Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service English News Wire
05-31-2006
WASHINGTON, May 30, 2006 (IPS/GIN) -- By just about any measure,
May has been a bad month for U.S. policy in Afghanistan.
It began with a warning by a shopkeeper in a small-town bazaar
in the Pashtun southern part of the country to the visiting
commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry,
duly recorded by the New York Times: "The Taliban and Al Qaeda are
everywhere."
Indeed, in the last several weeks, nearly 400 people have been
killed in an unprecedented Taliban offensive designed, according
to Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid, to pre-empt the deployment of
6,000 NATO troops who are supposed to replace some 3,000 U.S.
soldiers in southern Afghanistan over the summer.
While Taliban fighters have borne most of the losses,
particularly in airstrikes by U.S. warplanes, collateral damage has
taken the lives of scores of civilians as well, forcing President
Hamid Karzai to reiterate past appeals for foreign forces to
exercise more caution in deploying their firepower.
The month ended with the worst violence -- much of it directed
against U.S. and other foreign forces -- in Kabul since U.S.-backed
factions successfully ousted the Taliban in late 2001.
At least 11 people were killed in clashes between rioters and
U.S. and Afghan forces that followed Monday's early-morning crash
of a U.S. military cargo truck into a line of cars on a Kabul
roadway that reportedly took the lives of another five people.
Washington claimed the accident was caused by failure of the
truck's brakes, and pledged to compensate the victims or their
families. But the violent reaction of hundreds of people who stoned
U.S. troops and proceeded to loot nearby shops and the offices of
international-aid groups and vandalize at least one luxury hotel
appeared to confirm that the U.S. and its allies face a serious
challenge in retaining the hearts and minds of many Afghans.
"There is a large reservoir of discontent, and people are now
just looking for a reason to vent their rage," a Western diplomat
told the Christian Science Monitor after the rioting, an opinion
that was echoed here Tuesday.
"There is an underlying anger in Afghanistan," according to Mark
Schneider, Washington director of the International Crisis Group
(ICG). "It arises from the failure to finally put an end to the
insurgency and permit people to see their lives improving as a
result of the reconstruction that has not yet arrived. There are
lots of people who are unhappy for many different reasons."
Particularly frustrating for many Afghans is the growing gap
between rich -- especially those who profit from the thriving drug
trade -- and poor; pervasive corruption; and continued insecurity,
particularly in the Pashtun south where local warlords still rule
with the acquiescence of the Karzai government.
Indeed, the fact that the central government has largely failed
to effectively challenge their position by, for example, moving to
disarm and demobilize their militias, may be contributing to the
resurgence of the Taliban, which has also been bolstered by
alliances with drug traffickers who have also helped replenish the
group's finances and arms supplies, according to analysts here.
But the "key issue," according to ICG's Schneider, is Pakistan's
support for the Islamist group. "The main reason the insurgency is
sustaining itself is that it has a place to go to regroup, to rest
and resupply, and to re-infiltrate into Afghanistan," he told IPS,
adding that its headquarters appears to be in Quetta in
Balochistan, a city controlled by the Pakistani military.
The Taliban's resurgence, which has featured unprecedented use
of suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that
have done so much damage to U.S. forces in Iraq, as well as
fighting units as large as 300 men, appears to have forced the
administration of President George W. Bush to review its plans to
draw down its forces in Afghanistan from an average of about 20,000
over the last couple of years to about 16,500 by next fall.
These are to be replaced by the additional NATO troops whose
rules of engagement and deployment, however, have been
controversial in their home countries.
"(The Taliban and al Qaeda) have closely followed the testy
debates in parliaments across Europe about deploying troops to
Afghanistan," according to Ahmed. "They count on inflicting a few
bloody casualties, letting body bags arrive in European capitals,
and then seeing the protests against deployment escalate."
As a result, the U.S. drawdown may now be delayed. Indeed, in
light of the Taliban's resurgence, Washington actually has
increased its troop strength in Afghanistan from about 19,000 to
23,000 since the end of winter.
Any reduction in the U.S. presence now, it is feared here, will
be taken as a sign of weakness, if not the first installment of a
full withdrawal that will leave the Karzai government to fend for
itself.
"We've made tremendous progress in Afghanistan and no one wants
to endanger that progress or move too quickly to satisfy some
external deadline or agenda," one unnamed "senior administration
official" told the Times last week.
In addition, major gains by Taliban forces over the summer would
further embarrass an administration already battered in the public
opinion polls by the negative appraisals of its performance in
Iraq.
"Afghanistan is our one big victory in the 'war on terror'," a
retired U.S. diplomat told IPS. "If it, too, is seen as slipping
away, the political consequences for Bush and the Republicans would
be just devastating. Face it: we're stuck there."
For Schneider and a number of other analysts here, the key for
the administration now is to exert more serious pressure on
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to close down Taliban bases.
While he concedes that the Taliban enjoy some popular support among
religiously conservative Pashtuns, "I don't think the bulk of them
want to see the restoration of a Taliban government."
But, according to Rashid, Musharraf and the Pakistani army of
which he is still the leader see "the Taliban as its long-term
proxy force in Afghanistan" and are unlikely to abandon it -- at
least without exacting a very high price, including getting
"unqualified U.S. endorsement for his re-election as president
another five-year term, while retaining his post as army chief."
