Pubdate: Sun, 17 Sep 2006
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2006 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.mercurynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Peter Bergen
Note: The author is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and
author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know" (Free Press).

AMERICA'S JUGGLING ACT

Unless U.S. Takes Action, The Afghanistan Ball Will Hit The Ground, 
Allowing The Taliban To Accumulate Power

KABUL, Afghanistan - The interpreter's hand-held radio crackled with 
the sound of intercepted Taliban transmissions, and he signaled the 
infantry patrol to wait while he translated. At 7 a.m. one morning 
late in the summer, peasants were already out scything wheat, with 
their children tending fields of pink and white poppies that would 
soon add to Afghanistan's record-setting opium and heroin supplies. 
We were 9,000 feet up, in the hamlet of Larzab, in a remote part of 
Zabul province -- the heart of Talibanland.

Our interpreter, Mohammed, estimated that the Taliban fighters were 
less than half a mile away. We walked through the fields for 20 more 
minutes before stopping next to a small hill. The chatter revealed 
that the Taliban were "watching us and waiting for us to get closer," 
Maj. Ralph Paredes explained to me as his men radioed to their base 
the likely coordinates of the hidden fighters. Soldiers back at the 
base -- a mud-walled compound without electricity or water -- fired 
mortar rounds over our heads to a hill several hundred meters from 
our position, where the Taliban might be hiding. We never learned 
whether they found their target.

Just one more patrol, and one more skirmish, in Afghanistan's war -- 
a conflict in which the fighting and ferocity are regaining strength 
with each passing month. Indeed, the U.S. military and NATO are now 
battling the Taliban on a scale not witnessed since 2001, when the 
war here began, and are increasingly fighting them in remote areas 
such as Larzab where the Taliban once roamed freely.

When I traveled in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, the Taliban threat 
had receded into little more than a nuisance. But now the movement 
has regrouped and rearmed. Bolstered by a compliant Pakistani 
government, hefty cash inflow from the drug trade and a population 
disillusioned by battered infrastructure and lackluster 
reconstruction efforts, the Taliban is back -- as is Afghanistan's 
once forgotten war.

In the past three months alone, coalition forces have killed more 
than 1,000 Taliban fighters, according to Col. Tom Collins, a U.S. 
military spokesman, while the religious militia has killed dozens of 
coalition troops and hundreds of Afghan civilians, spreading a 
climate of fear throughout the country. And suicide attacks in 
Afghanistan have risen from single digits two years ago to more than 
40 already this year. Most of the victims are civilians -- including 
more than a dozen bystanders who were killed in Kabul Sept. 8 when a 
bomb-laden car struck a convoy of armored U.S. vehicles just 200 
yards from the U.S. Embassy; the attack also killed two U.S. soldiers 
and wounded a third. Half an hour after the blast, I watched as 
firefighters hosed down the streets, which were littered with shards 
of blackened metal and singed body parts.

I recently traveled to Afghanistan for three weeks, meeting with 
government officials, embedding with U.S. soldiers from the 2-4 
Infantry and interviewing senior American military officers. I found 
that while the Taliban may not constitute a major strategic threat to 
President Hamid Karzai's government, they have become a serious 
tactical challenge for U.S. and NATO troops, as the war here 
intensifies. And their threat is only amplified by their ubiquity and 
invisibility.

"In this place, they are everywhere," explained Mohammed, our 
interpreter. "They are sitting here as a farmer. Then they are Taliban."

When I visited Zabul province in July, Lt. Col. Frank Sturek was in 
charge of U.S. military operations there. Sturek, from Aberdeen, Md., 
earned his insurgent-fighting stripes in Mosul, Iraq, under the 
tutelage of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. When I spoke to Sturek, he had 
recently lost two of his men in firefights with the Taliban. In a 
nighttime interview conducted by flashlight in the mud compound, 
Sturek described a two-hour struggle on July 19 against about 120 
Taliban who were armed with mortars, recoilless rifles, machine guns 
and rocket-propelled grenades. Judging from newly dug graves, Sturek 
estimated 35 to 40 Taliban had been killed.

Despite their numerous casualties, the Taliban are much more willing 
than Iraqi insurgents to engage in pitched battles, Sturek said. 
"These guys will mix it up," he said, "and they use a lot more direct 
fire." In the five months he had been in Afghanistan, he noted, none 
of the Taliban fighters his men had fought had ever surrendered.

Echoing all other U.S. officers I interviewed in Afghanistan, Sturek 
emphasized that the Taliban threat required a political solution, not 
a military one, and that expanding the U.S. presence and 
reconstruction efforts into remote areas would win the long-term 
conflict. "You can win every firefight you want, but the battle is in 
these villages," he said. "This is where you change the minds of the 
people -- or at least create a doubt that the Taliban are not 
preaching the right message."

