The Taliban's retreat from northern Afghanistan sets the stage for new military battles. But taking the capital also accelerates the challenge of finding a legitimate leadership.
FACING a relentless United States bombing campaign and an offensive by the United Front, the Taliban had calculated on carrying out a tactical retreat from northern Afghanistan. However, it badly underestimated the power and speed with which the forces arrayed against it would move. After the United Front, also known as the Northern Alliance, captured the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif on November 9, the Taliban retreat turned into a rout. Four days later the United Front strolled into Kabul, as the Taliban fled pell-mell to its strongholds in southern Afghanistan.
The fall of Kabul and northern Afghanistan is the first significant achievement for the U.S. military campaign after nearly six weeks of intense bombing of Afghanistan and will come as a relief for U.S. military planners, who were facing increasing criticism at home and abroad for the lack of progress in the war against terrorism. It will also be the first political test for Washington's partners, the United Front, whose grim record and past failures of governance will now be put to a critical test that every Afghan will be watching closely.
Since early November Taliban troops in the low hills some 48 km to the south of Mazar-e-Sharif were taking a pounding from U.S. bombing strikes. On the evening of November 9 the Taliban front lines finally crumbled. Rather than face street-to-street battles and an uprising by the city's largely anti-Taliban population, the 8,000-troop Taliban force evacuated the city. That night the forces of three United Front commanders, helped by dozens of U.S. special forces troops, took control of the city in just two hours.
Over the next few days the United Front swept east, west and south, capturing nearly the whole of northern Afghanistan. In the west General Ismael Khan trapped Taliban troops trying to flee Mazar-e-Sharif, took control of three western provinces, and then attacked Herat, which fell on November 12 after its Taliban garrison of some 6,000 troops surrendered. U.S. aircraft bombed fleeing Taliban troops, leaving a swathe of destroyed pickups and bodies on the roads.
In the northeast, after a 12-hour battle, the United Front captured Takhar province and former United Front headquarters at Taloqan; in central Afghanistan it took control of Bamiyan province after mass defections from the Taliban, allowing the United Front to link up with its troops outside Kabul for the first time in three years. Only in Konduz, close to the border with Tajikistan, did the Taliban continue to resist despite relentless bombing. U.S. officials later claimed that Taliban troops had begun to abandon Konduz as well.
As province after province fell, the U.S., Britain and Pakistan urged the United Front to exercise restraint and not to enter Kabul. What nobody expected was a further Taliban retreat. As night fell on November 12, Taliban tanks and trucks revved up and fled Kabul. United Front forces entered the capital the next morning in triumph, facing only sporadic resistance by do-or-die Arab and Pakistani mercenaries.
Continents away, at the United Nations General Assembly, Western leaders and U.N. officials watched aghast as their slow-moving plans to call a council of all Afghan factions, which they hoped would set up a transitional government before Kabul fell, appeared to be falling apart. "Nobody, not even the CIA, foresaw a Taliban rout and such a speedy advance by the United Front," said a U.N. official in New York.
After meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on the sidelines of the General Assembly, U.S. President George W. Bush urged the United Front not to enter Kabul so that efforts to form a transitional government could be made first. "We will encourage our friends to head south... but not into the city of Kabul itself. We believe we can accomplish our military mission by this strategy," Bush told a news conference on November 10. His words were ignored.
The United Front had controlled 10 per cent of the country; within days it occupied 50 per cent. Now the Taliban, rather than the United Front, is the side confined to ever dwindling pockets of territory.
The United Front, a loose alliance amongst three ethnic groups - Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara - now has to establish a credible administration rather than divide the conquered cities into personal fiefdoms as it has done in the past. It must also prevent revenge killings of Taliban fighters and their foreign mercenaries, who include thousands of Pakistanis, Arabs and Central Asians. There were early reports of looting from Kabul, and a U.N. official spoke of unconfirmed reports that 600 Taliban supporters were executed in Mazar-e-Sharif.
Aides to former King Zahir Shah in Rome urged the commanders to set up a civilian administration under the Supreme Council for National Unity, which Shah and the United Front set up in October. "This would be the first opportunity to establish a national government in a part of Afghanistan, which could then develop as the alternative transitional government to Taliban rule," says a senior aide to the king in Rome. But persuading the headstrong United Front commanders to listen - the Uzbek, Rashid Dostum; Tajik, Atta Mohammed; and Shia Hazara commander Ustad Mohaqiq - will not be easy.
However, the political leadership of the Tajiks, who have taken Kabul, immediately called upon the U.N. to come and help the Afghans establish a new government. They insisted that they would not form a government on their own and their security force would only facilitate the meeting of a grand council of all Afghan factions, which could decide on the details of a new transitional government.
Foreign Ministers from eight key countries, who met in New York on November 12, urged U.N. Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi to "facilitate efforts by Afghan groups committed to a free and peaceful Afghanistan to establish a broad-based Afghan administration on an urgent basis." However, there is little hope in doing so as long as the majority Pashtun ethnic group, from whom the Taliban fighters are drawn, remains unrepresented. Until now, efforts by the U.S. and Pakistan to draw out defectors from the Taliban leadership have failed.
The key to U.S. strategic success is still the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaderships are based. Washington has been slow to support anti-Taliban Pashtun leaders in the south. Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal chief who is mobilising support for an anti-Taliban revolt in southern Afghanistan, says he has received no U.S. support despite statements by U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that food and ammunition had been provided.
"I need international aid, especially food and water for hundreds of my men, because we have nothing. There is a very desperate situation here," Karzai told the Far Eastern Economic Review by satellite telephone on November 11. Karzai, who entered Afghanistan with a small group of well-armed supporters on October 8, the day after the U.S. began its bombing campaign, remains in the southern part of Uruzghan province, just north of Kandahar. His pleas for aid reinforced widespread criticism from many Afghans that the U.S. has failed to help anti-Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan. Earlier this month Abdul Haq, another Pashtun commander, was captured and executed by the Taliban after he tried to stir up a similar revolt.
IN a belated move, on November 8, the U.S. State Department appointed Ambassador James Dobbins to coordinate support for all anti-Taliban forces. Dobbins is travelling to Pakistan and Central Asia to meet Pashtun exiles and United Front leaders. Now that the United Front has pushed into Kabul, the U.S. will need to move more quickly in building Pashtun alliances.
Karzai claimed he was receiving a tremendous response from Pashtun tribes and that Taliban forces in the south had been demoralised. "There is a tremendous weakening of morale amongst the Taliban, which is loosening its repressive grip on the countryside," he said. "Local people have been bending over backwards to help us."
With Ismael Khan's forces now heading down the road from Herat to Kandahar, the Taliban may well surrender their southern cities without a fight. But if they do they will take to the mountains and continue a guerilla war. And in the Pashtun heartland the Taliban will possibly try to gather popular support with claims that the U.S. is attempting to divide Afghanistan and set up a separate government in the north.
However, hundreds of Taliban fighters were reported to be deserting, dropping their weapons and either going home to their villages or trying to cross the border into Pakistan. The mass defections from the Taliban in the south will now help U.S. intelligence in finding Osama bin Laden. The United Front and the U.S. will be sure to take quick advantage of the mayhem, which has loosened the grip of Taliban repression and control on the population there for the first time in years.
(By arrangement with Los Angeles Times Syndicate International and Far Eastern Economic Review)
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