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Afghan Women in the South Forced to Lie Low    [
Afghanistan: The Taliban Are Back    [

    NATO and the Taliban
    Le Monde | Editorial

    Monday 30 April 2007

    The progressive return of the Taliban in Afghanistan with increasingly vigorous offensives each spring, notably in 2006, and now with a strong and destabilizing Taliban presence in over half of Pashtun country, is an alarm signal for the Afghan government and the NATO military coalition led by the United States. Southern Afghanistan has once again become a battle theater, and Western countries engaged on the ground are beginning to express - not unlike certain French diplomats and politicians - serious doubts about the chances for victory.

    The Pashtun "students of religion," nourished on the milk of Pakistan's secret services and madrassas, supported by the jihadist al-Qaeda movement, are gaining ground in the country and in the minds of Afghans. This rise in power - five and a half years after the fall of the Taliban Islamic Emirate - is a major failure for NATO.

    The Western operation in Afghanistan suffers from multiple maladies. On a military level, although the NATO mission was supposed to track down Osama bin Laden and to secure a battered country, it has resumed the warpath with soldiers perceived as arrogant occupiers, not very respectful of local customs, with deadly bombings that do not spare civilians and with an inability to intimidate the "warlords" who are relentless in their drive to preserve their own power and the existence of their own militias. On the economic level, the waste is gigantic: half the money spent goes to the operating expenses of the donors and part of the other half disappears in the meanders of a corrupt Afghan administration. On the political level, the record is hardly positive, with President Hamid Karzai really controlling only the capital, Kabul.

    The result of these failures is that the countries present in Afghanistan are now laying down drastic conditions for their engagement, refusing to deploy in such and such a province or to fight in this or that region, when they are not - quite simply - contemplating withdrawing their troops. As in Iraq, the operation knocks up against an almost-insoluble dilemma: staying means taking the risk of being dragged into a large-scale war doomed to fail; leaving means ratifying a defeat in the face of a totalitarian Islamist movement that practices terrorism, abandoning to their fate the Afghans who had bet on the Western intervention and, beyond that, on democracy.

    If George Bush's America does not yet seem capable of such a real reconsideration of its Afghan and Iraqi military operations, Europe, with respect to Afghanistan, must urgently pose the question about the nature of its intervention. Europe's credibility, NATO's credibility and NATO's future ability to intervene in conflicts outside its borders depend upon it.

 

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    Afghan Women in the South Forced to Lie Low
    By Jean-Pierre Perrin
    Lib ration

    Monday 30 April 2007

In a region controlled by the Taliban, the daily life of a woman MP who lives in hiding.

    When Nassima Niazi goes to Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand Province (in southern Afghanistan), she leaves behind her light tulle veil, which only hides her hair, and wears a thick burqa (the Afghan veil which covers the body and the face), takes a first bus from Kabul to Kandahar and a second to the small town. She leaves her cell phone in Kabul, and when it rings, the trusted person who answers makes it sound as though the young woman is still in the capital. If Nassima Niazi hides herself this way in order to go - "twice a month," as she says [ to Lashkar Gah, in the heart of a region in the Taliban's stranglehold, it's because she's one of its Members of Parliament.

    Consequently, she owes it to herself to show up there, even though she acknowledges that it's not possible for her to be effective under such conditions. Once in the city, controlled by British forces, where she feels like she's "in a prison," she worries about being followed, which prompts her to change burqas regularly. Knowing that she will be executed by the Taliban should she be discovered; does she describe herself as brave, even reckless? "No, I have to do what I do. And an Afghan proverb maintains that a person who is forced to be valiant cannot claim to be so." "Yesterday," she adds, "my father-in-law died, but it was impossible for me to go to his funeral. I had no way to get there quickly." Nor any way either to count on the ISAF (NATO's International Security Assistance Force). "They have the means to help me get to Lashkar Gah, but they don't want to do anything for a mere MP. And the British embassy also refuses to help me," she adds.

    Worse for the Young

    Nassima Niazi acknowledges that fear in Helmand is now general. She accompanied Afghan President Hamid Karzai there several weeks ago. At the airport, all the women professors who came to meet him had put on burqas so as not to be recognized. "They were afraid they would be killed afterwards. That's why the president of the Women's Association didn't go," she indicates. "The situation is even worse for the younger generations. For the whole province, only two boys were able to register for the University of Kandahar, and not a single girl." After the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001, the Afghan government had made girls' education one of its priorities. Today, in the four southern provinces (Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, Oruzgan), the schools for girls - against which the Taliban are most active - are often burned down; their instructors run the risk of being murdered, and the parents of schoolgirls are threatened with death. According to the Afghan press, of 224 schools opened after 2002 in Helmand, at least 90 have had to close or have been destroyed. Only schoolgirls in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and those who live in a district the Taliban have not yet taken over can still go to class without danger.

    Officially, only two districts of the four southern provinces are in Taliban hands - one in Helmand, the other in Zabul Province. In fact, most districts are controlled by the Taliban, with the exception of the administrative centers held by governmental forces, usually police. It is the latter, moreover, who pay the heaviest price, to such an extent that the Afghan interior minister refuses to publish statistics about their losses, so as not to slow recruitment. However, according to one of this minister's advisers, over a thousand police officers have died in the last year, mostly in the South and Southeast.

    "The Taliban are now entrenched in every district of southern Afghanistan," summarizes Mohammed Issa, former public prosecutor for Kandahar and four other provinces. Issa resigned to protest against the generalized corruption "in every sector of the administration, including the justice department." He adds, "They profit from the fact that 80 percent of the population no longer supports anyone. Only 10 percent of the people are on the Taliban's side, but no more than that support the government. For the government has appointed only bad guys, which means that all the good guys are now at home."

