Thread: Nato's top brass accuse Pakistan over Taliban aid

Originally Posted by tarek

Ok, that can be an answer, a few decades without war, but lets deal with reality - and reality is that the pashtun want what is their right anyway, they are not saying Karzai out, but if even a seat at the table is not available then...what i can tell you, it's unfortunate.

The pashtun angle is suspect considering that it is Pakistan that is in danger of having a Pashtunistan in NWFP. The Duran Line dispute exists and Pakistan wants to (understandably) secure it in its favour. But Afghanistan has no pashtun problem, it has a Taliban problem.

yara, Afghanistan is never going to be a Euro/American liberal "democracy", there is no history, cultural ethos for that, and Mr. Bush is not going to be president forever -- the success of iraq it is claimed has cost in excess of 600,000 lives, perhaps Afghanistan may be spared the same.

I agree the culture and methods needed for governnance are different.

Don't get me wrong, I supported both these, but I am no supported of doing things in a way that ends up a failure. We have made mistaks, lets learn from it and devise more effective policy --

If you only knew the state of things in Afghanistan, there was nothing there - we pay war lords, that's right we pay them and in turn they rip off every one else, we even work with former communists -- absolutely horrendous choices, really awful and worse -- there has to be a way out of this -- and bby the way,

We would know that after all have'nt we been dealing with the Northern Alliance since a long time. Although I can say that Masood was a gentleman compared to the likes of Hykmatyar and the other warlord.

look for a lot more NATO casualties - it not what I want, but it is my reading of events -- this project is as neo-imperial as it gets, we think we are going to tame these people or at least kill such large numbers that they will not forget -- and that's just what i'm affraid of, that they will not forget.

It is the backers/ sponsorers of the Taliban that are a problem.

Despite all of Tareks dissembling & attempts to deny the obvious- Pak is busy cutting deals with the terrorists,and its ISI is involved neck deep

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/taliban/view/

I would request ANYONE truly interested in the situation to see all the videos.

It ends with the usual plaintive, we need poor boy Musharraf...but its clear that Paks janus faced policies are increasingly under fire!

Who is this Tarek besides an appologist for the Pakistani terrorist machine?

OK, so tarek is a apologist, but he's not blind fool who is so wedded to ideology that he cannot recognize that we must choose reality over ideology -- That's for you Sniper, smell the coffee AKA get your head out of your ass




How to turn the tide in Afghanistan
Ahmed Rashid International Herald Tribune

Published: October 12, 2006


KABUL NATO will fail to combat the growing insurgency in Afghanistan unless it shows the flexibility and determination to deal with three major problems simultaneously - all of which are the legacy of the American failure in Afghanistan over the past five years.

A few days ago NATO took over all military operations in Afghanistan from the Americans. But ordinary people in Kabul are fearful that the Taliban are on their way back to power and the international community does not have the power or desire to stop them.

To turn the tide in Afghanistan, NATO will have to act not just as a military alliance, but also as a political, economic and diplomatic alliance - something it has never done before.

Since the spring when 10,000 NATO forces took over in southern Afghanistan from U.S. forces, they have suffered three times the casualty rate of American soldiers, as a result of well-planned offensives by the Taliban.

Although NATO forces have killed hundreds of Taliban, there is no quick end to the insurgency in sight as the Taliban move skillfully from mass frontal attacks on NATO positions to one-man suicide attacks in Afghan cities.

Not surprisingly the public, Parliaments and news media in many NATO countries whose soldiers are dying in Afghanistan are up in arms, and demanding that their governments recall their troops.

In the past few days, Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Stephen Harper of Canada have said their forces will get the best equipment and support available (Canadian troops have suffered the heaviest casualties). But their people want answers to more obvious questions: Why are the Taliban back, when the United States repeatedly said they were finished? Why has Pakistan's military regime continued to allow Taliban leaders to live on its soil? Can NATO actually succeed?

Since 2001, the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan has failed to deploy enough peacekeeping troops, resources and reconstruction aid. NATO is only now rectifying that, spreading troops out to key areas in the south that have been hit by the insurgency and developing a more clear- headed reconstruction policy.

But NATO members have been slow to come up with the necessary financial aid and military equipment. Major reconstruction has yet to take place. Even in Kabul there is less electricity today than there was under the Communists in the 1980s.

In the long term, NATO forces in the south can only win if they are prepared to come in with enough aid and reconstruction to win over the alienated Pashtun tribes. NATO's military successes must become an economic lever that pries more money out of the European Union, the United States and the Muslim world.

