Admonitions to spin off factions of the Taliban or Taliban-sympathizers against the so-called “hard core” Taliban are becoming commonplace. But who are the Taliban? We have already discussed the disaggregation of the Taliban into drug runners, war lords, petty former anti-Soviet commanders, criminals, Afghan Taliban, Pakistan Taliban, al Qaeda, and other rogue elements in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Drug runners, local war lords and other criminals can be dealt with differently than the Taliban. Drug runners will likely not have strong inclinations to Islamic fundamentalism and certainly not the global expansion of the same. On the other hand, the religiously motivated fighters within Afghanistan likely number as many as ten thousand fighters, including 3000 or so full time insurgents.
Then there is the Afghan Taliban who are not located within Afghanistan but who are indigenous to Afghanistan, under the leadership of Mohammed Omar who is probably in or around Quetta, Pakistan. They continually resupply Taliban fighters and give them rest and sanctuary within Pakistan. Quetta is a revolving door of support for Afghan fighters.
This group is organizationally disconnected with the Tehrik-i-Taliban, or Pakistan Taliban. These are groups of Taliban who are led by various commanders, the most powerful of whom are Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan, and Mullah Fazlullah in the SWAT valley. The Tehrik-i-Taliban number tens of thousands more fighters. It is estimated that Mehsud alone owns 20,000 fighters.
The Tehrik-i-Taliban are different than the Afghan Taliban in that they have brought a hard core global expansionist focus to their radical religious views. It is what Nicholas Schmidle calls the Next-Gen Taliban.
Some Afghan Taliban have laid down their weapons and taken up the Taliban cause in politics. They have not changed their belief system – the same one that allied itself with the Taliban fighters and al Qaeda prior to 9/11. The Afghan fighters who remain active in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have not laid down their weapons and still harbor hopes of regaining the leadership of Afghanistan. The Tehrik-i-Taliban are hard core radicals, and shout to passersby in Khyber “We are Taliban! We are mujahedin! “We are al-Qaida!” There is no distinction.
Not a single group or subgroup listed above can be violently turned against the active Taliban fighters, mostly because their are ideologically aligned. In Anbar, Iraq, the more secular Sunni tribes had the religiously motivated al Qaeda thrust on them from the outside with all of the oppressive violence, and it didn’t take long for them to rebel. The same is not true of either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The proof is pre-9/11 history in Afghanistan where the hard core fighters – including al Qaeda – had safe haven.
Given this state of affairs, Karzai and his foreign allies will not be in a position to do much against the Taliban and its supporters unless they work on three main objectives simultaneously. One is to address their political and strategic vulnerabilities; another is to widen and speed up reconstruction. A third is to re-establish a stable Afghan-Pakistan border by pressuring Pakistan to halt all support for the Taliban.
True enough for potential future Taliban fighters whom we wish to keep in the fold, this prescription is wrong for the existing Taliban because the ailment has been misdiagnosed (and besides, pressure has already been put on Pakistan, to no avail). For the Taliban, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum has the right suggestion: “NATO forces must be united in their commitment to wage war against the Taliban.” No single group can be spun off to fight the Taliban in lieu of Western military operations against them.
The Captain’s Journal admires Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and he can consider us to be in his corner. But we would be willing to bet that his position on Pakistan is “swing and a miss – full count now.” So where are we? Gates said Thursday that he has “real concern” about a sharp rise in attacks by insurgent forces in eastern Afghanistan and says it reflects infiltration of fighters from Pakistan.
Gates was asked at a Pentagon news conference what he thought of a report by a senior U.S. general in Afghanistan on Tuesday that insurgent attacks in the east have increased by 40 percent this year.
“It is a matter of concern — real concern,” Gates replied.
“It’s an issue that clearly we have to pursue with the Pakistani government,” he added.
The defense secretary said one reason for the jump in insurgent attacks in that part of Afghanistan is that fighters have been able to cross the border without facing sufficient pressure by Pakistani troops.
“It actually was not bad until a few months ago,” he said, when the Pakistani government began negotiating peace or ceasefire deals with a variety of militant groups in areas bordering Afghanistan.
“The pressure was taken off these people,” as a result of such deals, he added. And that has meant fighters are freer to cross the border and create problems for us,” Gates said.
In Truth or Consequences: Closing the Pakistan Border, TCJ is ahead of the game. We have already acquiesced to the fact that we aren’t going to get much help from Pakistan. We have pointed out that the Iraqi borders were problematic too, especially with Syria. But the insurgency is defeated, or almost so, and while more difficult, it is not impossible to fight a transnational insurgency in a singular battle space. It requires force projection, something that Gates doesn’t believe we have for Afghanistan as long as Operation Iraqi Freedom is ongoing. Gates is in a bit of a spot. But we have no trust in Pakistan, while Gates still places his eggs in their basket. What do we know that he doesn’t?
It’s not what we know, it’s a matter of listening and gaining perspective. The Asia Times gives us a glimpse into internal Pakistani politics and culture.
Washington saw the writing on the wall immediately after the February polls when former premier Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League won more seats than was expected. The anticipation had been that the US-friendly Pakistan People’s Party, headed by former premier Benazir Bhutto until her assassination last December, would romp home.
Amid the political uncertainty that this result caused, allied with terror attacks in the country, the military delayed operations in the tribal areas. The military’s position was hardened when on June 10 the US attacked militants in Pakistan’s Mohmand Agency but killed several Pakistani security forces.
Washington’s plan, which had been in the making for two years, is now in ruins, that is, the ideal of a compliant elected government, an accommodating military and a friendly president (Pervez Musharraf) acting in unison to further the US’s interests.
The crux is, while America was playing its game, so too was al-Qaeda. Through terror attacks, al-Qaeda was able to disrupt the economy, and by targeting the security forces, al-Qaeda created splits and fear in the armed forces, to the extent that they thought twice about dancing to the US’s tune.
Unlike Musharraf, when he wore two hats, of the president and of army chief, the new head of the military, professional soldier General Ashfaq Kiani, had to listen to the chatter of his men and the intelligence community at grand dinners.
What he heard was disturbing. Soldiers from the North-West Frontier Province region were completely in favor of the Taliban, while those from the countryside of Punjab – the decisive majority in the armed forces – felt guilty about fighting the Taliban and reckoned it was the wrong war. Therefore, Kiani decided it was necessary to support peace talks with the militants to create some breathing space for his men.
At the same time, the dynamics in the war theater have changed, providing Pakistan with more options and more room to play in its Afghan policy. Pakistan’s former ally in Afghanistan, the Taliban, are no longer irrelevant; they have emerged as the single-largest Pashtun opposition group.
The Pakistani people have rejected the U.S.-led war on terror. The Pakistani Army doesn’t want to fight the Taliban, and it isn’t just about fear or cowardice. They believe it’s the “wrong war.” Military defeat of the Taliban will occur primarily in Afghanistan rather than Pakistan, and it will occur mainly at the hands of U.S. forces, or not at all. All is not lost. We have pointed out before based on the Taliban’s own words that “If NATO remains strong in Afghanistan, it will put pressure on Pakistan. If NATO remains weaker in Afghanistan, it will dare [encourage] Pakistan to support the Taliban.”
Afghanistan is now and will remain the central point for the fight against the Taliban, and it behooves us to deploy forces and engage the fight as quickly as possible. TIme is of the essence.
The Captain’s Journal has been tracking the Khyber Pass and the Torkham crossing to determine how active they are with respect to enemy interdiction of U.S. supplies and materiel. Things have appeared to be relatively quiet, but this is deceiving. Action has occurred without making its way to the news – at least not until recently. But there are two separate versions of the story. The first comes to us from Reuters.
Four U.S. helicopter engines worth more than $13 million have been stolen while they were being trucked from Afghanistan to a port in Pakistan to be shipped home, the U.S. military said.
Most supplies for the U.S. military in landlocked Afghanistan, including fuel, are transported through Pakistan, and militants in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have been stepping up attacks on shipments.
A U.S. military spokesman said the engines were being transported by a Pakistani trucking company when they went missing some time in the month before April 10.
It was not known if the shipment went missing on the Afghan side of the border or in Pakistan, Sergeant Mark Swart said on Thursday.
“We don’t have the information on exactly where it disappeared. We just know that it did not get to the port,” he said.
Taliban militants in Pakistan’s restive tribal belt captured three US military choppers while they were being shipped in a dismantled state from Peshawar to Jalalabad in Afghanistan and sold one of the helicopters for several hundred thousand dollars, a media report said todays.
Pakistani officials confirmed the development while the US embassy spokesperson refused to comment, saying the information ‘appears to be only hearsay’, The News daily reported.
Some diplomats in Islamabad were aware of the Taliban operation but were not ready to speak on record. One of the hijacked helicopters had already been sold to an unidentified customer in Afghanistan, the report said.
The components of the helicopters arrived in containers at the Karachi Port and were taken by road to Peshawar. The containers then entered the tribal areas for the journey to Afghanistan.
When the containers entered the restive Khyber Agency, Taliban stopped the convoys and took away the helicopter components. Pakistani paramilitary forces tried to confront the Taliban but ‘suffered heavy losses due to darkness’.
The incident happened in the same area where Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan Tariq Azizuddin was kidnapped in February this year.
Or are these two separate events? One account has four helicopter engines making their way from Afghanistan to Karachi to be shipped to the U.S., the interdiction occurring prior to April 10. The next account has three dismantled helicopters making their way from Karachi to Afghanistan, the interdiction occurring some time in February.
Either way, helicopters or helicopter parts were interdicted, either to or from Karachi. Or, these are two separate accounts. But the strategic plan to make the Khyber pass a problematic transit route is still active by the Taliban.
General McNeill has said that the insurgency in increasing in Afghanistan, but along with the factual analysis he gives us the same warning concerning the Pakistan border region we have heard for months now.
The outgoing top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan said Friday that attacks increased 50 percent in April in the country’s eastern region, where U.S. troops primarily operate, as a spreading Taliban insurgency across the border in Pakistan fueled a surge in violence.
In a sober assessment, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, who departed June 3 after 16 months commanding NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, said that although record levels of foreign and Afghan troops have constrained repeated Taliban offensives, stabilizing Afghanistan will be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgent havens in Pakistan.
The Taliban is “resurgent in the region,” particularly in sanctuaries in Pakistan, and as a result “it’s going to be difficult to take on this insurgent group . . . in the broader sort of way,” McNeill said at a Pentagon news conference.
Clashes in the east pushed U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan in May to 15, and total foreign troop deaths there to 23, the highest monthly figure since last August.
