- KARACHI -- The Taliban's military offensive has begun in earnest
in southern Afghanistan, with many key districts already captured by
the militia that retreated from power in 2001 after the US-led invasion.
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- The scale and frequency of the Taliban's
revitalized insurgency can be attributed directly to the recent appointment
by Taliban leader Mullah Omar of legendary mujahideen leader Jalaluddin
Haqqani as overall military field commander.
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- In the latest action - the biggest since
the Taliban's ousting - in Helmand province, between 300 and 400
heavily armed Taliban fighters stormed a remote village. At least
100 people were killed, including 15 or more Afghan police and a
female Canadian soldier.
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- Haqqani, a cleric, rose to fame
during the decade of opposition to the Soviets in the 1980s. Coincidentally,
at that time he was an ally of the United States.
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- Mullah Omar has provided Haqqani
with major powers, funds and huge stockpiles of arms and ammunition
and, most important, hundreds of youths who have been trained by
the Iraqi resistance in urban guerrilla warfare.
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- Mullah Omar has demarcated specific
areas of Afghanistan to different commanders, but now Haqqani is
commander-at-large. He has also been charged with coordinating suicide
attackers throughout the country. He is authorized to wage battles
anywhere he chooses in Afghanistan.
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- Haqqani was not part of the Taliban
movement when it first emerged from Zabul, but he was the first and most
powerful commander of the Afghan resistance to surrender to the Taliban,
unconditionally, in 1995. The defection paved the way for the Taliban to
secure territorial advantage and finally victory in 1996.
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- Haqqani, in his 50s, had stunningly
captured the first major city since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989
- Khost - in 1991, from the puppet communist government of president Mohammad
Najibullah.
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- Afghan parents still tell their children
about the hero Haqqani, a thin man of small stature, who refused
to stay in Peshawar in Pakistan, preferring the mountains, from where
he kidnapped Soviet soldiers and ambushed their convoys. Haqqani
stood out from other mujahideen as he was never blamed for warlordism,
and he appeared to be truly dedicated to the cause of peace in Afghanistan.
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- Haqqani held relatively low-key positions
throughout the Taliban's tenure, but remained loyal to Mullah Omar. During
this time he is said to have run several al-Qaeda training camps
for Osama bin Laden, with whom he was friendly.
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- After the September 11, 2001, attacks
on the United States and soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan,
Haqqani was invited to Islamabad, where the Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI), with which he had close ties, offered him the presidency of
Afghanistan, but on the condition that he break all ties with Mullah
Omar and carve out a "moderate Taliban" faction. (In declassified
US State Department documents, Haqqani is described as the tribal
leader "most exploited by the ISI [and US] during the Soviet-Afghan
war to facilitate the introduction of Arab mercenaries". [1])
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- Haqqani refused the offer and went
back to the Ghulam Khan mountains between Khost and Pakistan's North
Waziristan tribal area and began his campaign of pitched battles
against US-led forces. He then became a prime US target, with a number
of attacks aimed specifically at eliminating him.
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- But although Haqqani still commanded
great respect all over Afghanistan and especially among the tribal
elders of Khost, Paktia, Paktika and Gardez, he still did not belong to
the Taliban core - Mullah Omar's "kitchen cabinet".
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- He thus was not given a central
role in the Taliban resistance, although he continued to mount random
attacks in his area.
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- Mullah Akhtar Osamani and Mullah Dadullah
were the central commanders, but they were not able to make any significant
military breakthroughs when the Taliban's spring offensive was launched
last month. Thus Haqqani's elevation.
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- Fresh funds, arms and human resources,
and Haqqani's unquestioned military acumen honed in years fighting the
Soviets, have revitalized the insurgency. An immediate spinoff was
that veteran Afghan resistance figures, such as Saifullah Masoor,
the commander of the renowned resistance leader Nasrullah Mansoor,
who were previously sitting on the fence in Gardez and other areas,
are now hand in hand with Haqqani.
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- The regions that the Taliban have
targeted and the patterns of mobilization are similar to those used
in the mid-1990s when the student militia emerged as a force to fill
the chaotic political vacuum created after the withdrawal of Soviet troops
and seize Kabul.
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- There are, though, two main distinctions
today: the Taliban do not have the support of Pakistan, as they did
to a large extent in the 1990s, and many independent groups have
now gathered under the Taliban umbrella.
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- Thus the Taliban-led movement has converted
into an organized revolt, concentrated in the southern provinces
of Zabul, Helmand and Kandahar. Strengthened by loyal tribes, the
targets are US-led coalition forces, as well as the Afghan National
Army (ANA).
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- According to Asia Times Online
contacts in Afghanistan, intense and constant battles have virtually paralyzed
the ANA's ability to retaliate, and many villages and districts in the
three key southern provinces are now under Taliban control. The ANA
is therefore concentrating on keeping the major Afghan cities under
the writ of the Kabul administration of President Hamid Karzai.
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- "Once again we are facing a
mid-1990s-like situation when bloodshed was everywhere and the situation
went from bad to worse and these circumstances allowed the Taliban
movement to emerge and boot our government out," said former
Afghan prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzaid in a telephone conversation
with Asia Times Online. Ahmad Shah was the acting premier before
the Taliban took power in 1996.
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- "The Karzai administration
writ is nowhere, and the Afghan nation is once again in limbo,"
Ahmad Shah maintained.
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- Solid spadework
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- While Haqqani has provided the
spark for the resistance, he could not have succeeded had thorough
groundwork not been laid over the past year or so.
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- The Taliban launched a major recruitment
drive last year. This coincided with the government of Pakistan clamping
down on jihad activities in Indian-administered Kashmir.
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- This played right into the Taliban's
hands as many former members of Pakistani jihadi organizations, including
from the banned Laskhar-i-Toiba and the banned Jaish-i-Mohamed, gathered
in North and South Waziristan, where the Taliban have established
a virtual Islamic state along the lines of the former uncompromising
fundamentalist religious Taliban regime in Afghanistan. All have
pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar.
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- According to authoritative estimates
obtained by Asia Times Online, about 27,000 fighters are gathered in
North Waziristan alone. More than 13,000 are believed to be in South Waziristan.
The Taliban leadership there had formed about 100 suicide squads by February,
assembled under the motto "fight until the last man and the last bullet".
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- Partners, not followers
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- Now that the spring offensive has gained
sustainable momentum, some of the old guard of the Afghan resistance against
the Soviets have jumped into the fray, but as partners of the Taliban
rather than followers of Mullah Omar.
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- One such is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the
Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, who operates in the Kunar Valley and Nooristan
province on the border with Pakistan. According to reports from the area,
his commanders and their men are grouping to pitch battle before
the Taliban mobilize cadres in eastern Afghanistan.
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- In the Khugiani district in eastern
Nangarhar province, Moulvi Yunus Khalis, the chief of his own faction of
the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, and his two sons, especially Anwarul Haq
Mujahid, have started up activities and are instigating all tribes
to revolt against the Kabul administration, as well as against foreign
forces in Afghanistan.
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- Sporadic information coming out of the
country also suggests revolts by many small warlords in the southern
Pashtun heartland against the Karzai administration. However, at
present they lack effective coordination among themselves, and with
the Taliban.
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- Should they get organized, say people
with close knowledge of the insurgency, a military mobilization all the
way to Kabul could be only a few weeks away.
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- Note
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- 1. Asia Times Online, Pakistan
through the US looking glass, September 20, 2003.
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- Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief,
Pakistan, Asia Times Online.
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