Strategy Fails to Splinter Taliban
U.S., Pakistani Efforts Not Yielding Significant Defections
washingtonpost.com
By Molly Moore and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 26, 2001; Page A01
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 25 -- U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agencies, hobbled by weak contacts and deep distrust, have failed to engineer any significant defections from the military ranks of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, according to officials familiar with the efforts.
The failure to lure defectors is a major setback for a central aspect of the strategy to topple the radical Islamic militia, the officials said.
Intelligence operatives trying to undermine the Taliban in Afghanistan's southern and eastern provinces have met "stiff resistance" from even the most ardently anti-Taliban tribal leaders, senior Pakistani intelligence officials said.
Washington's expectations that some key tribal leaders and moderate Taliban military commanders would be willing to turn against the Taliban soon after bombs began to fall on Afghanistan were "horrendously naive," said one Western official monitoring the intelligence agencies' attempts to foment dissent.
A Pakistani journalist with extensive experience in Afghanistan, Rahimullah Yusufzai, said: "There were expectations that the Taliban would not be able to stay in power, there would be defections, there would be local divisions against them. Nothing of the sort has happened. None of the expectations have been fulfilled."
The failure to persuade even the most vulnerable leaders to sever their ties with the Taliban, coupled with the Taliban's resilience in the face of the U.S.-led bombing campaign and the squabbling of Afghan factions competing for power in a post-Taliban government, points increasingly to what one official here forecast as "a long and messy" U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
Pakistani and Western officials blame the failures in sowing dissension within the Taliban on a combination of poor intelligence contacts and powerful religious and cultural bonds between even the most marginal commanders and the Taliban leadership.
Part of the problem stems from an abrupt shift last month in the agenda of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which helped to create the Taliban in 1994 and has sustained it since. Under pressure from Washington to purge his government of Taliban sympathizers, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, revamped the ISI leadership and ordered the agency to switch almost overnight from overt operations supporting the Taliban to covert attempts to overthrow it.
As a result, the Taliban and its supporters developed an immediate distrust of their former patrons. ISI operatives who previously had worked openly in Afghanistan had to be pulled out of Taliban territory for their safety, leaving Washington and Islamabad with a human intelligence vacuum in a place where they had hoped to be active, authorities here said.
"We had human assets all over the country from our two decades of involvement in Afghanistan," said one senior Pakistani intelligence official. "The nature of the current operation is such that our assets have turned into liabilities."
"They clearly haven't had a single major defection since September 12," said Ahmed Rashid, a journalist and author of a best-selling book about the Taliban. "That is a disaster. But how can Islamabad create defections when you have essentially betrayed the Taliban in the flick of an eyelash after seven years of being with them?"
At the same time, some Pakistani intelligence officials concede that the ISI has been far more enthusiastic in its pursuit of a post-Taliban political alternative than in its efforts to bring down the Taliban. One intelligence official described contact with ethnic Pashtun tribal leaders in southern Afghanistan on the issue of military defections as "exploratory," but called efforts on the political side "very intense."
Even those attempts, however, have been "without any tangible results," the official said.
ISI officials are not the only people trying to turn Taliban supporters and tribal leaders against Afghanistan's current rulers. Afghan exiles living in Pakistan are reportedly going to Afghanistan to build political support for a post-Taliban government and to encourage defections.
Hamid Karzai, a prominent Afghan tribal leader who lives in the southwestern Pakistani town of Quetta and is among numerous exiled leaders eager to regain some of their former power in Afghanistan, has been meeting with Pashtun tribal leaders inside Afghanistan for the past 2 1/2 weeks, according to his associates.
But one associate declined to characterize Karzai's progress other than to say,"There's a lot of work to do. He's doing well."
Current and former Pakistani intelligence officers point out that, regardless of issues of credibility and intelligence, they have little leverage to help them move Afghans away from the Taliban. Despite reports that the United States is providing money for bribes and holding out the possibility of leadership roles for defectors in a future government, Pakistanis explain that Afghanistan's ancient and complex web of cultural, religious and family ties often proves impervious to outside offers of material gain.
Most of the Taliban's founders and top leaders are from the Pashtun ethnic group, which is Afghanistan's largest, accounting for about 40 percent of the population. "During the Afghan war we used Islam, Pashtun nationalism and Afghan history to drive Afghans against foreign invaders," one intelligence official said. "In the present situation, we can't use any of them to trigger an intra-Pashtun coup against the Taliban.
"Pashtun tribesmen may change their political loyalties overnight, but it is unnatural to expect them to turn their weapons against fellow tribesmen to help foreign invaders," the official added.
Likewise, many ISI officers were less than enthusiastic about orders to approach friends in the Taliban and ask them to turn against its leader, Mohammad Omar. Those who were still able to approach tribal leaders or Taliban commanders in southern and eastern Afghanistan made only half-hearted attempts to persuade them to defect, some intelligence officials said.
"These [ISI] officials share Pashtun culture, deep religious upbringing and rich traditions with Afghans," said one official.
At the same time, the slow-moving and fractious effort to create a broad-based government to replace the Taliban and to identify Afghanistan's future leaders has yielded few potential Pashtun candidates.
"You cannot have defections until you have somebody there to defect to," said Rashid, the author.
And although there is widespread disaffection among everyday Afghans, and some local leaders, with the Taliban and its severe form of rule that largely restricts women to their homes and bans most forms of entertainment, defection remains out of the question for many.
"It would not be easy for them to defect even if they wanted to," said Yusufzai, the journalist. The Taliban "is not a political movement, it's a religious movement. That makes it more cohesive and stronger in terms of commitment and belief."
Most of the Taliban's leaders were impoverished students at religious schools in Pakistan, where poor families sent their young boys to be fed, housed and schooled in the teachings of the Koran, the Islamic holy book.
"For the first time, these people tasted power," Yusufzai said. "They know if they are out of power, they will be hunted down in each and every village and each and every house. That is the reason they will never defect or surrender."
Khan reported from Karachi, Pakistan. Correspondent John Pomfret in Quetta contributed to this report. |
