One of the arguments frequently put forward for sending more western troops to Afghanistan is that western failure there will destabilise Pakistan.

Very roughly summarised, this 21st century version of the domino theory suggests that a victory for Islamist militants in Afghanistan would so embolden them that they might then overrun Pakistan - a far more dangerous proposition given its nuclear weapons.

A slightly different but related argument is that the United States needs to show resolve in Afghanistan to convince Pakistan of its commitment to the region and encourage the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to turn against Islamist militants it once cultivated as "strategic assets" to be used against its much bigger neighbour India.

"Many in Pakistan have always believed the Americans are not really serious about Afghanistan. They recall that the U.S. supported Pakistan and the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s only to abandon both once the Soviets left," writes Bruce Riedel at Brookings in a follow-up to this weekend's attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters.

If President Barack Obama "shows resolve in Afghanistan, Pakistanis won’t love us, but they will believe we are serious and determined to stay until a stable Afghanistan and Pakistan emerges," he writes. "If it appears the United States cannot make up its mind about what to do, then Pakistanis will say I told you so and make their own accommodations."

Yet the assault on army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi raises several questions both about the domino theory and argument about the United States needing to show resolve in Afghanistan.

First, does the Pakistan Army still need to be convinced of the dangers from Islamist militants after its commandos, as the Daily Telegraph put it, "were forced to storm their own headquarters" to release hostages seized in an attack on the most powerful institution in the country?

Second, the attack - which in turn raised jitters about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons - appeared to have nothing to do with the main Afghan Taliban group fighting western forces in Afghanistan - the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar, which according to Washington is based in  Pakistan's Baluchistan province.   

As discussed in this post and in this analysis, the gunmen involved in the Rawalpindi raid came from a nexus of militant groups linking up the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in South Waziristan in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and organisations which have taken deep root in the country's heartland Punjab province - including sectarian groups and those originally set up to fight India in Kashmir.

The Guardian quotes Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as saying that five of the attackers came from Punjab while the other five were from South Waziristan. The ringleader, he said, was a Punjabi, while the operation was ordered from South Waziristan. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, but said it was carried out by its Punjab unit.

So if the threat to Pakistan comes not from the Afghan Taliban but from the Pakistani Taliban and the many militant organisations based in Punjab, can you still cite the need to stabilise Pakistan as a justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan?

There may be other arguments for sending more troops to Afghanistan, among them to prevent it again becoming a base for al Qaeda. As Reuters correspondent William Maclean writes here, analysts are still divided on whether the Afghan Taliban can be prised away from al Qaeda.

Pakistan's former ambassador to Kabul argues in this interview with India's Business Standard that they can. "First of all, we have to understand that the Taliban and the al Qaeda have totally different targets; and also that the Afghan Taliban are different from the Pakistan Taliban and there is evidence of this," he says. "We can do business with the Taliban and in order to bring back some normalcy in Afghanistan, the Taliban and the U.S. will have to do business. But we need to have some benchmarks for the conduct of the Taliban government before we do that."

And in this article in the Washington Post, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, suggests looking anew at the Afghan Taliban.

"Change the media theme from attacking the Taliban and calling them the terrorists to concentrating on al Qaeda and 'foreign terrorists'," he writes. "By removing the stigma of terrorism from the Taliban, you can pursue meaningful negotiations with them. Mohammad Omar has never enjoyed the full support of Pashtuns. He is a lowly figure in tribal terms, and he is blamed by many of them for the calamity that has befallen Afghanistan. Reaching out to tribal leaders is what will move negotiations."

Those are big questions about Afghanistan, but are they the same questions as those now being asked about Pakistan? Or is it time to start looking at the two countries separately again, albeit within a broad regional context that acknowledges the very complex links between different Islamist militant groups?

The "AfPak" label has never been popular in the region itself. Is it time to ditch it?

(Reuters file photos: Nuristan in Afghanistan; U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and Pakistani soldiers in the border areas)

It is both fascinating and horrifying to overhear a bad argument between two old friends. The drama is compelling but you shudder at the pain of each wounding criticism.

I doubt Kai Eide, the U.N.’s top man in Afghanistan, will be holidaying again with his former deputy, Peter Galbraith, after a lacerating row between them over electoral fraud. Once the best of friends, the two have fallen out spectacularly over what should have been done to prevent the ballot stuffing, vote rigging and intrigue that Western powers now publicly admit badly marred the August 20 poll in Afghanistan. Were the stakes not so high, the fight could be brushed off as the consequence of clashing egos and the vagaries of human nature. But the dispute has cast doubt on whether any outcome of the vote can be considered legitimate. A second round may still happen, depending on a recount of suspect votes likely to conclude in a few days. On current trends President Hamid Karzai will emerge the winner, but will look like spoiled goods in the eyes of many in the Obama administration. Obama needs a credible political partner in Kabul to help him sell to Americans the cost in blood and treasure of whatever approach he eventually decides to take on continuing the counter-insurgency fight in Afghanistan.