A political solution is also the mantra of the U.S. commanding 
officer in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, an intense, 
intellectual soldier who speaks Mandarin and is on his second tour in 
the country. Over coffee in his Kabul office, he said that the 
situation in Afghanistan still looks reasonably optimistic. "I tell 
everyone: 'Don't look at the snapshot'," he said. "Look at the movie 
called Afghanistan."

For Eikenberry, that movie features the democratically elected 
president and parliament, as well as millions of boys and girls who 
are newly in school. Indeed, in the most recent poll of Afghan public 
opinion, released by ABC News in December 2005, 77 percent of Afghans 
said their country is headed in the right direction.

Of course, a similar poll today might find fewer Afghans with this 
point of view, given rising dissatisfaction with the Karzai 
government and growing anti-American sentiment revealed in riots that 
shook Kabul in May. Eikenberry acknowledges that "the strength and 
coherence of the Taliban movement is greater than it was a year ago," 
citing tribal and land disputes and trafficking in narcotics as 
reasons for the resurgence.

An amnesty program formally begun in 2005 by the Karzai government 
offers one promising approach to containing the Taliban threat. In 
Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul, I witnessed U.S. forces 
release Mullah Abdul Ali Akundzada, who was accused of sheltering 
Taliban members and had been arrested near the site where a makeshift 
bomb had detonated. In a deal brokered by the Karzai government and 
the U.S. military, Akundzada was handed over to a group of about 30 
religious and tribal leaders, who publicly pledged that the released 
mullah would support the government. In an honor-based society such 
as Afghanistan, this program is working well. According to Afghan and 
U.S. officials, only a handful of the more than 1,000 Taliban 
fighters taking advantage of the amnesty have gone back to fighting 
the government and coalition forces.

Yet even as the amnesty program shows promise, Afghanistan's 
ballooning drug trade has succeeded in expanding the Taliban ranks. 
It is no coincidence that opium and heroin production, which now 
makes up about half of the Afghan economy, spiked at the same time 
that the Taliban staged a comeback. A U.S. military official told me 
that charities and individual donations from the Middle East are also 
boosting the Taliban's coffers. These twin revenue streams -- drug 
money and contributions -- allow the Taliban to pay their fighters as 
much as $100 a month, which compares favorably to the $70 salary of 
an Afghan police officer. Whatever the source, the Taliban can draw 
upon significant resources, at least by Afghan standards. One U.S. 
military raid on a Taliban safe house this year recovered $900,000 in cash.

The Taliban's growing presence in central Afghanistan's Ghazni 
province -- outside the group's traditional strongholds in the south 
and east -- is another benchmark of its strength. Nearly half the 
districts in Ghazni are now under significant Taliban influence, a 
U.S. military official said. The Taliban units operating there aim to 
control access to Kabul 100 miles to the north, just one more sign 
that Taliban forces increasingly move across the country with ease.

But the key to the resurgent Taliban can be summarized in one word: 
Pakistan. The Pakistani government has proved unwilling or incapable 
(or both) of clamping down on the religious militia, even though the 
headquarters of the Taliban and its key allies are in Pakistan. 
According to a U.S. military official, not one senior Taliban leader 
has been arrested or killed in Pakistan since 2001.

Amir Haqqani, the leader of the Taliban in Zabul province, "never 
comes across the border" from Pakistan into Afghanistan, Sturek told 
me. The Taliban's most important leadership council, the Quetta 
Shura, is based in the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan province; 
the Peshawar Shura is headquartered in Pakistan's North-West Frontier 
Province. In addition, Hekmatyar operates in the tribal areas of Dir 
and Bajur; Haqqani is based in Waziristan; and Al-Qaida has a 
presence in Waziristan and Chitral -- all Pakistani regions that 
border Afghanistan.

Finally, the peace deal announced this month between the Pakistani 
government and pro-Taliban militants along the Afghan border raises 
more concerns that such groups will operate more freely on and across 
the border.

The Afghan population remains generally pro-American, and its 
appetite for more conflict is low after more than two decades of war. 
However, the risks of a slide into Iraq-style chaos remain. Averting 
it would require Washington to end the Afghan drug trade and compel 
Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban warriors' havens. These are 
both tall orders, but Washington could gain real leverage in the area 
of reconstruction. So far, it has appropriated only $9 billion for 
Afghan reconstruction, as compared with $34 billion for Iraq, even 
though Afghanistan is larger and more populous and has greater 
infrastructure needs. And of the appropriated amount, only $2.5 
billion, a State Department official told me, has been spent.

In the absence of greater U.S. investments in roads, power and water 
resources, the Taliban will surely prosper and continue to gain 
adherents. Unless they take decisive action now, U.S. policymakers 
may be looking back in a few years, asking themselves why they lost 
Afghanistan despite the promise the country showed after the fall of 
the Taliban regime.

PETER BERGEN is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and 
author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know" (Free Press).

He wrote this article for the Washington Post.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine