It’s coming up to three months since Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Tariq Azizuddin, disappeared from the border region of Khyber  along with his driver and guard.

 After weeks of silence, the ambassador appeared on a video aired over Al Arabiya satellite channel last month saying he had been kidnapped by Taliban militants. Surrounded by masked men with automatic weapons, he said he was suffering from health problems and appealed to the Pakistani government to comply with his captors’ demands which Pakistani media have reported relate to the release of several jailed militants.
 
And that is the last that has been heard so far. Indeed, only slightly less intriguing than the envoy’s disappearance has been the lack of any public attention to his plight right from the beginning. So much so that Azizuddin’s family last weekend  issued a public appeal to the government to expedite efforts for his release. The family said they were greatly concerned there were no signs of an early and safe release of the envoy and his companions.
 
An ambassador, as the Pakistan Spectator said, symbolises the government and officials cannot afford to ignore the issue even if the media is focused elsewhere, all the more so after the emergence of a civilian government after nine years of military rule. How would another nation, for example the United States, act if its top diplomat was taken away and not heard from, for months ?

Perhaps the authorities are working quietly to secure the envoy’s release and any kind of statements might hamper the efforts.  Some say Azizuddin’s fate has become tied to a peace deal that the Pakistan government was trying to strike with militant tribes in the frontier region which have since suffered a setback after Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban  (Movement of Taliban) pulled out.

The Pakistan Taliban, though, denied any involvement in the envoy’s kidnapping when news first broke in February.
 
 

(Luke Baker is with the U.S. army in eastern Afghanistan) 

The snows have largely melted in the Hindu Kush and the high trails over the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan are once again passable. What’s more, Tehrik-e-Taliban’s leader, Baitullah Mehsud, looks like he may secure a peace deal with Pakistan’s new leadership, including the possibility of Pakistan’s security forces backing off from attacking his hideouts in South Waziristan.

To many observers, those two developments lead to a conclusion: any spring offensive by the Taliban against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan could be that much more powerful this year, with Mehsud throwing his tactical weight behind the offensive without fear of being squeezed by Pakistan’s forces from behind.
 
The argument has a fair amount of logic on its side, but how likely is the whole scenario really?

On the Afghanistan side of the border, U.S. commanders seem unconvinced, even if they are not dismissing the possibility of some sort of offensive in the coming months. First, they say many of the traditional infiltration routes over the mountains have now been closed off or are under watch by special forces. Even if much of the border is likely to remain passable — there’s no way 16,000 or so U.S. troops could seal every mountainous nook and cranny along hundreds of miles of frontier — they are not expecting the overall rate of infiltration to change substantially from last year.

Secondly, rather than relations between U.S. forces and Pakistani troops breaking down in the wake of President Pervez Musharraf’s sidelining and the murmurs of a peace deal with Mehsud, they say cooperation remains strong. Senior U.S. officers meet once a month, face-to-face for what they call “border flag” meetings with senior Pakistani officers, sharing intelligence and building relationships. Junior officers have even more contact — they have exchanged mobile phone numbers with the other side and sometimes communicate by radio on a daily basis.

“I wouldn’t say it’s perfect all along the border, but generally relations are pretty good. Uneven but good,” one senior U.S. officer said this week to describe the ties.

On occasion U.S. forces need to seek and have received permission to cross into Pakistan’s territory to pursue militants, he said. American unmanned spy planes are not allowed to pass into Pakistan’s air space, but otherwise, relations seem to be sound.

Perhaps most crucially, U.S. officers say they have seen no signs yet of Pakistani troops pulling back from the border area — a demand Mehsud has made as part of any peace deal.

Those three factors alone may not rule out any spring offensive — certainly the Taliban remains strong across southern Afghanistan and shows no signs of weakening — but they hint that this year may not see the big spring offensive some have suggested.

The U.S. State Department has just released its 2007 report on terrorism worldwide and it doesn’t look like it is winning the war against al Qaeda seven years after the Sept 11 attacks. The group not only remains the biggest threat to the United States and its allies, but using the tribal areas of Pakistan it has rebuilt some of its pre-Sept 11 capabilities. And its top  leadership, especially Ayman al-Zawahri, has regained some of its control over the group’s operations worldwide, says the report.