Indeed, comprehensive data released by the NATO-led command show a steady escalation in violence since NATO took charge of the Afghanistan mission in 2006, spurred in part by more aggressive operations by the alliance and most recently by U.S. Marine battalions in the heavily contested southern province of Helmand. ISAF troops in Afghanistan increased from 36,000 in early 2007 to 52,000 now, while the Afghan army grew from 20,000 to 58,000 soldiers.
Overall violence has increased and attacks have grown more complex, according to the data and U.S. military officials. The number of roadside bombs increased from 1,931 in 2006 to 2,615 last year. Attacks peaked during the months of the warm weather fighting season, with more than 400 in the peak month of 2005, more than 800 in 2006, and about 1,000 in 2007.
As violence has risen, it has remained concentrated geographically in a relatively small number of districts, the data show, in predominantly Pashtun areas. Afghanistan has 364 districts, and last year about 70 percent of all attacks took place in 40, or about 10 percent, of those districts, McNeill said. For the first half of this year, he said, about 76 percent of attacks took place in virtually the same 40 districts, with some shifts in Farah and Nimruz provinces.
The district data has helped drive the deployment of NATO forces, with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit focusing on a district in southern Helmand that shows extensive enemy activity. “We knew it was a dark hole and we had to get to it; we simply didn’t have the force,” said McNeill, noting that ISAF remains short of combat troops, helicopters, and intelligence and surveillance equipment.
Troop numbers are low compared with the size of the insurgency, which includes many part-time fighters. There are an estimated 5,000 to 20,000 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, plus an estimated 1,000 each for the insurgent groups led by Siraj Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, according to ISAF intelligence.
More worrisome than the Taliban expansion in Pakistan is the threat of more cooperation between homegrown insurgents and outside extremist groups, McNeill said. “The greatest risk is the possibility of collusion between the insurgents who are indigenous to that region and the more intractable, the more extreme terrorists who are taking up residence there in the North-West Frontier” Province of Pakistan, he said.
McNeill criticized Pakistani efforts to crack down on that threat, and — offering his unofficial view — described the political situation in Islamabad as “dysfunctional.”
He also criticized efforts by the Pakistan government to negotiate peace deals with insurgents on the frontier, saying past agreements have led to increased attacks across the border in Afghanistan. McNeill said the 50 percent increase in attacks in eastern Afghanistan in April compared with the same month last year is “directly attributable to the lack of pressure on the other side of the border.”
But is McNeill’s assessment true? Well, yes and no. It is true that “stabilizing Afghanistan will be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgent havens in Pakistan,” as long as NATO has only 52,000 troops in theater, and as long as restrictive ROE prevents the Germans from taking offensive actions against the Taliban, and as long as NATO lacks a coherent overarching strategy, and as long as half of the force is employed in force protection rather than counterinsurgency. What McNeill doesn’t really know is whether the campaign could be successful – regardless of disposition of the issue of the Pakistan Taliban – with the force size present in Iraq.
We should be careful and deliberate here. After all, The Captain’s Journal has been quick to point out that Syria and Iran must be confronted if the campaign in Iraq is to be successful. But also to be fair (and we still take this position), Pakistan doesn’t have the goals of regional hegemony that Iran does. In Conversation with a Jihadi, we learned from his perspective that “If NATO remains strong in Afghanistan, it will put pressure on Pakistan. If NATO remains weaker in Afghanistan, it will dare [encourage] Pakistan to support the Taliban.”
If we are engaged in fighting against a transnational insurgency, then we cannot realistically complain that the insurgency is transnational and recognizes no borders. We can continue to pressure Pakistan, but the one available avenue of kinetic operations against the Taliban – Afghanistan – must be the focus of our efforts. Until we have ramped up force projection within this theater, we do not know whether our actions in Afghanistan can be dispositive concerning the Taliban, and thus we have no real leverage with Pakistan. After all, if we haven’t committed to the campaign, then why should they? Or so they are left to think.
Pakistan’s peace agreements with Taliban militants have drawn concern from NATO forces, Afghan officials and the U.S. government who worry they will be short-lived truces that only undermine the war against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.
But a day before leaving on his first trip to Kabul, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi pushed back against critics during a forceful speech before parliament.
“When we talk of peace, we also have to tell our friends, who at times are cynical about the peace negotiations that Pakistan has undertaken,” said Qureshi. “Look at the spirit behind that negotiation. The spirit is not capitulation, the spirit is not compromise, the spirit is peaceful coexistence.”
As for the Afghanistan Taliban, one commander recently said “You know, the Taliban and the Americans are as different as fire and water. Maybe the water will kill the fire or the fire will kill the water, but one of these things has to happen.” “If the foreigners did not have their planes, then within five days I guarantee we would be in the streets of Kabul.”
As for the Pakistani Taliban, they are about to take control of Peshawar.
The provincial capital might slip into the hands of groups of militants within a few months if the government did not take adequate measures to arrest the growing trend of militancy.
The district is surrounded by tribal Khyber Agency in the west, Darra Adamkhel, Frontier Region Peshawar in the south and Mohmand Agency and Shabqadar town of Charsadda district in the north. Militant groups have been gaining strength for the past several months in all these towns.
Militants have now spread to innumerable villages of the Peshawar district. Radicals have thickly populated Matani, Mashokhel, Mashogagar and Badhber villages close to Darra Adamkhel.
The militants associated with two groups of Khyber Agency led by Mangal Bagh and Haji Namdar have been gathering vigour in Sheikhan, Sarband, Regi and Nasir Bagh while two militant groups of Mohmand Agency have established their writ in Mathra, Michni, Daudzai and Khazana villages.
