USA'S AFGHAN OPS: CRITICAL ANALYSIS --2
by B.Raman
With winter just about three weeks away, the US-led
operations against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's terrorist set-up in
Afghanistan are yet to register any significant forward movement.
Possible early indicators of a forward movement would
be:
* Weakening of the will of the Taliban militia in the
North to hold on to Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul.
* Defections in the South.
* Surfacing of sub-tribal and sub-regional rivalries
amongst the Afghan Pashtoons.
None of these indicators is discernible so far. On the
contrary, despite intensified US air strikes on the frontline in the
North, the Taliban militia units consisting largely of Pakistani jehadis
buttressed by a small component of Arabs from bin Laden's 055 Brigade,
have held on to their positions. Neither the Uzbeks from Abdul Rashid
Dostum's militia nor the Tadjiks from the Panjshir Valley have been able
to make any noticeable forward movement. It has been reported that Arab
mercenaries of the 1980s vintage, who had gone back to their respective
countries after the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89, have started coming back
to Afghanistan to assist the Taliban.
While the Northern Alliance has been blaming the lack of
a co-ordinated approach by the US for their inability to make
headway, which is possibly correct, another reason is that the Northern
Alliance has generally been good, despite the legendary reputation of the
late Ahmed Shah Masood, only in a defensive war of attrition and not in an
aggressive forward-moving war of occupation. This was evident ever since
the Taliban drove it out of Kabul in September,1996.
Moreover, just he had organised his terrorist network
into autonomous cells each capable of deciding and acting independently
without the need for directions from the top, bin Laden had helped the
Taliban organise its various militia units too into autonomous formations,
capable of deciding and acting independently without the constant need for
directions from Mullah Mohammad Omer, the Amir. As a result, even in the
event of the Amir being killed in the US strikes, they are unlikely to be
demoralised and would be capable of keeping up their fighting.
On the other hand, the late Ahmed Shah Masood and
Dostum had made their militias personality-centric, revolving round their
respective personalities. The troops of the Northern Alliance are,
therefore, yet to recover their elan, which was shaken by Masood's
assassination last month. They are still hesitant to engage the Taliban in
a direct confrontation and have been finding one excuse or the other to
avoid a confrontation.
Their much-vaunted fighting spirit is to be seen more in
the TV visuals than on the ground. Having said that, it must be added that
the US too has added to the confusion by its inability to decide to what
extent it should allow Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's self-reinstated
and self-extended Chief of the Army Staff (COAS),self-styled Chief
Executive, self-promoted President and self-proclaimed popular
leader, to influence its operational decisions.
Having initially agreed to help the US in crushing the
Taliban and bin Laden's set-up, he has been taking advantage of the USA's
over-anxiety not to do anything which might weaken him to preserve the
post-1994 Pakistani strategic gains in Afghanistan. His entreaties to the
US not to bomb the Taliban's forward positions and to accept the so-called
moderate Taliban leaders as part of any future dispensation are to be seen
in this perspective.
Initially, the US heeded his request. Subsequently,
realising that the Taliban will not probably collapse unless its hardcore
Pakistanis and Arabs are neutralised, it started bombing their units
around Kabul, resulting in the deaths of about 40 Pakistanis, most of them
from the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), designated by the US in October,1997,
as a foreign terrorist organisation under a 1996 anti-terrorism law of the
US.
After their body bags led to violent incidents in
Karachi, the US has relented in its bombing of the positions of the
Pakistanis in the frontline. This zig-zag policy, apparently motivated by
an over-attention to Musharraf's sensitivities, is unlikely to lead to
tangible results.
The capture and reported execution by the Taliban
of Abdul Haq, a Pashtoon commander of pre-1993 vintage, widely seen
in the Pashtun belt on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border as the
CIA's cat's paw, was waiting to happen. If the US had its eyes on him as a
possible future leader of post-Taliban (presuming the Taliban collapses)
Afghanistan, it should have refrained from any action which might have
damaged his credibility in the eyes of his own community and should not
have egged him on to clandestinely enter Taliban-controlled territory.
His clandestine entry into the Jalalabad area, where he
used to have a large following a decade ago, but no longer was designed to
create a split in the Taliban through the dregs of his once-upon-a-time
following and to collect intelligence regarding the whereabouts of bin
Laden, who used to live in Jalalabad till September, 1996, when he shifted
to Kandahar. This ham-handed covert operation shows how out of touch the
CIA is with ground realities in Afghanistan.
Abdul Haq was the most unsuitable person for this type
of covert action because of his well-known identity, physical disability
and high-profile nature. Even before his entry into Afghanistan, it was
being widely speculated in Peshawar and Quetta that he was going to
Afghanistan under the covert action plan approved by President Bush, with
a special funding of US $ one billion, for the physical elimination of bin
Laden.
The Taliban, which has a large following in Peshawar and
Quetta, must have been aware of this speculation and would have been
waiting for him. If there were any missing links in its information, these
would have been filled up by the large number of serving and retired
officers of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who have been guiding
the Taliban on how to counter the US.
The fact that Musharraf has not acted against this ISI
brainstrust secretly guiding the Taliban would show that, as is his wont
as the "great survivor", he has been keeping his legs in both
the boats---ostensibly and openly helping the US to crush the Taliban and
covertly preventing the Taliban from being crushed.
The Islamic parties continue their demonstrations
against the US and Musharraf. A significant development during the week
was that Qazi Hussain Ahmad's Jammat-e-Islami (JEI) followers have started
coming out into the streets to join the protests by the other Islamic
parties.
After nearly three weeks of air strikes and at least one
ground operation, it continues to be a war stuck in the first gear.
The junta has not so far explained the reasons for the
detention of Dr.Bashiruddin Mehmood, the retired nuclear scientist, and
one of his former colleagues (Chaudhry Abdul Majeed) from the Pakistan
Atomic Energy Commission. Speculation about the anthrax trail to the US
starting from Pakistan has been given added currency by rumours of
the secret arrest and transfer to the US for interrogation of one Qasim
Saeed Mohammad, a Yemeni student from Taiz in Yemen, who was a student of
the Microbiology Department of the Karachi University. He was allegedly
absenting himself from the University since the beginning of October and
had gone into hiding.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: corde@vsnl.com
)