It makes for sobering reading and some of the figures are worth recounting.

-  The number of what the report identified as terrorist attacks worldwide fell slightly in 2007, but the number of people killed in the attacks rose to 22,685, from 20,872 in the previous year which suggests that people around the globe were getting increasingly efficient killing other people, as Russ Travers of the National Counterterrorism Center put it.
  One factor contributing to the increased lethality of attacks: increased use of backpacks by suicide bombers that are easier to sneak into crowded areas.

- A 50 percent increase in suicide attacks worldwide over the previous year and this ranged from somebody as young as a 15-year-old boy to a 64-year-old man in the advanced stages of cancer, potentially the oldest.

 - Incidents fell slightly in Iraq, but still accounted for 45 percent of all attacks and 60 percent of all fatalities worldwide in 2007.

- Pakistan saw the grimmest change, a 100 percent increase in attacks, and injuries and fatalities quadrupled.

- A 16 percent increase in attacks in Afghanistan

- Well over 50 percent of those killed or injured were Muslims.

- 2,400 children were killed or injured in 2007 by suicide attacks, an increase of 25 percent.

 The one silver lining according to Oxford Analytica is that several radical groups, who are engaged in local conflicts, could be undermining al Qaeda’s appeal in some parts of the world by adopting its brand name.

Al Qaeda’s legitimacy rests on convincing supporters that it acts justly to defend Muslims against domination by foreigners. On current trends, this message may increasingly be undermined: as the State Department notes, several radical causes adopted al Qaeda’s ‘brand’ during 2006 and 2007, importing it into conflicts in Algeria and Libya as well as longer-established battlegrounds.

This insertion into intractable local conflicts — such as the confrontation between radical Islamists and the state in Algeria — is a key reason for the high share of Muslims in the global death toll from terrorism.

If al Qaeda’s potential supporters associate the group with the indiscriminate slaughter of their fellow practitioners — rather than daring assaults against US interests — its call to violence may no longer hit home.

Is that something the world can hold on to? Or is it a hopeless and unending cycle where the heavier the hammer used to crush the attackers, the more the backlash? Is it time to change tack?
 

Update - Since filing this blog,  Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has said he is pulling out of the peace deal with the government after it refused to withdraw the army from tribal lands on the Afghan border. So were the sceptics right all along? And what does this mean for the government’s new strategy?

On the same subject, here is an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor comparing Pakistan’s policy to that of the United States in Iraq. “Americans can hardly complain that Pakistan is on the verge of a deal with jihadists,” it says. “The US has already done a similar deal with Iraqi Sunni terrorists. In both cases, a prime goal is simply to isolate Al Qaeda.”

No doubt many more twists and turns are yet to come before the picture becomes clearer.

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Pakistan’s impending deal with the Mehsud tribes to end hostilities in South Waziristan could either turn out to be the door to a wider peace along the troubled corridor with Afghanistan or a strategic blunder with consequences not just for Pakistan, but for Afghanistan and beyond including the West.

Is Pakistan ready for it ? How far have the country’s new civilian leaders — who had pledged a radically different approach to the northwest region considered the haven of the Taliban and al Qaeda — thought it through?

Newspaper editorials, military experts and blogs are debating those questions both in Pakistan and a world away in the United States, Britain and even Canada, which worries whether its troops in Afghanistan will end up paying a price.

The 15-point agreement, according to a draft that has appeared in the media, essentially calls for an end to militant activity and an exchange of prisoners in return for the gradual withdrawal of the Pakistani military from parts of South Waziristan. There would be no more attacks or kidnapping of military and government officials, roads will be opened and the Frontier Corps, the local security force, will be allowed free movement.

More importantly, the Mehsud elders have also promised to expel all foreign militants from their territory starting within a month and the Pakistani government hopes to replicate the agreement in other parts of the region as well, aiming to drive the wedge deeper between the home grown elements and al Qaeda.

Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the umbrella group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan) has already announced a ceasefire and threatened to string anyone violating it upside down in a bazaar. So far so good although there was a car bombing on Friday near a police station in North West Frontier Province. The Taliban said it was in retaliation for a police shootout and the ceasefire remained in place.

The government justifies the policy change saying it believes negotiations, significantly increased development aid for the tribal region and legislation designed to eventually integrate it with the rest of Pakistan offer the most effective strategy for turning the population there against al Qaeda.

In any case the military option has been tried, and it hasn’t produced results ; the military has lost hundreds of soldiers in the fighting, it has brought forth a spate of suicide bombings, and the operations have been deeply unpopular across the country.

Indeed, even the U.S. Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report this month accused the Bush administration of failing to develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent — let alone decisively defeat — the al Qaeda leadership that fled to Pakistan after U.S.-led forces chased it out of Afghanistan more than six years ago.

The report, which was based on intelligence reports and interviews with U.S. diplomats and military and intelligence officers, found that Washington had relied too heavily on President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani army to deal with al Qaeda and that virtually all of the nearly six billion dollars in aid Washington had provided to help Pakistan fight al Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas had gone to the military, while only a tiny fraction was earmarked for economic and other forms assistance for the largely Pashtun population there.

So then where is the rub ? The main criticism is that Pakistan might be buying peace for itself, while letting the militants devote their energy to the fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan which they say is the “mother of all the problems there.”
There is no mention in the draft agreement of ending cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

Secondly, deals with militants in both North and South Waziristan have been tried before, with disastrous consequences. A report by the International Crisis Group said Musharraf’s 2006 North Waziristan agreement was directly responsible for creating a safe haven for al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

And finally there is an issue of principle. Pakistani defence specialist Ikram Sehgal argues that while “all militants are not terrorists”, he says “one cannot (and should not) negotiate with terrorists. Baitullah Mehsud is a terrorist.”

In a posting this week, the blog fiverupees says Pakistan must pause and consider if it is ready to face the consequences of another 9/11 or 7/7 , but this time originating directly from the areas it is supposed to control.

The rising cost of food that is stirring unrest in the developing world may have one positive spin-off: Afghanistan’s opium farmers, attracted by high wheat prices, may be turning to legal crops.

The Financial Times quotes a recent commander of British forces in Helmand, the heartland of the country’s drugs trade, as saying there is anectodal evidence of such a switch in the southern province. With wheat prices at record highs farmers are calculating they will make money planting the crop, says Brigadier Andrew MacKay.

But he adds, though, that this doesn’t mean that the tide has turned in the fight against the drug industry in Afghanistan, producing 93 percent of the world’s opium which is processed to make heroin and exported around the world.

Afghanistan’s opium crop is forecast to shrink by as much as half this year after 2007’s record harvest, but then this fall is not so much the result of international anti-narcotics efforts but mainly because of an unusally cold and dry winter that has disrupted germination of seeds.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation also cautions against reaching hasty conclusions, arguing that the profits from planting opium poppies are still high, so there might not be a very compelling incentive for farmers to make the change.

Also, looked at in another way, high food prices might actually drive desperate farmers to grow more opium to feed their families. Already Afghanistan, largely reliant on imports of wheat and flour, is reeling under the impact of high global prices and people have taken to the streets to protest.

It is suffering even more because Pakistan, which too is faced with a food problem, has restricted the flow of flour to its neighbour. A full-blown food crisis could be the spark for a national uprising in Afghanistan which has not yet happened despite some of the policies that the West has adopted, says abu muquwama, a blog which focuses on insurgencies and tactics to counter them.

In a new book launched this week about the ill-fated attempt by British imperialists in the mid 19th century to occupy Afghanistan, I came across an interesting detail: the Afghans refused to play cricket. During the occupation of Kabul by British troops from India, “the Afghans looked on with astonishment at the bowling, batting and fagging out of the English players”, writes former Reuters journalist Jules Stewart in ”Crimson Snow: Britain’s First Disaster in Afghanistan“.

With NATO reaffirming its commitment to Afghanistan in a “strategic vision” statement issued at a summit in Bucharest this week, I wondered if there was a bigger lesson in this refusal to engage in cricket,  just as the Afghans have never submitted to foreign occupation — seeing off the British Raj in the 19th century and defeating Soviet occupiers in the 20th century. ”The Afghans will always win,” writes Stewart in the conclusion to his book.