    "Yes, but the Taliban don't allow people to stay neutral," elaborates Taymur Shah, a journalist in Kandahar and co-founder of the Young Afghans Civil Society. "And then they say to the people, 'It's better to have the Taliban than British soldiers who kill your children and destroy your houses, and this government is not honest.'"

    Big Battle

    "Every day, the situation deteriorates more," adds Nassima Niazi, who blames both the Karzai government and the ISAF. She blames Karzai for the corruption and nepotism of the administration he's established, "which makes the people lose all belief in government." She blames the ISAF for its ignorance concerning the country and its traditions, which gives the Taliban a toehold. An example? "The fact that Western soldiers come into villages to search from house to house, a practice totally contrary to Afghan usage and custom."

    Taymur Shah is equally severe on the subject of NATO forces: "There's no coordination between them. In Oruzgan, we have Dutch forces that don't want to fight the Taliban. In Helmand, the British are even more cowardly: they try to come to an understanding with them. Only the Canadians in Kandahar Province are really aggressive." The insurgents have just announced a new offensive, called, "Ghazwatul Badr," the name of a victorious battle conducted by Mohammed 1,400 years ago that this time will reach the north of the country. But this battle, if it leaves the guerrillas' terrain behind, could prove costly in manpower losses and ultimately disastrous for the Taliban.

 

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    Afghanistan: The Taliban Are Back
    By Francoise Chipaux
    Le Monde

    Monday 30 April 2007

    Present today in force all over southern Afghanistan, the Taliban have made a progressive comeback in the country. That has a lot to do with the Afghan government's carelessness, with the international community's mistakes and also with the assistance the "students of theology" movement receives from Pakistan and al-Qaeda.

    In the country's South, mostly populated by Pashtuns, the Taliban - themselves a Pashtun party - are considered less corrupt and more effective than the officials put in place by authorities who emerged from the elections that followed the American military intervention in autumn 2001.

    On top of that, in a state in which tribal structure remains strong, the alliances concluded on the ground by President Hamid Karzai - a Pashtun himself [ or rather by his brother Ahmad Wali - have irritated a number of tribal officials. Those officials today collaborate with the Taliban.

    The international community, which, in 2001, had dazzled Afghans with the prospect of a marvelous future, has shown itself unable to keep its promises, especially in the Pashtun regions where, on the contrary, war is raging. The coalition's foreign forces, led first by the United States and now by NATO, have, moreover, multiplied their mistakes in behavior towards an extremely conservative population, pushing many young people into the arms of the Taliban.

    Finally, the leaders of the former regime have found a refuge conducive to the reorganization of their movement in neighboring Pakistan. Al-Qaeda, which had made Afghanistan its sanctuary under the Taliban regime, has contributed financially and through technical and strategic advice to the renaissance of a movement even more radical than it was in 2001. In the Pakistani tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, young Taliban have frequented the hardened al-Qaeda fighters who have taken refuge there.

    The new generation of Taliban is much more extremist and much more sensitive to the Sirens of international jihad (holy war). "This generation has been trained in the fundamentalist madrassas (Koranic schools) that have multiplied in Pakistan all along the Afghan border," asserts political analyst Wahid Modjda in Kabul. "We are now observing a very clear rapprochement between the Taliban and al-Qaeda; with, in consequence, more and more actions copied from the Iraqi 'model.'"

    The classic example is suicide attacks: previously unknown in Afghanistan, they keep increasing. From 27 in 2005, they reached 139 in 2006; and more than 45 have already been perpetrated this year.

    The Taliban are also increasing the use of improvised explosive devices (IED), generally placed on the roads used by local or foreign forces, with increasingly sophisticated techniques. "The trigger mechanisms are mechanically activated, and can therefore not be scrambled," asserts one expert.

    Moreover, they have adapted their fighting methods. Now the Taliban operate in highly mobile groups, which harass security forces. According to the experts, they have received more significant weaponry, notably anti-aircraft guns that they mount on little trucks. Finally, today, al-Qaeda asks the Taliban leaders in charge of military operations to recruit young men to fight directly under al-Qaeda's orders.

    Several of these training centers are located on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. One of these camps, near Barmal in the Afghan Paktika province, which faces the Pakistani tribal region of South-Waziristan, is held by Abu Yahia Al-Libi, alias Mohammad Hassan, one of those who escaped from the American Bagram air base in July 2005.

    Another camp, directed by Abu Leith Al-Libi, is set up in the thick forest of Shawal, in the North-Waziristan tribal region, opposite the Afghan provinces of Khost and Paktia. These "camps," light structures that can be rapidly hidden or dismantled, welcome the Taliban. On a video dating from the end of 2006, one may, for example, see the Mullah Dadullah, military leader of the Taliban, "visit one of the al-Qaeda mudjahadijn centers, Al-Jihad in Afghanistan," the film explains.

    Still, on the ground, the vast majority of fighters are young Afghans who have joined the movement either because of ideological conviction or because of lack of economic opportunities, or to take vengeance for the loss of a family member. "A Pashtun washes blood with blood, and thousands of Taliban were killed in 2001," Mr. Modjda asserts. "That makes many families who want revenge."

    Mullah Naeem-ur-Rahman Hashimi, who is responsible for suicide commando training, himself admits that the commandos are not always ideologically motivated. "Today, it's not just the Taliban who blow themselves up. Ordinary people do it because their father or brothers are in prison, or because they themselves have gotten out of prison and find their lives finished, their dignity flouted; and they know that if they conduct a suicide operation they will go to Paradise," he says.

    Over five years after the fall of their Islamic Emirate, the Taliban represent an undeniable force that has succeeded in demonstrating that - in spite of their military and technological superiority - foreign troops are not able, as the population so ardently wished in 2001, to assure security and peace.