ENDURING FREEDOM OR ENDURING TERRORISM?
by B.Raman
In launching Operation Enduring Freedom through
sustained air strikes on the so-called Taliban infrastructure in
Afghanistan on October 7,2001, the USA and the UK were acting under two
pressures:
* The pressure of public opinion in the US, which wanted
quick and visible reprisal.
* The pressure of time since the advent of winter and
snow in Afghanistan next month is likely to make the operations
difficult and messy till May next year.
Northward movement from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border
region towards Kabul should be possible even in winter, but southward
movement from the Panjshir Valley and other areas in the North controlled
by the Northern Alliance would be very difficult, if not impossible, once
winter sets in.
The Taliban has been the initial target of the US and
the UK. Since it does not allow the print and the visual media to
operate in the areas controlled by it, the only information of the impact
of the three nights of the air strikes has come from the US, the UK, the
Northern Alliance and the Taliban itself.
The Pakistani military junta has asked the local media
not to give too much publicity to the US and UK claims of success lest
public opinion be further inflamed. The accounts of the Northern
Alliance have been exaggerated and those of the US and the UK
misleading. The statements of the Taliban are difficult to verify.
According to the Taliban:
* There have been about 40 civilian casualties. The
Taliban has not yet confirmed the Iranian accounts of the deaths of its
Air Force chief and a militia officer in the US air strikes.
* All the leaders of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden
and the members of the brain trust of his International Islamic Front
for Jehad Against the US and Israel are safe. While the house of
Mulla Mohammad Omar, the Amir of the Taliban, at Kandahar was hit by the
air strike, he escaped unhurt.
* There has been no split in the organisation.
The Taliban's Air Force has been practically grounded since
the UN sanctions were imposed in 1999. The religious militia was not
infrastructure dependent and its command and control and communication
systems were primitive by US standards. It was more dependent on
couriers than on wireless.
On the advice of bin Laden, the Taliban leaders had cut
down the use of modern means of communications lest the American missiles
zero in on them. Moreover, the militia units operating in different
areas are highly autonomous and capable of operating independently
without the need for frequent communications with their leadership.
Claims such as the "destruction of the Taliban's
command and control system", "radar network" etc made
by the US are meaningless. The Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is not
like Iraq in 1991, where the US destruction of such infrastructures
totally paralysed the field formations of the Iraqi Army and denied
them the benefit of guidance and directions from their headquarters.
The Taliban's field formations don't need such guidance and directions on
a continuous basis.
Moreover, many of the infrastructures destroyed by the
air strikes had actually been set up by the Pakistani Army and
intelligence establishment for the benefit of its units serving in
Afghanistan. After the Pakistani withdrawal of these units and their
equipment, there was hardly anything left there.
US claims of having destroyed many training
infrastructures of the Al Qaeda have also to be treated with
reservation. Terrorist organisations such as the Al Qaeda do not run
their training institutions like one runs West Point, or the Indian
Military Academy, with batches of trainees passing out one after the other
at regular intervals.
Al Qaeda's training camps were improvised set-ups made
of tents or thatched huts, which were dismantled after each batch
completed its training and set up again when the next batch reported for
training.
Claims of material damage to the training camps are,
therefore, meaningless. However, if the attacks on terrorist
training camps are made in stealth without advance warnings, one could
kill a large number of trainees as happened during the cruise missile
attacks ordered by the then US President, Mr.Bill Clinton, in October,
1998, but this time, there was so much publicity surrounding the allied
action and such a long delay in starting action, that the trainees would
have had sufficient time to go into hiding.
The only way of neutralising the Taliban and the
International Islamic Front's brain trust in Afghanistan is,
therefore, through sustained ground action. Successful ground
action from either Pakistan or Uzbekistan would be difficult due to the
hostility of the local population to the US and the UK in Afghanistan as
well as in Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
Thus, the US and the UK would be ultimately left with no
other option but to depend on the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban
groups to carry out the ground action. The only other group, which
appears to be inclined to assist the allied forces, is that of Ismail
Khan, the Shia leader of Herat. However, he is dependent on Iran for
finances and material supplies. It remains to be seen whether
Teheran, which is afraid of the "war" leading to a destabilising
US presence in Afghanistan----just as Beijing is---- would help him launch
an operation against the Taliban from Herat.
No post-Taliban dispensation in Afghanistan could lead
to stability without the support of the Pashtuns. Presently, the
only Pashtun leaders outside the Taliban fold capable of energetic action
are Gulbuddin Heckmatyar of the Hizbe Islami, who has reportedly been
living in Teheran since 1996, and Abdul Haq, who has been in touch with
the CIA and was reportedly in Washington DC before September 11.
