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Failed Attack on U.S. Base Rattles an Afghan Valley
New York Times By JACK HEALY October 17, 2011
ROKHA, Afghanistan - As the suicide bombers threaded their way past patchwork farms and snow-dusted mountains here in eastern Afghanistan, they had to stop for directions. It was 4 a.m. and, apparently in need of help finding their target, they pulled up to a police station and asked the overnight guards, Which way to the Americans?
There was really only one answer: Forward Operating Base Lion, a small roadside outpost that is one of the last vestiges of the United States presence in the stable and fiercely independent Panjshir Valley. After years of the area’s being overlooked by insurgents, the war finally found its way here on Saturday morning.
The five assailants rammed a car loaded with explosives into the base’s red front gate and for half an hour in the chilly predawn buffeted the base with rocket-propelled grenades. At least two of the attackers were able to breach the walls, running a few feet inside before being cut down by American and Afghan bullets.
For the insurgents, the attack was a clear defeat: No Americans were killed or wounded. All five assailants — whose trip toward the base was recounted by the Afghan provincial intelligence chief — were killed or blew themselves up.
But outside the base, Afghans worried that the attack had somehow pierced the inviolability of the Panjshir Valley, a place that in years past had fended off both the Soviets and the Taliban. More important than ripping a hole in the front gate, the attack punctured a belief that the war existed only somewhere else, far from these sheer mountain valleys.
“That’s the symbolism they were trying to attack,” said Lt. Col. Dan Gajewski, who commands the small military development support team stationed at the base, “that Panjshir is a safe, secure place that the Taliban can never get to.”
That image has become an article of faith in a place that was home to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the iconic guerrilla commander who retreated to the Panjshir in 1996 after Taliban fighters overran a wrecked Kabul. As the Taliban consolidated territory across the country, driving many opposition leaders into exile, the resistance here burnished the idea of “Free Panjshir.”
Assassinated in September 2001 by suicide bombers from Al Qaeda, Mr. Massoud still permeates the valley, his beatified image smiling down from billboards and posters. They amount to a symbolic message of national unity, but also one of defiance against the Pashtun-anchored Taliban and, perhaps, against any negotiated peace with them.
The recent assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan’s chief peace negotiator and a former leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, strengthened the opposition to peace talks among many Tajiks here and across the country’s north, stirring talk — if not action — about girding for civil war.
“You have to defend your motherland,” said a man named Amrudin, whose brother is a security guard at the base. “You have to arm yourself. You have to take up weapons.”
As in many Taliban attacks, Afghan civilians were collateral damage on the outskirts of the base. Two Afghan civilians who had been sitting in a parked truck, waiting to make a delivery to the base, were killed as the firefight erupted. It was unclear who fired the shots that killed them.
Hours after the attack, the grisly chore of cleaning up was in full swing. The Afghan police hauled away the twisted metal wreckage of the bombed-out Toyota 4x4. American soldiers gathered bodies, taking fingerprints and digital images of the attackers.
It was hardly a regular day’s work for the soldiers stationed here.
The Americans built roads and schools in Panjshir, but never needed to do much fighting against a Tajik-dominated population that largely welcomed the overthrow of the Taliban.
Only three members of the NATO-led coalition have been killed here in the last decade, two of them gunned down this summer in a shootout after an argument with a bodyguard for Afghanistan’s spy agency. And apart from an occasional rocket-propelled grenade, Saturday’s attack was the only major assault on the base since it opened six years ago, NATO officials said.
Questions of blame were already coursing through conversations outside the base. How had well-armed attackers slipped through one of the few roadside checkpoints into the Panjshir, where cars are inspected and visitors registered? Were the Taliban’s claims of responsibility for the attack credible? Were there more to come?
“The attacks are increasing,” said Mohammed Kabir, the acting police chief of the province’s Unaba district. “If this keeps up, people will turn against the government. They are not paying attention to security.”
This summer, Panjshir assumed formal responsibility for its own security as part of the slow transition to Afghan-controlled security. With 33,000 American troops set to leave before the end of next year, it is quite possible that the few American soldiers here will not be replaced when their tour expires.
The withdrawal and drumbeat of insurgent attacks raise anxiety across Afghanistan, but here, they also spur a call to arms with men like Khalil Ulam, a retired mujahid who said he had fought the Soviets and Taliban.
“We are ready to fight them anytime,” he said, as he surveyed the detritus of the attack. “We are ready to defend our province.”
