Arab News Blog

This is a guest essay by Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, University of California, Berkeley, one of our country’s foremost academic specialists in comparative politics.:

“…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something
familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by
the process of repression.”– Sigmund Freud.

On assuming office, President Obama shifted US military action from Iraq to Afghanistan and then, more squarely, to Pakistan, where he claimed the terrorists responsible for 911 were hiding. In doing so, he tacitly acknowledged the nefarious character of the rationales of the Bush administration in invading Iraq, rationales that are now widely accepted as being cynical fabrications to wage a war that was planned well before the Trade Towers were destroyed.

Then, on November 24th, 2009, in the drum-beat that preceded the announcement of additional troops to be sent to the Afghan “theater,” the President decisively announced his intent to “finish the job.” With all the untruths that the American public heard about Desert Storm, Operation Enduring Freedom (earlier concluded in 2003) and the Afghan war, (earlier won in 2001), one might ask what this “job” is. Why has the administration decided to induct “moderate” Taliban into the “democratic process” underway in Afghanistan and relocate the core of its military campaign in Pakistan’s province of Balochistan?

To make Americans believe that this is still a war against Al-Qaida is disturbingly easy. There is a romance to this war that has an particular exonerating charge for the collective American psyche: A black president forcefully pursuing “lawless” “tribes” across inhospitable, dangerous terrain. The silent, sneaky enemy that blends with the terrain: The heady rush of the frontier myth without the off-putting eventuality of chattel slavery.

A similar collective need is at work in Great Britain, where a palpable nostalgia for Empire mingles with the fear of being over-run by post-colonial migrants. No surprise, then, that the long, traumatic decline of the British Empire (in which three full scale wars were lost to the Afghan) resonates with American efforts to heal the wound inflicted by the Vietnam debacle. The “job” Obama wants to “finish” has many facets. One of them has to do with re-writing national history and then believing it.

By the time “conspiracy theories” are proven true they are typically irrelevant. More importantly, they are normalized. In the United States, where the art of “spin” has become central to governance, policy drift is retroactively streamlined and rationalizations sprout up like so many mushrooms in the rain. Invoking “Conspiracy theory” allows us to dismiss unpleasant realities. Yet we all know that conspiracies occur. At the time conspiracies are afoot we retreat from naming them because we resist challenging the veracity of those we have endowed with authority.

The word “conspiracy” conjures a one-track, goal oriented operation pursued to achieve a specific, limited objective in a planned fashion. By this measure, the war being waged by the United States in Afghanistan and, now, in Pakistan, is neither a “conspiracy” or a “coincidence”: It is a serial effort to achieve two, much broader goals. First, it is a belated and doomed push to gain access to Central Asian oil and LNG resources. This endeavor began with the easy-to-market but unachievable goal of stabilizing Afghanistan by eliminating the Taliban, demolishing “Al-Qaida Central,” and finding a friend in Kabul.

But after the first invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban re-consolidated, Al-Qaida Central moved on (and will continue to do so), and the Afghans were not pacified. The next serial effort, currently underway, is much more insidious. It involves securing “other routes” to Central Asia, routes that must go through either Iran or through Pakistan and Afghanistan. On January 11, 2010 we heard General Petraeus say that bombing the nuclear facilities in Iran was not “ruled out” and that no new elite force of the US army “guards” Pakistan’s nuclear cite at Kahuta. Now we hear Gates protest that the US has no designs on Pakistan’s territory. The larger cause to which all of these efforts is dedicated is to stem China’s massive economic and political influence in South and Central Asia. Wait and watch: very shortly we will hear minority groups in the CARs and in Xinjiang Province cry out for democracy and human rights.

Securing passage to Central Asia would involve reshaping the geo-political landscape of the zone stretching from the Straight of Hormuz to the India-Pakistan border. Under the friendly gaze of the illegitimate and corrupt leadership in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with substantial support from India, the audacious project of dismembering Pakistan is well underway. Therefore, “Af-Pak”: a border first dissolved by an acronym and now brazenly violated by foreign troops. The on-going “surge” taking place on the Af-Pak border is the new chapter in a book about global hegemony. If the lawless tribes slither across the border and hide in caves on both sides, why should the United States army respect national sovereignty?

Seriality and Synchronicity

The dichotomy between “coincidence” and “conspiracy” theory is wrong-headed. US policy is both and neither: it is a serial effort to achieve a moment of synchonicity in which it would claim the hegemony that the collapse of the USSR promised, but failed to deliver. Seriality refers to groupings of apparently random events that seek to achieve goals that are actually quite stable. Seriality identifies the underlying thrust of policies that are redeployed repetitively, the surface manifestations of which are neither causal nor coincidental. Synchronicity, in contrast, describes temporal confluences when vivid and meaningful in patterns of seriality coalesce in same-time. In both serial patterns and synchronic moments, there are winners and losers. The former produces lingering conflicts; the latter fundamentally reshapes the terrain of global power. Traced together, seriality and synchronicity allow us to recognize the relationship between past and future events in present- time in contexts where we have incomplete information.

The would-be synchronic moment in global politics today is geographically situated in the West and South Asia. Within the region it is focused on “Af-Pak”. The fulcrum is the province of Balochistan. And within Balochistan, the pivot is the dusty, obscure coastal town of Gwadar. Gwadar has a spanking new deep water port. Wheels within wheels. Devices within devices.

Since 1979 seriality has been the idiom of US foreign and military politics in West Asia. The current serial effort is dedicated to fomenting secessionism and civil strife in Iran and Pakistan, while co-opting “moderate” Afghan Taliban and supplying the Baloch guerillas on both sides of the Pakistan-Iran border. Citing instability and the obvious dangers of weapons of mass destruction Washington has issued a clarion call to mobilize international sentiment against the Islamic Republic of Iran and put in place a military contingency plan to seize control of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. Solutions to the various “humanitarian crises” that would logically follow in the wake of state failure in both countries opens up the contingency of engineering regime change in Iran or redrawing borders such that the long awaited pipeline to Central Asia can be constructed. At the heart of this trajectory is a bigger geo-strategic ambition, namely, to contain China and prevent the Russians from using their energy resources to expand their influence in Europe. By now it is clear that China can out-produce anyone in consumer goods. The wars of the future are about energy. On account of being in the ground, energy resources are geographically stable. The will to hegemony, therefore, is now centered in territorial control of the colonial variety. Quite contrary to the claim that “globalization” is a deterritorializing process, the wars of the future will be about land. They already are.

There is a primitive and well worn logic at work in the Af-Pak war. In polyglot Af-Pak, where dozens of opposition groups and “insurgents” exist, or can be made to exist, destabilization is easy to arrange. But, for two important reasons, US seriality in Af-Pak is not going to coalesce into the synchronic moment when the shattered and war-torn region finally submits to hosting the pipeline that would deliver energy to the West via the Indian Ocean and overtake the Chinese in Central Asia.

First, public sentiment in the global south has permanently turned a corner. This is not because American rhetoric about democracy and freedom has rung hollow for some time now, or that the neo-liberal economic agenda has been discredited on a global scale. It is because China provides a new pedagogy of capitalist development that is vastly more attractive than the American promise of (largely undelivered) freedoms. The inconvenient truth about freedom delivery was announced to a shocked but thankfully small American reading public in 2006, when the erstwhile Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board wrote a book with that one memorable sentence: “The Iraq War,” said Greenspan, “is largely about oil.” It is 2010, and the war(s) are still about oil. This fact has not escaped the notice of the Af-Pak(istani)s. But it took the authority of Greenspan to exhume this “conspiracy theory” and resurrect it as an unassailable truth. By the time it happened, no one was interested anymore. We had moved on to Af-Pak.

American activities in Iraq, Iran and Af-Pak are ineffective, costly and brutal serial responses to China’s ascent and Russia’s economic recovery. Meanwhile, China, Russia and the Central Asian Republics (CARs) have quietly patched together a powerful alliance based on pure self interest that gives China access to Central Asian oil, Russia the assurance that Europe will remain dependent on Russian oil and the CARs the promise of genuine economic development funded by China. The Turkmenistan-China oil pipeline opened on December 14th 2009, the same day a deal for constructing a 1,833 kilometer pipeline connecting Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan fields was signed. The density of the international reconfiguration that undergirds these developments has gone largely unnoticed by the experts. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan (with Pakistan, India, Iran and Mongolia as observers) has conducted joint military exercises, regularly meets to discuss economic initiatives and recently considered forming a gas cartel. The world is finding new ways of articulating and deploying power that, by virtue of being plainly and brazenly self interested, are actually attractive. The Chinese do not invest in Africa to promote democracy; everyone knows it; and Africans are thankful for it.

Second, like the grab-and-go model of US international economic transactions, the American geo-strategic strategy of “managed chaos” is broken beyond repair. This is the strategy by which chaos is first created and then set on a preferred course. The problem for the US is that the American will to manage is not matched by capacity. This mismatch is the unstable fault-line where myriad and mysterious branches of US intelligence, counter-intelligence, local collaborators, mercenary forces and so on are at work. The rubbing point is that the nefarious arms of the US military machine are pursuing radically different strategies that are more often than not at odds with each other. In its effort to rise to the challenge of adjusting to a “new kind of war,” the ever more fragmented covert, private and informal combatants in the pay of US tax payers have no idea what they are doing. Chaos, in other words, has become the internal (dis)organizational idiom of the American military machine. Starting with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the very core of US military command and intelligence agencies incrementally lost control over the activities of the ever more mysterious agencies they are supposed to coordinate and oversee. Add to this the radical intervention of heretofore untested technologies of war—the dissonance between the drone operator living with his family in a Nevada suburb and the soldier on the ground in Helmand.

