[Mb-civic] He's Welcome In Pakistan - Ahmed Rashid - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

He's Welcome In Pakistan

By Ahmed Rashid
Sunday, February 26, 2006; B01

LAHORE - When President Bush lands in Islamabad later this week, it may 
be the closest he ever comes to being in the same neighborhood as Osama 
bin Laden. His nemesis is probably only a few hours drive away in 
Pakistan's Pashtun belt, now considered to be al Qaeda Central and one 
of the world's most dangerous regions.

During the past 12 months or so, CIA and Pentagon officials have quietly 
modified the line they employed for three years after the Sept. 11, 
2001, attacks -- that bin Laden was hiding out "in the tribal areas 
along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border." Now the same officials say with 
some confidence that he is "not based in Afghanistan." Whatever 
ambiguity there was in the past is gone: Bin Laden is in Pakistan.

What's left is the question: What are the United States and its ally, 
Pakistan, doing about it?

Not enough, according to high-ranking Afghan, Pakistani and Western 
officials I've spoken to here. Indeed, the disastrous policies of the 
United States and Pakistan, starting with the aftermath of the war in 
2001, have only hastened the radicalization of northwest Pakistan and 
made it more hospitable to bin Laden and his Taliban allies. The region 
has become a haven for bin Laden and a base for Taliban raids across the 
border back into Afghanistan which they had fled.

Not that you'd be able to tell any of that from what Bush administration 
officials have been saying. Almost everything the administration claims 
about the al Qaeda leader is tinged with bravado and untruthfulness. "We 
are dealing with a figure who has been able to hide, but he's on the 
run," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said earlier this month. Here 
in Pakistan, however, the view is different. Bin Laden is not considered 
to be on the run, but well protected by friends who are making his life 
as comfortable as possible.

After all, his number two, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, 
appears to have a busy social calendar in Pakistan's Pashtun belt. U.S. 
missiles narrowly missed him at a dinner party held in his honor on Jan. 13.

This represents a change in venue for bin Laden and his lieutenants. 
Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, bin Laden's zone of influence was 
among Pashtuns in Afghanistan, which was the center of the Taliban's 
power and its major recruiting base. The Pashtuns are Afghanistan's 
largest ethnic group and have ruled the country for the past 300 years. 
They were artificially divided by the British so that today millions of 
Pashtuns also live across the border in Pakistan, many of them in seven 
so-called tribal agencies where control by the government has been minimal.

It was in eastern Afghanistan that bin Laden made his last public 
appearance in Jalalabad on Nov. 10, 2001, just after the northern cities 
had begun to fall to the anti-Taliban alliance. He addressed an 
estimated 1,000 Pashtun notables and militants, urging them to continue 
resisting the American invaders, according to U.S. journalists working 
in the region at the time. He dished out wads of U.S. and Pakistani cash 
and then disappeared into the mountain fastness of Tora Bora, never to 
be seen again. (The CIA didn't learn of the meeting for several days.)

Few Afghan Pashtuns would have dared to betray him then. But times have 
changed in Afghanistan. The majority of Afghan Pashtuns now want the 
benefits of peace -- economic development, roads and schools.

Pakistan's Pashtuns, by contrast, have become more radicalized than they 
ever were before 9/11. And the bloody Taliban-al Qaeda resurgence now 
under way has relied on Pakistan's Pashtun belt for most of its 
recruitment, logistics, weapons and funding.

Bin Laden's new friendship zone stretches nearly 2,000 miles along 
Pakistan's Pashtun belt -- from Chitral in the Northern Areas near the 
Chinese border, south through the troubled tribal agencies including 
Waziristan, down to Zhob on the Balochistan border, then to the 
provincial capital Quetta and southwest to the Iranian border. The 
region includes every landscape from desert to snow-capped mountains. 
Sparsely populated, it provides bin Laden an ideal sanctuary.

Al Qaeda's money, inspiration and organizational abilities have helped 
turn Pakistan's Pashtun belt into the extremist base it is today, but 
U.S. and Pakistani policies have helped more. Although the Taliban and 
al Qaeda extremists were routed from Afghanistan by U.S. forces, 
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's refusal to put enough U.S. 
troops on the ground let the extremists escape and regroup in Pakistan's 
Pashtun belt. The Taliban settled in Balochistan where they had 
originated before 1994, while al Qaeda members hid in the tribal 
agencies they knew well. Bin Laden had built tunnels and caves there for 
the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in the 1980s.