Galbraith had been making the public running in the argument, charging that his efforts to prevent fraud were blocked and that he was muzzled by Eide, a veteran Norwegian diplomat. When he refused to keep quiet, says Galbraith, he was sacked. Eide’s actions or inactions have helped give the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting Western forces, Galbraith has told anyone who would listen, including the op-ed pages of major American newspapers.

When Eide finally bit back in public he lined up a silent chorus of Western ambassadors to sit on a podium beside him in Kabul to demonstrate the solid support of ‘the international community.’ (The British, French and U.S. ambassadors seated beside Eide did not take questions, despite one being tossed deliberately at Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. envoy). The mild-mannered Norwegian roused himself into indignant righteousness and, without ever mentioning Galbraith by name, fought back against the charges of having winked at massive fraud by agents of Karzai and castigated his former deputy for discourteously breaching confidences.

From my chair in the room it seemed Eide was most hurt by what he said was Galbraith’s use against him of remarks made while the former US diplomat was a guest in his house for over two months. “My view is that private discussions around the dinner table should remain private.”

The allegations “have been an attack on my integrity,” said Eide. “It’s not dignifed, not fair and not true,” he said, adding in a resigned finale, “but that’s the way it is.”

While watching the Eide/Galbraith friendship dissolve in such a public train wreck I wondered how Afghans were reacting to the squabble. I’m back in Kabul after a year’s absence. The distance, alienation and distrust between Afghans and their foreign helpmates that I saw last October, and which the Taliban promotes, sustains and thrives upon, has not much eased and will not have been helped by this undignified row.

Afghanistan has wasted little time in accusing Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency of being behind a bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on Thursday.

Asked by PBS news channel whether Kabul blamed Pakistan for the bombing, Afghan ambassador to the United States Said Jawad said: "Yes, we do. We are pointing the finger at the Pakistan intelligence agency, based on the evidence on the ground and similar attacks taking place in Afghanistan."

But what has been more striking is how careful India has been not to assign blame too quickly.  Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, the country's top diplomat, visited Kabul on Friday but said it was too early to say who was responsible for the bombing.

"I think the investigation should be completed," she said when asked if India thought Pakistan was behind the attack. "Whoever is responsible for this attack is against peace, is against democracy, is against people of Afghanistan and against the people of India."

India has in the past accused the ISI of being behind attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan. An attack on the same Kabul embassy last year killed 58 people. And as discussed regularly on this blog, rivalry between Indian and Pakistan over Afghanistan complicates U.S. efforts to stabilise the country no matter how many extra troops it sends.

For a sense of deja vu, see this post from last August on India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan, this post on the United States often conflicted approach in its dealings with the ISI, and this post from December asking whether it still made sense for President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan after last year's attack on Mumbai torpedoed hopes of a regional settlement.

So what is to be expected as a result of this latest bombing on the Indian embassy in Kabul?  Will it automatically lead to a fresh increase in tensions between India and Pakistan, or at the very least stall tentative attempts to repair relations soured by the Mumbai attack?

The answer to that is not as obvious as it might seem.

Pakistan's civilian government, which says its wants to hold peace talks with India, is already embroiled in an awkward stand-off with the Pakistan Army over provisions in the U.S. Kerry-Lugar aid bill which appear to curb the power of the military. So India might judge that now is not the right moment to raise the temperature.

Complicating the picture further is increasing violence within Pakistan itself - as highlighted by Saturday's attack by suspected Taliban militants on the Pakistan Army's headquarters in Rawalpindi, a day after 49 people were killed by a suicide car-bomber in the city of Peshawar. Do also read this chilling BBC account about the growth of militancy in south Punjab, in the heartland of Pakistan.

Add to that uncertainty about Obama's yet-to-be-completed review of strategy in Afghanistan, along with reports that the insurgency there is both growing and becoming increasingly independent of leaders in Pakistan, and you get one of the more fluid and volatile mixes in the history of relations between India and Pakistan.

All that makes it impossible to predict with any certainty the impact of the Kabul embassy bombing on relations between the two countries. One to watch closely in the days and weeks ahead.

