'War on terror' returning to its
cradle By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Five years after the US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was putting the
final touches on a brilliant campaign plan to oust
the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies from power,
Afghanistan is back in the headlines in
Washington, and the news isn't good.
An
unexpectedly fierce and prolonged Taliban
offensive that began last spring has US and North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officials
deeply worried that they face a serious insurgency
fueled
by a thriving drug trade
and growing popular disaffection with the
government of President Hamid
Karzai.
The deteriorating situation in
Afghanistan - and the increasing media attention
it is getting with the marking on Thursday of the
fifth anniversary of the launch of US operations
there - has added to the growing pessimism among
the foreign-policy elite about President George W
Bush's "war on terrorism".
Greatly
compounding their concern is Pakistan's ceasefire
agreement with pro-Taliban, Pashtun tribal leaders
signed last month to withdraw thousands of army
troops from Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal
area and release several hundred Taliban and
al-Qaeda militants from jail.
The accord,
similar to one reached with pro-Taliban forces in
South Waziristan two years ago, reportedly obliges
the tribal chiefs to prevent Taliban and al-Qaeda
forces from crossing into Afghanistan, but most
experts consider those pledges a mere face-saving
measure that enabled Pakistani President General
Pervez Musharraf to insist during his visits with
increasingly skeptical officials in the US and
Britain over the past two weeks that he remains
committed to the anti-terror fight.
But
even as Musharraf sat down with Karzai for a
peace-making dinner hosted by Bush on September
26, an anonymous senior US military officer was
telling reporters in Kabul that cross-border
attacks by Taliban forces had, in fact, tripled
since the North Waziristan truce took effect in
June.
Several days later, the Washington
Post reported on a captured al-Qaeda document that
strongly suggested that at least part of the
group's top leadership was in fact living in North
Waziristan, bolstering claims that the truce had
created, in Newsweek magazine's words, a
"Jihadistan ... an autonomous quasi-state of
religious radicals, mostly belonging to Pashtun
tribes ..." stretching from central Afghanistan to
much of northwestern Pakistan.
Whether the
White House dinner, which followed a week of
mutual recriminations between Karzai and
Musharraf, helped reconcile the two leaders
remains highly doubtful; US officials made no
attempt to convince inquiring reporters that any
major breakthrough had been achieved.
Only
last spring top administration and military
officials told reporters that Washington planned
to withdraw about 25,000 troops from Iraq and
4,000 troops from Afghanistan by now. At the same
time, Vice President Dick Cheney was confidently
describing Afghanistan as a "rising nation" from
which US forces could return home "proud of their
service for the rest of their lives". Cheney,
whose sunny optimism on Iraq has become fodder for
late-night stand-up comedians, used precisely the
same phrasing about Afghanistan as recently as
last week. But both the US military, which has
increased troop levels from 19,000 six months ago
to nearly 22,000 today, and independent analysts
see a much darker picture in light of the
intervening Taliban offensive, which has
reportedly taken the lives of at least 2,800
Afghans and more than 160 US and NATO troops in
the past year.
Not only has the death toll
been the highest for any year since 2001, but the
Taliban campaign has been made more deadly by the
importation of tactics - notably sophisticated
improvised explosive devices and suicide bombings,
of which one outside the Interior Ministry
headquarters in Kabul took 12 lives on Saturday -
from Iraq.
"My fear is that Afghanistan is
beginning to look like Iraq," Richard Haass,
president of the influential Council on Foreign
Relations and a top aide to former secretary of
state Colin Powell, told the Washington Post.
"We're seeing the beginning [of the] Iraqification
of Afghanistan."
To deal with the growing
threat, NATO, which currently has some 20,000
non-US troops in Afghanistan, has called for
contributions of 2,000 more soldiers to a
reorganized International Security Assistance
Force that will also incorporate 12,000 US troops
who are already there.
In addition, the
Bush administration, pursuant to urgent
recommendations by NATO's supreme commander,
General James Jones, has for the first time
nominated a four-star general to head the combined
NATO force. It is also reportedly considering
sending its current ambassador in Baghdad,
Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, back to his previous
posting in Kabul.
A Pashtun like Karzai,
Khalilzad was considered particularly effective
after the Taliban's ouster in juggling the
interests of the victorious Tajik- and
Uzbek-dominated Northern Alliance and the
Pashtuns, Afghanistan's single largest ethnic
group that also constitutes the Taliban's popular
base.
Khalilzad would be particularly well
suited for any enhanced effort to co-opt more
pragmatic elements of the Taliban, a strategy that
none other than Senate Majority Leader and Bush
loyalist Bill Frist recommended after a briefing
with senior US military officials in southern
Afghanistan this weekend.
"It sounds to me
... that the Taliban is everywhere," he said,
adding that the only way to prevail was "to
assimilate people who call themselves Taliban into
a larger, more representative government".
But that alone will not save the day,
according to Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert
at New York University, who nonetheless noted that
NATO's recent moves, as well as Khalilzad's
possible transfer, suggested that policymakers had
begun to realize how tenuous the situation has
become.
"I think some reality appears to
have pierced the veil around top-level
decision-makers, and there's a greater realization
of what has to be done," Rubin said, crediting
Jones with getting the attention of top officials.
Washington and NATO must give top priority
to three policy objectives, said Rubin:
"Eliminating the Pakistani sanctuary [for the
Taliban and al-Qaeda]; dramatically increasing
international economic assistance; and pressing
Karzai to take a much tougher stand against
corrupt and abusive elements in his government."
To achieve "strategic victory" over the
Taliban, he told the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee two weeks ago, the Western powers must
above all exert much stronger pressure on
Pakistan, including suspending all military and
economic aid, until it moved to disrupt and
dismantle the Taliban's Pakistan-based command
structures, which he called a "major threat to
international peace and security".
"Contrary to the analysis of the Bush
administration, whose response to September 11
[2001] wandered off to Iraq and dreams of a 'New
Middle East'," Rubin noted, "the main center of
global terrorism is in Pakistan, especially the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. In the words
of one military commander [he interviewed on a
recent trip to Afghanistan], 'Until we transform
the tribal belt, the US is at risk.'"
