Stygius

Afghanistan blues

From a Steve Clemons post on the Iran-US-Afghanistan dynamic:

Today, Afghanistan is coming undone as the Taliban are back big time.  My colleague Peter Bergen has a very important and disturbing piece on this, "The Taliban: Regrouped and Rearmed" in today's Washington Post.

Also in the Post today:

The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world -- no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image -- has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

Oh my...

From The Blotter:

Osama bin Laden, America's most wanted man, will not face capture in Pakistan if he agrees to lead a "peaceful life," Pakistani officials tell ABC News.

The surprising announcement comes as Pakistani army officials announced they were pulling their troops out of the North Waziristan region as part of a "peace deal" with the Taliban.

If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden "would not be taken into custody," Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, "as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen."

This is the press secretary to the president of Pakistan.

In addition to the pullout of Pakistani troops, the "peace agreement" between Pakistan and the Taliban also provides for the Pakistani army to return captured Taliban weapons and prisoners.

"What this means is that the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism director.

A Pakistan-Taliban peace agreement?

The "defeated" Taliban

New York Times:

Afghan officials said “foreign and Afghan terrorists” were pouring into southern Helmand Province from neighboring Pakistan. The operation is among the most audacious by Taliban forces and their allies since the ouster of the Taliban government by the American-led coalition in 2001.

The spokesman for the coalition, Col. Tom Collins, told reporters in Kabul that “decisive operations will begin soon” to reclaim the area from the insurgents, but offered no details.

In the past, the Taliban have seized towns for a few hours before being routed by coalition and Afghan forces. This time, the insurgents have retained control of a town in the district of Garmser for two days, and government forces have fled.

Taliban on the rise

The LA Times examines the vacuum in Helmand Province, Afghanistan:

In "night letters," leaflets posted on doors or scattered along pathways in the darkness, the Taliban threatens to kill anyone who works for, or cooperates with, the government. The Islamist militia has executed numerous people who didn't listen.

Despite coalition claims that several insurgents have been killed in recent weeks, most in airstrikes, the Taliban and its allies continue to recruit new fighters with a deft combination of intimidation and persuasion, said Gen. Zahir Azemi, spokesman for the Defense Ministry.

Just two hours' drive from the capital, Kabul, villagers in the desert surrounding the city of Ghazni say insurgents launch regular attacks on police checkpoints, plant roadside bombs, kill government workers and burn schools. A year ago, security was good, they say.

Wake up, folks. This is just the beginning.

Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan...

. . . things are not going well, and America seems fundamentally oblivious. Christian Science Monitor.

Afghanistan chaos

The New York Times devotes a lot of space to the fighting in Afghanistan. One wonders if the coalition forces there are properly structured to deal with an insurgency that is increasingly exercising political power in the hinterlands.

Afghanistan and power

From American Footprints:

IWPR reports convincingly that the Taliban are more powerful than the government in some parts of southern Afghanistan.  Mainly as a show of this authority, they have banned automobiles in Ghazni province.

From IWPR, this passage chilled me:

“We very rarely see a police patrol or a government team to come to our village, but we see armed Taleban patrolling the area every day,” said Rahmatullah, a shopkeeper in Safaraz village. “Whom should we fear more?”

“This is a test of who rules the area,” said one Taleban commander, who did not wish to be named.

Doesn't it seem rather mad that Afghanistan, al-Qaeda's refuge, has become the invisible war in the United States?

Taliban family values

I won't comment much on this, since it would only be intemperate and I would just be stating the obvious. The Taliban is demonstrating its resurgent terror by attacking girls schools. The Globe and Mail:

They came in the dead of night, as they always do, bearing a message of hate. We will kill you. We will kill your family. We will burn this school to the ground.

"I have letters here, life-threat letters to me here were dropped, to my family, to my house, where I'm residing," Ehsan Ullah says. "Bullets were dropped at my house, that I should stop doing this job."

His voice quavers slightly as he speaks of teachers who have been bullied and terrorized, of students forced by their parents to abandon their studies. And yet, he says, he is not afraid.

Canada's Hamilton Spectator has an impressive piece as well.

The reinvigorated Taliban burns schools and beheads teachers for daring to offer education to girls. Judges steeped in decades of the most conservative form of Sharia law routinely send women and girls to prison for disobeying their father's choice in marriage, or deserting violent husbands. Rape victims end up facing charges of adultery.

And National Public Radio reports on the declining enrollment and attendance of girls as their schools and their teachers are intimindated and attacked.