An important aspect of the failure of the logic of managed chaos is that the ever growing number of small radical combatant groups involved in the Af-Pak conflict are actually more organized, more informed and more disciplined than the “new” US army. Cooperation between “insurgent” groups in Af-Pak is governed by a fluid set of animosities and alliances that, in turn, are floating on aid and arms provided by a host of global and regional parties. Whatever they may do at any given moment, the lawless tribes are actually not lawless, nor are they confused about what they want. The problem for the United States on the ground in Af-Pak is severe: If US command is innocent of the activities of its own armed forces, how could it possibly be reading those of the mercurial enemy? This is not simply a matter of getting rid of the private contractors who are not governed by military law; it literally involves the recreation of the American military machine and the re-disciplining of the American military mind around some new totemic idea of purpose and authority. Many around the world are relieved by the enormity of this task.

Today Pakistan is fighting three wars of international providence and confronting four secessionist movements in the provinces of Sindh, Balochistan the North West Frontier Province and in Karachi. Managed chaos is always tragic for the unfortunate targets of management; it is even more tragic when the manager disintegrates. While the geo-strategic and economic goals of the United States in the region have not changed since 1979, what is going on in Af-Pak is just plain chaos—seriality run amok. One would think that it would be easy enough to arrange a civil war in Af-Pak. This would suit President Obama well, in the same way as declaring the end of Guantanamo racked up his ratings with liberals and constitutional lawyers while permitting him to keep the “facility” open as a half-way house for alleged terrorists before they were shipped off to countries where torture is routine. America does not torture (in America), it out-sources the gruesome job. But chaos in Af-Pak? Easy to create, difficult to control.

Setting the Stage: Neo-Liberal Reforms (1979-) and the Secessionist Provinces

Pakistan is a federal country where the central government has all but failed and the only stable institution – the military—might be on the verge of fragmenting under precisely the kinds of conflicting loyalties I described above. Like other cash-strapped developing countries, neo-liberal reforms in Pakistan have meant the whole-sale privatization of land, water, minerals and energy. Each of the four provinces in Pakistan are endowed with unique resources that create very different economic incentive structures as they integrate into international markets and each has a distinctive linguistic and cultural history that provides the terrain for historically “verifiable” claims for secession. All four provinces have dominant political parties that are at odds with each other. If international integration built on these legacies, the Af-Pak war has pushed them to the brink.

The basic infrastructural and labor requirements that are wired into the different economies created through international investment has broadened regional fissures in the most basic way possible. The privatization of land and water in the Punjab and Sindh, leasing of mineral and gas rich regions in Balochistan and the consolidation of poppy growing regions in NWFP and Afghanistan, is creating ties with international corporate counter-parts that are world players locked into cut-throat competition. The advent of new internationalized property regimes has meant that mineral rich Balochistan, land and water rich Punjab (and to some extent Sindh) are integrating into international markets in very different ways.

To be sure, these property regimes put local farmers at risk, (thereby creating new waves of urban migration), deplete aquifers with ultra-modern drilling techniques, (thereby contributing to an already alarming water shortage), use capital intensive agricultural machinery (thereby creating unemployment), but importantly, they also stir up centrifugal political forces in the provinces. Particularly in the megalopolis of Karachi, the financial and industrial center of Pakistan, muhajirs (migrants to Pakistan at partition in 1947) and their powerful political party, the Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (MQM) has deployed a robust imagined history of being “separate” from Pakistan. They possesses the resources and the human capital to conceive of an independent future. This imagined future involves the pursuit of the “city-state” strategy of international integration. The unreasonable but vibrant dream here is to compete with the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. The MQM has taken a particularly hard line against allowing refugees into Karachi, followed by Sindh and Balochistan. Much of the recent violence in Karachi is related to a massive influx of refugees from the war zone.

Added to the on-going hot war in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the NWFP, these structural fissures, based in different forms of production and extraction create the dangerous potential of a further rift between the provinces. This is a nightmare scenario because the vast majority of the formal military are Punjabi and Punjab has 60% of the country’s population. Much as in the central part of Iraq—the so called “Suni triangle”—Islamic inheritance law fragmented land holdings in the agriculturally rich Punjab, driving farmers into the military. These fissures, widened by the Af-Pak war have already created violence that the cash-strapped Federal government has tried, but failed to paper over with money. There is little doubt that a certain level of secessionist agitation could tip things over, leading the (Punjabi) army to step in. This is what happened in Bangladesh, but that would be a bad analogy: Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) was separated from (West) Pakistan by the land mass of India. It was still a very bloody conflict. One could predict, then, that a war against contiguous provinces would be Pakistan’s tragic synchronatic moment. All this, so that the US can compete in a game that has already won by someone else.

Contemporary History: Iran and U/sa(udi) in Af-Pak\i-?stän\

The real synchronic moment in Af-Pak\i-?stän\, and, for that matter, in the entire Muslim (\?mu?s -l?m\) world, was 1979. The Iranian Revolution marked the onset of violent sectarian politics in which Iran and Saudi Arabia pitted Shia against Suni and turned sectarian killing into a divinely sanctioned mission. Starting with the eight year Iran-Iraq war, on to Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and now Yemen, there is a way to read the whole post-1979 history of the Middle East and South Asia as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Pushing religion center-stage was an explicit US policy, born of the fantasy that Islam would defeat Socialism. The Mujahedeen were injected with a particularly virulent virus of divine inspiration in madrasas funded by the US and staffed by Saudi Arabia, first to create the subject-soldier who would fight to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and then to pit the (Shia) Northern Alliance against the (Suni) Pashtun. Having infused the “freedom fighters” with a frenzied desire for Wahabbi-style martyrdom through madrasas, the virus was exported to Pakistan and beyond.

The rest is history. If two hundred years of British colonialism left its indelible footprint on the civil administration, the political geography and the class structure of Af-Pak, the end-game of the Cold War in Afghanistan thrust Pakistan directly into the military ambit of the US-Soviet military engagement starting in 1979 when the Islamic Revolution in Iran ratcheted up American interest in a compliant Pakistan. But earlier still, when Khalk and Parcham, the two Marxist parties that overthrew the monarchy in Afghanistan, fell into feuding and the Soviet involvement in Afghan politics went from meddling to invasion, the CIA arranged for the removal of leftist (and wildly popular) Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977 in a bloodless coup. His replacement, General Zia ul Haq, obliged the United States by putting Bhutto to death by hanging in the middle of the night. In 1979.

The depth of the training and arms the Mujahedeen received in US military camps in America was comprehensive. It was there that the secrets of turning (NH2)2CO, (a common fertilizer) into bombs were revealed. True to form, the US left Af-Pak even before the retreat of the defeated Soviet army, as the Mujahedeen slowly morphed into the Taliban. The Pakistan government and military continued their support of the Taliban as the latter fought their way from Kandahar to Kabul, with the support of all but a handful of westernized Afghans. And, conveniently forgotten as the rain-fed mushrooms quietly covered the ground, so did the United States.

As late as 1997, when the nature of the Taliban’s policy towards female education and women’s rights, not to mention their criminal justice “system” had already become a known fact, the US State Department twice entertained a delegation of Taliban to help UNOCAL nudge out their sometime partner in a sometime pipeline, the Argentinean oil firm Bridas. The UNOCAL-Taliban deal failed. Black and blue were no longer welcome at the White House. Afghanistan became a rogue state, the erstwhile “Freedom Fighters” became “terrorists” and then 911 delivered the carte blanche for the invasion of Afghanistan even though the perpetrators of the attack were mostly from the friendly country of Saudi Arabia.

There is a pattern here, the logic of which cannot be placed at the door of a reactive, incoherent foreign policy any more than it can be attributed to the muddled minds of a gullible American public that suffers from collective amnesia. That would be too generous. Thus, while it would be hard to come up with a place and a time since WWII when US aims have been fully realized, US seriality reveals a pattern in which a temporary compromise position leaves instability in its wake, preparing the field for the next round. But wait: how did the war move into Quetta?

Gwadar \?gwä-d?r\, “Door to the Wind”

Balochistan (\b?-lü-ch?-?stan\) is resource rich province of Pakistan, that spans 48% of its territory and has only 8% of the country’s population. It is, without a doubt, the most underdeveloped area in one of the poorest countries of the world. It has a long border with Afghanistan, a 280 mile coast on the Indian Ocean and the Baloch live on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border. Draw the shortest line from Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean and your (pipe)line will end at the little known coastal town of Gwadar. Gwadar also happens to have a state-of-the-art deep water port, funded and built by the Chinese. Conceived in 1998, the port was completed in 2007.

A stones’ throw away from the Strait of Hormuz and an hour from the Iran border by land, Gwadar’s strategic value is clear. During its construction, Baloch were not even allowed to enter the construction site where Chinese workers both lived and worked. Not surprisingly, the US developed an avid interest in the project. The Pakistan government, beholden to the US for aid, halted the project after the completion of its first phase. Subsequently, the management of the firm was contracted out to the Singapore Port Authority, Pvt. (SPA), one of the biggest port servicing companies in the world.

Even beyond the Chinese need for secure sources of LNG and oil, and its strategic interests in the region, namely, its historically fraught relationship with India and India’s recent induction as a US proxy in the region, Chinese interest in the development of the Pakistani port is also a continuation of a pattern of engagement that pre-dates the meteoric rise of its economy. China’s self-financed support of large infrastructure projects in Pakistan has been long-standing and steady. The Chinese were quietly nudged out of Gwadar, but they continue to fund and build mega-projects in Pakistan. Having first reconstructed the Karakoram highway along the Old Silk Route, they are currently laying railway lines southward from Xinjiang Province and connecting roads and rail to Afghanistan and Central Asia. All of these routes will eventually involve transit through Afghanistan and Balochistan, both of which the US seeks to control. But the Chinese know how to sit things out. Their idiom of imperialism is more subtle. In the long run, the infrastructure not only becomes a valuable asset for the Chinese themselves, it also creates good will.

The Chinese are not the only ones with an interest in Gwadar. Several schemes for oil and LNG pipelines, some dating back to the mid-nineties, have been shelved, largely because of stalemated competition between a host of countries, including the United States, Russia, Argentina, China, Iran, Venezuela, the Gulf states and India. More recently, continuing military conflict in Afghanistan and the recent revival of Baloch armed resistance have stalled a number of mega-projects. Proposed pipelines, too numerous to describe here, are currently on hold. Canadian, Australian and Chinese companies have on-going mining projects in Balochistan, but their security is regularly threatened by the Baloch Liberation Army and the Baloch Republican Army. US incursions into Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, and other northern areas have stepped up the activities of militant Islamic groups who have formed tacit alliances with the (secular) Baloch guerillas against a common enemy, the Pakistan army.