What followed was a disaster: For 27 months after the fall of the 
Taliban regime, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, 
Washington's closest ally in the region, allowed the extremists free 
rein in the Pashtun tribal areas to re-establish training camps for 
militants who had escaped Afghanistan. These included Arabs, Central 
Asians, Chechens, Kashmiris, Africans, Uighurs and a smattering of East 
Asians. It was a mini-replay of the gathering in Afghanistan after bin 
Laden arrived there in 1996.

Musharraf did capture some Arab members of al Qaeda, but he avoided the 
Taliban because he was convinced that the U.S.-led coalition forces 
would not stay long in Afghanistan. He wanted to maintain the Taliban as 
a strategic option in case Afghanistan dissolved into civil war and 
chaos again. The army also protected extremist Kashmiri groups who had 
trained in Afghanistan before 9/11 and now had to be repositioned.

Indeed, in March 2002, just three months after the defeat of the 
Taliban, the United States began to withdraw its Special Forces, 
surveillance satellites and drones from Afghanistan to prepare for war 
in Iraq. Distracted by Baghdad, it did not notice what was happening in 
the tribal agencies. By the time the Pakistan army entered South 
Waziristan in March 2004, the extremists were so well entrenched that 
250 Pakistani soldiers were killed in the first encounters.

Since then, with no consistent political strategy to woo the Pashtun 
population away from bin Laden, the army has steadily lost ground. The 
political agents, who ran the tribal agencies with a mixture of bribery 
and pressure, have been replaced by arrogant generals ignorant of local 
conditions. Today the extremists rule over North and South Waziristan 
and other tribal agencies, while the 70,000 Pakistani troops stationed 
there are boxed up in outposts, too frightened to patrol the mountains. 
More than 100 pro-government tribal elders have been assassinated by 
extremists for divulging information to the U.S. or Pakistani secret 
services.

Meanwhile down south, the Balochistan provincial government is 
controlled by a coalition of pro-Taliban fundamentalist parties, which 
came to power in elections in 2002. Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islami, the party 
that controls the key ministries, openly supports the Taliban.

This has created a new stronghold from which the Taliban can launch 
attacks back in Afghanistan. The 99 U.S. soldiers killed last year in 
Afghanistan were mostly targeted by the Taliban based in Balochistan. 
While Washington's principal aim has been to capture bin Laden and 
decapitate al Qaeda, whose members are believed to be in Waziristan, the 
United States has failed to pressure Pakistan to deal with the Taliban, 
despite protestations from Afghan President Hamid Karzai. On a visit to 
Islamabad this month, Karzai handed Musharraf intelligence dossiers 
detailing how suicide bombers are being trained in Pakistan. In the past 
few months, at least 30 attacks have killed nearly 100 people in 
Afghanistan, including NATO peacekeepers and a Canadian diplomat.

The dossiers listed the names and addresses of Pakistani recruiters and 
people who equip suicide bombers with explosives before sending them to 
Afghanistan. Much of the recruitment takes place at a radical Islamic 
bookshop, several mosques and some madrassas in the port city of 
Karachi, while the training is done at safe houses in Quetta and Chaman, 
in Balochistan province.

"We have provided President Musharraf with a lot of very detailed 
information on acts of terrorism . . . and we discussed in great detail 
what actions Pakistan could now take," Karzai told me on Feb. 17 in 
Islamabad. ''Americans are dying, a Canadian diplomat has been killed, 
our people are suffering. So it is time that action is taken to stop 
these acts of terrorism and interference in Afghanistan internal 
affairs," he said. "We expect results."

Getting those results won't be easy. Bin Laden has fighters and 
sympathizers down the length and breadth of Pakistan's Pashtun belt. No 
Pakistani Pashtun has reason to betray bin Laden, despite the $27 
million reward for his head. Thanks to the drug trade in Afghanistan and 
the suitcases full of cash still arriving from backers in the Arabian 
Gulf, neither al Qaeda nor the local Pashtuns are short money. The 
Pakistani army's failure to offer Pashtuns a greater political role in 
the national framework has not inspired any loyalty among the tribesmen. 
And misguided U.S. interventions, such as the January missile strike 
that killed women and children, do the rest.

Washington's recent decison to start pulling U.S. troops out of 
Afghanistan this year has only reinforced al Qaeda's belief that it is 
winning. After nearly five years of avoiding capture or death, every 
single day that bin Laden stays alive is a day that inspires the 
extremists who protect him and join his ranks.

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, is the author of "Taliban: 
Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (Yale University 
Press) and "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia" (Penguin 
Books).


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/24/AR2006022401639.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060226/619368ae/attachment.htm