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July 2008

Insurgency in the East: The Taliban’s Military Strategy for 2008

Early in 2008, the Taliban insurgents announced their strategic military plans for Afghanistan. The strategy was said to have been conveyed to their base orally and in the Taliban monthly publication Al Samood via an interview with a deputy of Mullah Omar, Mullah Berader. During the course of the Al Samood interview, Deputy Mullah Berader outlined the Taliban’s military plan for Afghanistan in broad terms. In the interview, he told Al Samood that a key objective for the year would be to seize control of the main highway linking Kabul and Jalalabad.

The logistical significance of this route is that this road is currently used as a critical delivery and supply route by the international coalition and the Afghan and NATO forces. The road also functions as a a trade route bridging markets in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Taliban began implementing the new plan outlined by Mullah Berader with a series of ambushes soon after. Then on Feb 27, 2008, they attempted to assassinate Interior Minister Zerar Ahmad Muqbil as he traveled the highway in Laghman Province, 50 kilometers from Kabul on Feb 27, 2008. While Minister Muqbil managed to survive the attack, this was not enough to dissuade the Taliban of the efficacy of this strategy.

According to a report released by HMS, a British firm that keeps track of terror attacks for the US military, the number of insurgent attacks in eastern Afghanistan has increased 61% in the first six months of 2008 alone, rising from 269 to 439 compared to the same period a year earlier.

Taliban spokesmen such as Deputy Mullah Berader promote the growing number of roadside attacks positive proof of the Taliban’s strengthening resurgence. As Mullah Berader indicated in the Al Samood interview, once the Taliban were confident they had control of the south, they felt the need to expand their operations east and northward, before driving their stake into the heart of Kabul.

Recent reports do seem to suggest that the Taliban have succeeded in moving the theatre of their insurgency into the eastern provinces. Recently they have even begun threatening Kabul itself, just as Mullah Berader threatened they would.

Promoting fear and punishing the peaceful

The Taliban’s roadside ambushes of military and supply caravans traveling the Kabul-Jalalabad highway have not surprisingly made traversing the east and southern highways increasingly treacherous. While the insurgents are still not yet able to scare the military convoys away from these roads, the estimated one thousand vehicles that were routinely using this route are increasingly looking for ways to avoid the journey.

Clearly without the luxury of armored vehicles or weapons sufficient to defend themselves, Afghanistan’s civilian population that would ordinarily travel the Kabul-Jalalabad, for example, are forced to curtail their commercial activities for fear they will not survive the trip to market.

Tolo a private Afghan TV station, reported on August 15, many Afghan civilians have decided that now matter how much they may depend on getting to market, it is still not worth their life – or those of their loved ones. And so many already desperate Afghans are reduced even further, as the insurgents deny them the simply right to travel to markets.

One Jalalabad resident who survived the overland journey told Kabul Direct that he he feared for his life the entire time he was on the road. He described the road blocks the Taliban erect wherever they feel like it, and how they use such road blocks to then halt traffic, often for hours at a time. He said he has seen many such roadblocks but rarely any government or international security forces. The civilian population has essentially been left on its own to confront the Taliban insurgents.

A government official who agreed to talk to Kabul Direct only on condition of anonymity told the Kabul Direct that he believes that the reason why the Taliban are doing this in the east is because they want the public to believe that it is the Taliban who are the force they must contend with, that the Taliban has now become strong enough to successfully step in where the government should be. The official offered as evidence for his theory the demoralizing effect the ambushes are having on all those who no longer feel safe traveling the not just the Kabul-Jalalabad highway but also the road that links Nangarhar to Kabul.

Eastern Afghanistan is a strategic territory for the Taliban because this is the region of Afghanistan that borders Pakistan’s tribal areas. The residents of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province and the its Federally-Administered Tribal Areas are notorious for having resisted any and all attempts at outside rule.

