Taliban - Tag Search

I was off the grid all day, so I'm just now getting a chance to respond to the reports that the Afghan government was negotiating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar when he was arrested by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence.

Karzai "was very angry" when he heard that the Pakistanis had picked up Baradar with an assist from U.S. intelligence, the adviser said. Besides the ongoing talks, he said Baradar had "given a green light" to participating in a three-day peace jirga that Karzai is hosting next month.

If this report is true, it basically confirms one of the two rumors about Pakistan's motives for arresting Baradar: The ISI wants to control Taliban reconciliation talks in Afghanistan, so it's going to round up "moderate" Afghan Taliban figures who are talking directly with Karzai and replace them with "extremists" loyal to the ISI (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, come on down).

Four explosions struck the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday night, killing at least 35 and wounding around 45, according to Al-Jazeera.

Three of the bombs appeared to be a diversion to a larger blast at a prison that had been targeted during a successful jailbreak two years ago, Reuters reported.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks and called them a "message" to NATO commanders who have announced an impending offensive in Kandahar this summer, similar to the just-completed operation in Marja.

As many as 21 people were killed today by two U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan's Madakhel tehsil.

David Miliband's MIT speech on Afghanistan yesterday spent a good deal of time on two issues: reconciling the Taliban with the central government in Kabul, and integrating Afghanistan into the region.

On the first point, as expected, Miliband urged Afghan president Hamid Karzai to accelerate his Taliban reintegration and reconciliation programs.

U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates deserves some credit for his fairly reasoned and non-triumphal public statements during this week's trip to Afghanistan. He warned against over-optimism in Afghanistan, stressing that there are "dark days" ahead and that the quick "clear" phase in Marja doesn't suddenly mean the war is won (or even that Operation Moshtarak is won).

In Now Zad yesterday, he commended soldiers and Marines for clearing the area of Taliban, but then said "you own it" -- and warned of a complicated path ahead.

One theme that's clear in a lot of recent writing on the war in Afghanistan -- particularly writing from the policy community in Washington -- is the delineation between what's good for the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, and what's good for Afghanistan itself.

Monica Bernabe, a Spanish journalist writing on the Afghanistan Analysts Network, says Badghis province is basically a mess.

'Everybody has left because of the fighting', the American Major Richard Wade said in June 2009 to justify why very few civilians could be seen in the Bala Murghab bazaar. 'The Taleban have check points outside the town and force the people to pay if they want to enter', he added. ANA captain Abbasi Ghazanfar described the brutality of the insurgents: 'When they capture an Afghan soldier, they take out their eyes first and afterward behead him. Only those soldiers who are Pashtuns have a chance to save their lives.'

The deteriorating security in Badghis could have implications for other provinces in the north, like Faryab. And the minimal Afghan police/army presence in the province isn't large enough to confront an influx of Taliban (on the contrary: a police official was arrested last month for feeding information to the Taliban).

Pakistani officials say they've arrested another senior Taliban leader in Karachi. Agha Jan Motasim, an aide to Mullah Omar, has been missing for two weeks; military sources said today that he was detained.

The Pakistani government won't give the U.S. access to most of its detainees, so nobody's sure exactly how many members of the Quetta Shura they've arrested -- maybe half, maybe more, maybe less -- but it is clearly a significant number. So I tend to think we've settled the question of whether these arrests are a deliberate effort or just dumb luck.

I'm trying to figure out the logic behind NATO's latest rhetorical pivot.

I expected the Marja triumphalism -- the arrival of NATO's hand-picked governor, Haji Zahir, and the well-publicized flag-raising ceremony. Commanders said today that they've finished the "clear" phase of "clear-hold-build-transfer"; a press release from ISAF said NATO and Afghan soldiers have "cleared the last major pocket of resistance," though -- as with past Helmand surges -- the definition of "cleared" isn't necessarily what you think.

Last week was a busy one for the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, with four strikes in the span of five days, one of which killed the brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the high-ranking Taliban commander.

Meanwhile, Israel unveiled the Heron TP, a massive drone the size of a Boeing 737 jetliner that can fly as far as Iran.

Dexter Filkins, who Josh Foust recently dubbed "ISAF's official spokesman at the New York Times," has a remarkably upbeat analysis of the war in Afghanistan in today's week-in-review section. Filkins mentions several times that he, personally, feels optimistic about the direction of the war -- and builds to this conclusion (emphasis mine).

At week's end, by all accounts, the Marja operation was going well. In Pakistan, Mr. Baradar was said to be talking. After four long years, the initiative, at least for now, had returned to the Americans.

The U.S. is fighting a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Much ink has been spilled over the last few months about how the war is now population-centric, not enemy-centric; how "hearts and minds" matter more than body counts.