Mokhtar Amiri contributed reporting.
Afghanistan’s worst suspicions about Pakistan confirmed
IWPR By Khan Mohammad Danishju and Mina Habib October 17, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Most Afghans have long believed it. Now the outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff has publicly said it. The only remaining question is whether Washington will be able to do anything about it.
When Adm. Mike Mullen told a U.S. Senate Committee that the armed group founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani “acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency” and that there was evidence that the insurgent group, “with ISI support,” mounted a Sept. 13 attack on the U.S embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, he was only publicly stating allegations that have circulated for years regarding the ISI’s support for such insurgent organizations battling the Afghan government.
But Mullen’s statement was much more explosive, since he accused the ISI of sponsoring devastating attacks specifically targeting U.S. forces, as well as their Afghan allies.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gillani, said the government was shocked at the U.S. commander’s allegations and totally rejected them. The charges “negate our sacrifices and successes in the ongoing war against terror,” he said.
Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told Al-Jazeera television the allegations were “unsubstantiated — no evidence has been shared with us.” Without spelling out the ISI’s relationship with the Haqqani group, the foreign minister pointed out that in the past, the organization had been “the blue-eyed boy of the CIA itself for many years; I mean it was created by the CIA, it could be said.”
Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani was commander of a mujahidin force regarded as particularly effective during the Western-backed war against the Soviets in the 1980s, and went on to align himself with both the Taliban and al-Qaida.
The force has played an important role in the insurgency since 2001, allied with but distinct from the Taliban.
Haqqani seems to have taken a back seat and handed over command to his son, Sirajuddin.
The group operates out of North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan, just over the border from Paktia, Khosta and Paktika, the Afghan provinces where the elder Haqqani has strong tribal connections and operated in the 1980s.
Of late, however, the “Haqqani network,” as the group is now known, has gained notoriety for its ability to mount complicated, daring and devastating attacks in urban areas, such as the attacks in Kabul.
It has also been blamed for the recent assassination of Burhannudin Rabbani, the former Afghan president tasked with negotiating with the insurgents, although Sirajuddin Haqqani denied this in a BBC interview.
Many Afghans felt Mullen’s comments vindicated their long-held suspicions of Pakistan’s role in the decade-long conflict.
Abdol Wahed Taqat, a former general and now a political and defense analyst, believes there is a deep schism between the United States and Pakistan.
“Fundamentalism has got out of control in Pakistan. And that situation does not favor the Americans,” he said.
But it is unclear whether Washington is willing to rupture relations with a nation that not only possesses nuclear weapons, but is also located in a strategic part of the world.
Ajmal Sohail, a political commentator, said such tensions are a recurring feature of U.S-.Pakistani relations. He noted that the row over the killing of Osama bin Laden quickly dissipated.
“The relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan is like that between husband and wife — they frequently fight, but then they reconcile,” he said. “These conflicts are sporadic and temporary.” Jamshid, a student at Kabul University, expressed a cynical view of how Afghanistan is a victim of the dysfunctional relationship between Washington and Islamabad.
“I am sure the U.S. will apologize (for Mullen’s statement); the terror networks in Pakistan will remain untouched; America will pay Pakistan another $1 billion, and the war pursued by Pakistan will continue in Afghanistan,” he said.
“Afghans will no longer be deceived by the cat-and-mouse games played by America and Pakistan. Both of them are enemies of the Afghans,” Kabul shopkeeper Abdul Shokur said. “Israel and Pakistan are America’s pampered children. No matter what those pampered children want, America will accept it. The Americans are prepared to lose Afghanistan, but they will never lose Pakistan. If America exerted real pressure on Pakistan, I am sure the war in Afghanistan would end within two days.”
— Khan Mohammad Danishju and Mina Habib are reporters in Afghanistan who write for The Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization that trains journalists in areas of conflict.
Clinton to give Pakistan diplomacy one more big push
Foreign Policy By Josh Rogin Monday, October 17, 2011
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leading a very high-level delegation to Pakistan later this week to try one more time to set U.S.-Pakistan relations back on track, before they go off the rails altogether.
The State Department won't confirm that Clinton is visiting Pakistan as part of her tour this week, which we're told will include stops in Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Oman. But two senior officials have confirmed to The Cable that when Clinton arrives in Pakistan (we'll keep dates secret for security reasons), she'll be joined by CIA Director David Petraeus, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, and several other administration officials.