(Photos: Site of bomb blast in Kabul; Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao; soldiers take position in Rawalpindi)

An Afghan contractor stitches name badges for German armed forces Bundeswehr and NATO allied forces at his shop at Camp Marmal, in Mazar-e-Sharif, northern Afghanistan April 15, 2009. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

Jean MacKenzie covers Afghanistan for GlobalPost. She is program director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan, which she’s held for four years. This article originally appeared in GlobalPost.
KABUL — It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

At a staff meeting in 2006, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who was then commander of Combined Forces Afghanistan, took a sip of bottled water.

Then he looked at the label of one of the Western companies that were being paid millions of dollars a year to ship bottled water by the container load into Afghanistan.

And Eikenberry, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said, “There must be a way of producing bottled water in Afghanistan.”

Thus was born the concept of Afghan First, a policy of preferential treatment for Afghan-owned companies that steers military aid into the hands of Afghan vendors.

All local procurement from fuel delivery for the Afghan army to the production of winter socks for the Afghan police — everything short of weapons and ammunition — now comes from a variety of local contractors, who are being paid about $800 million per year from the U.S. military. The largesse comes out of the total $1.1 billion budget for local purchases that falls under the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, CSTC-A for short. It is the lead U.S. agency responsible for developing the Afghan army and police.

“We are building this country,” said Sgt. Edward Gyokeres, chief of the public affairs office at CSTC-A, explaining that the program is intended to use the American and coalition aid money in a way that helps construct a national economy in Afghanistan.

But, paradoxically, this well-intentioned policy may also benefit the insurgency, according to those inside the system, who contend that a significant portion of that money going to Afghan vendors trickles down into the hands of the very enemy the U.S. is battling in Afghanistan — the Taliban.

Precise numbers are impossible to obtain in the lawless fringes of rural Afghanistan where there is very little accounting for this money, but those knowledgeable about the process estimate that at least 10 percent, or about $80 million, has in the last year gone to the diverse groupings of Afghan insurgents whom the U.S. military has come to call the Taliban.

Some contractors say as much as 20 percent of the contracts go to paying off the insurgency, which would put the number closer to $160 million a year.

U.S. and Afghan officials tracking where the Taliban gets its funding estimate that the Taliban’s annual take of the poppy crop is about $100 million.

More on Afghanistan:
Life, death and the Taliban: Blowback
Life, death and the Taliban: War of ideas
Life, death and the Taliban: Counterinsurgency
Life, death and the Taliban: Funding the Taliban

Over the last month, GlobalPost conducted a series of interviews with contractors, military personnel and others who work inside the system and confirmed that a flow of money goes from these local Afghan contractors to the Taliban for payoffs and protection in the widening areas of the country that are Taliban controlled.

In fact, GlobalPost found almost no one inside the military procurement and aid community who expressed surprise at the phenomenon, but very few who were willing to discuss the process on the record out of fear of losing their lucrative contracts, their jobs, or their lives.

“There is no line item for bribes,” said CSTC-A’s Sgt. Gyokeres. “That’s not to say it doesn’t happen.”

Procurement officers working for two different companies with large CSTC-A contracts shared their stories and three military officers commented on the procurement process. The head of the non-governmental organization that matches contractors to funders also weighed in, as did numerous ordinary Afghans and foreigners more indirectly associated with the process.

They describe a system in which huge contracts in the tens of millions of dollars are being pushed through in a chaotic and violent environment with too few project managers and accountants. This is happening as the U.S. and coalition partners try to balance the desperate development needs of the country against the knowledge that some of those funds are ending up in the hands of the Taliban.

All agreed: Payoffs to insurgent groups do occur, are almost impossible to track and will be extremely difficult to stop. As with U.S. assistance funds, a percentage of which find their way to Taliban coffers, military procurement money is a major source of financing for the resurgent Taliban.

“ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) is aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring,” said Col. Wayne Shanks, chief of public affairs for the U.S. Forces in Afghanistan (USFOR-A).

“While rigorous contract award and oversight processes exist, the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent,” Shanks added.

His candid assessment of the process and the blind spots in it reflect an age-old struggle in counterterrorism: Money often flows through local businesses to the insurgency. It was a problem that was faced by the British Empire here in the 19th century and later by the Soviet Union when it invaded Afghanistan. The United States encountered the phenomenon in Vietnam and more recently in Somalia, according to aid workers who have been negotiating this terrain for decades.