It would appear that the “peaceful coexistence” doctrine has proven itself to be problematic.
The broad strokes of the picture were painted for us by Nicholas Schmidle in Next-Gen Taliban. Leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, told us of some of his concrete plans for the future.
“We want to eradicate Britain and America, and to shatter the arrogance and tyranny of the infidels. We pray that Allah will enable us to destroy the White House, New York, and London.”
Nationalism is evil and out of accord with the global aspirations of al Qaeda. Nation-states are not just not helpful, or even a necessary evil. They are quite literally an obstacle to jihad, not because they share the loyalties of jihadists, but rather, because they fundamentally don’t acquiesce to the vision of world conquest in the name of Islam and the forcible implementation of Sharia law. What we see as a transnational insurgency is to the jihadists simply a world wide struggle. They don’t recognize nation-states as legitimate.
Now with the “peace accord” between Mehsud and Pakistan, Baitullah has said that he intends to send fighters to Afghanistan to assist in the insurgency. It was merely a matter of time before Pakistan helped to implement his broader plan. His brand of Islam doesn’t recognize borders. “Islam does not recognize boundaries”… “There can be no deal with the United States.”
More to the point, Syed Saleem Shahzad gives us a glimpse into the evolution of the Pakistan Taliban from their relatively humble beginnings to becoming an international threat.
He has been cultivated by al-Qaeda and is now part of a nexus headed by Takfiris (those militantly intolerant of “infidels”) belonging to al-Qaeda and a group of former Pakistani jihadis who cut their teeth in Kashmir under Baitullah.
Baitullah sees a very broad role for himself and for his comrades. They do not want simply to be members of a local resistance movement. They are riding the global ideological bandwagon of al-Qaeda and envisage a complicated strategy to win a war against the West.
Regardless of whether the Taliban are engaged by the U.S. within Pakistan proper, as we discussed in Conversation with a Jihadi, the surest way to put pressure on the Taliban is to begin the pressure in Afghanistan. The Marines have made a very good start.
While purveying propaganda, al Qaeda and Taliban spokesmen often unintentionally relinquish information that points to vulnerabilities and infighting within their organization. An interview with a jihadist is used below, along with a question and answer session by Ayman al-Zawahiri, to supply the broad outlines of two specific vulnerabilities.
Background & Report
In spite of the U.S. objections to negotiations with the Tehrik-i-Taliban, there has been enough British and Canadian support, as well as internal support within Pakistan, that the authorities were persuaded to continue the process. They want more time.
This week the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, U.S. General Dan McNeil said any deal must include stopping fighters from crossing the two countries’ shared border.
“We have gone back and looked at the data we have over a long period of time when there have been other peace deals,” he said. “And the fact is each time the talks resulted in a peace deal we have an increased level of activity.”
Pakistani officials insist that unlike previous agreements the new peace talks involve elected government representatives – not the military – and those representatives have more credibility with tribal leaders …
Pakistan’s former spy agency chief Asad Durrani says people living near the disputed border known as the Durand line who are sympathetic to the Taliban will not immediately change their behavior because of a peace agreement.
“If we expect that these people will completely prevent the crossings of the Durand line – that cannot be done, simply impossible,” he said. “If we think that we can prevent those people who feel motivated to go on the other side and help the Afghan resistance – that again is mission impossible.”
Despite U.S. criticism of the deal and pessimism even among Pakistanis about finding a lasting peace agreement, negotiator Arshad Abdullah says that after more than six years of failed policies, critics should give the new approach time.
“With these agreements hopefully Afghanistan will be better off. It is a trial. Basically we want the world community to give us a chance and see how successful we are,” he said. “It is a matter of three or four months and within six months hopefully we will have an even better situation.”
But is more time going to matter? Understanding the enemy is crucial in the struggle against the global insurgency. An Asia Times journalist gives us a glimpse into the nature of the enemy in a recent article, and it behooves us to listen as he describes a conversation with a jihadi.
Seven months ago I visited Bajaur and Mohmandagencies. As my taxi driver headed from Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, he was played some Pashtu music on the car’s CD. Quickly, though, he changed it for jihadi songs.
“The militants have not only brought guns to the tribal areas, they have also brought a culture which has transformed tribal society,” commented a passenger traveling with me.
Syed Saleem Shahzad (with Asia Times) then goes on to describe a more recent meeting with a jihadi in the context of thinking about this “culture which has transformed” society. He talks with a fighter who converses with him under the psuedonym “S.”
S is the son of a Pakistani military officer and left his home after completing school at the age of 17. Ever since, he has been an active jihadi, and in eight years he has only seen his family once.
He joined al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan before September 11, 2001 – even serving for bin Laden – but soon after that event he went to the South Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan with Arab-Afghans such as Sheikh Ahmad Saeed Khadr and Sheikh Essa.
S said his association with Arab-Afghan militants turned him from an ordinary jihadi into an astute trainer. “In my early 20s, I was training big names of this region, including young Arabs and Uzbeks who were many years older than me,” said S.
S could have earned a monthly stipend to devote himself to being a jihad, but he chose to work as a trader in Pakistani cities to earn extra money. He then returned to the mountain vastness of Afghanistan to join the Taliban’s fight against NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in Afghanistan.
A turning point in S’s life came when, returning from Khost province in Afghanistan where he ran a training camp, he was arrested by Pakistani Frontier Corps.