Quite apart from the fast evolving covert conflict between the US and China, Balochistan is the arena for the tussle between Iran and the United States. The Baloch straddle the Iran-Pakistan border. For decades, and regardless of relations between Islamabad and Iran, the economic links between western Balochistan and Iran have been robust. Thousands of Baloch from Gwadar and the Makran coast travel to Iran as day laborers. Fish caught in Gwadar are processed and canned in Iran, brought back to Gwadar and then exported from Karachi. Smuggled diesel from Iran fills the thousands of “illegal” fuel pumps across Western Balochistan, where the “licensed” gas pumps rarely have anything to sell. The tribes trade flour, fruit and vegetables across the border. “There are shorter distances between here and Iran than [between] here and Pakistan” I was told in Gwadar, “…the borders are like knives in our chest.” Recently, tense relations between the governments of Iran and Pakistan have melted into cooperation aimed at keeping Baloch nationalists separated. All this is made possible by the “terrorism”-speak of the Bush era, an idiom that permits any state to do anything to anyone—no questions asked.

Meanwhile, the Jundallah (secular) Baloch movement has been supplied with arms, money and intelligence by the US and instructed to “take the war” to Tehran. The Iranian Baloch are a Suni minority that has been at odds with the Islamic regime since its inception. Their violent opposition to Tehran has intensified in tandem to the anti-regime demonstrations in Iranian cities. Should not the Baloch be given their right to form their own nation, separate from the exploitive, corrupt, women-hating Islamic regime? Certainly, this is a human rights agenda that Saudi Arabia, which has bought substantial land in both Balochistan and Sindh, would support. Iran rightly suspects the involvement of the United States in fomenting Baloch secessionism. The Af-Pak war is just another front on which it has been confronting Saudi Arabia and the United States. Since 1979.

Less known, but deadly important, are the nefarious activities of the US counter-intelligence services in encouraging Baloch nationalism. Uninvited, four Baloch Liberation Army fighters came down from “the mountains” to meet me in Gwadar around midnight on May 24, 2009. Most of the conversation was about the atrocities of the Punjabi military and the unity of the Baloch in the struggle for independence from Pakistan. Where did they get their weapons? “The Americans,” said one “…don’t write that down.” I probed: “Are you saying that the Americans are giving you weapons to kill Pakistani soldiers?” They looked at me with something between disgust and pity. More research clarified things. As the second generation sardars of the Marri and Bughti confederation, Nawabzada Haribyar Marri and Barahmdad Bughti (chief of the Baloch Liberation Front) have said openly in televised interviews, they refuse help from no one, including India.

So, what does even a small snapshot of a multi-dimensional proxy war look like? The algebra is bewildering: The US funds the Pakistan army to eliminate the Taliban that they themselves created a little more than a decade ago; the same weapons are used against Baloch nationalists; the US also supplies weapons to the Baloch nationalists to kill the same Punjabi soldiers that are trying to annihilate the Taliban; the Baloch are funded by India against Iran; the US supplies Iranian Baloch with money and weapons to destabilize Tehran; the US humiliates the Pakistani Army and drives a rift between the military and the citizens; the Chinese and the Russians supply the Af-Pak Taliban against the US; Saudi Arabia funds the (Sunni) Af-Pak Taliban and the Baloch nationalists to weaken Shi’i Iran. Much to the chagrin of the Pakistani public and the Pakistani army, the United States’ security interests result in a deal whereby it gains control over Pakistan air bases at Pasni, Panjgur, and Dalbadin. The bases sit on a straight line from Gwadar going north into other US controlled bases in Afghanistan—it’s another straight line to Turkmenistan. The railway links proposed in the Gwadar Port Authority’s master-plan go through all three bases, right up to Helmand Province, where an additional 30,000 U.S soldiers will soon land to perform what one New York Times journalist called the “hammer and anvil” operation to exterminate the border-crossing tribesmen. [Scott Shane, “The War in Pashtunistan,” NYT, December 6, 2009.] Much like the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, no one really knows who is responsible for the urban “terrorist” attacks. Meanwhile, the Chinese quietly continue to fund and build their mega infrastructural projects in the north, mine copper in Afghanistan and extract minerals in Balochistan.
So, who uses the port? During my stay in Gwadar, the only ships to dock were American naval vessels and the officials from the Gwadar Port Authority (GPA) confirmed that only US navy ships had docked since the port became operational. The ships were allegedly delivering fertilizer and alfalfa. Pakistan recently began to lease or sell a slated 7000,000 acres to Gulf agri-businesses from the Gulf, some involving livestock. The fertilizer could easily have legitimate uses—other than being the raw material for improvised explosives. But the nearest large-scale agricultural area is in Dera Ghazi Khan, which is on much closer to Karachi. More, there are no highways north from Gwadar while Karachi is the terminus for the Indus Highway, the major national artery. Why should fertilizer and alfalfa be coming to any farming areas through Gwadar? And why should these commodities be transported on US navy vessels? Answering the second question would require too much speculation, the report of my respondents notwithstanding. The first one, however, is not mysterious.
No American should need to be reminded that the best heists in history have been pulled off under the cloak of the law. Who really owns and profits from Gwadar? A relatively easy piece of the puzzle is found in the contract between the Gwadar Port Authority and the Singapore Port Authority. The Novatee Clause of the Concession Agreement Between Gwadar Port Authority and the PSA Gwadar, Pvt. Ltd (n.d.) gives sub-contracting rights to three companies that include the Terminal Operating Company, the Marine Services Company and the Free Zone Company. We can safely say that these “companies” do not actually exist. The phantom companies are under the administrative control of the National Logistics Cell, a military organization that was created in 1987 to transport supplies to the Mujahideen. Later privatized and “internationalized,” the National Logistics Cell is still under the control of the Pakistan army. Needless to say, the Saudis were involved in the Cell from the beginning; they continue as share-holders and partners. The National Logistics Cell is the recipient of virtually all (non Chinese) contracts for infrastructure and transportation in Pakistan. As such, it is the primary contractor for the numerous schemes to lay rail and asphalt roads through Balochistan and Afghanistan to the CARs, otherwise known as the “National Trade Corridor.” The National Logistics Cell works with a select group of companies, world-wide. In Saudi Arabia, its partners include the Bin-Laden family in the fields of construction and transportation—a legacy of Saudi involvement in driving the USSR out of Afghanistan. The business relationship between the Cell and the bin-Laden family is managed by Sheikh Omer Osama bin-Laden of Saudi Arabia, the elder brother of Osama Bin-Laden.

There is an important domestic link that makes the system work: corruption. To date, shipments to Gwadar have been goods imported by the Trade Corporation of Pakistan, Pvt., the largest company in Pakistan that straddles the divide between the public and private sectors to great profit. The TCP was originally created as a state-owned enterprise to import basic goods. Its aim was to stabilize domestic prices in wheat, cotton, fertilizer, edible oil, etc. After the successive waves of privatization undertaken by the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif administrations, (to great profit for both families), the TCP became an odd entity. It is both a part of the Ministry of Commerce and a private corporation. In other words, the TCP has all the immunity of a government organization and all the freedom of a private company. The results are predictable: In 2008 the Auditor General declared the TCP to be the most corrupt company/government agency in Pakistan. Needless to say, the TCP’s goal of stabilizing prices is now a trace memory in the minds of the military, bureaucratic and private elite that control it. The TCP is the only company that has unloaded shipments at Gwadar. It then relies on the National Logistics cell for the transport of imported commodities. Together, they claim that the outrageously high price of basic goods in Pakistan is the result of Gwadar’s underdeveloped infrastructure. But this infrastructure was to be built by the Cell (which it didn’t) on land occupied by the Navy and the Army (which it refuses to give up). Between them, the Cell and the TCP essentially control the import and distribution of the bulk of Pakistan’s commodities.

The land that the military will not give up, and that the civilian government is afraid to ask for, was part of the contract between the Singapore Port Authority and the Government of Pakistan. The Singapore Port Authority did not make the investments in its contract; Pakistan did not provide the land it had promised. On December 30, 2009, as Prime Minister Gilani was holding a lavish cabinet meeting in Gwadar to announce the federal government’s plan for the uplift of Balochistan’s economy, a team of analysts from the Planning Commission recommended that the PSA contract be annulled for non-performance. The gist of the report was that the Port had no prospects of becoming functional in the next decade. So: the US has a strategic port-in-waiting and a potential outlet for CAR LNG; the Pakistan army and navy get prime real estate; the Cell and the TCP reap extraordinary profits; and Pakistanis pay almost twice the international price for sugar—when they can find it.

Everyday Exploitation: “Come and See the Real Gwadar.”

“There will be progress but not for those of Gwadar. Like the red Indians, we will be like a zoo. They will put a board up saying “Come and See the Real Gwadar.”
–Interview, fishermen, Gwadar, July 2009.

It is a common mistake to think of Afghanistan, Balochistan, the North West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas as being inhospitable empty expanses populated by “lawless tribes.” Characterizations of “empty” lands awaiting “discovery” is the signature hallmark of colonial violence- in the Americas, in the Arabian Peninsula, in Palestine, and elsewhere. In fact, there are deep ethnic and social fissures in Balochistan. As both national and international forces struggle to control the port, the local costs of human dislocation come into sharp focus. Every war has an economic underbelly that often escapes the headlines. The violence delivered to the inhabitants of Gwadar is very local and easy to overlook, but it speaks volumes about what integration into the web of the international economy means, both for the powerful and for the disenfranchised.

