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Where now for the West's strategy in Afghanistan?

By Marko Beljac - posted Tuesday, 14 October 2008


The Taliban initially gained its political legitimacy because the population was sick and tired of the war and corruption that accompanied the Afghan warlords after the resistance to the Soviet occupation turned their guns on each other. Much of the populace now no longer welcomes a situation whereby outside military forces engage in virtually unconstrained military operations while the old corrupt warlords are back in business.

It is the dominant assessment that the Taliban insurgency has reached its current level of intensity because of the sanctuary that the border regions of Pakistan provide and because of the support that the Pakistan military, in particular the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), has provided insurgent groups. Earlier this year the US reportedly provided intelligence assessments of this support to then President Musharraf, especially the support given to Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hikmetyar.

They are both Pashtun based Mujaheddin commanders of long standing and were the favoured recipients of support from the CIA and the ISI during and after the Soviet occupation. Haqqani joined the Taliban in 1995, but Hikmetyar has been in conflict with the Taliban in the past. The insurgency might well be Taliban based but it involves more than just the Taliban.

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The toe hold that Jihadi groups have developed in the border region is a legacy of previous US and Saudi support for Pakistan policy, including busing in Jihadi extremists from the Arab world during the 1980s. Moreover, this type of support for conservative Islamists has been a consistent pattern in US foreign policy since the rise of Nasserism and secular Arab nationalism.

It should also be stressed that Pakistani support for the Taliban had its origins with the administration of Benazir Bhutto, with Zardari being a particularly enthusiastic supporter, not the ISI who preferred to support Hikmetyar. It was only after the Taliban demonstrated its superiority on the battlefield, contrasted with Hikmetyar's failure to take Kabul, that the ISI also began to support them.

This demonstrates that for the ISI support for the Taliban does not really reflect a Jihadi agenda by fundamentalist officers. Pakistan has enduring interests in Afghanistan and rivalries with neighbouring states, such as Iran and the former Soviet republics to the north. So long as there is a jockeying for influence by regional powers Pakistan will try and play its trump card - namely the Pashtuni provinces in the south. As an intelligence agency the ISI has an institutional interest in such matters.

In fact, the secular middle and upper classes in Pakistan greatly fear for their standing leading the Pakistani Army to intensify its operations against Islamist groups in the border regions following the Marriott Hotel bombing. However, this offensive is deeply unpopular among the people of the region.

Although Pakistan has supported Pashtun based insurgents, including the Taliban, it would be wrong to attribute the current insurgency in Afghanistan primarily to Pakistani machinations. To appreciate this we need only re-consider how the Taliban rose to power in the first place.

After the Soviet withdrawal and the fall of the Soviet instituted regime of Najibullah the international community washed its hands of Afghanistan. A vicious civil war broke out, which included large scale rocket attacks upon Kabul, when most of the media was transfixed on the relatively minor siege of white and well attired Europeans in Sarajevo.

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Nobody really cared much about Afghanistan after the Soviets left, except when it impacted on a new "great game" over the energy resources of Central Asia, much to the suffering of the Afghans.

The Taliban has benefited from this neglect twice over now. Following 9-11 and the over-throw of the Taliban the US essentially left Afghanistan, moving on to bigger and better things. One could see this in the manner in which the Taliban was dispatched.

The US adopted a strategy of bombing from the air, supporting Northern Alliance infantry attacks and using Special Forces to mop up al-Qaida central. The strategy demonstrated that the US was happy to revive the Northern Alliance warlords, institute a powerless figurehead at the top and then basically walk away.

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About the Author

Mark Beljac teaches at Swinburne University of Technology, is a board member of the New International Bookshop, and is involved with the Industrial Workers of the World, National Tertiary Education Union, National Union of Workers (community) and Friends of the Earth.

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