Paul O’Brien is the director of the aid effectiveness team at Oxfam who has spent many years in Afghanistan. He has deep inside knowledge of the difficulties that aid agencies and the military face in providing assistance in a war zone. He said that some of the funding inevitably ends up in the wrong hands. But he pointed out that imposing overly stringent accounting methods would jeopardize the overall effort and diminish the greater good of helping the Afghan people.

“If we go in there and the first thing we say is, okay, we need to write down your names for accounting purposes and for political purposes to be sure you are not with the insurgency, it is much harder to accomplish the larger goal,” O’Brien explained.

As GlobalPost first reported in its special report “Life, Death and the Taliban,” the insurgents are reaping rich dividends from local contractors who are paid through U.S. and coalition development funding. The story prompted a probe by the USAID inspector general’s office which is now underway.

Large contracts awarded to American firms often have accounting procedures in place, but most U.S. companies engage a variety of Afghan subcontractors to carry out the work. This is where things begin to fall apart for both military and NGOs, or non-governmental organizations that provide development assistance.

“Everything was done in cash,” said one contractor who worked for an Afghan firm with a wide range of CSTC-A contracts. “There is no way of tracking where the money is going. There are no controls on payments. The military does not follow up or check on [Afghan] companies the way they can U.S. vendors.”

This is the rule, rather than the exception, where Afghan companies are concerned, according to those closest to the process. As a result, they say, money can be easily diverted.

“Of course we pay off the Taliban,” said one procurement director for an Afghan company that imports fuel for the military. “What is the alternative?”

There are few viable options for those who work in the widening area of Afghanistan that is under Taliban control. Those who do not pay up-front end up bearing even greater costs in cash or blood.

Contractors often tell the story of one transportation company that refused to pay: It lost 800 trucks before it bowed to the inevitable.

The amounts involved are far from negligible. According to the procurement director, who spoke on condition of anonymity, when fuel comes into the country from Central Asia it costs approximately $1 per liter.

By the time it reaches a military base in Kandahar or Tirin Kot, in the volatile, dangerous, Taliban-controlled south, the price has gone up to $1.60 — billed, of course, to the U.S. military. A modest portion — between 10 and 20 cents — goes to the company as profit. The remaining 40 to 50 cents, or more than 25 percent of the total, goes for “security” — which means handouts to the Taliban or other local insurgents to allow the shipment through.

This money is baked directly into the price of the fuel – legitimate security costs, to private firms that accompany the shipments or guard the fuel storage areas, would be a separate line item in a firm’s budget.

It adds up. According to Mike Capstick, head of Peace Dividend Trust, an organization that matches Afghan companies to international donors, the value of military contracts given to Afghan companies last year alone was $1.1 billion.

If, as insiders say, between 10 and 20 percent is being siphoned off to the Taliban, then CSTC-A funding from the U.S. military would rival the narcotics industry as a source of revenue for the insurgency.

“I think it is important to note that the ISAF and our international partners are taking a broad-based approach to identify and close vulnerabilities that criminals, including the Taliban, use to raise, store and move funds,” said Col. Shanks with USFOR-A.

“We work closely with our Afghan partners to take action against specific people involved in financing of the Taliban, and to build Afghan capacity in strategic areas, like internal audits, to better track budget and procurement flows, as well as to improve overall security conditions with the help of the Afghan National Security Forces,” he added.

Shanks pointed to a series of recent military operations aimed at capturing or eliminating insurgents and their supporters.

Attempts are also being made to track and control the “hawala” system, a traditional financial structure in this part of the world that does not conform easily to regulation.

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars are moved through hawala every day. The procedure is simple, and virtually untraceable. The customer brings his money, in cash, to a hawala trader at a central market. The broker takes a percentage, then makes a phone call to a partner in London, Cairo, New York or Sydney, who dispenses the requisite amount in cash to a designated recipient.

In Kabul, the government has distributed forms to hawala traders, and is requiring that they fill them out for every transaction. This also means that the hawala trader would have to pay taxes on all his profits.

“Of course we do not record everything,” snorted one hawala broker. “We record a percentage — usually for those businesses that are all legitimate and above board. We do not register the rest.”

The major customers for hawala, according to the broker, are those dealing in drug money and those with major international contracts.

Cracking an internal Afghan system from the outside is no easy task.

“Afghans know how to get things done here,” said Capstick, from Peace Dividend Trust. “They can seal a deal with a handshake.”

But the Afghan way is all too often mired in corruption and nepotism, traits that have made the country the fifth most corrupt nation in the world, according to Transparency International’s most recent annual index. In a country where the rule of law is more a distant dream than a present reality, giving the Taliban a cut of the funding is not seen as treason — it is merely expedient.