As clear as the geo-strategic and economic goals of regional and global economic powers might be, several aspects of Gwadar port remain mysterious to its people. Key among them is why, after the massive investment in the port, the city of Gwadar and roads connecting it to transport hubs in Quetta, the Indus Highway and other thorough fares has not even been initiated. The single asphalt road that has been built runs along the Makran coast to Karachi, Pakistan’s main port and industrial center. “A port”, one level-headed respondent from the moderate National Party (Balochistan) explained, “is never built before the infrastructure.” The grandiose and unfulfilled plans of the Gwadar Port Authority and the Government of Pakistan included not only the port, but a comprehensive plan to develop the city and surrounding areas into a “new Dubai.” Today, central Gwadar remains a filthy ghetto without any roads or public services. The biggest problem, I was told, was the absence of potable water and a sewage system.

Ostensibly, Gwadar was built on the Dubai “model,” using the “modular” approach to development. Such development plans require a disciplined, skilled and cheap source of labor, namely, labor that Balochistan could not possibly provide. On paper, Gwadar is a tax free zone managed by the non-existent Free Zone Corporation. This non-entity allocated land titles in a wide radius surrounding the port. Similarly, land for housing and commercial areas was allocated through the (non-existent) Housing Corporation, a subsidiary of the Gwadar Port Authority.

This institutional and legal framework described above, once formalized in the contract between the Government of Pakistan and the Singapore Port Authority, set the scene for a massive wave of land speculation. The mechanism through which money was made was simple: The Pakistan army was allotted land on concessionary terms, which was then repeatedly sold along a chain of buyers in anticipation of a localized boom that the simpleminded anticipated. Investment in Gwadar real estate was an international affair, which bid land prices up and generated astronomical profits through speculation. Property changed hands at a giddy pace. Most of the land allotted to the Pakistan army was sold and resold several times by 2008, when plans for infrastructure were shelved and real estate prices collapsed. Today, these parcels of land, sold at great profit, are practically worthless—a sandy expanse of desert—home only to squatters and shanty-towns where thousands of migrant laborers and refugees live in abject poverty.

Many in Gwadar believe that land speculation was the actual motive behind the massive multi-stage development plan generated by the GPA and their international consultants. They believe that the GPA and the Government of Pakistan never had any intention of carrying through on the development of the region. There is truth in this. The port was conceived as a transit and trans-shipment center for goods to and from the Gulf, East Asia and China to Central Asia. However, both the director of the Singapore Port Authority and the Karachi Port Authority opined that trans-shipment from Gwadar was never financially feasible. Goods to Central Asia, I was told, are bulk goods, not the container goods that the port was built to handle. Infrastructure—such as the planned railway lines from Gwadar to Dalbadin airport (Quetta), the planned roads into Iran, and connecting to the Karakoram Highway, which passes through the Khunjrab Pass into China—were never constructed. Thus, while the 170,000 acres set aside for residential, commercial and recreational centers near the city were titled, and the 14,400 acres reserved for the “private schemes” of the National Oil Company were distributed, none of the projects for which the land was to be used ever got underway.

The law against labor organization in the whole area, the 20 year tax holiday and Gwadar’s free trade zone status were ostensibly designed to attract commerce via the incentive of sunk capital that did not materialize, but it did allow the police to shut down the fishermen’s union. In the plan, tourism, hotels, gas stations and electrical plants are reserved for the government of Pakistan, a fact that choked off any Baloch investment in these potentially profitable sectors. To the cynic, in short, Gwadar’s developmental trajectory was a hoax. Gwadar is useful for two purposes: as a terminal point for a pipeline and as a strategic asset, namely, a landing point for large vessels requiring a deep water port. For these two purposes, the Port is well suited and no local development is necessary.

In Gwadar itself, the port has reshaped the relationship between the coastal community and the inland tribes. Even in Pakistan, the myth that Balochistan is exclusively tribal persists to this day. Yet, the social structure of the Makran coast is very different from that of the inland tribal areas. The Makran coast does not have a sardari system [ The “sardari system” refers to a hierarchical version of tribal loyalty and tributary relationships geographically located mostly in Balochistan, but also common to certain parts of Sindh province. Sardar means “master.”]
that typifies the in-land areas of Balochistan. The Makran coast has a complex racial/ethnic segmentation dominated by a land-owning aristocracy that subsequently became a commercial elite. Gwadar has historically been a fishing city and even today, 90% of economic activity is in this sector. Like other port cities in the region—Aden, Dubai, Jeddah—Gwadar has an ethically heterogeneous population that includes a large number of Arabs from Oman, former slaves from Africa and even a Hindu population. Most of the fishermen belong to the Medh ethnicity, the original non-Baloch of the region. The rest are Darzada (literally “those who have the doors”–offspring of African salves and “pure” Baloch fathers), or Sheedi (descendants of slaves). Barriers against mobility within the tribal Baloch are somewhat porous at the borders, but Medh, Darzada and Sheedi cannot “become” Baloch. Unlike the highly egalitarian ethos of the Pashtun tribes, leadership in the Baloch tribal confederations is hereditary and strictly hierarchical.

The planning of the port, the subsequent real estate boom and the bust has meant the dispossession of land for the majority of the fishermen and the destruction of the ecology of their fishing grounds. Trawlers from Karachi and East Asia are able to access sea-ward areas where the hand made wooden ships of Gwadar cannot go, and deplete the sea of marine life. The fishermen complain about the busting of the Medh Itihaad (fisherman union) and the “diesel mafia” that pollutes the water. Inflation has driven many out into the shantytowns on the periphery of the development or into the inner city slum: “In real Gwadar, people are putting up road blocks just to get water. Fifteen or twenty people live in one room.” Other means of subsistence, such as labor remittances from Oman, dried up after 911 and the influx of cheap labor from the Punjab and the NWFP has flooded the job market. American incitement of the Baloch against Tehran and against Pakistan has blocked the flow of cross-border labor.

Baloch nationalism was a project of the Bugti, Marri and Mengal tribal confederations. It still is. The erection of the port and attendant changes have reshaped relations between the Makrani population and the tribes in paradoxical ways. On the one hand, the advent of hopeful Punjabi and Pashtun workers, a largely Punjabi police force and the port itself has injected Makrani economic disenfranchisement with a measure of Baloch nationalism. To the child, Gwadar’s original inhabitants curse the Punjabi military and police and decry the social evils that “development” has bequeathed. They describe their past lives as being safe, insulated and predictable: doors could remain unlocked, women were not harassed and the lines of professional training and guild-like induction of young men into fishing and boat building was a source of stability and pride. Skills were valued.

On the other hand, Gwadar’s original inhabitants are deeply ambivalent about what the triumph of Baloch nationalism would mean for them as an ethnic minority within an ethnic minority. Coastal Baloch in both Iran and Pakistan are much more comfortable with each other than with their in-land compatriots. Describing what they called the “diesel mafia” and the “fishing mafia” the Makranis were careful to point out that these “thugs” were all Baloch. Not unlike the original Baloch nationalists who resisted integration into Pakistan during the partition of the Sub-Continent in 1947, the Makranis feared becoming a minority in a shrunken state where there would be no redress from the central government. If Balochistan became independent, they told me, things would only get worse.

These ambivalent sentiments capture the tenor and texture of the web of conflicts and intrigue that shoot through the conflicts in Af-Pak. The Baloch nationalists are uncertain whether they would be better off allied with Iran, or as a production platform for American mining interests. They have the typical fears of the rentier. Regardless, they are certain that they no longer want to be part of Pakistan. By supplying the Baloch nationalists weapons and resources some faction of the US military is inflaming an already difficult situation, quite apart from the pressures of refugees from the war.

The fear among the Makrani population is palpable. As one fisherman put it,

“I have seen the world. I wonder what my grandfather saw.
I wonder what my children will see. There is a government
in most places, but not here. I am in debt. I am 76, but I
must work to pay it back. I have sold my gold. And my children
are still hungry. My net got caught in the trawlers. This is a
jungle for us. I wish I could cut the hour short and die.
If Balochistan becomes independent it will just be much worse.
It will be just us and them. If they win their freedom, I would go
back to Muscat.”

Whatever is happening to the fishermen, Gwadar and the Af-Pak war has been anything but a disaster for Baloch separatists. It has meant that, for now, the Baloch armed resistance can find allies and common cause with the Taliban, even though their politics are anathema to secular Baloch nationalism. It has also meant that they have access to covertly supplied US armaments to attack the Pakistan army and assist their Iranian counterparts in destabilizing Tehran. If Gwadar is the key to Central Asian LNG for the US, for the Baloch it is a newly acquired piece of infrastructure that makes an independent Balochistan a practical possibility. From the American perspective, Baloch nationalism is a gift: A means to destabilize Iran and possibly stoke Kurdish and Suni resentment against the regime in Tehran, potentially permanent access to the Gwadar port and guarantees of safety through (an imagined) independent Balochistan, through which the LNG pipeline would pass.

* * *
No one knows how many have died since the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, or since the war spread to Pakistan in 2007. And in a way it isn’t surprising. When do we start counting? “Af-Pak” has effectively been at some sort of war since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978. Governments quibble over the number of civilians killed by the drones, those unmanned mercenaries that endeared Bill Clinton’s administration to the US army and are now the weapon of choice for his democrat successor. There are disagreements about whether the US or the Taliban, or domestic groups are responsible for civilian deaths. It is impossible to separate killings that settle vendettas from sectarian violence. To the millions affected, it might not matter who is responsible. For all this, Secretary of State Clinton, has not yet learned how to say Pakistan. What’s in a word? Americans couldn’t say \i-?räk,-?rak\ either.

Pakistan was recently described by a journalist writing for the New York Times as a petulant teenager in search of an elusive identity that was scrambled in 1947 and could not be retrieved. [Sabrina Tavernise, “The Demons that Haunt the Pakistanis,” NYT, December 6, 2009.] In fact, commentary on the inner motives and psychological handicaps of Pakistanis and Afghans has become quite common in journalistic accounts—somewhat similar to the sloppy detective work routinely performed to identify which particular senior terrorist “inspired” a particular junior terrorist to perform a particular act. The attribution of this “inspiration” has become a science through which death sentences are pronounced. One could quibble with the notion that nations, once teenagers, “grow up” and cease to change on account of the fact that they find their identity. But why should psychological analysis be reserved for the young?

© Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, Professor of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
January 18, 2010
chaudhry a_t_ berkeley d*o*t edu

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A couple of recent items of Al-Qa‘ida-related interest:

• From Jihadica, “Did the Quetta Shura Break with Al-Qaida?
• In the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor, Michael W.S. Ryan on Zawahiri on Pakistan, among other items. (PDF)

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The run-up to the Ides of March in Pakistan has been characterized by numerous horrific bombings, credit for which has been claimed by the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or Taliban Movement of Pakistan. After a string of bombings in Lahore on Friday, on Saturday morning, a suicide bomber detonated his payload at a checkpoint station outside the city of Mingora in Swat, killing 10 persons, including two members of the security forces. Last summer, the Pakistani military expelled the Pakistani Taliban from Swat, before moving on to attack their bases and safe houses (or safe caves) in South Waziristan.

On Friday, bombing attacks on a military cantonment and on Iqbal Town and Samnabad in Lahore left 50-60 persons dead and 120 wounded. Some of the attacks targeted the Pakistani military, but the deadly bombing of a market inflicted severe damage on innocent civilians.

Aljazeera English reports on the Lahore bombings:

The Pakistani Taliban mostly hail from the Pashtun ethnic group in Pakistan’s northwest, though they do have some tiny fringe Punjabi associates, such as the Lashkar-i Tayyiba. Their attempt to impress on the Pakistani military and public that they are still capable of fighting back through such bombings of soft targets will likely backfire in a major way. As long as the TTP was primarily attacking NATO and US troops or the Afghan National Army across the border in Afghanistan, the Pakistani military and public could largely ignore them, or even configure them as a generally anti-imperialist force that admittedly was a little extreme.

But if they are going to blow up Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, the TTP is going to have to be finished off. Punjabis are 55 percent of Pakistan, and the wealthiest and most powerful part. They are 80% of the army. Now, editorials are widely and bitterly complaining that the government has not dismantled the ‘infrastructure of hate.’ Some Karachi observers are calling on Punjabis to wake up to the threat. The subtext here is that Punjabi officers and politicians in the 1980s and 1990s fostered the Mujahidin and then the Taliban and small terrorist groups in hopes of using them to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the Indians out of Kashmir. But relationships change, and Punjabis are in fact likely to wake up.

I would make an analogy to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which launched a massive bombing campaign inside Saudi Arabia 2003-2006, causing the Saudi security and intelligence forces to take them seriously as an internal threat and to institute a thoroughgoing crackdown on them that largely succeeded inside the kingdom. Before it was Riyadh and Jidda that were being bombed, the Saudis seemed to see radical terrorism as someone else’s problem, however regrettable. After that the kingdom suddenly became much more integrated into the war on terrorism.

In the same way, this week’s bombings in Pakistan are likely to stiffen the resolve of the Pakistani elite to wipe out the TTP and the Afghan Old Taliban of Mulla Omar. It has already captured about half of the Quetta Shura or the Old Taliban shadow government based formerly in Quetta but increasingly now in Karachi (where they appear lately to have been assassinating rival Sunni clerics)

Guerrilla movements win by winning hearts and minds over time and successfully positioning themselves as the true champions of national or communal interests. The Pakistani Taliban are just flailing around making themselves more and more hated, and that by the most powerful ethnic group in the country.

If I am right, the Obama administration is continuing to benefit in its own attack on the Taliban and al-Qaeda from the stupidity of the latter two, insofar as they are alienating the Pakistani public, which had earlier been somewhat sympathetic to them.

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The Afghan capital was struck by three suicide bombings early Friday morning, beginning at 6:30 am local time. Radio Azadi reports that there were five attackers, who struck in the area near the entrance of the Hotel Safi Landmark. The first bomb damaged the hotel.

Two of these bombings, Aljazeera Arabic says, targeted guest houses for Indian expatriates in Kabul who work for companies or NGOs. The third blast was huge, and the guesthouse was left in rubble, such that there may be bodies still within. As I write, the death toll is estimated at 18, with 32 wounded, and some of the dead are Indians and many of the wounded are. The Aljazeera correspondent says that Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told him that the mission had been to hit the “enemies of Afghanistan from among the foreign Indians.” The Sydney Morning Herald confirms that the Taliban were targeting Indian hostels.

The Taliban have hit the Indian embassy in Kabul twice, once in July 2008, and again in October 2009. Many Taliban have helped train or fought alongside Pakistani militant vigilantes fixated on overthrowing Indian rule of Muslim-majority Kashmir.

India is also a significant provider to Afghanistan of development aid and investment, and so is helping build up the government of Hamid Karzai. Having offered $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid, India is the largest regional donor. There are some 4,000 Indian workers in the country, some of them “security personnel,” according to the US Council on Foreign Relations.

Several prominent Tajik (Persian-speaking Sunni) politicians have long-standing ties to New Delhi because India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW, the equivalent of the CIA) provided aid to the old Northern Alliance at a time when it was under siege in the late 1990s by the Taliban. These Tajiks are die-hard enemies of the Taliban, who had committed massacres against them. The Taliban animus against India thus is multifaceted.

The attack lasted about 4 hours, according to Radio Azadi, with some of the attackers using small arms fire. All five were ultimately killed.

Some observers were surprised that the attack was launched on the commemoration of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. But many hard line Salafi revivalists, who say they want to go back to the practice of Islam that prevailed among the first generation of the companions of the Prophet, oppose celebration of birthdays in general and of that of the Prophet in particular.

Pollster Matt Dabrowski tweeted from Kabul that he was awakened by the first blast, and could see a smoke column bigger than the downtown indoors market building.

US Navy Lt. Joe Halstead tweeted from Kabul, “Insurgents using Mohammed’s Birthday and attempting to counter progress in Marjah with attack in Kabul today.”

Friday’s attack resembled one in January. Although the Taliban are attempting to project an image of Kabul as having little security and the Karzai government as helpless in the face of their assaults, actually they are just proving that the Afghanistan security forces are pretty good and can fairly easily capture or kill attackers.

The Taliban have lost momentum on two fronts in recent weeks. The CSM estimates that Pakistani authorities have captured 7 of the 15 members of the Quetta Shura, the command council of the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar. American drone strikes killed another major Taliban leader in North Waziristan on Thursday, Muhammad Qari Zafar. He was a mastermind of the attack on the US consulate in the southern Pakistan port of Karachi in 2006.

The other front is Marjah, where Taliban direct attacks are becoming rare as the US military and the Afghanistan National Army establish control of the city of 80,000. Some twenty thousand residents have fled to nearby Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. The Taliban are still fighting with roadside bombs, and are likely to go doing so for some time.

In the wake of these two defeats, the Taliban are apparently attempting to destabilize the capital and to punish foreigners working to stand up the new government (in this case India), using the tactics of Sunni radical insurgents in Baghdad. While this tactic can indeed slow state formation, it is just the act of a spoiler and does not lead to any positive political achievements.

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A US drone strike on N. Waziristan has allegedly killed Muhammad Haqqani, a son of guerrilla leader Jalaluddin Haqqani. The Haqqani network is considered particularly skilled insurgents, and is the faction closes to both the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and to al-Qaeda. Jalaluddin’s health is said to be poor and he may have already turned most decisions over to his other son, Siraj. The Telegraph hinted that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence has ceased supporting the Haqqanis behind the scenes, and may even have helped the Americans target their drone strike.

According to Dawn, the governor of the Afghan province of Qunduz is reporting that Pakistan has “arrested Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mir Mohammad, respectively the shadow governors of the northern Afghan provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan” in Pakistani Baluchistan (presumably in Quetta). Islamabad has yet to confirm the report.

The NYT revealed that Pakistan had captured the Old Taliban’s no. 2 man, Mulla Abdul Ghani Baradar, and it is not impossible that these two were picked up with intelligence gained from him. Pakistan and the US have still not decided whether to treat Mullah Baradar as an enemy combatant or to attempt to persuade him to back a reconciliation of the Taliban with the Karzai government in Islamabad. Gareth Porter believes that the reconciliation idea was put forward by Pakistan as a means of asserting Islambad’s indispensability to any settlement between Hamid Karzai and Mullah Omar.

These actions are degrading the leadership abilities of the Taliban and the Haqqani network, and creating a sense of momentum against the Taliban.

As US special envoy to Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, arrived in Islambad Thursday for consultations with the government, a bomb was set off at a cattle market in the Khyber Agency. It killed 20 and wounded 80. One of those killed was militant leader Azam Khan, of the Lashkar-i Islam or army of Islam. The bombing may have been the work of Ansar-i Islam, a rival political grouping which has feuded for some time with the Lashkar.

Aljazeera English probes the possibility of reconciliation between the Taliban and the Kabul government is very difficult.

Meanwhile, on the Afghan side of the border, guerrilla foes of the Karzai government and the foreign troop presence in Marjah killed 4 NATO troops with roadside bombs and sniping.

Richard Holbrooke claimed that some Taliban in the Marjah area are considering defecting to the side of President Hamid Karzai. (This assertion is not far-fetched. Some clan chieftains adopt a Taliban allegiance rather as a franchise, and they drop it just as easily.)

Aljazeera English interviews the former governor of Helmand, now a cabinet member, about the progress of the Marjah campaign:

Brave New Films reports on the condition of Afghan women:

Nick Turse on US bases in Afghanistan at Tomdispatch.

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The NYT broke the news that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, with the cooperation of US intelligence, captured Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar a few days ago. Baradar, the number 2 man in the Old Taliban led by Mulla Umar, is the equivalent of military chief of staff for the organization. Depending on how much he is willing to reveal about the whereabouts and operational plans of the other Taliban commanders, his capture could be devastating for the Old Taliban.

His capture shows just how abject former vice president Dick Cheney’s attacks on the Obama administration for its handling of terrorism are. And that Joe Biden and others kept the arrest secret, in order to allow further operations against Taliban leaders in Karachi, shows a discipline that Bush and Cheney never had. They were always happy to prematurely release details of ongoing investigations to get a political bump, even if it meant allowing terrorists to escape.