The lessons of history would suggest the odds are stacked against NATO. It has just 47,000 troops in the country, whereas the Soviet Union had between 100,000 and 120,000 troops there at any one time. U.S. Army General McNeill, the commander of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, has said U.S. doctrine suggests a force of well over 400,000 Afghan and foreign troops to fight an insurgency in a country of Afghanistan’s size and population, although he has made clear he does not expect NATO to provide that.

The situation is made additionally complicated by instability in Pakistan, whose lawless tribal areas are used as a refuge by al Qaeda and Taliban militants fighting in Afghanistan. As Karl Inderfurth, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, wrote earlier this week, Pakistan can “make or break” the NATO mission in Afghanistan: “Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably linked. There can be no successful outcome for Afghanistan if Pakistan is not a part of the solution.” 

Indeed, so bleak is the outlook that some are calling for an exit strategy as in this article by Patrick Seale, who says NATO has ”got itself into a colossal muddle in Afghanistan”.

But there are other voices to be found too. In the foreword to Crimson Snow, British General David Richards, a former commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, says that this war is different from those that preceded it.  While admitting that today’s diplomats and soldiers frequently make the same errors as did the British in 1841-42,  he argues that “after a hesitant start, lessons have been learnt”. He quotes polling in late 2007 that, he says, indicates that more than 80 percent of the Afghan population want its elected government and the international community to succeed. “While the lessons of history tell us that we do not have forever, in this Afghan war the Afghan people and the foreigner are for now on the same side.”

So is he right? Is there still cause for optimism in Afghanistan? Or is NATO condemned to the same fate as the foreign forces that preceded it?

As an afterthought, I checked with our Afghanistan correspondent Jon Hemming whether cricket has finally caught on in Kabul. He pointed me to a story he wrote late last year about a fledgling Afghan cricket team itching to take on the best sides in the world. Before, he writes, “the absence of cricket in Afghanistan was a sign that the Afghans, unlike neighbouring imperial India, had never been conquered by the British”. But the sport has now finally been brought to Afghanistan by refugees who had fled to Pakistan and then returned  when the Taliban were toppled in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks.

Interesting piece by Reuters Security Correspondent Mark Trevelyan about German authorities using comic strips to combat the appeal of militant Islamism to European youths. The comic strip, distributed to schools in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, features Andi, his Muslim girlfriend Ayshe and her brother Murat, who comes under the influence of a radical friend and an Islamist “hate preacher”.

The idea is to offer young people an alternative world view to combat the “narrative” of al Qaeda. ”We have learned from our opponents. This is exactly the age at which the Islamists are trying, through Koranic schools and other means, to fill young people with other values,” says Hartwig Moeller, from the German state’s interior ministry.

Of course, some people will argue that in a world polarised by the Iraq war and the Middle East conflict amongst others, tackling militant Islamism with comic strips is at best lightweight, at worst a failure to understand the issues.

But Moeller says the project — which is already attracting interest elsewhere in Europe and in the United States – could win over the hearts and minds of some youngsters.

“If I get through to someone this way, and it makes him more critical of people who want to make him a jihadist, then I’ve stopped him at some point committing terrorist attacks or going to a terrorist camp in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” he said. “Maybe he won’t slide off into this milieu — that’s the idea.”

What do you think? Read the full story here.

For those who missed, it’s worth looking closely at Barack Obama’s latest comments on Pakistan made in a speech this week in which he repeats a call for the United States to shift its focus from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan. ”This is the area where the 9/11 attacks were planned. This is where Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants still hide. This is where extremism poses its greatest threat.”

His plan is to rethink U.S. policy towards Pakistan – which has traditionally depended on cooperation with the military rather than civilian governments — to bolster the democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people, condition aid to Pakistan on its action against al Qaeda,  and show Pakistan that America is on its side.