The second problem is the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai, which has failed to come up with speedy and decisive decisions, promote good governance and clamp down on corruption and drug trafficking among its own ministers and officials.

As Afghans have become more and more critical of their own government, the Taliban find they can recruit extensively among disaffected people inside Afghanistan for the first time since 2001.

NATO has to play a critical political role in resuscitating the Afghan government and giving it the confidence to perform better.

Third, NATO has to play a diplomatic role in convincing Pakistan to stop pursuing a dual-track policy of supporting the war on terrorism when it comes to capturing Qaeda leaders, but declining to do the same when it comes to the Taliban. Washington has tolerated this dichotomy for the past five years because it placed little importance on restraining the Taliban, but NATO cannot afford to do the same.

In a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Sept. 21, General James Jones, NATO's supreme commander, testified that the Taliban headquarters was in Quetta, Pakistan. Yet President George W. Bush did not even bring up Quetta when he hosted a dinner recently for Karzai and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

The UN secretary general's latest report to the Security Council on Afghanistan says the Taliban leadership "relies heavily on cross-border fighters, many of whom are Afghans drawn from nearby refugee camps and radical seminaries in Pakistan." It lists five leadership centers for the insurgency. U.S. and NATO intelligence officials reportedly believe that at least three of those centers are based in Pakistan.

America's refusal to address this issue has convinced Afghans that the West is not serious about ending the Taliban insurgency and securing Afghanistan. NATO has to change this public perception if it is to succeed.

Ahmed Rashid is the author of "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia."

Originally Posted by tarek

OK, so tarek is a apologist, but he's not blind fool who is so wedded to ideology that he cannot recognize that we must choose reality over ideology -- That's for you Sniper, smell the coffee AKA get your head out of your ass

And what, embrace our 'peaceloving' Pakistani 'allies'?

LOFL, no thanx.

As far as reckognizing reality, a am HARDLY in lockstep with the US admin. In fact, i'd like to kick them in the balls as hard as i can.

No one requires your embrace and no one is asking for it, but if you do comment then make sense and refrain from getting personal - you really don't need that.

You disagree, that's fine, make persuasive argument - don't care for Pakistanis as allies, that's OK - you already know what they think of us as allies, don't you?

In the meantime, we have a job to do and need help, not complainers - we need people who can tell us the truth about mistakes and not just feed our egos, leading us even greater loss of blood and treasure.

It is in the interest of Pakistan to keep the issue festering lest the Pashtun demand Pakhtoonistan.

There can be nothing better than having the Pashtun fighting each other with the Born Again Islamist fervour of the Taliban so that they are kept busy and their minds off Pakhtoonistan.

Currently, too many states which have tribals and which are B Category (i.e. controlled by tribal heads) are getting too hot to handle for Pakistan.

So, keep them busy elsewhere.

Pashtunistan (Persian: پشتونستان) or Pakhtunistan (Persian: پختونستان), is what many Pashtun nationalists call the Pashtun-dominated areas of Pakistan. The Pashtuns in Afghanistan are the largest ethnic group in the country and are concentrated in the south and east, but nationalists have often included all of the western part of Pakistan as part of Pashtunistan. The Pakistani part of Pashtunistan comprises an area that runs from Chitral in the north (where Pashtuns are a minority, with Khowar people being the majority) to Sibi in the southwest and intentionally includes the ethnically mixed region of Balochistan. The Pashtun majority areas in western Pakistan include the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the northern portion of Balochistan. The main language spoken in the Pashtunistan region is Pashto, but substantial numbers of Afghan Persian-speakers can also be found throughout the Pashtun regions of western Pakistan where many Afghan refugees have established permanent roots. Thus, Pashtunistan can be defined in various ways depending upon the point of view of the political group involved.

Pakistan has more than double the number of Pashtuns compared to Afghanistan. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, over 4 million refugees, mostly Pashtuns, migrated to Pakistan, but they are not included in the official count of Pashtuns in Pakistan as they are not Pakistani citizens. Most of them have permanently settled in Pakistan due to continuing violence and instability in Afghanistan. The Pakistan's Pashtuns have integrated into Pakistan and have substantial representation in Pakistan armed forces, parliament, political parties, business and civil services. The Pakistani Balochs are also bitterly opposed to their inclusion in Pashtunistan movement and they support their own nationalist Baloch movement.

In fact the famous couplet of Ahmad Shah Abdali speaks of the association the people have with the region,

Da Dili takht herauma cheh rayad krhm, Zma da khkule Pukhtunkhwa da ghre saroona.
Translation: "I forget the throne of Delhi when I recall, The mountain peaks of my beautiful Pukhtunkhwa."