Pakistani media already reported that the very senior U.S. delegation will have meetings with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, and Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The trip was set up by the special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Marc Grossman, who was in Islamabad last week.
"It's Hillary's initiative," one senior official told The Cable. "This is what Hillary convinced the administration to do because although the relationship has been at its lowest in some years, the U.S. side doesn't want to pronounce their effort to improve the U.S.-Pakistan relationship dead."
The Obama team had been playing a game of "good cop, bad cop" with the Pakistanis as a means of ratcheting up pressure, following the uptick of attacks on Americans traced back to militant groups residing in Pakistan. U.S. officials have stated publicly that these groups are working with either the implicit or the explicit sanctioning of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
"Hillary is trying to position herself in the middle and say to Pakistan that there are those of us who want to engage and others who want to fold. How long do you want to play this game of poker?" the official said.
The mixture of threats and outreach coming from different parts of the Obama administration had the side effect of confusing their Pakistani interlocutors, according to experts. Now the administration wants to put forth one clear message, delivered by top diplomats and top military and intelligence officials all in the same room.
"The problem is still that different parts of the U.S. government, as far as Pakistan is concerned, are giving different messages," said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. "There needs to be a concise, unified message from Washington as to what the intentions are. In terms of high-level contact, we really haven't had that for a long while, so it's very critical."
The Obama administration is also trying to reprise the basic idea of the now defunct U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, which was meant to improve coordination of policy within both governments and also move the relationship from a "transactional" to a "strategic" one.
Some top officials no longer believe that a "strategic" relationship with Pakistan is possible, and around Washington, there is a growing realization that U.S. and Pakistani long-term strategic interests may not align, said Bruce Riedel, the Brookings Institution scholar who led Obama's first review of Afghanistan-Pakistan policy in 2009.
"We must recognize that the two countries' strategic interests are in conflict, not harmony, and will remain that way as long as Pakistan's army controls Pakistan's strategic policies," Riedel wrote in an Oct. 15 New York Times op-ed. "We must contain the Pakistani Army's ambitions until real civilian rule returns and Pakistanis set a new direction for their foreign policy."
In an interview Monday, Riedel told The Cable that the administration should abandon its efforts to seek help from the Pakistanis in bringing the Haqqani network and other militant groups to the table for peace negotiations, especially after the killing of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani by the Pakistan-based Taliban leadership.
"Grossman's primary mission of trying to find political reconciliation with the Taliban has been overtaken by events," Riedel said. "When one party murders the leader on the other side, we pretty much have an answer as to whether or not there's going to be a political reconciliation process."
The administration plans to warn the Pakistani government about the turning tide of public opinion in Washington against Pakistan and congressional threats to punish Pakistan. But if the Pakistanis don't change their approach to these groups, it's unclear what sticks the administration could really use against Pakistan to compel better behavior.
Overall, the Obama administration wants Pakistan to know it can't accept Americans being killed because of what's happening inside Pakistan. But there aren't expected to be any grand, new initiatives or new proposals to lift bilateral relations from what all sides agree is the lowest point in years.
"The U.S.-Pakistani relationship has been deteriorating all year, from the Raymond Davis case to the Osama bin Laden raid to the attack on the American Embassy in Kabul," said Riedel. "And there's really no evidence the bottom is in sight; it may be getting worse and worse."
Why Russia Fears US Afghan Plan
Having feared the US entry into Afghanistan, some in Russia now fear the United States’ exit will make it a bigger target for Islamic militants.
The Diplomat By Joshua Kucera October 18, 2011
For the last decade, Russian policymakers have watched in alarm as the United States, as part of its war effort in Afghanistan, has made strategic inroads into the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Washington has set up military bases and built relationships with the countries that Russia considers its sphere of influence, including Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
But now, the Kremlin is facing something potentially more dangerous than the Americans coming to Central Asia: the Americans leaving Central Asia.
The United States announced this summer that it intends to start pulling its troops out of Afghanistan in 2014. What sort of government develops in Afghanistan after that is unclear, but it will almost certainly include elements of the Taliban that are now fighting US forces. That could provide a bridgehead for radical Islamist groups to move northward, into the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics and possibly to Russia itself. Indeed, over the last month, Russian officials have been openly discussing this threat.
‘We aren’t on the verge of solving the problems in Afghanistan, but on the worsening of them, and quite a qualitatively different situation in the Central Asian region, especially after 2014,’ said Nikolai Bordyuzha, former chief of the Russian border service and now secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russia-led group that aims to form a political-military bloc to increase security in the former Soviet Union. ‘The prognosis is clear: Afghanistan will remain a base for organizing terrorist and extremist activities, we feel.’
