Afghanistan: Taliban’s New and Terrifying Face

By Alissa J. Rubin

This year the spring offensive by the Taliban and other insurgent groups has a new and terrifying face: the insurgents are using suicide bombers who create high casualties to sow terror and are planning an assassination campaign as well, Afghan and American military analysts say.

The insurgents' deadly bet is that fear will trump anger and that Afghans will lose any faith they had in their government's security forces and eventually turn to the Taliban.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘If you were the Taliban now, what would you do?' ” said Gen. Jack Keane, who retired from the Army in 2003 and is now a consultant to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) commander for Afghanistan.

Given the massing of NATO forces in the south, the answer appears to be attack the urban, civilian population, creating widespread insecurity in an effort to reinforce the existing resentment of foreign troops and doubts about President Hamid Karzai's government.

In less than four weeks, 116 Afghans have died in seven suicide attacks, most recently in Faryab Province on February 26. Two of the attacks, one in Jalalabad on February 19 and another in Kandahar on February 12, involved multiple assailants and were carefully choreographed and skillfully timed to obtain a high death toll and maximum media coverage. In at least one case, the mission was carefully rehearsed.

This is a striking change from Afghan suicide bombings of just six months ago, in which the bombers exacted few casualties.

These new tactics highlight the challenge of an adaptive insurgency with a reservoir of potential fighters, many of them madrasa students in Pakistan's tribal areas. They show too the increasingly integrated network of insurgent groups that lend their expertise to one another as well as the difficulties the Afghan government has had in rallying its own people to fight them.

President Karzai has compounded the problem, some Afghan analysts say, by insisting that the Taliban are not to blame for the violence and that they are “upset brothers” rather than mortal enemies.

Underlying the latest attacks are the region's geopolitics. Both Pakistan and Iran are known to be supporting the Taliban and play out their antagonism to the United States on Afghan soil. “You have to see these attacks in the broader strategic context,” said Haseeb Humayoon, the director of a risk consulting firm here.

A period of relative calm last year in Afghan cities coincided with an easing of tensions between the Afghans and Pakistan over negotiations with the Taliban. Now the Afghans appear to be trying to negotiate with the Taliban on their own, and there is talk of permanent American bases here, which Pakistan and Iran see as a potential loss of their influence.

The Taliban in the past have been careful not to single out civilians, although civilians are often killed in attacks. American and Afghan officials now believe that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group that planned the attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008, has been working with the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan. Lashkar-e-Taiba specialises in planning complex suicide attacks.

“The suicide bombings are, we believe, predominantly requested and funded by Haqqani but facilitated by LeT and AQ,” said a senior American military official, referring to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda. “The latter groups provide bombers and material in exchange for money. Haqqani chooses targets.”

And in bad news for Afghanistan, a little-noticed peace deal took place late last year between the Haqqani network and Shiite tribes in the Kurram Agency in Pakistan, which opened up a new route for Haqqani agents to enter Afghanistan, American and Afghan intelligence officials said. A number of fighters have been observed crossing the border over the past several weeks, American intelligence officials said.

The situation is strikingly reminiscent of Iraq in 2005, when that country's cities were gripped by violence, the government was unable to keep the people safe and fighters flowed in from other countries. It took four years to stem that violence.

Source: New York Times News Service

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