Bruce Riedel, who led a review of the “Af-Pak” strategy for the Obama administration, says the United States must now target Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, following the apparent death of the chief of the Pakistani Taliban this month.

The one-eyed, intensely secretive founder of the Afghan Taliban is a much more elusive and important player in the “terror syndicate” attacking Pakistan, Afghanistan and the NATO mission in Afghanistan than Baitullah Mehsud, reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike, Riedel says.

“Under his leadership, the Afghan Taliban has returned from near total defeat in 2001 to threaten the survival of the NATO effort in Afghanistan and indeed the future of the alliance,” Riedel, a former CIA officer and now a scholar at Brookings, writes here.

In 2003, the Taliban was active in only 30 of Afghanistan’s 364 districts; now it is a player in 160. “For too long the self-described Commander of the Faithful has been on the rampage. Now is the time for Washington and Islamabad to cooperate to shut him down.”

Going after Mullah Omar and other leaders with strong links to al Qaeda such as Jalaluddin Haqqani is Pakistan’s next test, the Los Angeles Times wrote on Monday.  Both these leaders have directed their efforts at Afghanistan, rather than Pakistan, and Islamabad as a result or otherwise hasn’t really focused on them, it said.

So does this mean the United States is building a case for widening military operations inside Pakistan to include Baluchistan, where Mullah Omar is believed to have long operated from, heading a leadership council known as the Quetta shura? U.S. drone strikes have so far been confined to the sparsely populated Federally Administered Tribal Areas in the northwest and even these have evoked such revulsion among Pakistanis that America is now considered the number one threat to Pakistan, as a poll we wrote about earlier showed.

And so to take the covert “Predator war” to Baluchistan would seem to be crossing another red line in the minds of a majority of Pakistanis already seething at the assault on its sovereignty. “The moral, legal and political dimension of it  (drone attacks) remains a dilemma for the government and parliament. It is difficult for national pride of a nascent nuclear power to swallow that it allows frequent infringement of its sovereignty by an ally,” former Pakistani army lieutenant general Talat Masood wrote in The News

 Riedel doesn’t obviously spell out how the United States should go about taking on Mullah Omar, but is a drone strike possible in  a city such as Quetta ?  The risk of civilian casualties would seem to be high in any such operation either in Quetta or the teeming Afghan settlements and refugee camps in and around the city and nearby the Afghan  border.

And above all the use of such missile strikes remains a matter of debate. Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council of Foreign Relations, says if you were to measure the strikes against President Barack Obama’s stated objective of disrupting and dismantling al Qaeda and those responsible for 9/11 then the strikes must be judged to be ineffective. At best, he argues, it can be part of a national strategy toward Pakistan, and that is something that still hasn’t been put on the table.

“There’s almost no U.S. military policy on Pakistan. There’s limited foreign internal assistance in terms of counterinsurgency training. There are a very small number of [U.S.] troops [inside Pakistan]. The other part is large payment for the Pakistani army to conduct operations. That’s the extent of our military policy.”

[File photograph of a newspaper notice of the most wanted men including Osama bin laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar and  2) Baitullah Mehsud at a news conference last year]

An overwhelming majority of Americans support President Barack Obama’s decision to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, according to a Gallup poll this week. It said 65 percent approved the measure, with support among Republicans hitting 75 percent, making it one of the rare policy decisions where a president gets greater backing from those who identify with an opposing political party than his own.

And in a still greater boost for his young presidency, 77 percent of those who voted for the surge said they would also approve if  Obama decided to send another 13,000 troops to Afghanistan as many expect after a regional policy review.

What’s the reason for this support for American boots on the ground ? Is Afghanistan really the good war in a way that Iraq was not?

One clue could be found in another poll that Gallup did before the latest one. It showed that a majority of Americans believed that the war was going very or moderately badly for the United States in Afghanistan, continuing a trend that began in mid-2008. And fully 70 percent of those polled felt that the Taliban would re-take control if U.S. forces were withdrawn. So they likely view the decision to send more troops as unfortunate but necessary.

Another interesting finding that was that only 30 percent thought sending troops to Afghanistan was a mistake in contrast to the majority who consistently said from Octber 2008 that deployment in Iraq was a mistake. (more…)

America’s ramped-up Predator drone campaign against al Qaeda in Pakistan’s northwest is starting to pay off, according to U.S. and Pakistani intelligence authorities quoted in a clutch of media reports.

