, the announcement comes at a moment when the US-led war against al Qa’eda and the Taliban is being escalated, not scaled down. The agreement on Afghanistan arrives as the US is placing pressure on Pakistan to expand the war to the restive, large province of Balochistan. Both decisions reflects a dangerous over-reliance on heavy-handed military solutions to regional problems that are largely political in nature.

It is difficult to conceive now, but in 2002, following the US invasion of Afghanistan the previous year, the Taliban were largely defeated and al Qa’eda bereft of its ability to stage attacks from Afghan soil. As the US commenced its bombardment of Afghanistan, the Taliban expressed a willingness to hand Osama bin Laden over to the coalition forces, on the condition that the superpower provide them evidence of his culpability in the attacks on September 11, 2001 and that his extradition be to a neutral country and not the US.

The offer was rejected in October 2001, as was an earlier suggestion, mooted by the Taliban and sympathetic religious groups in neighbouring Pakistan, to try bin Laden before a domestic or international tribunal.

We have no way of knowing now whether those offers were genuine or even practical. But we know the results of the last eight years. US-led and Afghan forces meander through an increasingly violent and destabilising war that has killed thousands of Afghans and foreign nationals. The costs of conflict are clear.

Most ominous of all, the strategy of targeting insurgent commanders – often with unmanned drone strikes – has created space for younger, more radical leaders who are more ideologically inclined towards al Qa’eda’s world view than the Taliban’s more limited focus on Afghanistan.

The decision has also increased support for the Taliban in the region, although such sentiments are not without reservations. “If the Taliban succeed, it will mean Pakistan will go backwards,” said Sohail Janvi, a business man who lives in the semi-tribal city of Kohat in Pakistan, a few hours’ drive from the Afghan border. “But,” he adds, “the government gives us nothing [and] we do not want Americans here,” referring to the US drone strikes that have killed scores of civilians in the past four years in Afghanistan and also near the border with Pakistan.

People living close to Taliban-held parts of Pakistan’s Orakzai tribal agency say that they often hear drones whirling overhead like giant, distant flies. The drones do instill fear but whether or not they are particularly good at dividing terrorists from civilians is an open question. The panic caused by the drones has also done much to support well-worn and crudely simplistic conceptions of the United States as a cruel empire bent on subjugating the Muslim world.

The Obama administration has escalated the drone strikes in its first two years, undertaking nearly four times as many attacks in that time than occurred in all eight years of the Bush presidency.

The Taliban are indeed repressive fanatics who marginalise women and have provided sanctuary to al Qa’eda. But escalating the US-led war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has transformed the Taliban into a Pashtun freedom force in a way that no rebel leader could have done on his own.

“Yes, they are freedom fighters because they are fighting against what they call foreign occupation of Afghanistan,” says Daud Khattak, a journalist based in Peshawar. “The Taliban don’t fight for political gain or money but want freedom from American slavery,” explained a resident of Dir, a mountainous Pashtun region bordering the tribal areas.

So long as the West’s presence in Afghanistan is primarily defined by military force, its relationship to ordinary Afghans will be based primarily on violence. By their very nature, armies must intimidate and coerce the population into accepting their authority. The coalition’s most important local allies in the three provinces of Afghanistan hardest hit by the insurgency are warlords who are widely believed to have grown rich and powerful by keeping civilians in fear and capitalising on the drug trade.

But Afghan warlords are notoriously fickle, switching sides as the fortunes of war change. A number of key Islamist warlord allies of the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, for example, are ideologically identical to the Taliban but chose to throw their lot with the US-backed Afghan leader as a matter of expediency.

By contrast, the Taliban say that they fight for freedom from western influence. Its core membership still considers Mullah Omar its leader and, over the last nine years, has not wavered from calling for foreign troops to withdraw. Rahimullah Yusufzai, the first journalist to interview Omar when the Taliban first emerged from Kandahar in 1994, says that talk of negotiating with the Taliban is premature. “They are confident, [and] in no mood to talk. Even if it takes another decade, they would wait for foreign troops to withdraw before taking negotiations seriously,” Mr Yusufzai says.

In the face of this reality, America’s ability to change Afghanistan is dramatically limited. Now is the time for US-led forces to shift responsibility for securing Afghanistan to regional powers like China, India, Iran, Pakistan, and even Russia, who are are better situated to assist the troubled country. Even this is far from a simple or foolproof option. But local and regional actors are better suited to forge a peace through political means because they have the most to lose from instability in Afghanistan.

With their troops already in the country, the US and its ISAF allies could then help mediate a power arrangement underwritten by regional powers. But as the US-led forces continue their current escalation, it is not at all clear that they will be in a position to withdraw even in 2014.

Mustafa Qadri is an Australian journalist based in Pakistan

[This article appeared in The National newspaper on Tuesday November 23, 2010: http://www.thenational.ae/the-national-conversation/comment/natos-tactics-and-timetable-strengthen-afghan-radicals?pageCount=0]

Why they love the Taliban

Rampant corruption, and the Pakistani government’s failure to provide, is driving people into the arms of the militants

• Mustafa Qadri
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 April 2009 20.30 BST

It may be difficult to understand, but in many of the tribal areas where Pakistan’s ethnic Pakhtun population live, the Taliban are very popular.

“If the Taliban succeed, it will mean Pakistan will go backwards,” says Sohail Janvi, a mobile phone dealer whom I met in Kohat, two hours’ drive south of Peshawar, recently.

“But,” he adds, “the government gives us nothing [and] we do not want Americans here,” referring to the US missile strikes that have killed 687 civilians in the past three years. According to the Pakistani security analyst Amir Mir, at most 6% of missile strikes hit their intended militant targets.