“I was passed on from one security agency to another, and each time the interrogation methods changed. My pre-9/11 association with bin Laden and Zawahiri and occasional meetings with Zawahiri after 9/11 boosted me as an ‘al-Qaeda associate’ in the eyes of my Pakistani examiners. For one-and-half years I did not see a single ray of sunlight. After thorough interrogations, they concluded that I was just a fighter and a trainer against NATO troops who happened to be a ‘renegade’ son of an army officer,” said S.
“They contacted my father and despite that he had abandoned me a long time ago, when he heard about my situation all his fatherly affection returned and he agreed to become my guarantor that I would not take part in any jihadi activities.
“So I was released in front of Peshawar railway station, blindfolded, and when my blinds were removed there was my old father in front of me. I was standing with my hands and feet chained, and when my guards removed these my father hugged me and wept profusely.
“That was the only brief interaction between me and my family as I once again went into my own world of jihad. It was me and my gun, and I never looked back to see if there was any family, a father or a mother, waiting for me … though I miss them a lot,” S related in a sad, soft voice.
Syed Saleem Shahzad goes on to discuss the location of Bin Laden and other things, but a meaningful exchange occurs late in the interview.
S said he is against the use of suicide attacks. “I do not know the exact status of such attacks in Islamic law, but certainly in my manuals of war it is prohibited. I have argued with all the top commanders that any target can be hit without the use of suicide attacks,” S said.
On strategic matters, S is clear that attacks on Pakistani security forces in the tribal areas can only add up to problems. “I always argued with top ideologues like Sheikh Essa that the more success we get in Afghanistan, the more we will gain support from Pakistan. If NATO remains strong in Afghanistan, it will put pressure on Pakistan. If NATO remains weaker in Afghanistan, it will dare [encourage] Pakistan to support the Taliban, its only real allies in the region,” S said.
Analysis & Commentary
Two very remarkable vulnerabilities have been accidentally divulged in this last exchange. It is obvious that S is religiously motivated. Not only does he say so, but the hold and sway this has over him is enough to break with a weeping father to go back to his commanders. Its power is complete with this jihadist.
This same religious commitment is also causing a problem within the movement. Note what S says about the tactics of suicide attacks. “I do not know the exact status of such attacks in Islamic law, but certainly in my manuals of war it is prohibited. I have argued with all the top commanders that any target can be hit without the use of suicide attacks.”
There may be a couple of reasons for the difficulty, one of which is the certain death of the jihadist. But the most significant objection doubtless has to do with death of noncombatant Muslims due to these attacks. They would like to believe that the suicide bomb is the Taliban equivalent of the JDAM targeted with GPS. Innocents are spared, or so the claim goes. Baitullah Mehsud recently had his own press conference in which he says that suicide attacks are “our most destructive weapon … out atom bomb,” but better than the enemy’s atom bomb because our bomb targets only the enemy while the enemy’s kills innocents.
But this isn’t true, and there is work ongoing within their ranks to backfit a justification for their tactics. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has an interesting analysis of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s recent Q&A session, and suicide tactics play a prominent role, having been brought up in the questions posed to Zawahiri. The problem is also summarized in the most recent issue of the CTC Sentinel.
In the course of defending al-Qa`ida against charges of unjustly killing innocent Muslims during his April 2, 2008 “open interview,” Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri reintroduced Hukm al-Tatarrus (the law on using human shields) into the debate.1 A relatively unfamiliar term to non-Muslims and Muslims alike, al-Tatarrus refers to God’s sanctioning of Muslim armies that are forced to kill other Muslims who are being used as human shields by an enemy during a time of war.2 Al-Tatarrus is a religiously legitimate, albeit obscure, Islamic concept that al-Qa`ida ideologues have been increasingly using in order to exculpate themselves from charges of apostasy. The method in which al-Qa`ida is promoting al-Tatarrus, however, seeks to facilitate the sacrifice of Muslim lives in contravention of 14 centuries of religious teachings.
Al Qaeda has turned to Abu Yahya for scholarly analysis, but his scholarship is nothing short of revolutionary, and he turns out not to be much of a scholar after all.
While the Qur’anic and hadith restrictions on killing innocent Muslims were appropriate during the early days of Islam, he suggests, they should have no bearing on warfare today because modern warfare is qualitatively different. Whereas early Islamic thinkers had to consider the implications of using a catapult against an enemy fortress in which Muslims were residing, or conducting night raids against an enemy household in which Muslims were likely present, the nature of contemporary warfare is one where the enemy uses “raids, clashes and ambushes, and they hardly ever stop chasing the mujahidin everywhere and all the time, imprisoning them, their families and their supporters.” What it means to be “directly engaged in combat,” Abu Yahyaargues, has changed. By positing that Islam is in a state of constant and universal warfare, he implicitly lowers the threshold for proving that one’s killing of innocent Muslims is just.
In short, the nature of today’s all-encompassing warfare means that the jihadist movement must find a “new perception of different ways of modern shielding which were probably not provided for by the scholars of Islam who knew only of the weapons used during their era.” In these few sentences, Abu Yahya attempts to wipe the slate clean of the most sacred and defining texts with regard to the issue of killing human shields.
They are obviously struggling with the justification for what Baitullah Mehsud calls his “most destructive weapon.” The brutality of al Qaeda in the Anbar province helped to turn the population against them. A well aimed information campaign outlining the noncombatant casualties and suffering resulting from suicide attacks is appropriate and would possibly be effective in weakening the enemy’s tactical position. In Anbar the U.S. had to prove themselves to be the stronger horse (to use a phrase made popular by Bin Laden). There is no magic, and the necessary context for a rejection of jihad is its battlespace defeat. But the battlespace defeat might be assisted by a good information campaign targeting this vulnerability.