Despite sharing a common language and believing in a common ancestry, Pashtuns have rarely been united and did not achieve unity until the 18th century CE. Another early Pashtun nationalist was the Pashtun "warrior-poet" Khushal Khan Khattak who was imprisoned by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for trying to incite the Pashtuns to rebel against the rule of the Mughals. The first Afghan empire (see Durrani Empire) of Ahmad Shah Durrani, which was established in 1747 and encompassed the Pashtun areas, united the Pashtuns until conflicts with the encroaching British Empire and the Ranjit Singh's Sikh Kingdom led to the eventual dismemberment of the old Durrani Empire.

Following the decline of the Durrani Empire, the Pashtun domains began to shrink as they lost control of the regions now in Pakistan to the Sikhs, Balochis, Persians, and ultimately the British. The British arrived in the middle of the 19th century, and the Pashtunistan region became an area of importance for both the British and the Russians. The Anglo-Afghan wars were fought as part of the overall imperialistic Great Game that was waged between the Russian Empire and the British, and the Afghans found their territories greatly diminished as a result of border adjustments made as a result of British peace terms. During the reign of the Afghan "Iron" Amir Abdur Rahman, in the late 19th century CE, the Afghans reluctantly gave up nearly half of the Pashtun territories to the British. It is possible that Abdur Rahman viewed the so-called Durand Line as a temporary arrangement rather than a permanent settlement and is known to have vocally despised the agreement and bitterly resented the British for it. Nonetheless, the British finalized the agreement as part of their permanent political border with Afghanistan.

In 1905, the North-West Frontier Province was created and roughly corresponded to Pashtun majority regions within the British domain and seemed to indicate the permanence of the border from the British point of view. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas was created to further placate the Pashtun tribesmen who never fully accepted British rule and were prone to rebellions, while Peshawar was directly administered as part of a British protectorate state with semi-autonomy.

The Khudai Khidmatgar were a non-violent group and Ghaffar Khan openly claimed to have been inspired by Gandhi. While the Red Shirts were willing to work with the Indian National Congress, some Pashtuns desired independence from both India and the newly created state of Pakistan following the departure of the British. When the decision for partition was announced, it included the condition of a referendum being held in the North West Frontier Province because it was ruled by the Khudai Khidmatgar backed Congress government of Dr. Khan Sahib. On 21st June 1947, Khudai Khidmatgar leaders met under the presidency of Amir Mohammad Khan at Bannu as realisation that the referendum was inevitable the participants declared that Pukhtuns did not accept India or Pakistan and announced a boycott of the referendum. The voters chose Pakistan by a margin of 9 to 1 in 1947. A loya jirga in the Tribal Areas garnered a similar result as most preferred to become part of Pakistan. Subsequent to indepenence and Pakistan's creation in August 1947 the Khudai Khidmatgar leaders reconvened at Sardaryab on 3 and 4 September 1947 and passed a resolution that accepted Pakistan's creation and they would leave in Pakistan as its bona fide citizens and would refrain from making any sort of disturbance and difficulty for the new state.

Despite some improvement provincially the Pashtunistan issue was inherited by the new state of Pakistan and would cause diplomatic problems with Afghanistan. Afghanistan was the only country in the world that voted against Pakistan's inclusion in the U.N. Assembly. While both countries showed a willingness to discuss the Durand Line, a brief period of calm was shattered in 1949 following a tribal uprising supported by Afghanistan on the Pakistani side of the border. The Afghanistan military allegedly bombed a Pashtun village in Pakistan during the conflict as to make Pakistan look bad and this led to deteriorating relations between the two countries. The Afghan government responded to the incident with a declaration that it found the Durand Line agreement of 1893 to be null and void and this prompted some measure of hostile relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. However there was a clear divide within the Afghan government on how to handle the issue. On June 13, 1948, Shah Wali Khan, the Afghan envoy to Pakistan, at a party in his honor by the Aligarh Old Boys' Association, declared: "Our King has already stated, and I, as the representative of Afghanistan, declare that Afghanistan has no claims on frontier territory, and even if there were any, they have been given up in favor of Pakistan. Anything contrary to this which may have appeared in the Press in the past or may appear in the future should not be given credence at all and should be considered just a canard."

Around the same time, the official Kabul daily, Anis, supported by Kabul Radio, demanded that the territory between the Durand Line and the Indus River should be amalgamated with Afghanistan. Again a statement supporting the views expressed by his Ambassador was soon issued by the Counselor of the Afghan Embassy in Karachi. This led to an unusual situation in which Kabul Radio challenged the authority of the Afghan envoy to speak for his own government.