“We delivered fuel to all the provinces, and the only way of accomplishing that was by greasing the Taliban,” said the contractor from the Afghan firm.

Between 10 and 20 percent of the proceeds were paid out to ensure security, he added. The overall contract amounts were staggering.

“I went to Camp Eggers to collect unpaid invoices,” he said, referring to the U.S. military base in the center of Kabul that houses CSTC-A. “For three weeks we were owed $16 million.”

At that rate, the firm would be making upward of $250 million per year — with a healthy cut going to insurgent groups.

The U.S. military is trying its best to build in checks and balances to keep the process honest.

“All ISAF agencies check potential contractors and organizations to ensure that money is not going directly into the hands of known terrorists,” said Shanks.

But none of the procedures in place can hope to catch or counter the built-in payments to the Taliban.

According to Lt. Col. Mitchell S. Appley, commander of the Kabul Regional Contracting Center, the military keeps a list of close to 4,000 Afghan vendors.

“The policy, basically, is if there is an Afghan vendor available, we should give them preference,” he said. “New rules and regulations allow us to restrict competition to Afghan only.”

The contracting system is long and complex, with multiple layers of bureaucracy designed to ensure transparency.

First a potential vendor is vetted by Peace Dividend Trust, which checks the organization’s registration, does a site visit to make sure that it is a legitimate company, and helps its Afghan officials to negotiate their way through the military procurement system.

“Corruption is a possibility,” said Sgt. Gyokeres. “But our job is to administer the contracts fairly and objectively.”

For those working inside the system, this desire to remain above the fray amounts to a willful refusal to see what is going on.

“They say ‘just get it done,’” said the procurement director. “They do not seem to want to know too many of the details.”

A former international military officer explained why CSTC-A may be feeling a bit overwhelmed.

“Someone from above is pushing on the soft spot in their forehead and telling them to get the contracts out,” he said, speaking privately. “There is a lot of pressure on the military procurement system.”

The contractor definitely agrees.

“That is the way things happen,” he said. “It is not easy to start with nothing and then create a functioning infrastructure; some latitude is required. But this ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy has evolved to such an extent that Taliban funding is fully baked into the system. It stands to reason that the insurgency can now forecast revenue and accurately budget for combat resources based on lucrative contracts from the U.S. military, which were intended to rebuild their war-torn country.”

(GlobalPost’s C.M. Sennott contributed to this story.)

       By Golnar Motevalli

Herat province in west Afghanistan is seen as one of the country’s safest areas. It is one of the largest, most prosperous Afghan provinces — its capital’s wide, smooth and tree-lined boulevards are a far cry from Kabul’s crumbling skyline.

But the past few months have seen a sharp increase in violence.

Last month a cabinet minister and former militia leader, Ismail Khan, was the target of a bomb attack in Herat city. A day earlier, Herati traders took to the streets to protest against rising insecurity in the province.

Khan, who is seen by many Heratis as an icon of the anti-Taliban and anti-Soviet mujahedin, was unharmed, but three civilians were killed.

 The district of Guzara in Herat has seen a spate of Taliban attacks, including the shooting dead of three men and the hanging of another and an ambush on a policeman’s home in which his teenage son was killed.

Since July at least 29 civilians have been killed in insurgent-linked attacks in Herat. Foreign troops, mainly Italians and Americans, are hit by roadside bombs or ambushed on a weekly basis.

While these attacks do not put Herat on a par with southern provinces such as Kandahar or Helmand — where the Taliban have grass-roots support in many areas — they still point to a considerable rise in instability in Herat, when compared to the same period last year.

Although the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, focusses mainly on the insurgency in the Pashtun tribal belt of the south and east, in
an interview with CBS news recently, he said the spread of violence to the mostly Tajik north and west was worse than he had expected.

Some analysts, including Ahmed Rashid, a prominent authority on the Taliban, have warned that the Taliban has been pushing further westwards and northwards for the past year in an effort
to consolidate gains already made in northern provinces such as Badghis and Kunduz — where there are mainly European troops.

Iran might also have reason to be alarmed. Last month, three Afghan policemen at a checkpoint very close to the border with Iran were killed in a Taliban ambush about two months after they attacked an Iranian engineering company, killing one employee.

U.S. military and Afghan officials have said that the rise in Taliban attacks in the west is partly a result of July’s U.S. operation “Strike of the Sword” in southern Helmand province, which has pushed Taliban fighters to the west and north.