The second important thing we learn from the interview of S is that the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan is, in the words of The Captain’s Journal, inextricably tied. “If NATO remains strong in Afghanistan, it will put pressure on Pakistan. If NATO remains weaker in Afghanistan, it will dare [encourage] Pakistan to support the Taliban, its only real allies in the region,” S said.
The corollary to the the tribal region of Pakistan being a safe haven for the Taliban is that strong action in Afghanistan will affect Pakistan. It is one campaign, a fight against a transnational insurgency, and seeing the campaign through the lens of borders and nation-states is wrongheaded. The surest way to put pressure on the tribal region within Pakistan is to continue the chase in Afghanistan. There is no replacement for kinetic operations to kill or capture the enemy. We know this not only because it is common sense, but also because the enemy has told us so.
We covered the surrender plea from David Miliband, and while pusillanimous and pitiful, at least Miliband was either duplicitous or didn’t know what he was talking about. Specifically, he advocated “negotiations between Pakistan’s new civilian government and Pashtun leaders in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).”
If he was referring to tribal elders in FATA, then he was merely confused, as there are no negotiations with “Pashtun leaders.” Further, they would be irrelevant if these talks existed, as the tribal elders do not control FATA. They have no security from the Taliban, and thus hard core Taliban fighters control FATA and NWFP. If he is referring to the Taliban as “Pashtun leaders,” then he is intentionally avoiding naming the enemy and stating that we should negotiate with them. He is either stupid or a liar.
As for Des Browne, no such charge can be made. He is a coward and specifically advocates surrender to the enemy.
Defence Secretary Des Browne endorsed peace talks between Pakistan and Taliban militants on Wednesday despite concerns from Afghanistan that the talks will allow the Taliban to regroup and launch more attacks.
Browne said Britain supported any moves that would encourage militants to put down their weapons and stop violence, and said Pakistan and Afghanistan needed to work together on problems with their border, much of which is controlled by Taliban insurgents.
He said reconciliation should be a part of any strategy, although it was clear some militants had no intention of putting down their weapons.
“But you can’t kill your way out of these sorts of campaigns,” Browne told journalists at Australia’s National Press Club on Wednesday.
Faced with a wave of suicide attacks, Pakistan has begun talks with Taliban militants who control much of the country’s 2,700 km (1,670 miles) mountain border with Afghanistan.
The Taliban, however, said it would fight in Afghanistan until all foreign troops were driven out of the country, and Afghanistan has expressed concerns about any peace deals.
Browne, in Australia for talks with Australian Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, said sovereign countries had the right to welcome insurgents back into society if they agreed to obey the rule of law and recognise democratic governments.
“If people are prepared to give up violence, put down their weapons, accept and recognise legitimate and democratic government … then the sovereign governments from both countries are entitled to say we will welcome you to become part of our society,” he said.
But the British sensibilities are offended and shout out “How is it that Browne is advocating surrender when all he is really doing is offering the chance to put down their weapons? Have we not been too hard on our man in London?”
The Taliban in South Afghanistan (and coming from Quetta) are hard core fighters who didn’t relent when fighting the Soviet Union, and will not suddenly decide that the fight should be over. They fight for religious reasons, and thus laying down weapons would be seen as irreligious. As for the Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-i-Taliban, they are in many ways just as brutal as the original Taliban, but without the strictures against suicide bombings and other such tactics. They are a new breed of enemy whom Nicholas Schmidle calls Next-Gen Taliban.
This brand of fighter is in large measure controlled by the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and ultimately by Baitullah Mehsud. As for what Mehsud thinks about this idea of a cease and desist order on his operations, let’s hear him in his own words.
The ceasefire, it seems, is already starting to take effect.
But will it last, or go the way other deals have gone before?
In our garden meeting, “Amir Sahib” (honoured leader) – as Baitullah Mehsud is affectionately called by his men – smiles and shakes his head when this query is raised.
Around us, dozens of militants armed to the teeth listen intently to their leader.
“The Taleban are committed to their word,” he says.
“The onus is now on the government – whether they hold to their word, or remain in the alliance with the US.”
If that persists, Commander Mehsud says, the militants will have no choice but return to their path of resistance.
“We do not want to fight Pakistan or the army. But if they continue to be slaves to US demands, then we our hands will be forced.
“There can be no deal with the US.”
The idea is that NATO and the U.S. leave Afghanistan or violence will continue against the Pakistani government. As for Afghanistan, Baitullah intends to send in more fighters to help in the insurgency effort, regardless of and unrelated to the negotiations. In other words, the most powerful man in Waziristan has said that the insurgency in Afghanistan will continue unabated no matter what, while it will resume in Pakistan unless the U.S. leaves.
Browne is smart enough to know that the Taliban will not surrender their weapons or aspirations. He is advocating negotiations in spite of the fact that he knows that NATO and the U.S. cannot win concessions. Given this level of bravery and commitment by the British, it’s a wonder that the Taliban don’t march up Whitehall and into the MOD Headquarters. It may not be very tough.
U.S. commanders have been braced for a “spring offensive”, a pick-up in violence tied to the season, when warmer weather allows the Taliban to work their way over the mountains from hideouts in north-western Pakistan and into Afghanistan.