But then comes the rub.  If the United States has intelligence about al Qaeda targets hiding in Pakistan then America should act if Pakistan will not, or cannot do so, he says.  So far that has meant sending in unmanned Predator aircraft to fire missiles at suspected Islamist hideouts, often leading to civilian casualties and outraging Pakistanis who feel their sovereignty has been violated.

So is there a contradiction in Obama’s commitment to Pakistan? Can the United States win over the people if it is also firing missiles at targets in its territory? Here is the whole excerpt:

“For years, we have supported stability over democracy in Pakistan, and gotten neither. The core leadership of al Qaeda has a safe-haven in Pakistan. The Taliban are able to strike inside Afghanistan and then return to the mountains of the Pakistani border. Throughout Pakistan, domestic unrest has been rising. The full democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people have been too long denied. A child growing up in Pakistan, more often than not, is taught to see America as a source of hate - not hope.

“This is why I stood up last summer and said we cannot base our entire Pakistan policy on President Musharraf. Pakistan is our ally, but we do our own security and our ally no favors by supporting its President while we are seen to be ignoring the interests of the people. Our counter-terrorism assistance must be conditioned on Pakistani action to root out the al Qaeda sanctuary. And any U.S. aid not directly needed for the fight against al Qaeda or to invest in the Pakistani people should be conditioned on the full restoration of Pakistan’s democracy and rule of law.

“The choice is not between Musharraf and Islamic extremists. As the recent legislative elections showed, there is a moderate majority of Pakistanis, and they are the people we need on our side to win the war against al Qaeda. That is why we should dramatically increase our support for the Pakistani people - for education, economic development, and democratic institutions. That child in Pakistan must know that we want a better life for him, that America is on his side, and that his interest in opportunity is our interest as well. That’s the promise that America must stand for.

“And for his sake and ours, we cannot tolerate a sanctuary for terrorists who threaten America’s homeland and Pakistan’s stability. If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot. Senator Clinton, Senator McCain, and President Bush have all distorted and derided this position, suggesting that I would invade or bomb Pakistan. This is politics, pure and simple. My position, in fact, is the same pragmatic policy that all three of them have belatedly - if tacitly - acknowledged is one we should pursue. Indeed, it was months after I called for this policy that a top al Qaeda leader was taken out in Pakistan by an American aircraft. And remember that the same three individuals who now criticize me for supporting a targeted strike on the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, are the same three individuals that supported an invasion of Iraq - a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. “

Thanks to openDemocracy for highlighting this piece on EurasiaNet about a row between the Taliban and al Qaeda which it says has surfaced among bloggers on a website in Egypt.

“Islamic extremists who regularly post messages to a pro-Al-Qaeda website in Egypt are accusing Afghanistan’s Taliban of straying from the path of global jihad,” it says.  “Internet criticisms of the Taliban follow a February statement from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar announcing that his movement wants to maintain positive and ‘legitimate’ relations with countries neighbouring Afghanistan.”

It caught my eye since it linked into comments in the Pakistani and other media about the relationship between pro al Qaeda Arab fighters and the Taliban based on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its implications for Islamist militancy now spreading into the heartland of Pakistan.  The usual argument is that while elements in the Pakistan army and the ISI, the country’s powerful intelligence agency, might have some sympathy for the Taliban — a legacy of the days when they worked together to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — they blame al Qaeda for turning on Pakistan. 

In a blog on this earlier this month I highlighted a feature on Salon.com headlined Killing ourselves in Afghanistan in which the writer accused the ISI of working against American interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This had begun to change, however, said writer Matthew Cole, with the attacks on Pakistan itself. 

“Of late, however, the foreign-led Taliban factions in the Tribal Areas, the ones believed to shelter al-Qaida’s Arab leadership, have begun focusing more attention on destabilizing Islamabad than Kabul,” he wrote. “Now Pakistani intelligence has reason to work with the Americans, at least when it comes to some jihadis, including those known locally as ‘the Arabs’. Many of these insurgents were once aligned with the ISI, but no more.”

Is there a pattern emerging here? Is there a split between the Taliban and al Qaeda that could be exploited by the Pakistan army and the ISI? Or is this just more smoke and mirrors about an invisible enemy that nobody can either understand or control?