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Sunday, December 6, 2009

The War in Pashtunistan


The plan President Obama unveiled last week for Years 9 and 10 of the war in Afghanistan left a basic question begging for an answer: If Al Qaeda is the threat, and Al Qaeda is in Pakistan, why send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan? In his address Tuesday night, the president mentioned Pakistan and the Pakistanis some 25 times, and called Pakistan and Afghanistan collectively “the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by Al Qaeda.” But he might have had an easier time explaining what he was really proposing had he set the national boundaries aside and told Americans that the additional soldiers and marines were being sent to another land altogether: Pashtunistan. That land is not on any map, but it’s where leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban both hide. It straddles 1,000 miles of the 1,600-mile Afghan-Pakistani border. It is inhabited by the ethnic Pashtuns, a fiercely independent people that number 12 million on the Afghan side and 27 million on the Pakistani side. They have a language (Pashto), an elaborate traditional code of legal and moral conduct (Pashtunwali), a habit of crossing the largely unmarked border at will, and a centuries-long history of foreign interventions that ended badly for the foreigners. Whether Mr. Obama will have better luck there than President Bush, the Soviet Politburo and British prime ministers back to the early 19th century remains to be seen. But it is there that the war will be fought, because it is there that the Taliban were spawned and where they now regroup, attack and find shelter, for themselves and their Qaeda guests. Today, the enemies of the United States are nearly all in Pashtunistan, an aspirational name coined long ago by advocates of an independent Pashtun homeland. From bases in the Pakistani part of it — the Federally Administered Tribal Areas toward the north and Baluchistan province in the south — Afghan Taliban leaders, who are Pashtuns, have plotted attacks against Afghanistan. It is also from the Pakistani side of Pashtunistan that Qaeda militants have plotted terrorism against the West. And the essential strategic problem for the Americans has been this: their enemy, so far, has been able to draw advantage from the border between the two nation-states by ignoring it, and the Americans have so far been hindered because they must respect it. That is because Pakistan and Afghanistan care deeply about their sovereign rights on either side of the line, but the Pashtuns themselves have never paid the boundary much regard since it was drawn by a British diplomat, Mortimer Durand, in 1893. “They don’t recognize the border,” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group. “They never have. They never will.” And that has enormously complicated the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Taliban can plan an attack from Pakistan and execute it in Afghanistan. Their fighters — or Al Qaeda’s leaders — can slip across the border to flee, or to rejoin the battle. At the same time, the Americans can fight openly only in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan, and the Taliban know it. An American military officer who served at the border in 2003 and 2004 recalled Taliban fighters waving their rifles from the Pakistani side to taunt the Americans. “Our rules said we couldn’t follow them and we couldn’t shoot at them unless they shot at us,” the officer said. “But when we saw them over the border, we knew we should expect an attack that night. The only ones who recognized the border were us, with our G.P.S.” That has been changing all year, however, and it is about to change even more, as the Americans gear up for an intensified war on both sides of the line simultaneously. The dispatch of 30,000 additional Americans to the Afghan side of the border will occur simultaneously with more intensive missile strikes from drone aircraft and Pakistani army offensives on the other side. Ever since Osama escaped American forces in December 2001, crossing the mountains of Tora Bora from Afghanistan into Pakistan, American strategists have spoken of a “hammer and anvil” strategy to crush the militants. Until now, the border has proven so porous, and Pakistani governments so squeamish about a fight, that the American hammer in Afghanistan was pounding Taliban fighters there against a Pakistani pillow, not an anvil. Now, Mr. Obama’s added troops are likely to be concentrated in the Taliban stronghold in Helmand and Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, and near Khost in the east. At the same time, the president has approved a major intensification of drone strikes in Pakistan, even as the Pakistani army continues a campaign against the militants launched this fall in South Waziristan, following on a counterattack that swept militants last spring from the Swat Valley.

Khamenei says US, Britain will fail to isolate Iran



Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei lashed out Sunday at the US and Britain, labelling them Tehran's main "enemies" and warning they will fail to isolate Iran over its nuclear issue. "Americans are at the head of the list of enemies and the British are the most awful of them," state television reported Khamenei as saying in an address to thousands of people to mark a major Shiite ceremony. "The Iranian nation wants to achieve it so that it does not have to beg to Westerners 20 or 30 years later. But the Westerners through the false campaign are preventing us from getting it." He also said that when the "oppressive powers fail to achieve their goal against a country through threats of military action or sanctions, then they start saying that there is a division inside that country.

Death Toll in Russia Nightclub Fire Reaches 112



Shocked residents of the Urals city of Perm laid carnations Sunday at the snowy scene of a cordoned-off nightclub where officials say at least 112 people died in a fire. The blaze, in the early hours of Saturday, was thought to be sparked by fireworks that shot into the decorative twig ceiling of the Lame Horse nightclub during a pyrotechnics show. Nearly 100 were killed on the spot, and some 130 were hospitalized, many in critical condition. Many victims were trapped in a panicked crush for the exit as they attempted to escape the flames and thick black smoke. Emergency Ministry spokeswoman Darya Kochneva said Sunday the latest victim was a man who died of severe burns in a Moscow hospital where he was flown for treatment after the fire. Mourning residents are indignant over what they call negligence on the part of the club's management, which President Dmitry Medvedev also criticized in a nationally televised videoconference on Saturday. Officials said club managers had ignored repeated demands from authorities to change the interior to comply with fire safety standards. Authorities quickly arrested two registered co-owners of the club, its managing director and two other suspects. One other suspect was injured in the fire and remains in critical condition.