‘Russia should expect the activation of militant activity on the borders of Central Asia after the withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq and AfghanistanThreats can now come creeping to our southern borders,’ said Col.-Gen. Vladimir Chirkin, commander of Russia’s Central Military District.
‘We don’t want NATO to go and leave us to face the jackals of war after stirring up the anthill. Immediately after the NATO withdrawal, they will expand towards Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and it will become our problem then,’ said Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro.
Irina Zvyagelskaya, vice president of Russia's Centre for Strategic and Political Studies and senior scholar of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies, agrees with such sentiments. ‘There were a lot of people here who said the US being in Afghanistan was against Russian interests. Now the same people are saying, “how dare they leave Afghanistan,”’ she says.
Before the United States war in Afghanistan began in 2001, Islamist groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan maintained a low but persistent profile in several Central Asian states. An apparent assassination attempt on Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, killed 16 people in 1999, and in 2004, attacks on the United States and Israeli embassies in Tashkent killed four Uzbekistani security guards.
There have been no such attacks in recent years, however, and a major reason is because the United States’ war in Afghanistan has drawn jihadists from around the region. The number of Uzbeks, Tajiks and other Central Asians now fighting in Afghanistan or Pakistan is unknown, but a US departure would free them up to return to the fight in the former Soviet republics, says Georgi Engelhardt, a Moscow-based expert on political Islam in Russia.
In the meantime, secular, authoritarian governments in the ex-Soviet Central Asian states have, in their efforts to stamp out any internal opposition, instituted increasingly harsh control of religious groups. They will thus be attractive targets for Islamist groups, who believe the governments are un-Islamic. That would bring instability closer to Russia’s borders, and even – via the large diaspora of guest workers from Central Asia in Russian cities – into Russia itself, Engelhardt says. ‘And Russia doesn't have many answers for this.’
Others, however, suggest that this threat is being overblown. While the infiltration of Islamist radicals northward toward Russia is certainly plausible, hard information about the extent of the threat is difficult to come by. Exaggerating the threat suits the governments of Central Asia, who can appeal to foreign powers for military aid and justify crackdowns on legitimate opposition.
‘There’s a danger, but we also might be exaggerating the danger,’ says Arkady Dubnov, a Russian journalist and expert on Central Asia. ‘What we’re seeing now is PR, preparation for this period (when the US leaves). This PR is to prepare popular opinion, internal Russian popular opinion and also Central Asian popular opinion, to accept the inevitability of Russian security measures.’
The spate of public expressions of Kremlin concern coincided with the launch of large-scale military exercises with the countries of Central Asia, Tsentr-2011. The exercises involved countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a political-military bloc that Russia is promoting as a means of maintaining stability in its near abroad.
‘The processes taking place in North Africa and the Middle East were difficult to forecast. What will happen next? What leadership will come to power? This has to be a warning to all states. We have similar questions for the Central Asian countries. We must be prepared for anything. This is why we are practicing with these drills,’ said General Nikolay Makarov, chief of the general staff of the Russian Army, before the CSTO exercises began. ‘Russia's military organization must be ready for a worst-case scenario.’
Dubnov argues that rhetoric about an Islamist threat in Central Asia is a pretext to allow Russia to gain influence in the region. ‘Everyone knows that the Taliban won’t cross from Afghanistan into Central Asia, but everyone claims that’s the threat,’ he said. ‘It’s rhetoric. We want to scare them so much that they let us in in advance; we want presence, not war.’
This view is certainly supported by the fact that the most significant current threat coming from Afghanistan to Russia – the large-scale export of opium – would, in reality, likely decrease in the event of a Taliban government coming to power. While the Taliban had cracked down heavily on poppy production, the United States has refused Russian demands to eradicate poppy fields, in the belief that doing so would unnecessarily alienate the Afghan population whose support US forces are trying to gain.
In addition, there’s great scepticism in Russia over whether the United States will actually leave Afghanistan, reflecting a belief that the United States won’t abandon the strategic foothold it has gained in Central Asia, on the flank of China and Iran, in addition to Russia.
