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THE ROVING EYE
Osama is in Kunar,
but the US can't get him
By Pepe
Escobar
PESHAWAR - Al-Qaeda, "the base", is now
extinct. Al-Qaeda has a brand new name: Fath-e-Islam
(Victory of Islam). And Fath-e-Islam's leader, none
other than Osama bin Laden, is very much alive. But not
anymore in Pakistan. Osama has returned to Afghanistan.
More precisely, the Kunar province.
 Key players
in the ultra-complex Pakistan-Afghanistan game had been
saying that since the fall of Kabul in November 2001
that "the last battle" in this ongoing war would be in
Kunar. The scenario now seems more than likely. The
Taliban and the rebranded al-Qaeda have full tribal
support in Kunar - where everybody seems to know someone
who died from the American bombing of Afghanistan. A
Pashtun notable puts the issue succinctly, "If the
Americans are serious about grabbing Osama, they will
have to put up a fight. On the ground. Man to man. There
will be a lot of body bags."
On August 10, the
Daily Ummat, the number one Urdu-language paper in the
Pakistani port city of Karachi, published a front-page
story filed from Asadabad, Afghanistan (the capital of
Kunar). The story did not appear in other Pakistani
English-language papers, nor in the international media,
for that matter.
The story was headlined "Osama
spotted in Pakistani area - Dir". Dir, in the northern
strip of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) is
about 80 kilometers from the Afghan border in Kunar
province. The story also said that Ayman al-Zawahiri,
aka "The Surgeon", was reorganizing al-Qaeda something
like 50 kilometers west of Chitral. Chitral, north of
Dir, is at the base of the Hindu Kush mountains.
The story was essentially quoting an Afghan
defense ministry source - that is, a source close to the
powerful Northern Alliance commander and now Defense
Minister Mohammed Fahim in Kabul. Pashtuns and even
Tajiks (Fahim is Tajik) comment that in the current
scenario, "the Americans in Kabul cannot control Fahim -
well, maybe 10 percent of him", according to a
Pakistan-Afghanistan insider. Anyway, American military
sources, according to the story, were "fearing al-Qaeda
may launch full-scale activity in the coming few weeks
or months", starting with an attack in eastern
Afghanistan.
According to the Afghan defense
ministry, al-Qaeda - or Fath-e-Islam - has reorganized
and has established training centers in Pakistan; it is
trying to get hold of surface-to-air missiles from
China; and will launch a series of attacks against the
Afghan government. The Afghans add that the Americans
believe that these two al-Qaeda training centers enjoy
cooperation from China. One of them is identified as
being 140 kilometers north of Gilgit - the capital of
the Pakistani northern areas - in an area called
Markash, close to the Chinese border.
The story
gets some of the facts right. Al-Qaeda has, indeed, been
in touch with Hezb-e-Islami (the Islamic Party founded
in 1975) and has been assured of the cooperation of its
volatile leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the ultra hardline
Pashtun mujahideen and former prime minister who
devastated his own capital, Kabul, with rockets in
mid-1992. And al-Qaeda has also extended its network of
informers in Asadabad, the capital of Kunar,
capitalizing on the unrest the American presence is
causing all over the Pashtun tribal belt.
But a
key Pashtun source - who required anonymity - fluent in
Pashto, Dari, Urdu and English and acquainted with all
the major players in the complex Afghanistan-Pakistan
new great game, identifies not a few but a whole
collection of holes in the story. Let's call him Haji S.
For starters, Haji S dismisses the notion of an al-Qaeda
training center in northern Pakistan near China: "This
region simply does not accept foreigners. People speak
only local languages, like Balti or Brushiski." He
points to Afghan-American disinformation trying somehow
to involve China, "The Chinese are being accused of
harboring terrorists and selling weapons to al-Qaeda.
This is serious. The Chinese know they are being
encircled."
As far as the sheik with a US$25
million price tag on his head is concerned, Haji S is
adamant: "Osama bin Laden would never have crossed that
border. Pakistan has extensive military forces there -
in the constabulary, the Bajaur Scouts, paramilitary
forces. And now, whatever the Pakistani army knows, is
immediately shared with the FBI."
This means,
according to Haji S, only one thing: bin Laden and the
Fath-e-Islam leadership are themselves based in Kunar.
"The Americans know it, of course. But they simply
cannot get into Kunar. It is full of mountains and the
area is religiously ultra-conservative, and 100 percent
pro-Taliban.
Another Pashtun source confirms the
analysis of Haji S: "Americans in Kabul are scared. They
get bad information all the time. They don't understand
that Afghans take the money today and forget about it
tomorrow. The Americans came too early, they didn't do
their homework."
American forces in Afghanistan
to date seem to have followed a pattern of
highly-publicized operations in the wrong places. The
latest example happened this past weekend, when hundreds
of Special Forces backed by helicopter gunships and
planes, and with the help of Afghan government units,
encircled the village of Tani, south of Khost, and also
advanced to Zormat, the biggest district of Paktia
province - an area where anti-American sentiment is as
extreme as anywhere else in the Pashtun belt. Locals
hate the Northern Alliance's grip on Hamid Karzai's
government in Kabul. Zormat is near the area of the huge
Operation Anaconda last March - the biggest US offensive
in the war so far. Anaconda was basically a failure:
most Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters managed to escape to
the NWFP.
This time in Zormat, the Americans
carried house-to-house searches and apprehended a few
guns - nothing extraordinary as any tribal Pashtun male
has been carrying a gun for centuries. Basically, the
Americans found no Taliban and no al-Qaeda. The escape
pattern is always the same: Taliban and al-Qaeda - in
this last case Chechens - are tipped off by local
tribals, hide in the mountains or melt into the local
population, cross to the NWFP, and then return.