 Farah province, which is sandwiched between Herat and Helmand, has also seen a sharp spike in violence since the U.S. operation and the Taliban now command checkpoints in districts
such as Bala Boluk.  In April I accompanied U.S. and Afghan army patrols in Bala Boluk, but on my second visit to Farah in August, I was told the entire district was now pretty much a no-go zone.

 Could Herat’s Guzara district, where much of the Taliban-related violence has taken place in the past months, be on the same slide into Taliban control?

And are the Italian troops, who make up the bulk of main foreign force in Herat, and whom the Taliban perceive as weaker than their U.S. counterparts, capable of containing the growth of the insurgency in the west?

[Pictures of a mosque in Herat and a bombing]

According to Dawn newspaper, the Pakistan Army is poised to launch a major military operation in South Waziristan, stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban.

It quotes senior military and security officials as saying that the army would launch what it called "the mother of all battles" in the coming days.

"If we don’t take the battle to them, they will bring the battle to us," it quotes a senior military official as saying of the militants. "The epicentre of the behemoth called the Taliban lies in South Waziristan, and this is where we will be fighting the toughest of all battles."

"For three months, the military has been drawing up plans, holding in-depth deliberations and carrying out studies on past expeditions to make what seems to be the last grand stand against Pakistani Taliban in the Mehsud heartland a success," it says.

"We are ready. The environment is ready," it quotes the senior officer as saying. "It will not be a walkover. This is going to be casualty-intensive hard fighting. The nation will have to bear the pain," said another officer.

The Pakistan Army is not saying anything in public, and information about its operations in Waziristan is hard to come by since the area is so remote and inaccessible.

But any ground offensive into South Waziristan would be a major escalation in the Pakistan Army's battle against the Pakistani Taliban, dwarfing its operation earlier this year to clear militants out of the Swat valley northwest of Islamabad.

The army has been reluctant to send ground troops into South Waziristan, instead aiming to seal off the area and rely on airstrikes to target militants. But talk of a possible ground offensive has risen after two bomb attacks last weekend raised fears the Pakistani Taliban were recovering from the death of their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a U.S. missile strike in August.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik told me earlier this week that Pakistan was considering whether it needed to launch a full-scale military operation against the Pakistani Taliban, who he described as "the front face of al Qaeda".

And according to Dawn, "Thousands of army soldiers - two divisions - are now sitting on the fringes of the Mehsud mainland waiting for orders from the high command to move in."

South Waziristan is believed to be heavily defended; it is larger than Swat and more inaccessible. Its people have always been hostile to outsiders, unlike Swat which was once a tourist paradise before it was overrun by Taliban militants. So any ground offensive would likely cause heavy casualties.

The general view has also been that the army has been running out of time to launch a ground offensive before the winter snows make operations extremely hard and would defer any big moves until the spring. That could still be the case, if it judges that a combination of air attacks and missile strikes by U.S. drones - the latest reported casualty from these was Uzbek militant leader Tahir Yuldashev - is enough to keep the militants at bay and stop them from bombing Pakistani cities.

But Malik said Pakistan could even launch an operation in winter if needs be. "Even in the winter, even before starting winter ... if we feel appropriate that this operation is unavoidable, yes, we will consider that," he said.

The Pakistan Army has years of experience of fighting in winter conditions - along with the Indian Army it became a world expert in high-altitude warfare in the conflict over the Siachen region which erupted in 1984, and it also has troops posted in the mountains along the Line of Control dividing Kashmir - although there has been a ceasefire there since 2003.

So it is not out of the question for the Pakistan Army to launch an offensive that drags into the winter. According to the Dawn report, temperatures in Waziristan can drop to 20 degrees below freezing, with snow setting in towards the end of November -- fairly brutal conditions for an offensive, but less hostile in terms of weather than it has had to deal with in Siachen over the years.  And Dawn quotes military strategists as saying the weather problem would hit the militants more than the troops, although the former would have the advantage of knowing their terrain.

In its battle against Islamist militants, Pakistan has concentrated on tackling the Pakistani Taliban, which threaten the country directly. That has annoyed the United States, which wants Pakistan to move as well against militants fighting western troops in Afghanistan, including the Afghan Taliban which it says are based in Quetta, in Baluchistan province. India is pressing for action against militant groups based in Pakistan's Punjab province, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group it blames for last year's attack on Mumbai.

But for now, attention within Pakistan seems to be turning to Waziristan for what could turn out to be the toughest military campaign in the whole of the Afghanistan and Pakistan theatre.