Moreover, the residents of this region, though Pakistani by national origin, are linked to the inhabitants on the Afghan side of the border because of they spent years on the same side fighting common enemies (for example in recent times, the Soviet Union, the international forces, NATO, the Americans, as well as their usual adversaries, the central governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan). The two populations also have family, clan and tribal links, and last but not least, religious and sectarian links. In these parts, these are the types of ties that matter far more than the passport someone carries.

The Taliban’s Local Affiliates

Another reason this was territory must have struck the Taliban as ripe for expansion were the many affiliate relations the Taliban has long had with other groups who operate in these areas. Some of their these alliances include:

TEHREK-e TALIBAN is one of the Taliban’s closest affiliates in Pakistan. As the group’s name would suggests, Tehrek members generally identify themselves as the Pakistani branch of the Afghan Taliban movement.

The Tehrek-e Taliban first appeared in December 2007 under the leadership of Baitullah Behsud. Leaders from all of the key districts on the Pakistani side of this border came together in order to drive out the foreign forces in the region, including the Pakistani military. They were also drive to organize in order to obtain the release of a close affiliate, the leader of the Lal Masid, was captured by Pakistani authorities after he and his followers seized the mosque and held its students hostage in Islamabad.

Tehrek was also named as the primary group suspected of having carried out the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December of last year. However the group’s leader, Mr. Mehsud, has vociferously denied the charges, in public statements where he expressed that he was personally shock by the assassination and characterized the loss of the former Pakistani leader as a “tragedy” according to press accounts.

TEHREEK-E NAFAZ-E-SHARIAT-E MOHAMMADI (TNSM) is another Taliban affiliate in the area. This group is headed by Maulana Fazlullah, famous for the FM radio program he hosts on which he promotes a radical interpretation of Islam that attracts a similar following to the Taliban. Mullah Fazallulah also garnered world attention when forces under his command captured 250 Pakistani forces in August 2007.

THE HAQQANI NETWORK is arguably the most notorious of the Taliban-linked affiliates in Afghanistan’s eastern region. The network is connected via several madrassas and family-based connections primarily in Waziristan. The head of the network is Malawi Jalaludin Haqqani. His sons serve as leading commanders.

Haqqani first achieved renown during the mujahideen campaign against the Soviets where he his band of Afghan fighters from a base in Waziristan on the Pakistani side of the border. After the mujahideen victory against the Soviets, his forces succeeded in capturing the Afghan city of Khost from the Najibullah regime in 1991. In retrospect this would be considered one of the battles that paved the way for the mujahideen to seize control of the central government in 1992.

Though Haqqani was not a founding member of the Taliban, he did join the movement early enough to be named one of the regime’s leading military commanders after they wrested control of the Afghan government from the mujahideen in 1996. He would only return to his old base in Pakistan after the Taliban fled the invasion of the international coalition in late 2001.

Lately Haqqani has emerged as one of main drivers of the insurgency. His top commanders include his sons. Moreover the senior most among them is Sirajuddin Haqqani. Sirajuddin is believed to be closely linked to Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of Al Qaida. Some observers have suggested that it is Sirajuddin’s closeness to Al Qaida that explains why the Haqqani network has been so quick to adopt such traditionally non-Afghan tactics such as simultaneous suicide bombings, widely considered signature tactics of Al Qaeda.

Unfortunately, the Haqqani network’s reach does not end at the borders of Waziristan where they maintain a network of Deobandi mosques from which they are suspected of recruiting their rank and file. The Haqqani group is considered to be the main suspect in most of the attacks has been named as a chief suspect in many attacks that have occurred in the Afghan capital, including the attack on the Serena Hotel that occurred Jan 18.

MAVLAWI ABDUL KABIR has to be mentioned on any list of key players in the insurgency. Though he is not independent to the same extent the other players mentioned here are, he is significant because Mavlawi Abdul Kabir was appointed the chief commander of the Taliban in this very zone last year.