Eleven of the group’s top 20 “high value targets” along the Afghan border have been eliminated in the past six months  Newsweek magazine reports, citing Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The strikes by the unmanned drones circling high above Pakistan’s rugged tribal areas have been so pin-pointed that in one case a missile fired at a hideout in North Waziristan didn’t just hit the right house, but the room in which Mustafa al-Misri (”Mustafa the Egyptian”) and several other Qaeda operatives were holed up. the magazine reports, quoting a Taliban sub-commander.

A U.S. counter-terrorism official goes so far as to suggest that the CIA-directed strikes have been so successful that it was possible to foresee a “complete al Qaeda defeat” in the mountainous region , according to this report in America’s National Public Radio.

Is that stretching the gains,  a bit too triumphalist a picture?

Al Qaeda’s leadership cadre had been “decimated” with up to a dozen senior and mid-level operatives killed as a  result of the strikes and the remaining leaders reeling from the attacks, U.S. officials say in the NPR report, adding achievements of the past several months should not be under-stated.

“In the past, you could take out the No. 3 al-Qaeda leader, and No. 4 just moved up to take his place,”  NPR quoted a U.S. official as saying. “Well, if you take out No. 3, No. 4 and then 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to revive the leadership cadre.”

(more…)

Keeping track of the many countries with a stake in Afghanistan — and the shifting alliances between them — is beginning to feel awfully like one of those school history lessons when you were supposed to understand the complex and tenuous balance of power whose breakdown led to World War One.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer became the latest to call for a regional solution to Afghanistan when he said this week that the United States and its NATO allies must directly engage with Iran if they are to win the war there. “If we are going to succeed in this game, we need to be playing on the right field,” he said. “And that means a more regional approach. To my mind we need a discussion that brings in all the relevant regional players: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, Russia and, yes, Iran.”

The idea of seeking Iran’s cooperation as part of a regional strategy for Afghanistan has been around for a while, as I have discussed in previous posts here, here and here. It gained currency during the U.S. presidential campaign among foreign policy analysts looking for an alternative to the policies of former president George W. Bush. But what seems to be new is a certain realpolitik creeping into the discussion after the inauguration of President Barack Obama turned a subject for debate into one of actual policy decisions.

Shi’ite Iran has reasons to cooperate with the United States over Afghanistan. It is deeply suspicious of the hardline Sunni ideology of the Taliban which regards Shi’ites as apostates. But at the same time, among the issues up for discussion is how far the United States and Iran can find common ground, given Washington’s concerns about Tehran’s nuclear programme and backing for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Then even if Washington were to find an accommodation with Iran over Afghanistan, where would Russia - one of the other regional players seen as crucial to a regional solution — fit into the picture?  According to this piece in Eurasia, Moscow might act to undermine any rapprochement between the United States and Iran, fearing this would damage its commercial interests and threaten its stranglehold on gas supplies to Europe.

Russia in turn seems to be flirting with China, by suggesting that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation could play a bigger role in stabilising Afghanistan, as discussed in this post. Like Iran, Russia is expected to demand a price for help over Afghanistan which in Moscow’s case may include 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.

And just in case Obama missed the point, the Moscow Times spelled it out in an op-ed before his inauguration. “Afghanistan may well define your foreign policy legacy the way Iraq defined Bush’s. 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.”

As if all that was not complicated enough, the attack on Mumbai in November last year has soured relations between India and Pakistan, dashing hopes that by improving relations between the two countries the United States might reduce tensions in Afghanistan, where both have competed for influence.

In the early years of the last century, it took only the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo to show the weakness of the balance of power that had held the peace until then. So what do we make of today’s shifting allegiances? No more than the bedding down of a new century, and the jostling for influence under a newly elected U.S. administration? Or a cause for fear?

(Photos by Bob Strong in Afghanistan)

Central Asia is much in demand these days, whether as a transit route for U.S. and NATO supplies to Afghanistan as an alternative to Pakistan or for its rich resources, including oil and gas.