In any case, a decreased US presence in Afghanistan and the surrounding countries is inevitable. And whether Moscow likes it or not, that means that Russia is thus going to be taking a greater amount of responsibility for keeping a lid on whatever threats might emerge in Central Asia.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
New York Times By JACK HEALY October 17, 2011
ROKHA, Afghanistan - As the suicide bombers threaded their way past patchwork farms and snow-dusted mountains here in eastern Afghanistan, they had to stop for directions. It was 4 a.m. and, apparently in need of help finding their target, they pulled up to a police station and asked the overnight guards, Which way to the Americans?
There was really only one answer: Forward Operating Base Lion, a small roadside outpost that is one of the last vestiges of the United States presence in the stable and fiercely independent Panjshir Valley. After years of the area’s being overlooked by insurgents, the war finally found its way here on Saturday morning.
The five assailants rammed a car loaded with explosives into the base’s red front gate and for half an hour in the chilly predawn buffeted the base with rocket-propelled grenades. At least two of the attackers were able to breach the walls, running a few feet inside before being cut down by American and Afghan bullets.
For the insurgents, the attack was a clear defeat: No Americans were killed or wounded. All five assailants — whose trip toward the base was recounted by the Afghan provincial intelligence chief — were killed or blew themselves up.
But outside the base, Afghans worried that the attack had somehow pierced the inviolability of the Panjshir Valley, a place that in years past had fended off both the Soviets and the Taliban. More important than ripping a hole in the front gate, the attack punctured a belief that the war existed only somewhere else, far from these sheer mountain valleys.
“That’s the symbolism they were trying to attack,” said Lt. Col. Dan Gajewski, who commands the small military development support team stationed at the base, “that Panjshir is a safe, secure place that the Taliban can never get to.”
That image has become an article of faith in a place that was home to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the iconic guerrilla commander who retreated to the Panjshir in 1996 after Taliban fighters overran a wrecked Kabul. As the Taliban consolidated territory across the country, driving many opposition leaders into exile, the resistance here burnished the idea of “Free Panjshir.”
Assassinated in September 2001 by suicide bombers from Al Qaeda, Mr. Massoud still permeates the valley, his beatified image smiling down from billboards and posters. They amount to a symbolic message of national unity, but also one of defiance against the Pashtun-anchored Taliban and, perhaps, against any negotiated peace with them.
The recent assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan’s chief peace negotiator and a former leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, strengthened the opposition to peace talks among many Tajiks here and across the country’s north, stirring talk — if not action — about girding for civil war.
“You have to defend your motherland,” said a man named Amrudin, whose brother is a security guard at the base. “You have to arm yourself. You have to take up weapons.”
As in many Taliban attacks, Afghan civilians were collateral damage on the outskirts of the base. Two Afghan civilians who had been sitting in a parked truck, waiting to make a delivery to the base, were killed as the firefight erupted. It was unclear who fired the shots that killed them.
Hours after the attack, the grisly chore of cleaning up was in full swing. The Afghan police hauled away the twisted metal wreckage of the bombed-out Toyota 4x4. American soldiers gathered bodies, taking fingerprints and digital images of the attackers.
It was hardly a regular day’s work for the soldiers stationed here.
The Americans built roads and schools in Panjshir, but never needed to do much fighting against a Tajik-dominated population that largely welcomed the overthrow of the Taliban.
Only three members of the NATO-led coalition have been killed here in the last decade, two of them gunned down this summer in a shootout after an argument with a bodyguard for Afghanistan’s spy agency. And apart from an occasional rocket-propelled grenade, Saturday’s attack was the only major assault on the base since it opened six years ago, NATO officials said.
Questions of blame were already coursing through conversations outside the base. How had well-armed attackers slipped through one of the few roadside checkpoints into the Panjshir, where cars are inspected and visitors registered? Were the Taliban’s claims of responsibility for the attack credible? Were there more to come?
“The attacks are increasing,” said Mohammed Kabir, the acting police chief of the province’s Unaba district. “If this keeps up, people will turn against the government. They are not paying attention to security.”
This summer, Panjshir assumed formal responsibility for its own security as part of the slow transition to Afghan-controlled security. With 33,000 American troops set to leave before the end of next year, it is quite possible that the few American soldiers here will not be replaced when their tour expires.
The withdrawal and drumbeat of insurgent attacks raise anxiety across Afghanistan, but here, they also spur a call to arms with men like Khalil Ulam, a retired mujahid who said he had fought the Soviets and Taliban.
“We are ready to fight them anytime,” he said, as he surveyed the detritus of the attack. “We are ready to defend our province.”
Mokhtar Amiri contributed reporting.
