Since September last year, the Pakistan-based leadership of the Neo Taliban has been saying that 2007 would be a crucial year in its jihad to liberate Afghanistan from foreign occupation. It has also been warning that it was planning a spring offensive starting fromApril, 2007, which would be more ferocious than the attacks of last year.
While overtly seeming to ignore these statements and warnings, the Afghanistan-based NATO commanders have been taking them seriously and planning a proactive counter-strategy. The underlying idea of the counter-strategy is to take the battle to the Neo Taliban in its strongholds in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan and in its sanctuaries in Pakistan instead of waiting for the Neo Taliban to launch its spring offensive and then retaliating against it. This counter-strategy would, inter alia, call for the effective sealing of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on both sides in order to prevent large-scale infiltrations by the Neo Taliban. While the NATO forces would be responsible for the effective sealing on the Afghan side of the border, Pakistan was to bepressured to similarly seal on its side. The recent visits of a number of senior US officials and leaders, including Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, to the Pakistan-Afghanistan region were intended to work out the details of this pre-emptive strategy and to seek the co-operation of Pakistan.
The Neo Taliban has taken note of the plethora of statements emanating from NATO officials saying that their plan would be not to wait for the Neo Taliban to launch its offensive first, but to pre-empt it by the NATO striking first. It has launched its own moves to pre-empt the NATO's planned pre-emptive strike. According to reliable reports from Pashtun sources in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, it has already infiltrated about 1,000 of its trained cadres, fully armed, into Southern and Eastern Afghanistan through the Waziristan area of Pakistan's Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), by taking advantage of the peace agreement signed by the Pakistan army with the pro-Taliban elements in North Waziristan in September last year. Large quantities of arms and ammunition have been cached by the Neo Taliban in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan. The idea is that the Neo Taliban cadres, who have already infiltrated and taken up position, would launch their spring offensive not from Pakistani territory as anticipated by the NATO forces, but from behind their back in Afghan territory. The infiltrated cadres consist almost exclusively of Afghans recruited from the refugee camps in the Pakistani territory and Pashtun ex-servicemen from the Pakistan Army.
It is groups of trained cadres from among these infiltrators who recently occupied the town of Musa Qala in the Helmand Province. This town had earlier been vacated by British troops after a peace deal with the local tribal leaders. The Government of Pervez Musharraf has stepped up pressure on President Hamid Karzai ofAfghanistan—directly as well as through pro-Pakistan elements in the newly-raised Afghan Army— to make a deal with the Neo Taliban in order to prevent further bloodshed. Karzai has resisted this pressure till now. Retired officers of the Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) such as Lt. Gen. (retd) Hamid Gul have also been pressing the Pashtun officers of the Afghan security forces to make overtures to the Neo Taliban. It is to pre-empt the moves towards a dialogue with the Neo Taliban thatCondoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, seems to have told a Congressional Committee earlier this week that the State Department is likely to designate the Neo Taliban as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation FTO). She is apparently hoping that its designation as an FTO would silence those advocating a dialogue with the NeoTaliban.
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B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies,Chennai.