U.S. Officials Place bin Laden in No-Man's Land Between Pakistan, Afghanistan


U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the U.S. hasn't had intelligence on Usama bin Laden in years, but National Security Adviser Jim Jones speculates he is in North Waziristan and freely crossing the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. National Security Adviser James Jones said Sunday that Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden still spends some time inside Afghanistan. Most recent U.S. estimates have placed bin Laden inside Pakistan. But Jones, a retired general, said the best estimate is that bin Laden "is somewhere in North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border." Jones described it as "very, very rough, mountainous area. Generally ungoverned and we're going to have to get after that to make sure that this very, very important symbol of what Al Qaeda stands for is either, once again, on the run or captured or killed." Earlier, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. hasn't had any good intelligence for years on bin Laden's whereabouts. He said he couldn't confirm reports that bin Laden had been seen recently in Afghanistan. "If, as we suspect, he is in North Waziristan, it is an area that the Pakistani government has not had a presence in, in quite some time," Gates said. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said it was important to kill or capture bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, "but certainly you can make enormous progress absent that." Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said people in the region have told him bin Laden "moves back and forth." He said the hunt for bin Laden has prevented him from establishing bases for training and equipping terrorists, adding, "Don't think Al Qaeda could not flourish without him if we give them a safe haven." Jones appeared on CNN's "State of the Union," Gates and Clinton were on ABC's "This Week," NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBs' "Face the Nation." McCain was on NBC.

US soldier deaths in Afghanistan top 300 this year



A bomb killed another US soldier in Afghanistan, bringing to more than 300 the number of American troops killed in the war this year as NATO-led troops pressed deadly raids. The latest death pushed to 301 the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan so far this year. The number is nearly twice the 155 American soldiers killed in 2008 when total foreign troop deaths numbered 295 for the entire year. US President Barack Obama has ordered 30,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan in a bid to bring a quick end to the eight-year war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda that is increasingly unpopular at home. NATO allies have pledged at least another 7,000 troops to back the new US-led drive, which will boost foreign troop numbers to more than 150,000.

Pakistan’s nukes are safe: Indian minister



Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor said that Pakistan’s nuclear assets are safe and India has no suspicion about their security. In an interview with an Indian news channel, there is no possibility of falling Pakistani nukes into the hands of terrorists. Shashi Tharoor said that India has no information about Pakistani nuclear arsenal and those countries, who are very close to the coutry, are also satisfied with the security of nukes.

Violence erupts during Athens march




Police and protesters have clashed in Athens as the city marked the first anniversary of the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old boy which led to Greece's worst unrest in decades. Riot police, hoping to avoid the lengthy riots of last year, fired tear gas at thousands of demonstrators as they marched through the capital and other Greek cities on Sunday. Greece's government had deployed more than 6,000 police officers onto the streets of Athens to avert a repeat of the severe rioting that hit the capital and major cities last year which caused millions of dollars of damage.

US in back-channel talks with Afghan Taliban



After fighting a bloody war in Afghanistan for more than eight years, the United States appears to have undertaken a re-think of its policy and has started engaging the Taliban in negotiations through Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies, highly-placed sources told here on Monday. ‘We have started ‘engagement’ with the Afghan Taliban and are hopeful that our efforts will bear fruit,’ a source involved in secret negotiations told this correspondent. He said that four ‘major neutral players’ were engaged with the Afghan Taliban on behalf of the Saudi leadership and the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) of Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani leadership and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). The GID and ISI have been doing the job on behalf of the US government and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The source said that one of the main objectives of the recent visit to Pakistan by CIA chief Leon Panetta was to assess progress in the back-channel negotiations. The source said that four leaders were playing the role of mediators on behalf of the Saudis and the Afghan Taliban. Among them is Abdullah Anas, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam who was killed in Peshawar in 1989 along with his two sons. Anas lives in the UK, but maintains close links with the Afghan Taliban and even Al Qaida. Saudi national Abul Hassan Madni, once a prominent leader of Rabta-i-Alam-i-Islami, has also been in the picture. He lives in Madina. Abu Jud Mehmood Samrai, an Iraqi who is married to a Pakistani woman, has also been contacted. He was given Pakistani nationality by former president Ziaul Haq for his role in the Afghan war. Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a Pakistani militant leader, is also in the loop. Khalil, who co-founded the Harkatul Ansar, currently heads Hizbul Mujahideen. He had signed the famous decree issued by Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri in 1998 calling for killing the Americans. Khalil commands respect among both Pakistani and Afghani Taliban and is said to have played a secret mediatory role with Pakistani authorities for peace in the country. Reliable sources also told that Mullah Umar, the chief of Afghan Taliban, has nominated his shadow foreign minister, Agha Motasam, to negotiate with the Americans. They said that talks held so far were of a preliminary nature, but may resume on a serious note after Eid.