Let's not pretend all is well, for doing so psychologically impedes us from properly fighting back.

A long spring for Afghanistan

The Taliban thinks it has found its tactical formula, to the detriment -- as ever -- of the Afghan people, and it looks like it is going to be a long spring for Afghanistan. The Seattle Times:

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, appearing with Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, said attacks within Afghanistan were up 20 percent between 2004 and 2005, suicide bombings increased "almost fourfold" and makeshift bombs, similar to those used in Iraq, had "more than doubled."

The Los Angeles Times:

One of the most disturbing trends has been a surge in the number of suicide bombings, which were rare in Afghanistan before the Taliban regime was toppled. Maples said that suicide attacks in Afghanistan had almost quadrupled in the last year and that the violence could accelerate as winter gives way to spring.

Maples also cited a rise in the use of improvised explosive devices, typically roadside bombs that can be detonated remotely. He said that the number of attacks using such bombs had doubled and that insurgents had "increasingly used beheadings to terrorize the local population."

The legitimacy and survivability of the Karzai Government is the key issue, which will go to the political relevance of the Taliban's insurgency, and thus to its long term endurance. Intuitively, it seems to me that Karzai and the Afghan Parliament are in a much better position than Iraq's. I don't know if that's saying much though.

Ahmed Rashid: Osama's "friendship zone"

The bestselling author of the now seminal Taliban has an important Washington Post op-ed.  In it, Ahmed Rashid, reflects on President Bush's upcoming visit to Pakistan:

When President Bush lands in Islamabad later this week, it may be the closest he ever comes to being in the same neighborhood as Osama bin Laden. His nemesis is probably only a few hours drive away in Pakistan's Pashtun belt, now considered to be al Qaeda Central and one of the world's most dangerous regions.

During the past 12 months or so, CIA and Pentagon officials have quietly modified the line they employed for three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- that bin Laden was hiding out "in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border." Now the same officials say with some confidence that he is "not based in Afghanistan." Whatever ambiguity there was in the past is gone: Bin Laden is in Pakistan.

What's left is the question: What are the United States and its ally, Pakistan, doing about it?

The stock government line is that Bin Laden is hiding, or "on the run." This is so inadequately reassuring it's not really worthy of dismissal, and it's nowhere defended. (Well, I suppose there's always Victor Davis Hanson: "Bin Laden is in theory "loose," but can't go anywhere except the wild Afghan-Pakistan border or perhaps the frontiers of Kashmir." So -- beyond displaying an ignorance of Pakistan's frontier provinces -- does that mean Bin Laden isn't loose, since he's only "loose"? Anyway . . . .) Rashid:

The region has become a haven for bin Laden and a base for Taliban raids across the border back into Afghanistan which they had fled.

Not that you'd be able to tell any of that from what Bush administration officials have been saying. Almost everything the administration claims about the al Qaeda leader is tinged with bravado and untruthfulness. "We are dealing with a figure who has been able to hide, but he's on the run," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said earlier this month. Here in Pakistan, however, the view is different. Bin Laden is not considered to be on the run, but well protected by friends who are making his life as comfortable as possible.

After all, his number two, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, appears to have a busy social calendar in Pakistan's Pashtun belt. U.S. missiles narrowly missed him at a dinner party held in his honor on Jan. 13.

Since Pakistan's government cannot exercise its sovereignty over these areas, is it accurate to say Osama bin Laden is running around "in hiding," or that Bin Laden has vacated Afghanistan and established a new base for al-Qaeda's operations? A large void of a distinction separates the two.

Al Qaeda's money, inspiration and organizational abilities have helped turn Pakistan's Pashtun belt into the extremist base it is today, but U.S. and Pakistani policies have helped more. Although the Taliban and al Qaeda extremists were routed from Afghanistan by U.S. forces, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's refusal to put enough U.S. troops on the ground let the extremists escape and regroup in Pakistan's Pashtun belt. The Taliban settled in Balochistan where they had originated before 1994, while al Qaeda members hid in the tribal agencies they knew well. Bin Laden had built tunnels and caves there for the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in the 1980s.

And Rashid continues with a cruelly illuminating look at Musharraf's  failed strategy towards the Taliban and jihadist Arabs running amok in his country. Worth your time.

Cross-posted to American Footprints; and why not Blue Force too while I'm at it.

Update: Via masterchef, if you can stand some graphic photos of the Taliban's victims, go read "The Taliban's bloody foothold in Pakistan", from the Asia Times.