THE KUNAR SALAFISTS: Another helpful alliance forged for the Taliban has been the Salafists of Kunar Province. Taliban-Salafist ties in Kunar go back to the earliest days of the movement. At the same time the Taliban first emerged from religious schools in Pakistan, the Salafists of Kunar Province coming out of their own madrassas. While they may have had slight differences in their religious educations, for the most part the Salafists share many of the same goals for Afghanistan – and the region –their Taliban compatriots do.

However, one significant difference is that the Salafists in Kunar Province have generally tended to tilt more toward Al Qaida than they have the Taliban. The suspected leader of Al Qaida in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu Al Yazid, comes from this base, for example, and Salafists from Kunar also provided Al Qaeda with the pool of management with which the organization ran its training camps in the 1990s. And it was to the sanctuary provided by Kunar Salafists that the Al Qaeda leadership fled to for safe harbor once they found themselves in the crosshairs of the international forces after the attacks in New York and Washington September 11, 2001.

Affiliations such as these have meant that the Taliban expansion into the east has been accretive versus dilutive, to use an investment analogy. Because of such affiliations, the Taliban improved its access to financial, logistical and military bases of support, not to mention one of the few reservoirs of sympathy that still exist among the Afghan civilian population.

The Taliban has been so quick to succeed in this region that some observers are suggesting that conditions in the country are rapidly beginning to resemble the way things were in the days just before the Najibullah government fell in 1992. One Afghan observer, writing in an Afghan daily, suggests that judging from the pace of recent attacks, and their locations, it would appear that the Taliban is laying the ground to attempt an imminent storming of the gates of Kabul.

While most observers will not go this far with their alarms, they are concerned. What stops them from panicking at this point is the fact that the international community has not yet decided to abandon Afghanistan to its own devices. In their mind this was the critical condition that led to the collapse of the Najibullah government after the Soviets pulled out.

Though the Taliban have indeed managed to terrorize the Afghan public, and to some extent the international and Afghan security forces, presumably the international community understands that if Afghanistan fails as a state, it will not just be Afghanistan’s problem. The country no longer seems as remote as it did in 1989, once the Soviets had been vanquished.

The way out

So what needs to be done to restore security? One way of combating the insurgency in the Eastern region might be to simply go around it. Were alternative arteries resuscitated that could connect Afghanistan to markets outside Pakistan, the Taliban would no longer have quite the same power to wreak havoc it currently does.

Considering that Pakistan’s trade with Afghanistan reached approximately one billion dollars (US) in 2007, it does defy logic that Pakistan has not made every effort to protect its trade routes with Afghanistan. While other experts try to decipher the reasons why Pakistan might not be solving this problem, others are quick to suggest that for now the most practicable alternative might be to simply remove Pakistan from Afghanistan’s security equation and work out all these issues later.

In other words, if Afghanistan should simply reroute traffic away from the insecure areas that border Pakistan and move them up north, to the peaceful provinces that would link Afghanistan once again to the markets of the old Silk Road. Such a change in route would also have the added benefit of rewarding the north for having been patiently supportive of the democratic government these past seven years, and for the role the north played in ousting the Taliban back in 2001. That said, Afghans would naturally prefer not to lose their access to markets in Pakistan forever, but for now, there is a growing sense that there might not be any faster route to peace.

But until Pakistan demonstrates that it can and will protect its trade routes with Afghanistan, why not just reroute trade to the more stable north? Why should Afghanistan’s destiny hinge on a population that makes it abundantly clear by its actions that it does not subscribe to the idea that it is time for the country to finally become a modern connected is nation? Why should Afghans who do want a unified state be held hostage to the unreasonable demands of the extremists in its south and east, to its enemies inside Pakistan? Under these conditions Pakistan should not get the benefit of one billion in Afghan trade each year, while Afghans cannot even get to Afghan markets.

In the final analysis, the 2500-km border with Pakistan should not be able to hold the entire country hostage. There are other markets besides those in Pakistan, and regions in Afghanistan where the insurgents curry no favor. While the south and east should not be entirely abandoned to the Taliban, the rest of the country, those who have amply demonstrated their commitment to the new government should not be held hostage to the Taliban either.