Afghanistan’s worst suspicions about Pakistan confirmed
IWPR By Khan Mohammad Danishju and Mina Habib October 17, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Most Afghans have long believed it. Now the outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff has publicly said it. The only remaining question is whether Washington will be able to do anything about it.
When Adm. Mike Mullen told a U.S. Senate Committee that the armed group founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani “acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency” and that there was evidence that the insurgent group, “with ISI support,” mounted a Sept. 13 attack on the U.S embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, he was only publicly stating allegations that have circulated for years regarding the ISI’s support for such insurgent organizations battling the Afghan government.
But Mullen’s statement was much more explosive, since he accused the ISI of sponsoring devastating attacks specifically targeting U.S. forces, as well as their Afghan allies.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gillani, said the government was shocked at the U.S. commander’s allegations and totally rejected them. The charges “negate our sacrifices and successes in the ongoing war against terror,” he said.
Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told Al-Jazeera television the allegations were “unsubstantiated — no evidence has been shared with us.” Without spelling out the ISI’s relationship with the Haqqani group, the foreign minister pointed out that in the past, the organization had been “the blue-eyed boy of the CIA itself for many years; I mean it was created by the CIA, it could be said.”
Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani was commander of a mujahidin force regarded as particularly effective during the Western-backed war against the Soviets in the 1980s, and went on to align himself with both the Taliban and al-Qaida.
The force has played an important role in the insurgency since 2001, allied with but distinct from the Taliban.
Haqqani seems to have taken a back seat and handed over command to his son, Sirajuddin.
The group operates out of North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan, just over the border from Paktia, Khosta and Paktika, the Afghan provinces where the elder Haqqani has strong tribal connections and operated in the 1980s.
Of late, however, the “Haqqani network,” as the group is now known, has gained notoriety for its ability to mount complicated, daring and devastating attacks in urban areas, such as the attacks in Kabul.
It has also been blamed for the recent assassination of Burhannudin Rabbani, the former Afghan president tasked with negotiating with the insurgents, although Sirajuddin Haqqani denied this in a BBC interview.
Many Afghans felt Mullen’s comments vindicated their long-held suspicions of Pakistan’s role in the decade-long conflict.
Abdol Wahed Taqat, a former general and now a political and defense analyst, believes there is a deep schism between the United States and Pakistan.
“Fundamentalism has got out of control in Pakistan. And that situation does not favor the Americans,” he said.
But it is unclear whether Washington is willing to rupture relations with a nation that not only possesses nuclear weapons, but is also located in a strategic part of the world.
Ajmal Sohail, a political commentator, said such tensions are a recurring feature of U.S-.Pakistani relations. He noted that the row over the killing of Osama bin Laden quickly dissipated.
“The relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan is like that between husband and wife — they frequently fight, but then they reconcile,” he said. “These conflicts are sporadic and temporary.” Jamshid, a student at Kabul University, expressed a cynical view of how Afghanistan is a victim of the dysfunctional relationship between Washington and Islamabad.
“I am sure the U.S. will apologize (for Mullen’s statement); the terror networks in Pakistan will remain untouched; America will pay Pakistan another $1 billion, and the war pursued by Pakistan will continue in Afghanistan,” he said.
“Afghans will no longer be deceived by the cat-and-mouse games played by America and Pakistan. Both of them are enemies of the Afghans,” Kabul shopkeeper Abdul Shokur said. “Israel and Pakistan are America’s pampered children. No matter what those pampered children want, America will accept it. The Americans are prepared to lose Afghanistan, but they will never lose Pakistan. If America exerted real pressure on Pakistan, I am sure the war in Afghanistan would end within two days.”
— Khan Mohammad Danishju and Mina Habib are reporters in Afghanistan who write for The Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization that trains journalists in areas of conflict.
Clinton to give Pakistan diplomacy one more big push
Foreign Policy By Josh Rogin Monday, October 17, 2011
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leading a very high-level delegation to Pakistan later this week to try one more time to set U.S.-Pakistan relations back on track, before they go off the rails altogether.
The State Department won't confirm that Clinton is visiting Pakistan as part of her tour this week, which we're told will include stops in Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Oman. But two senior officials have confirmed to The Cable that when Clinton arrives in Pakistan (we'll keep dates secret for security reasons), she'll be joined by CIA Director David Petraeus, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, and several other administration officials.