So it’s worth noting that India has been hosting Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev as its guest of honour at its Republic Day celebrations while signing a bunch of trade deals in the process. According to reports in the Indian media, including in the Business Standard, the Week and the Times of India,  India is seeking supplies of uranium for its nuclear plants and access to Kazakhstan’s oil and gas and in return would be expected to support Kakazhstan’s bid for membership of the World Trade Organisation. (India’s state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) said on Saturday it had signed a deal to explore for oil and gas in Kazakhstan.)

Before anyone gets too carried away about India stealing a march in Central Asia, this Indian website adds a note of realism: “India’s strategy towards Central Asian countries has been no different than its strategy towards African nations, and can be only summarized as ‘playing catch-up with the Chinese’,” it says. “In this new “Great Game” of the century, India is consistently assuming the role of “Johnny-come-lately” to China in Central Asia.”

That said, it still struck me as an interesting signpost in the competition between Asia and the U.S-led west for resources and influence, with Central Asia likely to become increasingly important both as a source of energy and as a supply route to Afghanistan.

The significance of this competition is unlikely to be lost on Russia which, according to this article by former Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar ,could end up playing off the United States against China.  He writes that while Russia does not want to see the United States and NATO defeated in Afghanistan, nor does it want them to use Central Asian supply routes to Afghanistan as an excuse to win access to the region’s oil and gas. “Russian experts estimate that the proposed Caspian transit route could eventually become an energy transportation route in reverse direction, which would mean a strategic setback for Russia in the decade-long struggle for the region’s hydrocarbon reserves.” So as part of this complex balancing act, he says, it is looking for a bigger role for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — dominated by Russia and China — in stabilising Afghanistan.

Critics of the Bush administration acknowledged that former vice-president Dick Cheney got the importance of Central Asia even as they condemned his methods. Now India is jumping in on the act.  How is the new administration of President Barack Obama going to approach Central Asia, while juggling relations with Russia, trying to turn the tide in Afghanistan and reducing U.S. dependence on Pakistan?

(Photos: President Nursultan Nazarbayev inspects guard of honour in New Delhi/B. Mathur

Young hunter with his tame golden eagle in central Kazakhstan/Shamil Zumakov)

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has attacked the Afghan government over its failure to tackle corruption and inefficiency, saying that “the basic problem in Afghanistan is not too much Taliban; it’s too little good governance”.

In a strongly worded op-ed in the Washington Post, he says people in countries that have contributed troops to the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan are wondering how long its operation must last, “and how many young men and women we will lose carrying it out”.

“Afghans need a government that deserves their loyalty and trust; when they have it, the oxygen will be sucked away from the insurgency,” he says. “The international community must step up its support of the elected government, and, through it, the Afghan people. But we have paid enough, in blood and treasure, to demand that the Afghan government take more concrete and vigorous action to root out corruption and increase efficiency, even where that means difficult political choices.”

The comments appear to reflect increasing frustration with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and come as President-elect Barack Obama prepares to send up to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan to try to stabilise the country.  Other NATO members are expected to come under pressure to match the higher U.S. troop presence with greater commitments of their own.

As discussed in an earlier post, more troops means more casualties, not just because of the rise in numbers, but because of a perceived need for them to spread out among the population, using manpower rather than firepower to win over Afghans who have been alienated by civilian deaths.  That may prove hard to sell to sceptical Western populations already questioning their governments’ policies towards Afghanistan seven years after 9/11. (For an interesting round-up of articles and blogs, this website put together by those opposed to sending more troops is worth looking at.)

De Hoop Scheffer  – who calls for a regional approach to Afghanistan incorporating Pakistan and India –  says the cost of failure in Afghanistan would be ”instability in a highly unstable region; a haven for international terrorism; and massive suffering for the Afghan people”.  So given the challenges he outlines in his op-ed, what is the cost of success?

(Reuters file photos from Taloqan in Afghanistan)

Given the focus on U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan since 9/11, it’s easy to forget the regional context. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid try to set that right, calling for a regional approach that would take account of the interests not just of Afghanistan, but also of Pakistan, Russia, Iran, India and China.

“Both U.S. presidential candidates are committed to sending more troops to Afghanistan, but this would be insufficient to reverse the collapse of security there. A major diplomatic initiative involving all the regional stakeholders … is more important,” it says.