Mullah Baradar planned out the spring-summer, 2008, campaign aimed at overthrowing the Karzai government, called “The Object Lesson” (`ibrat).

In fall of 2008 there were rumors of Saudi-brokered negotiations between the Karzai government and the Taliban. Mullah Baradar denied that any such meetings had taken place, though some reports placed him at the Dubai round of talks.

He appears to have been absolutely enraged by President Obama’s decision in February, 2009, to send 21,000 further US troops to Afghanistan. He announced extensive operations to harry and attack the foreign troops through summer, 2009. By this time he was emerging as the operational leader of the Old Taliban, perhaps in some ways supplanting Mullah Omar. He also released a pamphlet on a Taliban code of conduct that discouraged attacks on civilians (a pamphlet completely ignored by the Pakistani ‘Taliban’ led by members of the Mahsud tribe in South Waziristan).

Obama’s drone attacks on the Taliban leadership forced Mullah Baradar and some other commanders to relocate to the southern port city of Karachi, hundreds of miles from the action in the tribal areas of the northwest. He is said to attempted to restructure the military command of the Taliban in fall of 2009, but met a good deal of resistance. The episode is said to have resulted in poor morale in the Old Taliban.

Mullah Baradar gave a defiant interview in late December, translated by the USG Open Source Center, which Informed Comment reprinted, in which he boasted of NATO’s and the Karzai government’s disarray in 2009 and threatened a wideranging military campaign in 2010 to pull down the Karzai government and push the foreign troops out.

My own suspicion is that Mullah Baradar was behind the violence against Shiites in Karachi this winter. Provoking Sunni-Shiite violence so as to destabilize Pakistan’s financial and industrial hub would be a typical al-Qaeda tactic. The bombings succeeded in provoking major riots and property damage. But when you hurt stock prices and harm government revenues, you rather draw the attention to yourself of the country’s elite and their security forces, since you have mightily inconvenienced them. As long as the Old Taliban were mainly bothering the government of Hamid Karzai over the border in Pakistan, the ISI might have been able to turn a blind eye to them. But if they were going to cause billions of dollars of damage to Karachi, which they did this winter, that is intolerable.

I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Mullah Baradar’s capture will destroy the Old Taliban. And even if that organization is weakened, there are at least three other major insurgent groups only loosely connected to them, which have the operational autonomy and resources to go on fighting.

But it is true that with the loss of the $200,000 a month the drug trade in Marjah was generating, and with the loss of some important commanders to drone strikes, the Old Taliban may be in a weakened posture compared to a year ago.

(There are four groups typically but inaccurately referred to as Taliban among Pashtun dissidents. They include Mulla Umar’s original Taliban; the Haqqani Network founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, based in North Waziristan, which is now led by his son Siraj; the Islamic Party or Hizb-i Islami of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar based in Eastern Afghanistan; and the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, whose leader, Hakimullah Mahsud, was reported recently killed by a US drone strike). For Mullah Omar’s organization, based in Karachi and Quetta, to suffer a severe setback would probably not have a huge impact on the other three, which operate relatively independently. None of the others is actually Taliban in the sense of seminary students or graduates of madrasahs among the Afghan Pashtun refugees in Pakistan).

Appendix:

I append some reports on Mullah Baradar from the Pakistani press and from translations made by the USG Open Source Center, which illustrate the arc of his career over the past two years:

The Nation (Pakistan), March 26, 2008: “Taliban leaders and their stalwarts have evolved a strategy to wage a decisive war against the US-led allied forces and Karzai government during the coming summer. Taliban Military Commander Mullah Baradar framed the strategy, named as ” Ibrat” (admonition or warning), and the 12-member Shura approved it a couple of days before at a meeting held at somewhere inside Afghanistan, the reliable sources informed The Nation Tuesday.”

Jihadi Websites, Monday, April 10, 2008, OSC: “Dhabih Allah (mujahid)–At 1900 last night, hero mujahid Sayfallah, one of the mujahidin of the Islamic Emirate, carried out a martyrdom attack with a detonated vehicle targeting a military convoy of the German occupation in the Isa Khel area of Garduri District in Kunduz Province. The explosion resulted in the destruction of three tanks and the grave casualties of the convoy personnel. The explosion was so huge, so that the wreckage and the killed enemy body parts were scattered across one kilometer. This successful attack comes within the operations of ‘The Lesson,’ announced by Mullah Baradar, deputy amir of the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, may God protect him.”

Jihadi Web sites, November 15, 2008, OSC: “Taliban’s Second in Command Denies Negotiations With US, NATO, Afghan Government: On 7 November, a forum participant posted to a jihadist website a statement issued by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan-Taliban announcing the publication of the 29th issue of the group’s monthly Arabic-language magazine, Al-Sumud, or Perseverance. The 56-page magazine contains an interview conducted with Taliban’s second in command, Mulla Baradar. In the interview, Mulla Baradar flatly denies Taliban’s engaging in any negotiations with the United States, the NATO, or the Afghan Government. He says that those who opened negotiations with the Afghan Government did not represent the Islamic Emirate in any way, and that they lived as prisoners or were held under house arrest by the Afghan Government. ‘

Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Tuesday, November 18, 2008, OSC: “informed Afghan sources in the capital Kabul disclosed that progress has been made in the preparations for a third round of talks between the Afghan Government and the opposition Taliban movement. They talked about the possible direct participation of the representative of Mullah Omar, the leader of the armed fundamentalist movement, in the meetings that are scheduled to be held during the pilgrimage season. The source, which asked to remain unidentified, said Mullah Qayoum Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamed Karzai, met with Saudi officials in Dubai to help prepare for the next round of negotiations which will be held in Mecca during the pilgrimage season next month. … Shaykh Mohammad Siddiq Tashakkuri, the former Afghan information minister, disclosed to “Al-Sharq al-Awsat” that “a second round of negotiations between the Kabul and Taliban delegations were held in Dubai after the Mecca round which was held during the blessed month of Ramadan.” He said representatives of Mullah Omar attended both sessions, both notably Mullah Mohammad Hasan Rahmani, member of Taliban’s Shura Council and Mullah Omar’s adviser, and Mullah Baradar, Taliban’s general military commander who is also close to Mullah Omar.

Afghanistan News, OSC: ‘On 29 April, [2009] Mullah Baradar Akhund, the Taliban movement’s first deputy leader, announced in a statement posted on its website that: “As the United States and NATO want to send more troops to Afghanistan, the Afghans also sense the need for a strong and robust operation to counter the new forces. The Islamic Emirate Mojahedin will launch a new operation throughout Afghanistan by the name of Nasrat (Assistance). The new operation, which will start on Thursday (30 April), will include an increased number of suicide attacks, ambushes, and offensive assaults. The target of the operation will bethe military bases of invaders, diplomatic centers, military convoys, officials of the puppet government, and members of the parliament.” The statement also called on Afghan Government employees and security forces to stop working with the “puppet government,” while warning transportation companies that haul military supplies for NATO troops and construction firms that buildmilitary bases to halt their activities or they will face consequences.((Internet) Afghanistan News in Dari. ‘

The Nation (Pakistan), April 30, 2009: “Fearing US drone attacks, a large number of Taliban’s Afghan leaders have shifted from Quetta to Karachi, Peshawar and other cities . . . Taliban leadership has intensified efforts for collecting maximum donations from their Arab world’s well-wishers and in this respect Maulvi Hamdullah has been made Taliban representative for the Gulf region. . . The Taliban leadership has also posted Maulvi Muatasem as head of Finance Committee, Maulvi Abdul Kabir as head of political Affairs Committee, Maulvi Aminullah as Commander for Orazgaan province . . . and Mullah Baradar as special aide to Mullah Omar. The sources informed that purpose of this reshuffling is to stimulate Taliban activities all over Afghanistan.”

The Nation (Pakistan), August 3, 2009: “Newsweek has published a thriller in its latest issue claiming that Mullah Omar has empowered his No 2, Mullah Baradar, to run the war while the former remains in hiding. The weekly projects the proxy to be a deadlier fighter than his boss.”

Omid-e Watan: December 28, 2009, OSC: “Omid-e Watan reported that deep rifts have been seen among the Taliban. Mullah Baradar, the number-two man to Mullah Omar has made changes in the command structure, which has created conflict with the local commanders. According to Jamil Bahrami, head of the Strategic National Security Council of Afghanistan, “Mullah Baradar spends most of his time in Karachi and there is a sense of narcissism and pessimism taking shape in various levels of this group.”

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NATO troops appear to have made a horrible error in Afghanistan on Friday, as they clashed with what turned out to be Afghan National Army troops and called in an air strike on them, killing 4 and wounding 6. The governor of Wardak province where the fight took place said he was at a loss to explain it.

The incident comes on top of Thursday’s slaying by NATO of an Afghan religious leader, again apparently by accident.

Aljazeera Arabic is reporting that Duran Safi, an insurgent leader of the Hizb-i Islami in eastern Afghanistan, has rejected talks with the Karzai government.

The Saudi government declined President Hamid Karzai’s call for Riyadh to broker a deal with the Taliban, saying that first the latter must cut off their relationship with Usamah Bin Laden and cease giving him safe harbor.

Ironically, at the same time India is softening on the idea of talks with the Taliban, which New Delhi initially opposed out of fear they would rehabilitate allies of Pakistan.

Meanwhile, Sonia Verma explores the issue of how likely the insurgents in Pakistan are to open talks with the Kabul government. The most promising negotiations might be with Gulbadin Hikmatyar, the leader of Hizb-i Islami or the ‘Islamic Party’ in eastern Afghanistan. It is unlikely that Mullah Omar, leader of the Old Taliban in Quetta, will take part in talks, and even if he did, she says, he does not seem in firm operational control of the Taliban commanders, some of whom openly say they will defy him if he makes the wrong decision. Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani network in North Waziristan and south Afghanistan, will also likely not talk.

Aljazeera English reports on the Taliban attack at Lashkar Gah late on Friday after the London conference ended.