Pakistani media already reported that the very senior U.S. delegation will have meetings with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, and Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The trip was set up by the special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Marc Grossman, who was in Islamabad last week.
"It's Hillary's initiative," one senior official told The Cable. "This is what Hillary convinced the administration to do because although the relationship has been at its lowest in some years, the U.S. side doesn't want to pronounce their effort to improve the U.S.-Pakistan relationship dead."
The Obama team had been playing a game of "good cop, bad cop" with the Pakistanis as a means of ratcheting up pressure, following the uptick of attacks on Americans traced back to militant groups residing in Pakistan. U.S. officials have stated publicly that these groups are working with either the implicit or the explicit sanctioning of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
"Hillary is trying to position herself in the middle and say to Pakistan that there are those of us who want to engage and others who want to fold. How long do you want to play this game of poker?" the official said.
The mixture of threats and outreach coming from different parts of the Obama administration had the side effect of confusing their Pakistani interlocutors, according to experts. Now the administration wants to put forth one clear message, delivered by top diplomats and top military and intelligence officials all in the same room.
"The problem is still that different parts of the U.S. government, as far as Pakistan is concerned, are giving different messages," said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. "There needs to be a concise, unified message from Washington as to what the intentions are. In terms of high-level contact, we really haven't had that for a long while, so it's very critical."
The Obama administration is also trying to reprise the basic idea of the now defunct U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, which was meant to improve coordination of policy within both governments and also move the relationship from a "transactional" to a "strategic" one.
Some top officials no longer believe that a "strategic" relationship with Pakistan is possible, and around Washington, there is a growing realization that U.S. and Pakistani long-term strategic interests may not align, said Bruce Riedel, the Brookings Institution scholar who led Obama's first review of Afghanistan-Pakistan policy in 2009.
"We must recognize that the two countries' strategic interests are in conflict, not harmony, and will remain that way as long as Pakistan's army controls Pakistan's strategic policies," Riedel wrote in an Oct. 15 New York Times op-ed. "We must contain the Pakistani Army's ambitions until real civilian rule returns and Pakistanis set a new direction for their foreign policy."
In an interview Monday, Riedel told The Cable that the administration should abandon its efforts to seek help from the Pakistanis in bringing the Haqqani network and other militant groups to the table for peace negotiations, especially after the killing of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani by the Pakistan-based Taliban leadership.
"Grossman's primary mission of trying to find political reconciliation with the Taliban has been overtaken by events," Riedel said. "When one party murders the leader on the other side, we pretty much have an answer as to whether or not there's going to be a political reconciliation process."
The administration plans to warn the Pakistani government about the turning tide of public opinion in Washington against Pakistan and congressional threats to punish Pakistan. But if the Pakistanis don't change their approach to these groups, it's unclear what sticks the administration could really use against Pakistan to compel better behavior.
Overall, the Obama administration wants Pakistan to know it can't accept Americans being killed because of what's happening inside Pakistan. But there aren't expected to be any grand, new initiatives or new proposals to lift bilateral relations from what all sides agree is the lowest point in years.
"The U.S.-Pakistani relationship has been deteriorating all year, from the Raymond Davis case to the Osama bin Laden raid to the attack on the American Embassy in Kabul," said Riedel. "And there's really no evidence the bottom is in sight; it may be getting worse and worse."
Why Russia Fears US Afghan Plan
Having feared the US entry into Afghanistan, some in Russia now fear the United States’ exit will make it a bigger target for Islamic militants.
The Diplomat By Joshua Kucera October 18, 2011
For the last decade, Russian policymakers have watched in alarm as the United States, as part of its war effort in Afghanistan, has made strategic inroads into the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Washington has set up military bases and built relationships with the countries that Russia considers its sphere of influence, including Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
But now, the Kremlin is facing something potentially more dangerous than the Americans coming to Central Asia: the Americans leaving Central Asia.
The United States announced this summer that it intends to start pulling its troops out of Afghanistan in 2014. What sort of government develops in Afghanistan after that is unclear, but it will almost certainly include elements of the Taliban that are now fighting US forces. That could provide a bridgehead for radical Islamist groups to move northward, into the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics and possibly to Russia itself. Indeed, over the last month, Russian officials have been openly discussing this threat.
‘We aren’t on the verge of solving the problems in Afghanistan, but on the worsening of them, and quite a qualitatively different situation in the Central Asian region, especially after 2014,’ said Nikolai Bordyuzha, former chief of the Russian border service and now secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russia-led group that aims to form a political-military bloc to increase security in the former Soviet Union. ‘The prognosis is clear: Afghanistan will remain a base for organizing terrorist and extremist activities, we feel.’