(File photos:Pakistani soldier in Swat; Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani with U.S. General David Petraeus; Taliban fighters; author in Siachen)

    The Dalai Lama believes the war in Afghanistan has so far been a failure, saying military intervention creates additional complications for the country.
    The exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, making his first visit to the Western Canadian city of Calgary in 30 years, said foreign military intervention against Taliban insurgents has only served to make the fundamentalist group more determined.  
    The war has been "so far, I think, a failure," he told reporters, adding that he could not yet judge its outcome. "Using military forces, the other hard-liners become even more hard ... and due to civilian casualties the other side also sometimes is getting more sympathy from local people." 
    U.S. President Barack Obama is weighing calls to boost troop levels and alter strategy to reverse what officials have said is a deteriorating military situation. But the Dalai Lama said it would all have been unnecessary had the United States and the European Union spent more on aid to the region.
    "Instead of spending billions and billions of dollars for killing they should have spent billions .... on education and health in rural areas and underdeveloped areas. (If they had) I think the picture would be different."

-- Written by Scott Haggett

(Photo: The Dalai Lama speaks at a conference in Calgary, Alberta, on October 1, 2009. REUTERS/Todd Korol)

A single paragraph in General Stanley McChrystal's leaked assessment of the war in Afghanistan has generated much interest, particularly in Pakistan.

"Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan, including significant development efforts and financial investment," it says. "In addition the current Afghan government is perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani counter-measures in Afghanistan or India."

He did not say anything that anybody did not already know. Pakistan has long been wary of India's growing influence in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and is seen as reluctant to turn against the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups as long as it believes it might need them to counter India. The fact that he said it all suggested a renewed focus on the relationship between India and Pakistan, whose confrontation to the east spilled long ago into rivalry over Afghanistan to the west.

Pakistan's Daily Times said in an editorial the rivalry between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan highlighted the need for peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, which have fought three full-scale wars since independence in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.

"One must be clear in one’s mind that in many ways the mess in Afghanistan is actually a spillover of the Indo-Pak conflict in the region of South Asia," it said. "Pakistan’s policy of “strategic depth”, which reached a climax with the hijacking of an Indian airliner to Kandahar in 1999, was in reaction to the unresolved dispute over Kashmir which created the “threat of India” that Pakistan felt “from the east”. Even today, as Pakistan struggles against the Taliban, 80 percent of its army is stationed on the Indian border.

Dawn newspaper said McChrystal's words on India were "perhaps as significant as any other in the report".  The Americans appeared to have finally understood, it said, that the war in Afghanistan could not be won without help from Pakistan. "But that means gaining Pakistan’s full cooperation, which in turn means alleviating the national security establishment’s concerns vis-à-vis India."

However, as discussed in this analysis, India is in little mood to move rapidly towards peace talks with Pakistan until it takes greater action against militants it blames for last year's attack on Mumbai, although the two countries have been taking incremental steps towards repairing relations. Many argue that the powerful Pakistan Army would be unlikely to turn against militant groups it once cultivated to fight India in Kashmir, without a comprehensive peace settlement with India. (For an understanding of how complicated all this is, read this book reviewby Pakistani strategic analyst Ayesha Siddiqa.)

So, to win the war in Afghanistan, the United States needs help from Pakistan, which Pakistan in turn is reluctant to provide so long as it believes it is threatened by India to both the west and east.  From Washington's point of view, it needs to nudge Islamabad and New Delhi towards the negotiating table, by leaning on Pakistan to act against militant groups and putting pressure on India to resume peace talks. 

Here is another catch. Although the relationship between the United States and India blossomed under former President George W. Bush, there is far less warmth in New Delhi towards the Obama administration. The relationship started on the wrong foot with India concerned about increasing U.S. economic dependence on its rival China.

Now India and the United States are at loggerheads over President Barack Obama's nuclear non-proliferation drive.  India has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That row, in turn, complicates efforts by Washington to persuade India to talk to Pakistan.

(Reuters file photos: Obama with Karzai and Biden; a British soldier in Afghanistan; hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar)

By Golnar Motevalli

On Friday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — accused by thousands of Iranians back in June of stealing Iran’s own disputed election — congratulated Afghan president Hamid Karzai on being re-elected.

It was a bit premature: even Karzai himself hasn’t actually claimed victory in last month’s presidential poll.

While in Iran, the election results were announced swiftly after polls closed, in Afghanistan there is still no official result a month after the vote, and a second round run-off could now be delayed until next year. 

A preliminary count of votes shows Karzai with a majority, but the election has been marred by accusations of fraud, most levelled at Karzai’s supporters.