Ajazeera English interviews a female member of parliament on the issues broachd at the London conference.

End/ (Not Continued)

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Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates’s trip to Pakistan this weekend has in many ways been public relations disaster, and I think it is fair to say that he came away empty-handed with regard to his chief policy goals in Islamabad. Getting Pakistan right is key to President Barack Obama’s policy of escalating the Afghanistan War, and judging by Gates’s visit to Islamabad, Obama is in worse shape on the AfPak front than he is even in Massachusetts. Since he has bet so heavily on Afghanistan and Pakistan, this rocky road could be momentous for his presidency.

In one of a series of gaffes, he seemed to admit in a television interview that the private security firm, Blackwater, was active in Pakistan.

The Pakistani public has a widespread resentment against US incursions against the country’s sovereignty (64% say the US is a danger to the country’s stability). But it also has a sort of paranoid obsession with Blackwater, which they suspect of covert operations to disrupt security in the country (i.e. they blame Blackwater for bombings that Americans see as the work of the Taliban). Thus, Gates’s statement produced a media frenzy. (Jeremy Scahill has alleged in The Nation that Blackwater is in fact in Pakistan in a support role to CIA drone attacks in the country’s mountainous Northwest on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets).

Dawn, a relatively pro-Western English daily, quoted the exchange, saying Gates was asked by the interviewer on a private television station,

‘ “And I want to talk, of course, about another issue that has come up again and again about the private security companies that have been operating in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan. . . Xe International, formerly known as Blackwater and Dyncorp. Under what rules are they operating here in Pakistan?”

Gates replied,

‘ “Well, they’re operating as individual companies here in Pakistan, in Afghanistan and in Iraq because there are theatres of war involving the United States.”

The Urdu press concluded that he had admitted Blackwater is active on Pakistani soil, while noting denials from the US embassy in Islamabad that that was what Gates had meant. The News, the mainstream English-language sister of Jang, was also insistent that Gates had let the cat out of the bag.

Gates had one strike against him, since he came to Pakistan from India. Moreover while in New Delhi he clearly was a traveling salesman for the US war materiel industries, who would like to pick up some of the $60 billion India is planning to spend on weapons in the next few years. During the Cold War, the US had mainly supplied Pakistan’s military, and had been lukewarm to India, which Washington felt tilted toward Moscow. The current shift of US strategy to wooing India to offset growing Chinese power in Asia is taken by some Pakistanis as a demotion.

Then, he encouraged a greater Indian role in Afghanistan, including, according to the Times of London, possibly in training Afghan police. Pakistan considers Afghanistan its sphere of influence and the last thing it wants is a role for Indian security forces in training (and perhaps shaping the loyalty) of Afghan police. Germany is currently in charge of the police training program, but India is afraid that in the next few years NATO will depart, and that Pakistan will then redeploy its Taliban allies to capture the country for Islamabad’s purposes. India is also concerned about significant Chinese investments, as in a big copper mine, in Afghanistan. So New Delhi is considering the police training mission.

In addition, Gates had praised Indian restraint in the face of the fall, 2008 attack on Mumbai (Bombay) by the Pakistani terrorist organization, the Lashkar-i Tayyiba [Army of the Good]. He warned the Pakistani leadership that India’s forbearance could not be taken for granted the next time. That is a fair point, but it is not the sort of thing you say publicly on your way to Islamabad from Delhi if you want to be received as an honest broker. Pakistanis feel that India has inflicted many provocations on them, too, not least of which was the Indian security forces’ often brutal repression in Muslim-majority Kashmir, where thousands have died since 1989 in a separatist movement with which Pakistanis deeply sympathize. (Pakistani guerrilla groups also did routinely slip into Indian Kashmir in support of local separatists).

Prominent members of the Pakistani Senate denounced Gates for setting up Pakistan as a sort of patsy and hostage to communal violence in India, and of fomenting a Washington-New Delhi ‘conspiracy’ against Islamabad. What if some Indian terrorist group carried out an attack in India? wasn’t Gates giving New Delhi carte blanche, they asked, to blame Pakistan for it even in the absence of any evidence, and then to launch a war of aggression on Pakistan with the incident as a pretext?

The LAT said that “Gates, on the first day of a visit here, urged government officials to build on their offensives against militants . . .”

In fact, Gates was careful not to over-emphasize such demands, but there was a general public perception that he was doing so. The editorials in Urdu newspapers on Jan. 23, which the USG Open Source Center analyzed, complained bitterly about this further demand. Express sniffed that the US should establish security in Afghanistan and then everything would settle down in Pakistan’s northwest. Khabrain rather cleverly pointed out that Pakistan has concentrated on limited territory in fighting its Taliban, which is wiser than the US policy of opening several fronts at once and getting bogged down.

Jang, which is mildly anti-American, said,

Describing Robert Gates’ pro-Indian statements irresponsible, the editorial says: “It is believed that the political and military leaderships of Pakistan, with one voice, have made it clear to Gates and the titanic-size delegation accompanying him that in the present circumstances, it is not possible for Pakistan to accede to the persistent US demands of ‘do more’ and to further expand military operations in the tribal areas, because Pakistan not only has to secure the areas that it has taken control of from the militants but also has to strengthen and stabilize its position there.”

Then the Pakistani military spokesman came out and flatly told Gates that the Swat and South Waziristan campaigns were it for now. The BBC reports, ‘Maj Gen Abbas, head of public relations for the Pakistan army, told the BBC: “We are not going to conduct any major new operations against the militants over the next 12 months. . . The Pakistan army is overstretched and it is not in a position to open any new fronts. Obviously, we will continue our present operations in Waziristan and Swat.” ‘

To be fair, the Pakistani military committed tens of thousands of troops to these two campaigns, in Swat and South Waziristan, and is in fact attempting to garrison the captured areas so as to prevent the return of the Pakistani Taliban. In the past two years, the Pakistani army has lost over 2,000 soldiers in such fighting against Taliban in the Northwest, a little less than half the troops the US lost in its 6-year Iraq War.

The Pakistani military campaigns of the past year, however, have not targeted those radical groups most active in cross-border raids into Afghanistan– the Quetta Shura of Mullah Omar’s Old Taliban, the Haqqani Network of Siraj Haqqani in North Waziristan, or whatever cells exist in Pakistan of the largely Afghanistan-based Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party) of Gulbadin Hikmatyar. Washington worries that the effectiveness of its own troop escalation in Afghanistan will be blunted if these three continue to have havens on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. And, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani worries that the US offensive in Afghanistan will push thousands radicals over the border into Pakistan, further destabilizing the country’s northwest.

Gates made a clumsy attempt to mollify Pakistani public opinion over the very unpopular US drone strikes on suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban cells in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, by offering the Pakistani military 12 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones of its own. But the Pakistani military pointed out that the outdated RQ-7 Shadow UAV’s on offer were unarmed and merely for aerial reconnaissance, and maintained that Pakistan’s arsenal already contained such drones.

Gates addressed the Pakistani cadets at the National Defense University, attempting to emphasize that he wanted more of these future officers to study in the US, and that Pakistan is in the driver’s seat with regard to the anti-Taliban counter-insurgency campaign. Its message was largely missed in the civilian Urdu press.

Does it matter? One sometimes see Americans dismiss Pakistan as “small” or “unimportant.” Think again. Pakistan is the world’s sixth-largest country by population (170 million),just after Brazil (200 million). It is as big as California, Oregon and Washington state rolled together. Pakistan’s 550,000-man military is among the best-trained and best-equipped in the global South. Pakistan has within it a middle class with a Western-style education and way of life (automobiles, access to internet and international media) of some 37 million– roughly 5 million families. (Pakistan has over 5 million automobiles now and is an emerging auto producer and market, with auto production at 16 percent of its manufaturing sector). If we go by local purchasing power, it is the world’s 27th largest economy. It is a nuclear power with a sophisticated if small scientific establishment, and produced a Nobelist in physics.

Gates went to Pakistan to emphasize to Islamabad that the US was not again going to abandon it and Afghanistan, as it had in the past. Pakistan, he wanted to say, is now a very long-term ally of Washington. He hoped for cooperation against the Haqqani, Taliban and Hizb-i Islami guerrillas. He wanted to allay conspiracy theories about US mercenary armies crawling over Pakistan, occasionally blowing things up (and then blaming the explosions on Pakistanis) in order to destabilize the country and manipulate its policies.

The message his mission inadvertently sent was that the US is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated; that he is pressuring Pakistan to take on further counter-insurgency operations against Taliban in the Northwest, which the country flatly lacks the resources to do; and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it.

In baseball terms, Gates struck out. In cricket terms, Gates was out in the most embarrassing way a batsman can be out, that is, leg before wicket.

End/ (Not Continued)

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The USG Open Source Center translates an interview with the “Old Taliban’s” number 2 man, Mullah “Baradar” Abdul Ghani, on Taliban tactics against the US.

Taleban deputy leader warns of more attacks in Afghanistan in 2010
Afghan Islamic Press
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Taleban deputy leader warns of more attacks in Afghanistan in 2010

The deputy leader of the Taleban, Mullah Berader, has said that if the foreign “aggressor forces” persist with their activities in Afghanistan, they should not expect the Taleban to “soften their posture” either and if they wanted peace they must withdraw their forces. He also said Taleban attacks had proved successful so far and more of the same could be expected, perhaps using new tactics. The following is the text of an “exclusive” interview given by Mullah Berader to the private Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency, put out by the agency on 31 December; subheadings inserted editorially:

Kandahar, 30 December:

Deputy leader of Taleban Islamic Emirate: If the aggressor forces in Afghanistan dream about invasion of the country, they should not expect us to show softness either.

Deputy leader of the Islamic Emirate of the Taleban Mullah Abdol Ghani, also known as Mullah Beradar, told the Afghan Islamic Press in an exclusive interview that if the foreigners keep dreaming about invading Afghanistan, the Taleban will not show any softening in their posture either.