The New York Times and the Washington Post both have stories this morning about the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. But they come to strikingly different conclusions about why Baradar was captured. Here are Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung in the WaPo, casting the capture as a sign of increased U.S.-Pakistani cooperation:

The capture of senior Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan represents the culmination of months of pressure by the Obama administration on Pakistan's powerful security forces to side with the United States as its troops wage war in Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

This is pretty much the standard narrative that has emerged since Baradar's capture was announced on Monday night: The Pakistani intelligence and security services have finally accepted that the Taliban poses a threat, and Baradar's arrest signals a new level of cooperation.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban's military commander and one of the group's "founding fathers," was captured recently by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence in a raid in Karachi.

... Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

A significant development, to be sure. Baradar is the highest-level Taliban figure apprehended to date; his capture will probably degrade the Taliban's military capabilities, at least in the short term. And it's notable that he was nabbed in Pakistan, with (presumably) extensive cooperation between the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

The coalition leadership in Afghanistan spent months publicizing the just-launched offensive to clear and hold the alleged Taliban stronghold of Marja. This intense flag-waving left us pondering the benefits of hyping such an offensive: Given the overwhelming NATO force brought to bear, wouldn't the drawbacks of a possibly prolonged, bloody fight outweigh the public-relations benefits of a victory everyone saw coming?

A British press release (flagged by the Long War Journal yesterday) offers a concise if unsurprising justification, courtesy of U.K. spokesman Major General Gordon Messenger:

There were three reasons for signalling the operation in central Helmand in advance. First, to give the Taliban a choice. Second, to make the population aware that the operation was about to unfold. Third, it allowed a much greater level of Afghan involvement and ownership, and subsequently Afghan participation.

But I think there's a fourth, unspoken reason.

If you go to Google News and search for "Marja," you'll find (literally) about 4,000 stories, most of which are rewrites of the same set of ISAF talking points: 20,000 NATO and Afghan troops are gearing up to attack the Taliban; Marja is the Taliban's last refuge in southern Afghanistan; the battle will be the most important military operation in eight years; etc., etc.

Very few of these bother to point out the inherent contradictions in Operation Moshtarak -- like the conflict between this enemy-centric offensive and NATO's stated population-centric strategy.

A preface: I disagree with the whole idea of indefinite detention. It's a moral and legal disgrace, and it's incompatible with American ideals. That goes for Guantanamo Bay -- and for President Obama's plan to close the prison and replace it with a Guantanamo-by-another-name. So none of this should be read as an endorsement of Obama's plan, which I consider a violation of his campaign promises.

That said: I think replacing Guantanamo with "Guantanamo North" could deprive the prison of much of its symbolic value.

After months of hyping the latest Helmand surge, ISAF officials are launching one last PR blitz before Operation Moshtarak, a large assault on the town of Marja. Al-Jazeera reports that it will be the largest offensive since the 2001 invasion, led by more than 1,700 Afghan soldiers. The New York Times has been hyping the Helmand offensive all week. And a well-publicized overnight operation in Nad Ali killed roughly 30 Taliban fighters (of course!).

One other item jumped out at me from the latest U.S. intelligence community threat assessment, released yesterday. Remember last month, when U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates urged Islamabad to launch a new offensive against the Taliban in North Waziristan? I called that irrational and suggested Pakistan needs to focus on consolidating its existing gains.

The threat assessment seems to agree!

NATO commanders in Afghanistan have a new strategy for winning the war, according to Dexter Filkins (emphasis mine).

The leaders of one of the largest Pashtun tribes in a Taliban stronghold said Wednesday that they had agreed to support the American-backed government, battle insurgents and burn down the home of any Afghan who harbored Taliban guerrillas.

ISAF is clearly keen to get this story out: Joshua Foust noticed that an AP reporter wrote almost exactly the same story. Filkins goes so far as to call this a "promising" initiative. That's one interpretation, I guess; another is "war crime." The U.S. is offering a tribe $1 million to torch the homes of anyone it defines as a Taliban sympathizer. (I'm sure the tribe will never, ever misuse this authority in order to settle scores with its rivals.)

Pakistani tribesmen in Miranshah claimed on Wednesday to have shot down another U.S. drone, according to Press TV and other Web sites. If true, it would be the second such incident in five days: A drone crashed in the same area of North Waziristan on Sunday, and local reports said tribesmen were congratulating each other for shooting it down.

Meanwhile, there have been no reports of drone missile strikes in Afghanistan or Pakistan for a week -- a marked drop-off following an early January blitz. Between Dec. 30, when a suicide bomber struck a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan, and Jan. 19, the date of the most recent drone attack, the United States was launching drone strikes almost every other day.