Taliban threat

Taliban fighters at a base in eastern Afghanistan in February.-SAEED ALI ACHAKZAI/REUTERS

A resurgent Taliban is a problem for Musharraf, both for the Islamist fundamentalism it inspires and for the U.S. pressure it generates.

THE current travails of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf are to a large extent because of the resurgence of the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan. The failure of the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces to combat the Taliban effectively has emboldened its sympathisers in Pakistan. The George W. Bush administration finds it politically expedient to blame Pakistan for not doing enough to contain the Taliban and its militant allies in the volatile Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas. Yet the fact remains that the primary responsibility for a resurgent Taliban lies with Washington and its allies. As Pakistan government officials have pointed out repeatedly, their Army has lost thousands of soldiers fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Most of the Pakistan Army was transferred from the Indian border to the Afghan border.

Pakistans contribution to the fight against its erstwhile allies may not have been whole-hearted. It is well known that influential sections of the establishment have continued to nurture ties with the Taliban since its ouster from Kabul. But senior Pakistan officials deny that Islamabad is helping the Taliban to stage a comeback.

A senior Pakistani official told this correspondent last year that it was only a question of time before the Taliban launched a military offensive. The official, who had served in Kabul, said that the Taliban had hidden large caches of weaponry, much of it in mint condition, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. The Disarmament of Illegal Arms Groups in Afghanistan (DIAG), an organisation formed by the Afghan government, has reported that weapons abandoned by the Soviet Union are now being moved by professional smugglers to Taliban strongholds in the south. Furthermore, the sophisticated weapons the Americans themselves provided Afghans to fight the Soviet army in the 1980s are now in the hands of the Taliban, the ideological successors of the mujahideen, who were backed by the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The Taliban has changed its military tactics in recent years; now small groups of fighters stage regular hit-and-run attacks on U.S. and NATO forces. More ominously, it has started replicating the tactics of the resistance in Iraq, including suicide bombings and using improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The number of suicide attacks increased from 27 in 2005 to 139 in 2006, and, looking at the numbers thus far, it is likely that even more will occur this year.

According to reports in the Western media, Taliban training camps run by al Qaeda can be found on both sides of the border in the provinces of Khost and Pastia in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of North and South Waziristan in Pakistan.

Now that the Taliban has regrouped and U.S. and NATO forces are woefully overextended, the military tide seems to be turning. Since January, 114 Western soldiers have been killed. In recent months, U.S. and NATO forces have launched operations in the south and the east of the country aimed at regaining territory captured by the Taliban. There has been a dramatic rise in kidnappings involving foreign nationals, especially from countries that are militarily involved in Afghanistan. The Taliban leadership is aware that many countries are ambivalent about their involvement in Afghanistan. The South Korean government has already announced that its small military contingent will be going home by the end of the year.

There are signs that the international mission in Afghanistan is wobbling at this juncture. The public support that the international force initially received seems to have eroded dramatically; it is now viewed as an arrogant occupier, who disrespects local customs and engages in punitive bombing of civilians. According to recent independent estimates, U.S. and NATO forces have killed more non-combatants than Taliban soldiers. With too few troops on the ground, the U.S. and NATO military has resorted to bombing from the air to keep the Taliban at bay. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has cautioned his Western allies against using indiscriminate force. Afghan life is not cheap and should not be treated as such, he said on June 23 after more than 100 non-combatants were killed in a single week in U.S. Air Force bombings.

The fact is that the authority of Karzai today barely extends beyond the capital and the main cities. The power vacuum left is being rapidly filled by the Taliban. A Canadian government report on Afghanistan, prepared last November and obtained by the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that a secret memo was circulated warning that Afghanistan was in danger of splitting into two and that the influence of Karzai wa s weakening to a new low.

Under the present circumstances, if the Taliban returns to power in Kabul, Pakistan could pay a heavy price. The new battle-hardened Taliban is more receptive to al Qaeda than to Islamabad. After the Lal Masjid showdown in Pakistan, Pashtun tribal leaders from provinces on the border with Afghanistan renounced the peace accord with Islamabad. Islamist fervour is reportedly on the rise in the area; a group that calls itself the Pakistani Taliban has already raised the banner of revolt against Islamabad. The Bush administration is putting pressure on the Pakistan government to launch an all-out offensive in the tribal areas. In highly publicised statements, senior U.S. officials have said that the U.S. reserves the right to act on its own if the Pakistan Army does not take the initiative. The U.S. Air Force has bombed alleged al Qaeda targets inside Pakistani territory on several occasions in the past. U.S. Special Forces have also been carrying out small-scale special operations across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Washington is no doubt aware, like the rest of the international community, that the Taliban has control of most of the southwestern part of Pakistan. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and members of al Qaedas leadership are said to be hiding in the region. The thousands of square miles across the Afghan-Pakistan border have been described by some observers as an autonomous jehadistan. The people here do not recognise the arbitrary border drawn by the British in 1893.

Another important factor responsible for the resurgence of the Taliban is the boom in opium production. In the last years of Taliban rule, the Afghan government was successful in drastically reducing the amount of opium produced in the country. In the year 2000, the Taliban banned the cultivation of poppy flowers from which opium is derived. The United Nations even gave a good certificate to the Taliban government for its efforts to curtail the illegal trade in narcotics. However, five years after the U.S.-led invasion, Afghanistan has re-emerged as the biggest producer of the drug. The Taliban no longer discourages the cultivation of poppy seeds, on which more than three million Afghan farmers are dependent for their livelihood. Like other guerilla forces around the world, the Taliban levies a war tax on those involved in its production and export. Taliban coffers are said to be flush with money levied from the traffickers. According to reports, this has helped the Taliban recruit fighters. In a country where unemployment is rampant, the Taliban is said to pay $5 a day to many of its fighters, much more than the small salary soldiers of the Afghan army receive from Karzais government.

When the U.S. Army invaded Afghanistan, only around 7,600 hectares were under poppy cultivation. Today, despite the heavy-handed poppy eradication programme, which is largely funded by the U.S., around 165,000 hectares are under poppy cultivation. According to reports, this year the area under poppy has increased by more than 60 per cent. Many of the politicians and warlords, currently allied to the Americans and Karzai, are known to have links with the heroin trade.

Before the U.S.-backed war against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the country produced no heroin at all. Alfred McCoy, writes in his book The Politics of Heroin that through the American intelligence agencies the Rea gan administration encouraged Afghan warriors masquerading as mujahideen to grow poppy in order to finance their fight against the Afghan Communists and their Soviet ally. Mujahideen commanders and Pakistani Army officers helped smooth over the process of refining heroin and transporting it to lucrative markets in the West. The CIA gave the entire operation legal cover. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence agencies once again struck up a close rapport with the drug lords in the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. A U.S. official told a New York Times reporter in 2004 that the Bush administration was soft on the drug kings because they were the guys who helped us liberate this place in 200 1. NATOs supreme commander, Marine General Jim Jones, recently told the U.S. Congress that Afghanistan is unfortunately well on its way to becoming a narco-state.