The deputy leader of the Taleban Islamic Emirate answered questions from the Afghan Islamic Press sent to him in an email in the last week of December. The Afghan Islamic Press now publishes the text of the questions and answers on the last day of the current Gregorian year:

Exclusive interview of the Afghan Islamic Press with esteemed deputy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Mullah Beradar Akhond

Q: How do you evaluate your resistance during the current year which is almost ended?

In the name of God!
Fighting this year
A: The Americans, British and their other allies in the war in Afghanistan had expected to achieve decisive military results, suppress the Afghans’ jihad resistance, recapture all the areas and parts controlled by the mojahedin and pave the way for administration and activities by the puppet Kabul government at the end of the current year by conducting various great military operations, adopting military strategies and using different kinds of weapons during the year, but with special blessings from Great God and the unsparing support and sacrifice of the mojahedin nation, the current year had many surprising and consecutive glad tidings of triumphs and victories for the mojahedin of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The mojahedin not only countered the great military operations by the aggressor forces by forcing them to withdraw and proudly defended the areas controlled by the mojahedin, they also freed and pushed the invaders out of vast areas. The casualties and financial and losses they inflicted on the invaders could be found in reports, speeches and announcements of the Pentagon and other Western sources, who said the casualties of the past seven years has been equal to the losses and casualties of the current year. That means the current year has been the bloodiest year full of calamities and fears for them in the past eight years which is a great achievement of the mojahedin.

Cont’d (click below or on “comments”)

Taleban’s tactics for 2010

Q: What will be your military and political strategies in the coming year (2010)?

Part 1: Will the number of suicide attacks increase?
Part 2: Will you step up the planting of mines and mine attacks?
Part 3: Will you organize frontier wars? Will you increase explosions and sudden attacks on important targets?

A: Thank God the jihad direction and strategy during the current year was more successful and full of victories than we expected, particularly roadside mines, group attacks by suicide bombers on some government and foreign important targets in Kabul and some other provinces and ambushes against foreign and local aggressor forces were very effective. Perhaps, the same attacks may continue with some new tactics. Regarding our future political strategy, I should say that if the aggressor forces continue their military bullying, dream about invading Afghanistan, stand fast or send more troops, they should not expect us to show softness either.
Increase in foreign troops

Q: In your opinion, will the foreigners be able to defeat the resistance by increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan or not?

A: It is obvious that the aggressive forces in Afghanistan are not to some extent faced with lack of troops, militias, financial and military facilities, etc, but the problems they are faced with are their soldiers’ weak fighting morality and unsparing support of the Afghan mojahedin nation and their increasing coordination with jihad. Even if they (the foreigners) send more troops to Afghanistan, they will have no other achievements but heavy casualties.

Q: What is the major cause of the foreigners’ lack of success in Afghanistan so far?

A: Although the Americans anticipated eight years ago that the Taleban would no longer pose a military problem for them in Afghanistan, saying they (the Taleban) were finished for ever and could no longer move around or resist, these US expectations were proved wrong very quickly. Not only did the Taleban not leave the scene, they changed every foot of Afghanistan into a stronghold of jihad and resistance against the Americans. Now, the situation in Afghanistan has reached a stage where all the areas, deserts, mountains and villages of the country have changed into hot griddles and enemies for the invaders. The invaders tried to kill the spirit of jihad among the Afghans by using all kind of weapons such as arbitrariness, force, money, etc, but since the Afghans love their faith, belief, independence and national power, the invaders are, with the blessing of God, defeated and do not have any chances of victory.

Source of Taleban weapons

Q: Where do you receive weapons and ammunitions from for the current resistance?

A: In our fight against the aggressive forces in Afghanistan, we use weapons which were used by the mojahedin against the Russians. These weapons are still in Afghanistan. Some weapons dumps built during the period of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan still exist and the mojahedin use them. The mojahedin also capture some weapons and ammunitions from the enemy from time to time as booty of war, because the enemies escape from the battlefields immediately and leave all their weapons.
Efforts to split Taleban, Al-Qa’idah

Q: The foreigners want to separate the Taleban from Al-Qa’idah and reach an agreement with the Taleban. Do you think this is possible? How close are the Taleban and Al-Qa’idah at the moment?

A: The current jihad in Afghanistan is led by the Islamic Emirate. What the international community says about separating the Taleban and Al-Qa’idah is meaningless, it is just a pretext.

Q: Where are the Taleban leaders and Usamah Bin-Ladin? Is it true they are in Pakistan? Is the Taleban Leadership Council in Quetta or not?

A: So far as the leadership of the Islamic Emirate is concerned, they are not in Pakistan. We can also say that the leadership of Al-Qa’idah is not in Pakistan.
Peace talks

Q: They say some Taleban commanders and leaders support talks with the government which has caused differences and conflicts among the Taleban. Is it true?

A: I think the weapons and propaganda to split and separate the Islamic Emirate have lost their value by now. Over the past eight years, they have just been pointless rants by America and other aggressor forces.

Q: Have you ever talked to the government or the foreigners?

A: No.

Q: They say Abdollah Anas has negotiated representing the Taleban. Is he your representative?

A: We have neither permitted anyone to negotiate nor do we have any representative by the name of Abdollah Anas.

Q: If you are ready to negotiate, with whom will you negotiate and on what conditions?

A: Afghanistan has been attacked and invaded. If the aggressor forces take steps to end their invasion and put an end to their aggression and if we have guarantees of that, we will then explicitly announce our stance.

Q: After the new forces are deployed, the total number of the foreign forces in Afghanistan will be more than 130,000 soldiers. How and with what strategies will you and other resistance groups confront these forces?

A: The previous jihadi strategy has been very effective and efficient against the aggressive forces. Continuing the same strategy with some new initiatives will beat the Americans’ military arrogance and defeat them.

Q: If the foreigners leave Afghanistan, will you be able to negotiate with Hamed Karzai and his other allies?

A: Karzai’s administration is a symbol and unclean sign of the Americans. The Afghans are very sensitive about and strictly hate the administration. Still, this is a question which could be answered when the aggressors leave Afghanistan.

Q: As an Afghan, what do you think is the solution for the problem in Afghanistan?

A: Withdrawal of the aggressors and establishment of an Islamic system.

Q: When you come closer to power in the future, what kind of a system will you suggest?

A: The Afghans always demand and hope for an Islamic system in Afghanistan.

Q: How can you assure the Afghans that there will be no civil and domestic wars after the foreigners leave Afghanistan?

A: If the foreigners, particularly our neighbouring countries give up their obvious and secret conspiracies and stop interfering in domestic affairs of Afghanistan, the Islamic Emirate has the pride and initiative to ensure peace and stability all around the country. Meanwhile, thank God unity and single leadership of the jihad line is also present which can avoid such calamities.

Q: How can you assure the world that no country will be attacked from here after the foreigners leave Afghanistan and you come to power?

A: We had given the world such an assurance also during the Islamic Emirate’s previous era. We have and will have the same stance in the future as well.

Q: Are you ready to include former communists, the mojahedin groups which fought amongst each other and members of the current administration in the future system?

A: This will be decided later depending on conditions.

(Description of Source: Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto — Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto — Peshawar-based agency, staffed by Afghans, that describes itself as an independent “news agency” but whose history and reporting pattern reveal a perceptible pro-Taliban bias; the AIP’s founder-director, Mohammad Yaqub Sharafat, has long been associated with a mujahidin faction that merged with the Taliban’s “Islamic Emirate” led by Mullah Omar; subscription required to access content; http://www.afghanislamicpress.com

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Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has announced the end of the Pakistani military campaign in South Waziristan, although he seems to reserve the possibility that it might nevertheless continue. The reason for the ambiguity is surely that South Waziristan is a huge place, and that many fighters of the Taliban movement of Pakistan melted away before the advance of the conventional Pakistani army. Thus, South Waziristan is unlikely actually to have been decisively pacified with this short campaign. Some of the escaped insurgents are likely now on the Afghanistan side of the border and are now a headache for the United States and NATO. Indeed, PM Gilani is petrified that the Obama surge will send thousands of angry Pashtuns back over the border into Pakistan.

Courtesy BBC

Gilani also indicated that the next big military campaign against the Pakistani Taliban would focus on the Orakzai Tribal Agency. It lies athwart the route to the Khyber pass and is a convenient staging ground for attacks by the Pakistani Taliban on Peshawar and on NATO convoys and warehouses in the Peshawar area, which provision US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Orakzai is dominated by the Taliban of Hakeemullah Mehsud [PDF], the successor to Baitullah Mehsud, and has been put under typical rigid religious rule. One of the targets in South Waziristan had also been Taliban insurgents from the Mehsud tribe. An Orakzai campaign does have some benefit for the US and NATO if it contributes to the safety of NATO convoys heading for the Khyber Pass. But neither South Waziristan nor Orakzai is central to the insurgency on the Afghanistan side of the Durand Line, and so Pakistani military intervention in those two places concentrates on threats to Islamabad. Many observers feel that an attack on North Waziristan, the stronghold of the Haqqani Network and al Qaeda allies, would be far more consequential for President Obama’s war effort insofar as attacks are launched by these groups deep into Afghanistan from North Waziristan. That Orakzai might be the next target suggests a continuing preoccupation in Islamabad with perceived threats to Pakistan proper rather than a determination to take on frontally the groups most dangerous to the Karzai government in Kabul.

Gilani went on to talk about reconciliation with dissident Baluch tribes, whose own insurgency is characterized by a form of subnationalism and tribalism rather than Muslim extremism. Baluch activisits point out that the federal government derives far more revenue from the province in the form of natural gas and other commodities than Islamabad returns to it in the form of services. Again, Gilani is addressing a Pakistani internal matter. US officials see the Baluchistan capital of Quetta as a continuing headquarters for Mullah Omar and the Old Taliban; they see it as indeed the center of the Quetta Shura, which plans out attacks inside Afghanistan. That Gilani is preoccupied with settling Islamabad’s feud with the secessionist Bugti tribe rather than focusing on Mullah Omar and Quetta again demonstrates that the Obama administration still faces hurdles in attaining complete cooperation from the Pakistani government in the Afghanistan war effort.

End/ (Not Continued)

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