In the first few weeks of this spring, there was little change in the level of violence compared with last year, officers say. But in recent days, at least in one key region along the border, that picture has shifted, even if it may be still too early to say that a renewed Taliban offensive has started.
“A lot of things are starting to happen in the area,” Lieutenant-Colonel Kathy Ponder, the chief nurse at the combat support hospital, which put out the call for more blood to treat the wounded from a roadside bomb, told Reuters on Thursday.
“The Taliban seem to be picking up on the IED (improvised explosive device) blasts and we’re getting a lot of gunshot wounds. The intel we’re getting is that they are targeting our area, so we’re ready. We’re making sure we’re overstocked on what we need.”
Wednesday afternoon’s attack, just north of the city of Khost, near the Pakistan border, targeted a U.S. military patrol. Two U.S. soldiers and one U.S. civilian were killed, and two U.S. soldiers were wounded. The wounded pair lost both of their legs, hence the call for large amounts of blood.
But according to U.S. personnel, its all just a myth.
“There is no such thing as a spring offensive,” Colonel Pete Johnson, the commander of a taskforce from the 101st Airborne Division that is responsible for security in six Afghan provinces along the border with Pakistan, told Reuters.
“I think this year this myth is finally going to be debunked. Last year was the same thing — it never materialised. This year it has not materialised and it won’t materialise.”
“Will there be increases in fighting and insurgent activity. Absolutely. But it’s a weather-based construct, a seasonal construct, not a deliberate execution of an offensive. Increased activity is not a coordinated offensive.”
But what difference does this make? This argument has become rather passé. The Taliban know that any “fire and maneuver” engagement of U.S. forces brings a disadvantageous kill ratio. They tried it again in Garmser with the Marines, and lost. This is why The Captain’s Journal had previously clarified the issue of a “spring offensive” in the context of distributed operations and what it does or doesn’t mean. “When NATO speaks of a spring offensive, they are talking tactical maneuvers and larger scale kinetic fights. When we speak of a spring offensive, we are talking about guerrilla tactics – small teams, fire and melt away, etc.”
There has been a disaggreagation of the Taliban into smaller groups of tribal and commander affiliation, fighting for different causes (with the only common goal being the overthrow of the Karzai government), sometimes competing with each other. This makes the notion of a Taliban command and control quaint, but fairly useless (During questioning of the Presidential candidates Bill O’Reilly flatly stated that Taliban command and control was Quetta, and while this might have been true a year ago, it is doubtful that a literal command and control exists for Taliban).
So the supposed spring offensive to which U.S. commanders have so sardonically referred is not applicable to the current scene. We have suggested that the tactics will rely on fire and melt away rather than fire and maneuver, IEDs, suicide tactics, guerrilla tactics and intimidation of the population. In this way, the disaggregation of the enemy along with his focus on terror tactics make Afghanistan look somewhat more like the Anbar Province than it did a year ago.
In Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud is playing the Pakistani officials for fools as he repeatedly enjoins negotiations, then withdraws from the same, and then hints at them again. Mehsud’s forces, rather than fight the Pakistan Army in fire and maneuver, simply set up a series of checkpoints and road blocks in South Waziristan. The Pakistani Army responded with one of their own. The population tires of this, the Pakistani Army tires of this and agrees to withdraw troops from South Waziristan, and Tehrik-e-Taliban gains their objective.
While Quetta cannot be said to be a literal command and control, as we observed earlier, there are dual Taliban campaigns, one in Pakistan (focused in Waziristan against the Pakistani government, led by Baitullah Mehsud) and the other focused on Afghanistan (focused on Southern Afghanistan where Quetta serves as a rallying point for fighters crossing the border).
Mapping the route the cross-border militants take, Mr Walsh said the insurgents crossed from Balochistan, whose capital Quetta was considered to be the Taliban headquarters by Nato commanders.
“They muster in remote refugee camps west of Quetta — Girdi Jungle is most frequently mentioned — before slipping across the border in four-wheel drive convoys that split up to avoid detection. Sometimes sympathetic border guards help them on their way.
“Inside Afghanistan the fighters thunder across the Dasht-i-Margo — a harsh expanse of ancient smuggling trails which means “desert of death” — before reaching the River Helmand. Here, the sand turns to lush fields of poppy and wheat, and they reach Garmser, home to the most southerly British base in Helmand.”
British officers told Mr Walsh that they had ample evidence that many of the enemy were Pakistani. While remaining coy about their sources of intelligence, they spoke of hearing Punjabi accents and of finding Pakistani papers and telephone contacts on dead fighters.
Four months ago, Den-McKay said, British Gurkhas shot dead a Taliban militant near a small outpost known as Hamburger Hill. Searching the fighter’s body, they discovered a Pakistani identity card and handwritten notes in Punjabi.
There are dual fronts in the campaign, one in Afghanistan and the other in Pakistan. These two fronts are part of the same insurgency / counterinsurgency campaign. The expensive UAVs that fly overhead are merely further testimony to the necessity for force projection on the gound when reports arrive of more young sons of America who have had their legs blown off from IEDs.
Since Afghanistan may more closely resemble Anbar in terms of its reliance on terror tactics, the pretext for success in Anbar becomes all the more important. Al Qaeda terror would have won the day without extreme force projection by the U.S. The Taliban will not engage in fire and maneuver, and arguments about whether a “spring offensive” will materialize are childish, wasteful and irrelevant. The Taliban will engage in fire and melt away, and the chase must ensue to hunt them down and kill them with the utmost violence.