“No government in the region around Afghanistan supports a long-term U.S. or NATO presence there. Pakistan sees even the current deployment as strengthening an India-allied regime in Kabul; Iran is concerned that the United States will use Afghanistan as a base for launching ‘regime change’ in Tehran; and China, India, and Russia all have reservations about a NATO base within their spheres of influence and believe they must balance the threats from al Qaeda and the Taliban against those posed by the United States and NATO,” it adds. (more…)

America is in Afghanistan for the long haul and the sooner it tells its people the better it would be for its own sake, says top U.S. military scholar Anthony Cordesman in a study published by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Warning that the United States faced a crisis in the field, Cordesman says Washington has no choice but to commit more troops, more resources and time to stop the haemorrhaging. And even if the Taliban/al Qaeda momentum is decisively reversed in 2009/2010, this is a war that will last into the next presidency.

Some of the Powerpoint slides developed by the U.S. command in Afghanistan show timelines through 2019, he says. So, he says, it’s time to tell the American public the truth.  ”We need to stop the spin and liar’s contests and provide honest public reporting. We need enough transparency and credibility to get sustained Congressional, media and public support for a long war.”

“Stop “bs-ing” the American people. Tell them what new draft US intelligence assessments say, provide the level of transparent and honest reporting that prepares them for the necessary level of sacrifice.”

Others, notably the British, have spoken about the war in Afghanistan as unwinnable, amid reports on the possibility of opening talks with the Taliban. But Cordesman argues this is exactly the capitulation the Taliban are looking for. “The Taliban and its allies win if they simply outlast the NATO/ISAF and the U.S. and force the Afghan government in ways that make them part of government or give them de facto control of territory.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates also said that comments by the British military commander were “defeatist.” 

Incredible, actually, when you think about how the Taliban and al Qaeda have proved more than a match for the world’s only superpower, backed by some of the finest Western armies in the mountains of Afghanistan.  Rahimullah Yusufzai, journalist and an expert on Pakistan and Afghan security issues, says given the obvious inequality of the Afghan battle, it is remarkable how the Taliban have fought their way furiously into a position that has made them stakeholders in the fractious nation’s power game.

A small ill-equipped army of, at best, 5,000 Taliban fighters has made life difficult for the 70,000-plus U.S. and NATO forces, the 85,000-strong Afghan National Army, the more than 70,000 Afghan National Police, and scores of government-funded village defence militias.  

“The unthinkable has happened. The Taliban dreaded by many, loved by few, are back in contention,” he says in an article in The News. They first made their presence in the traditional southwestern strongholds of Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul. Nowadays they are able to organise attacks and maintain bases in faraway provinces such as Badghis and Faryab on the Turkmenistan border, Herat and Farah on the Iranian border, and finally provinces around Kabul such as Ghazni, Wardak, and Kapisa.

A colleague during a trip I made to Kabul last month told me he had seen a map in an aid group’s office which showed a large swathe of the country marked either in red,  indicating a no-go area, or yellow, which meant high risk. Only a small stretch of the north out of Kabul was green, considered safe to travel.

“We currently are losing and the trends have been consistent since 2004,” says Cordesman in his report.  There would not be any single moment of crisis in the Afghan-Pakistan War, but the militants would have the initiative if America went through another year of ”a flood of ideas, concepts and Powerpoint oversimplifications,” he says. “In practice most of them range from well-meaning nonsense to  re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

 His prescription: the U.S. must accept this is its war and there is no running away from it.  “Almost all the necessary added resources will come from America. They will not come from our allies, by creating an effective central government in Afghanistan  or by U.S. efforts to pressure or win support in Pakistan. The problems with NATO/ISAF, Karzai, Pakistan are known quantities where improvement may be possible to some degree, but this war will be won or lost by U.S. resources and actions.”

Peshawar is such an important city for Pakistan that it can be hard to write about it without sounding shrill.  It is significant strategically since it lies near the entrance to the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.  But it is also important emotionally – not only is it a Moghul city and an ancient Silk Route trading hub, but it is also a Pashtun town on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line , the ill-demarcated border between Pakistan and Afghanistan imposed by British colonial rulers that splits the Pashtun people of the region in two. For Pakistan, fighting for control of Peshawar is probably comparable to what France and Germany felt about Alsace Lorraine before World War Two.

