'Can't Afford To Be Hypocritical Anymore'

While the Musharraf government in Pakistan continues to claim making frantic efforts to uproot the al-Qaeda network from the troubled Waziristan region bordering Afghanistan, the Karzaigovernment has repeatedly questioned Islamabad's willingness to effectively eliminate the Taliban-backed insurgents operating from the Pak-Afghan border and attacking the US-led Allied Forces in Afghanistan.

There has been unrest in the Waziristan region and other tribal areas for almost three years now, amid clashes and military actions between foreign fighters and the Pakistan Army. Operations have been carried out and it has subsequently been announced by the Pakistangovernment that these have been 'successfully' wound up. Quite clearly, however, militant activity has not been eliminated; indeed there are reports of al-Qaeda and the Taliban militants re-grouping in the area.

While Islamabad strongly denies Taliban and al-Qaeda infiltration into Afghanistan from the Pakistani side, the Karzaigovernment insists that the infiltration was actually being orchestrated from the Pakistani border area. Not long ago, it was the South Waziristan Tribal Agency that used to hog the media limelight on account of the military operation there against local and foreign militants. Now the focus of attention has shifted to the neighbouring North Waziristan region. It was South Waziristan that first became the hub of Taliban and al-Qaeda rebels, but after the Pakistan's grand operation to hunt down militants in this area, the wanted men slipped away into the North Waziristan tribal region after losing their hideouts.

Pakistani military authorities claim there were 500-600 foreign militants in the South Waziristan area when Army operations first started in early 2004. Of them some 400 have either been killed or captured so far, according to the Army, while a remaining 200 still 'stranded' in North Waziristan, are now using the Pak-Afghan border strip as their base to launch mid-night guerilla attacks against the US-led Allied Forces in Afghanistan, creating trouble for Afghan President Karzai, and also embarrassing the most-trusted US ally in its war on terror - Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf.

The Pakistan Army has now shifted the focus of its anti-terrorist operations from Wana in South Waziristan to Miranshah in North Waziristan. Despite official claims to have largely contained insurgents in the two tribal agencies, the North Waziristan area continues to pose a serious challenge, and has become a stronger base for the al-Qaeda and Taliban militants on the run, due to presence of a large number of religious seminaries in the area and because an estimated 70 per cent of the local population supports the jehadis.

Since early 2005, the Army has killed and arrested hundreds of foreign militants and their local facilitators in North Waziristan. The events in Waziristan continue to make international headlines due to the strong Western belief that defeating militants in these borderlands would inflict a deadly blow on al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies. American intelligence operatives stationed in Pakistan believe that Osama bin Laden and some of the top al-Qaeda figures are hiding somewhere in the mountain recesses of the region. For US-led coalition troops operating across the border in Afghanistan, effective Pakistani military operation in Waziristan holds the key to facilitating their job and saving lives in the battle against the al-Qaeda and Taliban.

For the time being, the situation in the Waziristan region is deteriorating fast, despite official claims to the contrary by Pakistani authorities. Between August 15 and September 15, 2005, alone, over 100 persons have reportedly been killed in armed clashes in North Waziristan between the militants and the Army. The bodies of 25 persons, mostly Pakistanis, were recently recovered inside Pakistani territory in North Waziristan after they are reported to have been killed in a missile strike and bombing raids by the American warplanes. This was blatant US transgression into Pakistani soil, but American, Afghan and Pakistani authorities have all justified the action by alleging that the victims had taken part in an attack on a US base in Afghanistan's Paktika province, and were trying to flee across the border to Pakistan.

The Afghan government has accused Islamabad from time to time of turning a blind eye to the infiltration from Pakistan's tribal areas into Afghanistan and the high-command of the US-led Allied Forces even suspects some official complicity between the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants, as attacks intensified in the run up to the September 18 parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. As soon as the election schedule was announced, the Taliban started issuing threats to kill the election workers, candidates and voters, ostensibly to sabotage the polling process. In a nation that has been plagued by armed conflicts, the elections for the Wolesi Jirga - the lower house of the Afghani Parliament, with 249 seats, 68 of which are reserved for women - is of extraordinary political significance. For the first time in the history of Afghanistan, a legislative body is being created. President Hamid Karzai, elected in October 2004 with US backing, has been governing Afghanistan via a de facto self-given authority since the creation of an interim administration in December of 2001.

Since early 2005, the Taliban and their al-Qaeda aides, backed by new volunteers from Pakistan, had been reuniting and expanding their area of operations in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, which were their former stronghold. Despite the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan way back in October 2001, the US-led Allied Forces have failed to uproot the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan who have regrouped and are reorganizing their resistance. With ample funds from opium trade, the Taliban-led resistance has the funds to finance its struggle against the Allied Forces. The Taliban are reported to be buying more sophisticated arms, and Russian and Chinese-made surface-to-air missiles in particular are flowing into Afghanistan in increasing numbers, giving an added dimension to the Taliban's fighting capabilities.

These trends have provided repeated opportunities to the Bush Administration to push Pakistan to do more to curb the activities of militants operating along the 2,500 kilometer-long and porous border with Afghanistan.