Copyright 2006 IPS/GIN. The contents of this story can not be duplicated in any fashion without written permission of Global Information Network
U.S./AFGHANISTAN: BUSH MAY HAVE TO RETHINK WITHDRAWAL PLANSJim Lobe
Inter Press Service English News Wire
05-31-2006
WASHINGTON, May 30, 2006 (IPS/GIN) -- By just about any measure,
May has been a bad month for U.S. policy in Afghanistan.
It began with a warning by a shopkeeper in a small-town bazaar
in the Pashtun southern part of the country to the visiting
commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry,
duly recorded by the New York Times: "The Taliban and Al Qaeda are
everywhere."
Indeed, in the last several weeks, nearly 400 people have been
killed in an unprecedented Taliban offensive designed, according
to Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid, to pre-empt the deployment of
6,000 NATO troops who are supposed to replace some 3,000 U.S.
soldiers in southern Afghanistan over the summer.
While Taliban fighters have borne most of the losses,
particularly in airstrikes by U.S. warplanes, collateral damage has
taken the lives of scores of civilians as well, forcing President
Hamid Karzai to reiterate past appeals for foreign forces to
exercise more caution in deploying their firepower.
The month ended with the worst violence -- much of it directed
against U.S. and other foreign forces -- in Kabul since U.S.-backed
factions successfully ousted the Taliban in late 2001.
At least 11 people were killed in clashes between rioters and
U.S. and Afghan forces that followed Monday's early-morning crash
of a U.S. military cargo truck into a line of cars on a Kabul
roadway that reportedly took the lives of another five people.
Washington claimed the accident was caused by failure of the
truck's brakes, and pledged to compensate the victims or their
families. But the violent reaction of hundreds of people who stoned
U.S. troops and proceeded to loot nearby shops and the offices of
international-aid groups and vandalize at least one luxury hotel
appeared to confirm that the U.S. and its allies face a serious
challenge in retaining the hearts and minds of many Afghans.
"There is a large reservoir of discontent, and people are now
just looking for a reason to vent their rage," a Western diplomat
told the Christian Science Monitor after the rioting, an opinion
that was echoed here Tuesday.
"There is an underlying anger in Afghanistan," according to Mark
Schneider, Washington director of the International Crisis Group
(ICG). "It arises from the failure to finally put an end to the
insurgency and permit people to see their lives improving as a
result of the reconstruction that has not yet arrived. There are
lots of people who are unhappy for many different reasons."
Particularly frustrating for many Afghans is the growing gap
between rich -- especially those who profit from the thriving drug
trade -- and poor; pervasive corruption; and continued insecurity,
particularly in the Pashtun south where local warlords still rule
with the acquiescence of the Karzai government.
Indeed, the fact that the central government has largely failed
to effectively challenge their position by, for example, moving to
disarm and demobilize their militias, may be contributing to the
resurgence of the Taliban, which has also been bolstered by
alliances with drug traffickers who have also helped replenish the
group's finances and arms supplies, according to analysts here.
But the "key issue," according to ICG's Schneider, is Pakistan's
support for the Islamist group. "The main reason the insurgency is
sustaining itself is that it has a place to go to regroup, to rest
and resupply, and to re-infiltrate into Afghanistan," he told IPS,
adding that its headquarters appears to be in Quetta in
Balochistan, a city controlled by the Pakistani military.
The Taliban's resurgence, which has featured unprecedented use
of suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that
have done so much damage to U.S. forces in Iraq, as well as
fighting units as large as 300 men, appears to have forced the
administration of President George W. Bush to review its plans to
draw down its forces in Afghanistan from an average of about 20,000
over the last couple of years to about 16,500 by next fall.
These are to be replaced by the additional NATO troops whose
rules of engagement and deployment, however, have been
controversial in their home countries.
"(The Taliban and al Qaeda) have closely followed the testy
debates in parliaments across Europe about deploying troops to
Afghanistan," according to Ahmed. "They count on inflicting a few
bloody casualties, letting body bags arrive in European capitals,
and then seeing the protests against deployment escalate."
As a result, the U.S. drawdown may now be delayed. Indeed, in
light of the Taliban's resurgence, Washington actually has
increased its troop strength in Afghanistan from about 19,000 to
23,000 since the end of winter.
Any reduction in the U.S. presence now, it is feared here, will
be taken as a sign of weakness, if not the first installment of a
full withdrawal that will leave the Karzai government to fend for
itself.
"We've made tremendous progress in Afghanistan and no one wants
to endanger that progress or move too quickly to satisfy some
external deadline or agenda," one unnamed "senior administration
official" told the Times last week.
In addition, major gains by Taliban forces over the summer would
further embarrass an administration already battered in the public
opinion polls by the negative appraisals of its performance in
Iraq.
"Afghanistan is our one big victory in the 'war on terror'," a
retired U.S. diplomat told IPS. "If it, too, is seen as slipping
away, the political consequences for Bush and the Republicans would
be just devastating. Face it: we're stuck there."
For Schneider and a number of other analysts here, the key for
the administration now is to exert more serious pressure on
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to close down Taliban bases.
While he concedes that the Taliban enjoy some popular support among
religiously conservative Pashtuns, "I don't think the bulk of them
want to see the restoration of a Taliban government."
But, according to Rashid, Musharraf and the Pakistani army of
which he is still the leader see "the Taliban as its long-term
proxy force in Afghanistan" and are unlikely to abandon it -- at
least without exacting a very high price, including getting
"unqualified U.S. endorsement for his re-election as president
another five-year term, while retaining his post as army chief."
Copyright 2006 IPS/GIN. The contents of this story can not be duplicated in any fashion without written permission of Global Information Network