‘Russia should expect the activation of militant activity on the borders of Central Asia after the withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq and AfghanistanThreats can now come creeping to our southern borders,’ said Col.-Gen. Vladimir Chirkin, commander of Russia’s Central Military District.
‘We don’t want NATO to go and leave us to face the jackals of war after stirring up the anthill. Immediately after the NATO withdrawal, they will expand towards Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and it will become our problem then,’ said Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro.
Irina Zvyagelskaya, vice president of Russia's Centre for Strategic and Political Studies and senior scholar of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies, agrees with such sentiments. ‘There were a lot of people here who said the US being in Afghanistan was against Russian interests. Now the same people are saying, “how dare they leave Afghanistan,”’ she says.
Before the United States war in Afghanistan began in 2001, Islamist groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan maintained a low but persistent profile in several Central Asian states. An apparent assassination attempt on Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, killed 16 people in 1999, and in 2004, attacks on the United States and Israeli embassies in Tashkent killed four Uzbekistani security guards.
There have been no such attacks in recent years, however, and a major reason is because the United States’ war in Afghanistan has drawn jihadists from around the region. The number of Uzbeks, Tajiks and other Central Asians now fighting in Afghanistan or Pakistan is unknown, but a US departure would free them up to return to the fight in the former Soviet republics, says Georgi Engelhardt, a Moscow-based expert on political Islam in Russia.
In the meantime, secular, authoritarian governments in the ex-Soviet Central Asian states have, in their efforts to stamp out any internal opposition, instituted increasingly harsh control of religious groups. They will thus be attractive targets for Islamist groups, who believe the governments are un-Islamic. That would bring instability closer to Russia’s borders, and even – via the large diaspora of guest workers from Central Asia in Russian cities – into Russia itself, Engelhardt says. ‘And Russia doesn't have many answers for this.’
Others, however, suggest that this threat is being overblown. While the infiltration of Islamist radicals northward toward Russia is certainly plausible, hard information about the extent of the threat is difficult to come by. Exaggerating the threat suits the governments of Central Asia, who can appeal to foreign powers for military aid and justify crackdowns on legitimate opposition.
‘There’s a danger, but we also might be exaggerating the danger,’ says Arkady Dubnov, a Russian journalist and expert on Central Asia. ‘What we’re seeing now is PR, preparation for this period (when the US leaves). This PR is to prepare popular opinion, internal Russian popular opinion and also Central Asian popular opinion, to accept the inevitability of Russian security measures.’
The spate of public expressions of Kremlin concern coincided with the launch of large-scale military exercises with the countries of Central Asia, Tsentr-2011. The exercises involved countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a political-military bloc that Russia is promoting as a means of maintaining stability in its near abroad.
‘The processes taking place in North Africa and the Middle East were difficult to forecast. What will happen next? What leadership will come to power? This has to be a warning to all states. We have similar questions for the Central Asian countries. We must be prepared for anything. This is why we are practicing with these drills,’ said General Nikolay Makarov, chief of the general staff of the Russian Army, before the CSTO exercises began. ‘Russia's military organization must be ready for a worst-case scenario.’
Dubnov argues that rhetoric about an Islamist threat in Central Asia is a pretext to allow Russia to gain influence in the region. ‘Everyone knows that the Taliban won’t cross from Afghanistan into Central Asia, but everyone claims that’s the threat,’ he said. ‘It’s rhetoric. We want to scare them so much that they let us in in advance; we want presence, not war.’
This view is certainly supported by the fact that the most significant current threat coming from Afghanistan to Russia – the large-scale export of opium – would, in reality, likely decrease in the event of a Taliban government coming to power. While the Taliban had cracked down heavily on poppy production, the United States has refused Russian demands to eradicate poppy fields, in the belief that doing so would unnecessarily alienate the Afghan population whose support US forces are trying to gain.
In addition, there’s great scepticism in Russia over whether the United States will actually leave Afghanistan, reflecting a belief that the United States won’t abandon the strategic foothold it has gained in Central Asia, on the flank of China and Iran, in addition to Russia.
In any case, a decreased US presence in Afghanistan and the surrounding countries is inevitable. And whether Moscow likes it or not, that means that Russia is thus going to be taking a greater amount of responsibility for keeping a lid on whatever threats might emerge in Central Asia.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com