In July 1949, the Afghan Parliament declared that "it does not recognize the imaginary Durand or any similar Line." Kabul Radio and the Afghan Press intensified their propaganda, inciting the tribesmen living on the Pakistan side of the Durand Line to revolt in the name of 'Pakhtoonistan'.

Afghan backed insurgents crossed the Durand Line from Afghanistan to openly combat the Pakistani military between 1950 to 1955 and diplomatic relations were briefly severed during this tense period. Relations were resumed in 1951, but the issue remained unresolved. Relations briefly improved in the mid-1950's after an abortive attempt to agree to a confederation between the two countries. The effort allegedly collapsed because President Iskander Mirza rejected the idea of disbanding the One Unit scheme. Subsequently problems further aggravated because of the Pakistani crackdown on the Pashtun nationalist Khudai Khidmatgar movement. A constant propaganda war was waged between the two governments while there was evidence to suggest that the Afghan government intentionally or unintentionally was encouraging seccesionist activies in Pakistan, besides Afghanistan many Congress party leaders felt a sense of obligation to their former compatriots in the Khudai Khidmatgar movement.

Originally Posted by tarek

Anoop

" - Aren't Indians willing? Or is it that Indians do not wish to die for NATO and the US, while NATO and US and Pakistanis, you seem to suggest, ought to put themselves at risk for countries such as India, Iran, Russia and the like -

That's it musharraf is a slacker and has little control over the radicals in his own country, as for India they'll do nothing or else they'll be more useless and conterproductive than the French/Venezuelans unlike America's real allies such as Australians, British, Philippines, Italians and NATO.

Originally Posted by tarek

OK, so tarek is a apologist, but he's not blind fool who is so wedded to ideology that he cannot recognize that we must choose reality over ideology -- That's for you Sniper, smell the coffee AKA get your head out of your ass."

Dear Tarek, writing excitably and posting in bold font does not exactly a convincing arguement make. Article by Ahmed Rashid, eh?

Shall we get into what else Ahmed Rashid says about Pakistan & the ISI & the Taliban?

Or for that matter what of the frontline videos which demonstrate the charade that is the Pak war on terror? Including telling the Afghanis- no Afghan was in 9/11...these Americans blah blah, by your own top generals..good job!

Archer

I am open to all points of view, even Mr. Ahmed -- Among thinking Afghans (oxymoron?) Mr. Ahmed is incredibly popular, because he thinks ISI has extended itself and for Mr. Ahmed's own politics is more closely allied with theirs.

And I bold sections of Articles that I think are important - I also read with a highlighter, (if only I wrote with a spell checker) - I did not intend to seem to be shouting thru the article - but hey, can't please everybody and don't want to - Does that make me bad?

Hmm.. Tarek, why is "thinking Afghans" an oxymoron?

Sricangan-

You will note the question mark - Some may question if a nation that has now been at war for more than 30 years and with more than 1 million killed, by some estimates more than 2 million.

To bidness:

General takes long view in Afghanistan
By Carlotta Gall The New York Times

Published: October 15, 2006


KABUL Leaning against the red webbing that passes for upholstery in a military aircraft, Lieutenant General David Richards, the British commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, scanned a news clip as he flew back to the capital from Kandahar, the center of combat operations in the south of the country.

The article was by a well-known British columnist who had written in The Guardian that he was "baffled by Richards' naïveté about the Taliban." The author, Simon Jenkins, contended that NATO could not possibly win in its fight against an enemy that could "count on the tacit support of tens of thousands of fighters from tribal militias."

"I am not naïve; he's naïve," Richards shouted over the roar of the plane engines. He dismissed as "nonsense" the idea that the increase in the Taliban insurgency across southern Afghanistan this year was driven by ideology or the ethnic grievances of Pashtun tribes.

"This is not a huge popular uprising," he added, bristling. "And to distort the truth is so unjust for the people here who want us. And it is unhelpful since it undermines the fabric of what we are doing. People do not want a return to the Taliban, but we need time to allow that aspiration to win."

Already halfway through his one-year command in Afghanistan, Richards, 54, does not have much time. He arrived in February as commander of NATO peacekeepers in Kabul and the relatively peaceful northern and western regions of Afghanistan.

Since then, he has taken command of forces across the whole country, including those in the combat zones, which represent 13 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. In all, he commands more than 31,000 troops of the International Security Assistance Force here, including 12,000 U.S. troops.

