Side-stepping the imperatives

January 17, 2007

Side-stepping the imperatives


THE US is barking at the wrong tree in Afghanistan. Not that it should be surprising, given the example of Iraq. The mistake that Washington is making is that it is not ready to accept that the insurgents it faces in Afghanistan are very much sons of the Afghan soil and they are fighting on their own territory and are not sent there by a foreign force to challenge the sole superpower in the world.
The US military is also unwilling to recognise that Pakistan has an interest in Afghanistan's stability and it does make sense to accuse Pakistan of helping the insurgents by sheltering them on the border.
Islambad has a problem on its own in its hands posed by the unruly and unweildy tribes living in areas straddling the border with Afghanistan, but it has to devise its own methods and means to deal with them. External solutions would not work.
The US should not expect or pressure Pakistan to unleash summary military action to "clean up" the suspected areas. Such action would only add to the instability of the border area and deprive the government in Islamadad of whatever popularity in has in those areas.
Pakistan is trying to do what it could. It did so again on Tuesday when it bombed five suspected Al Qaeda hideouts near the border as US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was visiting Afghanistan for the first time after assuming office.
Gates's talks with Afghan leaders are unlikely to produce any dramatic breakthrough in the effort to eliminate the Taliban-led insurgency.
By treating the Taliban insurgents as alien to Afghanistan and not working towards bringing them into the political process through dialogue, the US is compounding its problems in the country, which it invaded in late 2001 to dislodge the hardline group from power after it refused to hand over Osaman Bin Laden.
More than five years later, the US and allied forces find themselves caught in a vicious guerrilla war with Taliban fighters who, everyone thought at one point, had become part of the history of a land that had always eluded foreign efforts to control it.
In the short term, the International Stabilisation Force in Afghanistan (IFSA) and the US military could score a few hits against the insurgents as it did last week when it claimed it killed some 130 of them in one of the largest winter battles in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
The Taliban rejected the claim, and the group's purported spokesman who issued the rejection was said to have been arrested after he crossed into the country from Pakistan on Tuesday.
Questioning the man could produce clues to the whereabouts of Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar who are reportedly being sheltered somewhere along the porous Afghan-Pak border. Of course, securing a clue is something and actually capturing the fugitives is something else. Bin Laden and Mullah Omar have eluded capture for more than give years, and even US President George W Bush has suggested that it is no longer relevant whether they are captured.
That is of course an implicit and perhaps unwitting admission that the insurgency in Afghanistan — as the larger one in Iraq — has assumed an independent nature without having to wait for orders from a centralised leadership, which Al Qaeda never had in any event.
As such, it would apepar that the foreign forces would not be able to sustain the momentum against the Taliban, who enjoy support from the local residents. Such is the Afghan nature that there is always someone to replace a fallen fighter, and this means the ranks of insurgents will not remain vacant for long.
Most of these issues are peripheral to the key challenge the US and its allies face in deeply troubled Afghanistan — how to contain the insurgency and make the country governable. In order to arrive at that point, the US, the Afghan government and their supporters and allies have to turn attention to daily life issues of the people of Afghanistan parallel to engaging the Taliban in dialogue on an equal footing with all others. Not that the Taliban appear to be desparate or even anxious for dialogue. But keeping the Taliban at arms length would only turn the situation more vicious for the foreign soldiers and government forces in Afghanistan than it is today.