The rocky and barren Central Asian state of Afghanistan is a graveyard of optimism. While the US and NATO count down to the withdrawal of their troops, the Taliban militia is shaking the feeble facade of normality in Afghanistan.
The agendas for the forthcoming İstanbul conference on Afghanistan, as well as the Bonn meeting in December, changed abruptly on Sept. 20, when the Taliban killed Burhanuddin Rabbani, former president of Afghanistan and head of its High Peace Council. This was by far the most high profile assassination since allied troops entered the country, but it did not occur in isolation.
About three months ago the Taliban murdered Ahmad Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president. On the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, a truck laden with explosives detonated, injuring dozens of US troops in Wardak. Two days later, militants used an uninhabited under-construction building to target the US Embassy and NATO headquarters in the heart of Kabul, once again exposing the vulnerability of the so-called high-security zone. Clearly, security managers in the heavily barricaded Afghan capital had learned no lessons from the Aug. 19 suicide bombing at the British Council.
This surge in the Taliban’s acts of terrorism is not simply seasonal or tactical. The death of Rabbani will have dire consequences, foremost among these being damage to the process of reaching peace and reconciliation with the Taliban. Unlike his Eid message last year, this year Mulla Omar sent out positive vibes regarding the negotiations for peace. Given this new conciliatory tone, Rabbani’s assassination either reflects a sudden change in the Taliban’s policy and strategy or Mulla Omar’s waning control over the loosely knit militia.
Though the Rabbani-led High Peace Council has been in place since last October, the reconciliation process had yet to start. With Turkey and Qatar receptive to the idea of opening Taliban representative offices, neighboring Pakistan and Iran have also backed the process.
Decades-old rivalries
Although Rabbani enjoyed favorable opinion within the Karzai regime, as well as among international powers, he also had decades-old rivalries to overcome. Following the fall of the communist regime in Kabul he held on to the presidency for four years rather than handing it over to Gulbaddin Hekmatyar after four months. The ensuing prolonged civil war left Kabul in ruins, triggering massive displacement and bloodshed. In his message on the eve of the Muslim festivity of Eid al-Fitr this year Hekmatyar sounded resolved to fight on against the “invaders.” “The ongoing peace process is not the solution to the Afghan problem. The only way forward is to wage jihad and refuse to lay down arms until the foreign forces leave Afghanistan,” the Afghan warlord said.
Forces working against the peace initiative are not only internal. US Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan C. Crocker also doesn’t feel the time is right for the process. In league with the Obama administration’s hard-liners, he told the Financial Times in an interview, “The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile with them.” Such remarks fail to get more people on board Kabul’s diplomatic community as well as in political circles, where searching for potential negotiators within the militia is a herculean task.
The US and the Afghan leader it supports, Hamid Karzai, have not only directly accused Pakistan of backing the Taliban’s Haqqani faction, but have also brought Afghanistan’s ties with the neighboring country to their lowest ebb in recent history. Islamabad has reacted with anger, bringing its entire political leadership and parliament to bear, standing behind its armed forces and its intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Once partners in the campaign to oust Soviet troops from Afghanistan, relations between the ISI and the CIA have developed many fissures; the worst resulting from the clandestine marine operation of May 2 to kill Osama bin Laden. Pakistan and the US both had agreed to share intelligence collected by drones from the hideouts of alleged al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives. However, “no boots on the ground” was a red line which Washington crossed and Islamabad refuses to overlook this breach.
With relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan worsening, especially with regard to the military, the Afghan peace process seems to be about to be sacrificed for the sake of realpolitik. Karzai’s rushing to New Delhi to renew the 1950 India-Afghanistan Treaty of Friendship (meaning a strategic partnership against Pakistan) highlights Kabul and Washington’s seriousness about handling the post-Rabbani situation. Peace in Afghanistan cannot be achieved by threatening Pakistan, where 1.7 million Soviet-era refugees still live in relative comfort and peace. Introducing the India factor into the Pakistan-Afghanistan equation may increase the cost of peace for the US and its NATO partners. The success of the post-Rabbani peace initiative largely rests on the internal cohesion of stakeholders inside Kabul. Afghan analysts believe that demoralized security forces may overreact against innocent Pashtun civilians, worsening the law and order situation in the weeks to come. On the other hand, the “victorious” Taliban may not sit back and relax in the wake of its highest-profile killing in the last decade.
Revival of Pashtun-Tajik rivalry?
Many observers see Rabbani’s death as catastrophic enough to reignite Pashtun-Tajik rivalry, with the potential to culminate in an intense civil war. The divide is evident at the top levels of the war-torn country. The bruised and battered Karzai regime suddenly has more on its plate than it can handle. The Afghan president does not have a track record of being able to successfully walk the ethnic tightrope.
Since the truck bomb attack in Wardak, Washington has stepped up the pressure on Islamabad to sever its alleged ties with the Haqqani network. The Taliban affiliate group led by Jalaluddin Haqqani is allegedly based in the North Waziristan border region of Pakistan. His son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who commands an estimated 10,000-strong militia, told Reuters in a rare interview that the group has moved to Afghanistan, where they feel more secure.
Washington has pointedly accused Pakistan of having ties with the dreaded Taliban militia. Despite unprecedented diplomatic pressure and Congressional arm-twisting over aid to Islamabad, Pakistan is in no hurry to launch a military operation in the last semi-autonomous tribal region of North Waziristan. With the US Senate Appropriations Committee’s passing of a bill that places the condition on all American financial assistance to Pakistan that action must be taken against the Haqqani network and other terrorist groups associated with al-Qaeda, Washington’s shortsighted policy towards Islamabad has been exposed yet again.
While Washington blames Islamabad for North Waziristan-based terrorists operating deep inside Afghanistan, Pakistani officials question the efficacy of the NATO troops and sophisticated military wherewithal the US has at its disposal. Most parts of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border remain unmanned from the Afghan side, as compared to 1,000 manned border checkpoints on the Pakistani side. The militants’ capacity to choose and successfully attack targets at will, despite layers of security around Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan has not waned over the past decade. Defense strategists understand that Pakistan has been avoiding launching a military operation in North Waziristan against the Haqqani network, because its military is engaged in consolidating the gains in those tribal areas previously cleared of militants. Other analysts, mostly Western or Indian, fear that Islamabad desires to use the Haqqani group as a point of leverage in Afghanistan’s power struggle. Pakistani military and civilian officials deny such a scenario and cite operational limitations for the delay.
Owing to the evaporating mandate of the Karzai government in Kabul and worsening relations between Islamabad and Washington, hope for an amicable solution seems remote. Even if a new Pashtun versus non-Pashtun feud does not emerge, an appropriate replacement for Rabbani will be hard to agree upon. Pashtun influence in the Karzai regime may be further diluted by greater Indian influence in Afghanistan, as well as the US’s reactionary posturing towards Pakistan.
A successful transition for Afghanistan won’t be possible without a minimum of consensus among the NATO countries, as well as Afghanistan’s immediate neighbors. Within Afghanistan, the Taliban are not the only militia blocking the way to peace: The likes of Hekmatyar also enjoy enormous clout in the eastern and southeastern parts of the country.
The US is failing to meet the goals set at the last Bonn conference and realities on the ground require foreign troops to prolong their presence on Afghan soil. Washington and its NATO allies are beset with newer challenges going into December’s Bonn conference, following the no less important İstanbul meeting. Any sense of normality in Kabul is only on the surface, if the US and Afghanistan fail to revive a good working relationship with Pakistan and if a widely accepted Pashtun candidate does not fill the space left by Rabbani on the High Peace Council. Delegates to the İstanbul conference will need a miracle to cool things off, ahead of the much-anticipated Bonn conference.
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