In The Disaggregation of the Taliban we noted that the analysis by David Ignatius concerning the diminution of al Qaeda and the Taliban was likely overly optimistic. The Taliban insurgency has strengthened. But if The Captain’s Journal is quick to point out overly optimistic assessments, we are equally quick to claim the successes when they exist. Take careful note of the assessment offered by Ignatius concerning al Qaeda.
The most interesting discovery during a visit to this city where Osama bin Laden planted his flag in 1996 is that al-Qaeda seems to have all but disappeared. The group is on the run, too, in Iraq, and that raises some interesting questions about how to pursue this terrorist enemy.
“Al-Qaeda is not a topic of conversation here,” says Col. Mark Johnstone, the deputy commander of Task Force Bayonet, which oversees four provinces surrounding Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Pete Benchoff agrees: “We’re not seeing a lot of al-Qaeda fighters. They’ve shifted here to facilitation and support.”
You hear the same story farther north from the officers who oversee the provinces along the Pakistan border. A survey conducted last November and December in Nuristan, once an al-Qaeda stronghold, found that the group barely registered as a security concern among the population.
Al Qaeda is defeated in Anbar, and is taking a beating in Tarmiyah, Mosul, and throughout the balance of Northern Iraq. But if the assessment Ignatius gives us is correct, the power of al Qaeda is waning in the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan as well.
The Asia Times must be read with caution due to the exaggeration in which this source sometimes engages, and so we sat on this report for several days while waiting for confirmatory analysis. The assessment by David Ignatius serves as this confirmation. Some (Asia Times) reports attempt to give excuses for al Qaeda and Taliban failures while they accidentally divulge important truths about the same. There was recently such a report, humorously entitled Al Qaeda adds muscle to the Taliban fight.
From many hundreds, al-Qaeda now has fewer than 75 Arabs involved in the Afghan “war on terror” theater, but the group is more lethal in that it has successfully established a local franchise of warriors who have fully embraced al-Qaeda’s ideology and who are capable of conducting a war of attrition against the coalition in Afghanistan.
In the years following the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, al-Qaeda lost hundreds of members, either killed or arrested or departed to other regions. These included diehard Arab ideologues such as Mustapha Seth Marium (arrested) and commanders Abu Laith al-Libbi (killed) and Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi (arrested) .
And this month, news of the death in January of Abdul Hameed, alias Abu Obaida al-Misri, from Hepatitis B, was released to Western intelligence. He was a most-trusted aide of al-Qaeda deputy Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri and had been appointed by Osama bin Laden as the head of the khuruj (revolt) in Pakistan. He was in his mid-50s.
While al-Qaedawas suffering losses, Pakistan’s tribal areas became increasingly radicalized, which al-Qaedawas able to tap into to reinvigorate the Afghan insurgency. When military operations chopped off its vertical growth, it grew horizontally.
This defied intelligence estimates, polls, analysis and strategic opinions. Former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was of the opinion that by 2003, as a result of US military operations in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda had been destroyed as an organization and it was unable to strike against US interests.
However, the US National Intelligence Estimate report in July 2007 said al-Qaeda had regrouped and posed a threat to the US homeland. Recently, US President George W Bush also said al-Qaeda was a serious threat.
The year 2007 was important for al-Qaeda’s development as severalstand-alone Arab groups operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, including Libyans and Egyptians, either merged into al-Qaeda or made an alliance in which they would be subservient to al-Qaeda’s command.
With al-Qaeda losing key members, a vacuum should have been created, but that did not happen, and another figure has emerged – Maulana Ilyas Kashmiri. He is a veteran fighter of the Kashmir struggle, groomed by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence’s India cell.
Islamabad’s clampdown on activities in Kashmir and being arrested a few times disheartened Kashmiri, and he moved to the North Waziristan tribal area. He was soon followed by his diehard Punjabi colleagues and they made Afghanistan their new battlefield.
This year, a “crossbreed” of fighters – a combination of Arab command and that of Kashmiri, as well as an alliance with tribal warlord Baitullah Mehsud – is expected to spring some surprises in Afghanistan.
There is no reason to discuss the fact that Arab fighters have almost disappeared from the scene unless intelligence has already seen signs of this. The public relations arm of al Qaeda jumped into action with the Asia Times, as they have many times before, since it is customary for them to regurgitate what they’re told without much critical analysis.
To be sure, Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud is a very real threat, and has in fact actually made very real threats. “Allah willing, Musharraf will suffer great pain, along with all his aides. The Muslims will never forgive Musharraf for the sin he committed. We want to eradicate Britain and America, and to shatter the arrogance and tyranny of the infidels. We pray that Allah will enable us to destroy the White House, New York, and London.” Note that Mehsud doesn’t make our destruction contingent upon our presence in Afghanistan or Pakistan. He threatens to destroy the U.S. because we are “infidels.” This is not a local insurgency. It is a transnational insurgency.
The global jihad is not finished, and will be carried forward by the new breed of Taliban that has aspirations beyond the borders of Pakistan. The Afghanistan campaign will proceed forward against primarily the Taliban (with perhaps also some Kashmiris), indigenous both to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But despite the attempt by the Asia Times to put a good face on al Qaeda, they are diminishing in both numbers and effectiveness. Despite their recruitment efforts, they are losing their global jihad to U.S. forces, and their very propaganda efforts tell us so.
16 years, 4 months ago