Pakistan might like Gulbuddin to occupy an important
position in any future set-up. He dislikes India and has had a long
history of contacts with Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment
since the days of Z.A.Bhutto, when Maj.Gen.Nasirullah Babar, the then head
of the Afghan division of the ISI, was his handling officer.
However, Gulbuddin had always been anti-Zahir Shah and
has been angry with Pakistan and the US for ditching him in 1994 and
creating the Taliban in order to use it as an operational asset against
Iran and to facilitate the gas and oil pipelines from Turkmenistan to
Pakistan via Afghanistan in which UNOCAL, the politically influential US
company, was interested.
Also, Gulbuddin has recently been critical of the US
action against the Taliban and bin Laden. The anti-bin Laden and
anti-Taliban rhetoric of the Bush and Blair Administrations is going to
come in the way of a successful execution of their operational plans.
By personalising the campaign around the personage of
bin Laden, Mr.Bush and Mr.Blair have given bin Laden the halo of a
religious leader, which he did not have before September 11. Large
sections of the Muslim Ummah, including in India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and
Indonesia, have come to look upon him as a courageous protector of their
religion.
Moreover, he has become a hero in the entire Pashtun
belt. The "war" is no longer looked upon as one against
international terrorism. Instead, it has come to be perceived as a
"war" against Islam and, more particularly, as a "war"
against the Pashtuns.
Mr.Bush and Mr.Blair have committed the same mistake as
Mrs. Indira Gandhi did before November, 1984, by personalising the
counter-terrorism campaign in Punjab around the personage of Bhindranwale.
India had to pay a heavy price for it during the next 12 years through the
tragic assassinations of Mrs.Gandhi and Gen.Vaidya and the deaths of
hundreds of civilians at the hands of the terrorists.
Under the present circumstances, it is doubtful
whether the Pashtun leaders, even if they dislike the Taliban, would
co-operate whole-heartedly with the allied forces. US hopes of a
revolt inside the Taliban itself against the Amir could be belied.
At present, the US and UK plans seem to revolve around:
* A quick commando action by their special forces in
Kabul to free the eight Western humanitarian workers of Shelter Now
International, who are detained there;
* Capture of Kabul and holding it under allied
control till winter sets in. This will split the Taliban forces fighting
against the Northern Alliance from those in the South and enable the US
and the UK to provide air cover to the Northern Alliance to facilitate
its advance to Kabul without having to use any Pakistani or Uzbek
airport for this purpose;
* Withdrawal from Kabul after the Northern Alliance
troops reach there by mid-November;
* Similar assistance to the forces of Ismail Khan,
Abdul Haq and Gulbuddin (if he is willing to co-operate under Pakistani
pressure) to occupy Herat, Kandahar, Khost and Jalalabad.
* Help ex-King Zahir Shah to bring all these groups
together and form a national unity government, which could go after bin
Laden and his dregs, if they are still around by that time.
The successful materialisation of this scenario would
depend on the following:
* Musharraf being able to control the growing anti-US
and anti-UK feelings in the NWFP, Balochistan and the FATA and in the
lower and middle ranks of the Pakistan Armed Forces. The longer
the action lasts without decisive results, the weaker his position would
become. He is in the unenviable position of being damned if the
US-UK operations against bin Laden and the Taliban succeed and being
damned if they don't.
* The Governments of other Islamic States being able to
tightly control the similar surge of anti-Western feelings. If
they do not succeed, there would be serious dangers of instability in
Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Uzbekistan. If the Bush
Administration is unwise enough to extend the present operations to
cover Iraq too, it could prove suicidal.
Ultimately, bin Laden, alive or dead, would continue to
haunt the world in general and the US and the UK in particular, for years
to come just as Bhindranwale haunted Punjab for nearly 12 years.
But, Bhindranwale was a purely local phenomenon with very little following
outside India. India suffered from the depredations of his
followers, but not the rest of the world except for isolated incidents
such as the blowing up of the Kanishka aircraft of Air India in June,
1985. The US and the UK have transformed bin Laden into an Ummah-wide
phenomenon, threatening peace, stability and the economic prosperity of
vast areas of the world.
The present "war" as being waged by the US and
the UK is unlikely to see the end of international terrorism fed by
religious fanaticism. It will, most probably, be the beginning of a
new and more virulent form of punishment terrorism of the kind witnessed
on September 11. No country, having a sizable Muslim population, and
no economy would be safe from its debilitating impact.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: corde@vsnl.com
)