People living close to Taliban-held parts of Orakzai Agency told me they often hear drones whirling overhead like giant, distant flies. The drones have created a general sense of terror among the population and the fear that they may fall victim to the next missile strike.

The Pakistan army too has killed many civilians and, according to human rights organisations, displaced up to a million more. Although a precise number is not available, the death toll from army operations is estimated to be in the thousands.

The army looks like a foreign occupier in these fiercely independent lands. From mountain-top bases in Kohat army guns pound far-away peaks in far-away Taliban strongholds after nightfall. The powerful vibrations that follow each volley echo through the valleys like a thunderstorm.

A storm of discontent has already infected the population.

“You get used to it [the sound of mortars],” says Gul Khan, “but always you think of your wife and children. They get very scared.”

Sometimes, the ordnance misfires and lands in farmland and, occasionally, villages.

The army and paramilitary police man numerous checkpoints, and it is not uncommon to see the rubble of a government building that has been struck by a suicide bomber.

But by night the Taliban travel freely through districts nominally under army control, and the locals advise against leaving the safety of the village for the highways where kidnappings are common.

Attacks on Pakistan army and government targets occur on an almost daily basis. The vast majority of those are in the tribal agencies or North-West Frontier Province where the Taliban recruit most of their fighters.

The Taliban have expanded their insurgency through these same areas with alarming speed, much to the shock of the international community. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton described Pakistan as a “mortal threat” to the world following Pakistan’s formal approval of de facto Taliban rule in the lower Himalayan Swat valley. The Zardari government caved in after fears that its refusal to approve the measure would lead to a fresh round of hostilities.

That was not the end of it, though. The Guardian reports that in the Buner district neighbouring Swat, a mere 100km from Islamabad, the Taliban now run checkpoints – much like the army in areas it controls – and have occupied government buildings and ordered bureaucrats and aid workers to leave the vicinity. Slightly to the west, an uneasy truce between the provincial government and the Taliban in Bajaur tribal agencies risks turning into an all-out civil war as militants from Tehreek-e-Nifaaz-e-Sharriat-e-Mohammadi – the same group that brokered the Swat peace deal on behalf of the Taliban – clash with their Taliban counterparts.

According to one of the US government’s chief counter-insurgency strategists, Pakistan “could collapse within months”. Rather than quick, violent disintegration, however, the real threat to Pakistan is a slow and equally brutal Balkanisation where loyalties, and conflict, may increasingly be drawn upon ethnic lines.

From its very creation, Pakistan has struggled to find a national identity beyond the ethnic fault lines that for centuries defined the region’s different communities. As the government struggles to deliver the basics to a population in the grip of grinding poverty – the United Nations Human Development Report 2007/08 conservatively estimates that 32.6% of Pakistanis live in poverty – ethnic nationalism has, for many and not just tribal Pakhtuns, become a panacea for their tribulations.

The paradox of the Taliban is that although they are ostensibly not nationalists their insurgency is largely fuelled by disaffected young Pakhtun men who, with few other prospects, are lured by tribal honour and the respect garnered from fighting the Pakistan army, seen as a proxy for the United States. For disfranchised, highly patriarchal tribal societies, long instilled with a warrior culture that is not an insignificant thing.

In the Kohat and Dera Adam Khel tribal areas just south of Peshawar, where I travelled last week, support for the Taliban is extraordinarily high – even among those who do not agree with their strict social precepts. As in other areas, the Taliban have successfully exploited resentment towards a largely non-existent government.

That support appears to have two key elements. First, it is a response to the local and federal governments’ abject failure to provide livelihoods and services and crackdown on rampant corruption. Second, the Taliban have won respect and prestige with their resilience against the better-equipped Pakistan army, with its jet fighters and tanks, and United States’ missile strikes.

There is also widespread refusal to acknowledge the Taliban’s capacity to wreak violence and oppression on the areas it occupies. Often, for instance, I was asked if I believed stories of the recent flogging of a young woman in Swat. The incident – captured on video and widely distributed throughout Pakistan and the world last month – caused uproar even among people in these parts. Many are sceptical of such incidents, stating that they have been manufactured to discredit the Taliban and Islam. With confidence in the government so low, it isn’t difficult to understand where the scepticism comes from.

“The solution to Pakistan’s problems is to follow [the Taliban's understanding of] Islam,” says Ahmed Gulzai, a mid-ranking Taliban activist who only last year was fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now he is proselytising to the youth at a village madrasa. “The elite don’t want the Taliban [to rule the country] because then they won’t be able to keep stealing the society’s wealth,” he notes. “Things will be much better under the Taliban, there will be no corruption. If something is worth 100,000 Rupees, it will be sold at 100,000 Rupees.”

The war with the Taliban has been sold for a lot more. According to a Guardian report in February, up to 70% of all military aid since 2002 may have been misappropriated.

Pakistan’s elite may soon have more billions to play with. The Friends of Democratic Pakistan – a group of 31 nations including the United States and Britain and a number of international organisations like the World Bank and the United nations – pledged donations totalling $5.28bn in Tokyo last week.

Then there is a further $7.5bn over five years in non-military aid that the Obama administration is considering furnishing to Pakistan. Military aid is expected to be even greater. Pakistan has also received a $7.6bn loan from the International Monetary Fund, while the World Bank has given another $500m.

But without a concerted, genuine battle for hearts and minds in the tribal areas that addresses core grievances, no sums of cash will stem the Taliban.

• The names above have been changed to protect the identities of people interviewed.

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