Even before Richards took command of the turbulent south, Taliban insurgents were swarming in numbers not seen since their defeat in 2001. Richards estimates that his troops now face 4,000 to 5,000 Taliban fighters.

The summer months were consumed by heavy fighting. The general's forces came under repeated attacks, both on patrol and at their bases, forcing NATO to call in airstrikes and artillery strikes that inevitably killed scores of the very civilians he was trying to win over. It was not exactly the hearts-and-minds strategy he had planned.

Still, Richards insists that his forces were fully ready for the fierce resistance they met. His task force had spent nine months preparing for the mission as the NATO deployment was delayed by several months.

"We knew there was a lot of opposition," he said, this time in an interview in his headquarters in Kabul, set between the U.S. Embassy and the presidential palace. "We had been watching it, and the Americans were very forthcoming with their intelligence."

"There were doubts about NATO and our ability to conduct demanding security operations," he continued. "There are no questions about our ability now."

The fighting was regrettable, but necessary, he said. He even expressed some understanding of the enemy his men have faced. "We've killed, sadly - because in many respects some of them are just unemployed young Afghan men who need employment and are paid cynically by the Taliban to do their dirty stuff for them.

"But we have killed many hundreds of Taliban in the last month, chiefly in Kandahar and Helmand, and it has put paid to any doubt in anyone's mind that NATO can do what we were sent here to do."

Recently, there have, indeed, been some successes. Not least, Richards's forces regained control of Panjwai, a district just 24 kilometers, or 15 miles, west of Kandahar, the main southern city, where the Taliban had gathered in large numbers. The victory was vital for its strategic and psychological impact, the general said.

"The Taliban were very cocky about Panjwai," Richards said on his visit to Kandahar during the operation. "They think they can face us down. We will prove to them that they are defeatable. It's very important for people to see that happening, and the rather worried atmospherics will change overnight."

Richards said that about 10 percent of the population in the south might support the Taliban, that 20 percent was opposed to them, and that the rest were stuck in the middle.

"They are straightforward, simple folk who above all want security for their family, and they will go with whichever side can convince them they are going to win," he said. "And that 70 percent must not be allowed to slip into the hands of the Taliban this autumn."

That will mean rolling out tangible benefits - in the form of assistance - as soon as security allows, he said.

"It's a very important psychological, physical, military and wider campaign that we are conducting, and I think this autumn is a critical period," he said. "And that's my main focus at the moment, getting those visible improvements, in security, governance and reconstruction and development to start happening in the south so that we can persuade that 70 percent that we will win."

Yet in his time in Afghanistan, Richards has seen up close just how weak and ill-equipped the Afghan government is to handle a crisis, like the riots that broke out in Kabul after a U.S. military truck plowed into civilian cars, killing at least four people in May.

He also found a startling lack of coordination among the government, the military and foreign donors, which he described as "anarchy" in his first weeks on the job.

Richards set to work to help President Hamid Karzai form a kind of privy council to convene crucial ministers and security officials, as well as United States and NATO commanders and ambassadors of leading donor countries, the United Nations and European Union.

Called the Policy Action Group, it now meets weekly and is designed to bring much-needed coordination to security and aid efforts.

"It's a pretty powerful structure," said one NATO official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature and who credited Richards with the idea. "This is his war cabinet; this is the bit he never had."

The group has already drawn up guidelines and raised money to recruit thousands of auxiliary police from local tribes to help improve security in the south, an idea that had been considered for a year but was never realized for lack of consensus, Richards said.

"We have been setting the conditions for the success that we must achieve," he explained, "and it is not just military success. It is very important that we combine with reconstruction and development and governance, because all three together underpin a successful counterinsurgency strategy."

There is still a long way to go. Richards talks of the need to combat corruption, replace bad government officials and persuade international donors to drop their lengthy procedures and tendering rules to help reconstruction aid flow.

"I am not giving the rosy picture," he said on the military flight. "I'll be honest. There's a lot to do."

Taliban-linked attacks kill 7

A series of Taliban-linked attacks on Sunday left seven people dead, including a provincial councilor who was shot on his way to work in the southern city of Kandahar, Agence France-Presse reported from Kabul.

There were also fears for an Italian photojournalist who had been out of contact for several days, with media reports saying men claiming to be Taliban had captured him in Helmand Province on allegations he was a spy.

Unknown gunmen opened fire on the councilor, Muhammad Younis Hussaini, after he left his home, a doctor at a Kandahar hospital said. Three of his companions were hurt in the attack, said a doctor at Mirwais hospital, where the wounded were being treated.