So when the New York Times publishes an article about Peshawar being at risk of falling into Taliban hands  we must pay attention.  “In the last two months, Taliban militants have suddenly tightened the noose on this city of three million people, one of Pakistan’s biggest, establishing bases in surrounding towns and, in daylight, abducting residents for high ransoms,” it says. “The threat to Peshawar is a sign of the Taliban’s deepening penetration of Pakistan and of the expanding danger that the militants present to the entire region, including nearby supply lines for NATO and American forces in Afghanistan.”

The Daily Times says it more dramatically, with a Kiplingesque notion of what the fall of Peshawar to Taliban control would mean for Pakistan: “The Taliban are no longer at the gates of Peshawar, they’re inside, making their presence felt in the largest city in the NWFP (North West Frontier Province),” it says.

Pakistan has just launched an offensive against Taliban fighters near Peshawar  in an attempt to re-impose government control. As I said at the beginning, it’s hard not to sound shrill about a place that few outsiders understand. But history is in the making here, and the battle for Peshawar is one we all should watch.

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” (Or so said the British philosopher and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell.) So who is going to be left standing once U.S. and NATO forces have finished battling it out with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain came out with some interesting comments in a speech in Ohio last week on where he sees Afghanistan at the end of his first term in office in 2013, if he were to be elected president:

“The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated. U.S. and NATO forces remain there to help finish the job, and continue operations against the remnants of al Qaeda. The Government of Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in successfully adapting the counterinsurgency tactics that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan to its lawless tribal areas where al Qaeda fighters are based. The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven.”

Optimistic or realistic?

Digging around on the internet, you can find a different view. Back in April Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Chief of Asia Times Online, wrote that the Taliban were taking their inspiration from the Vietminh who chased the French out of what was known as Indochina in the 1950s.  He wrote that they were inspired by the Vietnamese commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who successfully employed guerrilla tactics against the French before crushing them in the battle of Dien Bien Phu  in 1954.

Taking up the theme, the website openDemocracy  followed up by saying that the west tends to assume that it alone is watching the lessons of Vietnam. ”It is as if “only” the United States (and by extension western forces or combatants in general) have the capacity or the interest to draw lessons from the past,” it said. It called the reference to the Taliban looking for  inspiration in Vietnam ”startling and ominous”.

“In the early 1950s, the Vietminh - faced with an imbalance between their own forces and conventional French military power - concentrated on attacking isolated garrisons in the northern part of Vietnam well away from the main colonial centres of control…  This strategy, combined with attacks on French supply-lines, gradually wore down the French military and political leadership’s resolve. Now, it seems, the Taliban aim to do the same against an equivalently “asymmetrical” enemy: Nato, and the International Security Assistance Force forces in Afghanistan.”

So do we go with McCain, who has his own experience of Vietnam? Or the historical parallels with France, which like the United States today in Afghanistan and Iraq, was struggling to cope with guerrilla warfare, did not know how to win over the hearts and minds of the local population, and faced economic crisis at home and a general public which was tired of war in faraway places?

I thought it would be interesting to ask one of the retired Reuters correspondents who had covered Vietnam whether it was legitimate to compare it to Afghanistan and got the following reply from Bernard Edinger, a French reporter who was sent in from Paris before the fall of Saigon in 1975 and also covered Kabul when the Russians first went in with ground troops in 1979:

“Yes, America’s opponents all dream of seeing the US helicopter its people out of Kabul the same humiliating way they flew out of Saigon. I stood on a rooftop opposite the embassy and watched the last choppers go as thousands of local Vietnamese clamouring to be evacuated were abandoned. As you know, the Communists did not win the war, the Americans lost it - at home. The press and much of the public had turned against the war to the point that the politicians just no longer thought it was worth fighting,” he wrote.

“Obviously domestic opposition to US involvement in Afghanistan is far less than that over Vietnam because the horror of the Taliban regime is already known and the Western public has seen the execution by rifle fire of kneeling women in midfield at half-time at Kabul soccer matches , the condemned men hanging from the goalposts etc … Also, opposition to Vietnam was led by students who had the threat of army service before them if the war lasted whereas the US only commits pro soldiers to the war today.”

“An outright Taliban victory over the US is out of the question … But in asymmetric warfare, ‘the strong lose if they don’t win and the weak win if they survive.’ I’m quoting others. The Pathans outlasted Kipling’s British Indian army (and even slit the throat of the British ambassador in his residence) and the Soviet Army. All they have to do is hang in there.”
  

 Any other views out there?