The commander of the 3rd Brigade Task Force of
the 82nd Airborne Division, James Huggins, was forced to
admit the failure of this operation in Zormat: "It was
clear to me there was advance warning at each of the
sites we went to." The "advance warning" always comes
from the local population and even from warlords whose
alliances lie with suitcases full of dollars, not with
the American agenda.
It may be totally
un-Hollywoodish for American - and Western - public
opinion to digest the fact that these soldiers are being
sent on futile missions, and some in the process are
being killed for it. But a lot of information about the
war simply does not travel - or is edited out by the
Western media. Veterans of the jihad against the Soviets
in the 1980s remember that loads of Russian equipment
used to be available in the bazaars of Quetta and
Peshawar in Pakistan. Now anybody can buy night-vision
devices, brand new M-16s, fireproof jackets and trekking
boots. Where? In the bazaar in Miram Shah, in the NWFP,
close to the Afghani Paktia province, where the
Americans have a base. The goods are all-American,
captured from American casualties.
Pashtuns
swear that American casualties are mounting, although
for the Pentagon they don't exist. Different sources in
Peshawar and Islamabad confirm there are American
casualties every week. Even now in the tribal areas
there is a lot of talk on what happened in Helmand
province last December - when 200 Americans were
surrounded in a valley by only 37 Taliban, and many were
slaughtered, with some beheaded. A humble porter of
Shaheen Cargo confirmed the story at the time: he
complained that his shoulders were sore because he had
spent the night carrying coffins to a transport plane.
If American forces venture into Kunar they will
be against tremendous odds. Kashmir Khan - the most
powerful Hezb-e-Islami commander - keeps his base in the
mountains of Kunar. Haji S says that "even the Taliban
at the time did not disturb him. He is not interested in
ideology or politics. He is interested in power." This
also means that Kashmir Khan is unbribable by the
Americans.
Before the Taliban came to power,
adds Haji S, "the provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar were
the strongest and most fortified hubs of the
Hezb-e-Islami. They were captured from the Soviets. And
of course Hekmatyar himself is in Kunar." Hekmatyar
allegedly still controls 80-odd Stinger missiles -
another major reason preventing an American attack.
For Haji S, the notion that the Pakistani
military would know about the presence of al-Qaeda in
Dir and Chitral and do nothing about it is nonsense:
"Either the military are conniving with al-Qaeda, which
of course is impossible: or they are helpless, which is
not the case, not with [Pakistan President General
Pervez] Musharraf acting as such a good pal of Bush's."
General Tommy Franks, the head of the US Central
Command, said at Bagram air base in Afghanistan last
Sunday that the war on terror needed to be expanded to
the countries neighboring Afghanistan. Pashtun insiders
interpret this as an admission of failure to find the
Taliban and al-Qaeda where they really are: in Kunar.
The Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman, the
extremely able diplomat Aziz Khan, took no time to reply
to Franks: there's no reason for the US to enter
Pakistan to look for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. When
asked how Pakistan would act if the US made a formal
request for American troops to cross to Pakistan to go
after terrorists, Aziz Khan was unflappable, "Why should
we suppose that the US would make such a request now
that we are at the fag end of the exercise."
There's the rub. This may be the "fag end" from
the Pakistani perspective, but American generals from
Tommy Franks down are now increasingly talking of
staying in Afghanistan "for years". In Afghanistan, and
of course in Pakistan as well, where America is
operating its own air bases, in strategic Baluchistan.
The key player to watch in the next few moves in
the game is "Engineer" Hekmatyar - as he is known in
Afghanistan. The man is back with a vengeance. It is
important to remember that during the jihad in the 1980s
he always placed the long-term goal of an Islamic
revolution above resistance to the Soviets. And during
the Taliban rule starting in 1996 he was patiently
waiting for an opening in self-imposed exile in Iran.
Haji S insists that Hekmatyar has access to "an
unlimited amount of weapons". "And despite the
opposition of Hamid Karzai and the Americans, he had 319
members in the loya jirga [grand council] in June
[that finalized the current government in Kabul] and he
controls four loyal governors. He has installed his own
governor even in Kunduz." Hekmatyar is a Kharruti
Pashtun who comes from a family of traders settled in a
district of Kunduz, in the predominantly Tajik northern
Afghan plains.
According to Haji S, Hekmatyar's
first move in a showdown against the Karzai government
could be to block Sarobi, a religiously hardcore
strategic bottleneck on the Jalalabad-Kabul road. And
that would be only the beginning. Haji S adds that a few
weeks ago Hekmatyar said strictly off the record that
"Americans won't be here [in Afghanistan] in
one-and-a-half years. Two years will be the maximum."
Tommy Franks may not be aware of these plans.
Another top intelligence source revealed to Asia
Times Online that in the beginning of August a key
meeting took place in eastern Afghanistan - more exactly
in Kunar. The importance of this meeting can be attested
by two subsequent visits to Islamabad this week: US
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, next
Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. They
did not visit Islamabad just to talk about the easing of
Indian-Pakistan tensions or the situation of Afghan
prisoners in Pakistani jails.
It is known for
sure Hekmatyar was one of the key guests at the Kunar
meeting. Every intelligence service on the planet is now
scrambling like mad to find out exactly who else was
there - and what was decided. If they had the answers,
they would indubitably unveil the road map for the next
two years in the South Asia-Central Asia new great game.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contactcontent@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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