The U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” and has ordered a recount of 10 percent of polling stations, which could mean ballots are nullified and Karzai may face a second-round run-off.

Afghanistan has not experienced the kind of post-election protests that ran in Iran after the election there, but diplomats in Kabul fear that a disputed election result could undermine the government and increase instability.

Comparisons between Karzai’s election and Ahmadinejad’s are awkward for Western leaders, especially U.S. President Barack Obama, who has already sent thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan and is considering whether to send more.

A few months ago I asked Karzai as he left a press conference in Kabul if he had spoken to Ahmadinejad about the elections in Iran when the two men met at a summit.

At that time anti-Ahmadinejad protests were at their height in Iran. Karzai simply replied, “we just met and exchanged greetings”.

I asked Karzai if he had sought any advice or tips from his Iranian counterpart about how to conduct an election campaign. Karzai laughed-off my question and continued his way out of the room, surrounded by security and the usual scrum of photographers. 

(File photo of Ahmadinejad and Karzai)

Back in 2008, even before Barack Obama was elected, Washington pundits were urging him to adopt a new regional approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan involving Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia and even Iran. The basic argument was that more troops alone would not solve the problems, and that the new U.S administration needed to subsume other foreign policy goals to the interests of winning a regional consensus on stabilising Afghanistan.

It would be simplistic to suggest that the Obama administration's decision to cancel plans to build a missile-shield in eastern Europe was motivated purely -- or even primarily -- by a need to seek Russian help in Afghanistan. But it certainly serves as a powerful reminder about how far that need to seek a "grand bargain" on Afghanistan may be reshaping and influencing policy decisions around the world.

"Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years, but only a regional diplomatic initiative that creates a consensus to place stabilizing Afghanistan ahead of other objectives could make a long-term international deployment possible," Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid argued in their much-cited 2008 policy paper titled "From Great Game to Grand Bargain". (pdf document).

Many of those arguments reappeared in a more recent report by the Asia Society (pdf document) -- formerly chaired by U.S special envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke -- so they are worth studying closely.

The ideas were ambitious and far-reaching, from remapping relations between Russia and the United States, prodding India and Pakistan towards a peace deal on Kashmir, seeking help from Iran and drawing in China and Saudi Arabia.  Some of those ideas were blown off course by the financial crisis, by the row in Iran over its disputed election, and by last November's attack on Mumbai which undermined U.S. attempts to steer India and Pakistan towards a peace deal.

And recently, they had been almost completely drowned by the media focus on military tactics and the merits of sending more troops to Afghanistan. With the U.S. decision to cancel the missile shield, one of those ideas -- about seeking Russian help in Afghanistan -- may have finally managed to break above the surface again.

In the case of Russia, the question was always about what price the United States was willing to pay to win Moscow's help in Afghanistan, possibly through less ardent support for NATO aspirants Ukraine and Georgia and a review of the missile shield due to be set up in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Obama already moved to try to assuage fears in Moscow and elsewhere that the United States might be seeking a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, a long-standing concern in Russia wary of having U.S. troops in what it sees as its backyard. “Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there," Obama said in his speech in Cairo in June. 

But it has been unclear how much further he might be willing to compromise to win Russia's support for what has become widely known as "Obama's war" in Afghanistan.

As discussed in this post, the Moscow Times spelled out what it saw as the price of Russian cooperation in Afghanistan in an op-ed published before Obama's inauguration:

“Afghanistan may well define your foreign policy legacy the way Iraq defined Bush’s," it said. "You will need all the support you can muster, including from Iran. You will also need Russia’s support. Moscow understands that the stability of its southern flank will hugely depend on what happens on the Hindu Kush mountain range in eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. But Moscow is torn between giving support to the West and preparing for the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The latter would mean cutting deals with the Taliban locally and relying on China strategically. You can help Russia make the right choice.”

Of course, there are many other reasons for, and consequences of, the U.S. decision on the missile shield, as discussed here and here.

But if anyone wants a steer on the likely direction of U.S. foreign policy, and its implications globally, it's probably worth rereading Barnett Rubin's "grand bargain" proposal from last year. Diplomacy is the art of the possible, and nobody expects the recommendations to be followed to the letter. But with Obama a considerably more cerebral president than his predecessor, the old "Read my Lips" slogan probably needs to be replaced with a new one: "Read the pdf."

(You can also find regular updates on the progress in relations between India and Pakistan -- one of the key themes of that report -- on "Pakistan:Now or Never", most recently in this post)

(Reuters photos: Girl in Afghanistan; Holbrooke, Obama)