It was in response to such persistent accusations that President General Musharraf suggested in New York on September 12, 2005, that the Pak-Afghan border be fenced to prevent cross-border infiltration. He was of the view that, besides addressing the Afghangovernment's concerns, the fencing would also help block the entry of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. The proposed fence would start from the point of convergence of the frontiers of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan and extend right up to Pakistan's border with the Chinese territory of Xinjiang, passing on the way the Wakham Corridor where the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs meet. The barrier would obviously be a miracle of engineering if it ever materialised.

The border fencing idea may sound good at first glance, but it is weighed down by enormous negatives. First, the cost: the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline, which would be only about 700 miles long, is estimated to cost $7.2 billion; the fence would just be a humble fence, but its 2,500 kilometres wouldn't come too much cheaper because of the forbidding terrain involved. Secondly, this may not succeed in stopping the flow of determined militants or even the traditional two-way traffic of tribals from either side for trade, marriages, and other interaction. Thirdly, the biggest fly in the ointment can be sighted in a statement by an Afghangovernment official on September 1, 2005, that, before accepting any such idea, the Pak-Afghan border, which has been the cause of much friction in the past between the two neighbours, be demarcated. Since the British demarcated the Durand Line - as the border between British India and Afghanistan [which split the Pushtun tribes between the two countries] - it remains a bone of contention, with Kabul clinging to irredentist claims that the Pushtun belt on the Pakistani side belongs to Afghanistan. The border fencing proposal, consequently, is unlikely to fly.

The situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating since the beginning of 2005. Nearly 150 US troops have been killed there since the US intervention commenced in October 2001, some 50 of them between January-August 2005. About 17,000 American troops are in Afghanistan battling a Taliban-led insurgency focused on the south and east, and training the new Afghan Army. Increasing numbers of better-trained, better-equipped and better-led Taliban cadres operating from sanctuaries in Pakistan have stepped up their hit-and-run raids into southern and eastern Afghanistan to demoralise the newly-raised Afghan Army and Police in the hope of inducing large-scale desertions.

The Taliban resistance has apparently chosen the Zabul, Spin Boldak and Hilmand areas to re-establish their lost control and revive their authority. These districts are located in mountainous terrain, which best serves a guerilla campaign and also leads to safe routes across the Durand Line, which exists only on the map. Dozens of villages are actually located on the Line itself, part in Afghanistan and part in Pakistan. The Pakistani tribal areas thus provide natural strategic depth to the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

Though Pakistan denies these reports, the Washington Post splashed a detailed news report on August 21, 2005, along with the pictures of a captured 28-year old Pakistani by the name of Sher Ali, vowing to "go to do jehad again and again" when the opportunity comes, and providing details about a terrorist camp in Mansehra. The interview by the newspaper correspondent N.C. Aizenman reportedly took place in Kabul. Sher Ali toldthe Washington Post that he attended a 20-day weapons training course at a secret mountain camp in the North West Frontier Province. Sher Ali was captured by Afghan police in July 2005 shortly after crossing into the Kunar province.

Sher Ali's story offers a glimpse of what Afghan authorities charge is a shadowy Pakistani network that continues to fuel the insurgency with fresh recruits as fast as the American and the Afghan forces kill or capture their predecessors. The Afghangovernment's allegations gained further credibility with the August 7, 2005 statement of Opposition Leader in Pakistan's National Assembly, Maulana Fazalur Rehman, often called the 'father of the Taliban', who told newsmen at Lahore that the Pakistangovernment was deceiving the US and the West by helping militants freely enter Afghanistan from Waziristan: 

"The government should give the identity of the infiltrators and its motives for helping them enter Afghanistan. They must also give the nation the identities of the men being moved from Waziristan to militant camps in Mansehra. The rulers are not only trying to deceive the US and the West, but also hoodwinking the entirenation ... We ask the rulers to reveal the identity of the people being transported to Afghanistan from Waziristan via Kaali Sarak in private vehicles; tell who is supervising their trouble-free entry into Afghanistan and reasons for their infiltration. Thegovernment would have to decide whether it wanted to support jehadis or close down their camps. We will have to openly tell the world whether we want to support jehadis or crack down on them. We can't afford to be hypocritical anymore".

These are the factors that make President Karzai accuse General Musharraf of treating the Taliban differently from al-Qaeda. Karzai has pointed out, further, that even though Pakistan has arrested and handed over to the FBI half-a-dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders, not a single senior Taliban commander was captured and extradited to Afghanistan. And it remains an open secret in Pakistan that the top leadership of the Taliban military hierarchy lives and operates out of Quetta and Peshawar cities even today.

The Afghan government's official newspaper, Anis, claimed recently that many key Taliban commanders are openly living in the Kachlogh and Pashtunabad regions of Balochistan's capitalQuetta, and have based their military presence in these areas. The daily stated that some of the Taliban commanders being ferried by the ISI are sheltered in the residential blocks belonging to the Pakistan Army cantonment in Peshawar. Significantly, the Frontier and the Baluchistan provinces are being governed by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a fundamentalist alliance with close links to the Taliban. With these details in mind, the Taliban resistance is expected to gain further strength until and unless the Pakistani establishment, which wants to keep the Taliban alive in the hope of using them to retrieve its lost influence in Afghanistan, eventually decides otherwise.

Amir Mir is a senior Pakistani journalist affiliated with Karachi-basedmonthly, Newsline. Courtesy, the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South AsiaTerrorism Portal