[The US actually expected to attract Pashtuns to our cause by bombing them for a few weeks. And now, after having said there can't be a stable government without them, it's decided the best thing is to bomb them for a few months. I can't say how embarassed I am for ever thinking Powell had an ounce of brain in his head -- especially reading his extended interview in today's WSJ. I can only think I must have been deeply addled by events and desparately in need of a straw of hope. Mea culpa.]
Wall Street Journal November 1, 2001
Southern Afghanistan Won't Side With U.S.; Instead, Pashtun Support for Taliban Grows
By NEIL KING JR.
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- Despite continuing misgivings, the Bush administration has cast its lot with the opposition Northern Alliance in Afghanistan largely because the U.S. has failed to win anti-Taliban support among the country's crucial Pashtun population in the south.
Experts on the region cite several reasons for the failure, including Pakistani obstruction, paltry U.S. knowledge of the pivotal players on the ground and difficulty overcoming the deep animosity among Afghanistan's four biggest ethnic groups: the Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek.
For whatever reason, though, the effect on the effort to topple the Taliban has been significant as Pashtun tribal leaders rally around the regime, and hopes fizzle for a second front of opposition from the south, they add.
"The fact that we haven't won support among the Pashtuns, as many of us expected, is one of the main reasons our military and political objectives have gotten bogged down," said one U.S. official with long experience in the region.
When the U.S. began its bombing campaign almost four weeks ago, administration officials said they anticipated a brisk wave of defections among Pashtuns in the southern and eastern regions of the country, which are controlled by the Taliban. The administration hoped disenchanted Pashtuns would take up arms, as the opposition Northern Alliance has done in the north, and help squeeze the Taliban from two sides.
But the attacks have had the opposite effect as U.S. jets struck Pashtun strongholds in Kandahar and Jalalabad, and American military planners talked of siding with the northern rebels, a group long seen as inimical to Pashtun interests. This forced many Pashtuns to side with the Taliban as their main defender, U.S. officials now say.
Although every one of Afghanistan's neighbors is part of the U.S.-led alliance, each is taking an increasingly strident stance on which Afghans should or shouldn't join a new government in Kabul. Their antagonism of each other is weakening the alliance and providing the Taliban with another propaganda coup, as they play one neighbor off against another.
Pashtuns account for at least 40% of Afghanistan's 27 million people, and have been the country's dominant force, except in the early 1990s when the same clique of ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks that now form the Northern Alliance held Kabul. The Taliban, which took control of the capital in 1996, is overwhelmingly Pashtun.
"The problem is that the bombing quickly became seen as an anti- Pashtun campaign above all," said Lee Coldren, a retired State Department official with long experience in Afghanistan. "Winning Pashtun support now will be tough."
According to Afghan refugees arriving in the Pakistani border cities of Peshawar and Quetta, Taliban morale has strengthened and the regime has been able to muster more recruits, though many are conscripts rather than volunteers. Tens of thousands of tribesmen in Pakistan -- which has a sizable Pashtun population -- also are mobilizing to enter Afghanistan and fight for the Taliban.
"The Taliban have successfully created the impression inside Afghanistan that they are getting stronger, and if they can last out for the next few weeks until winter and Ramadan comes, they will have defeated the U.S. attack,'' said the Afghan head of an Afghan nongovernmental organization in Peshawar who travels into Afghanistan frequently.
Even before the bombing began, operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency were trying -- with little success -- to reach out to Pashtun leaders, mainly within the Afghan exile community in Pakistan. The agency offered money and logistical help, including satellite telephones and global-positioning systems that would enable CIA recruits to pass along intelligence that might help the U.S. target the Taliban and track down Osama bin Laden. The CIA hasn't offered military equipment, in part because of opposition from Pakistan's own spy service, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
But the CIA effort has largely flopped, U.S. officials say. Critics contend that the lack of success shows that the agency's knowledge of the area is scant, and that little goodwill remains from the 1980s when the CIA helped organize and arm the jihad against Soviet occupation.
Until the Sept. 11 attacks, according to several former CIA officials, the agency had lost interest in Afghanistan beyond its attempts to find Mr. bin Laden and eliminate the core of his al Qaeda organization that is based there. As a result, the CIA has few contacts within the country and only a handful of operatives who speak Pashto, thus deepening the agency's reliance on Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, which was long the Taliban's staunchest supporter.
But suspicion runs deep in the Bush administration that many rank-and- file ISI agents remain loyal to the Taliban and have stood in the way of attempts to build an anti-Taliban coalition among the Pashtuns.
Afghan experts say the death last Friday of famed Pashtun commander Abdul Haq is a prime example of how muddled Washington's approach to the Pashtuns has become. Mr. Haq, who spent years in exile, ventured into Afghanistan on Oct. 22 with a small group of lightly armed supporters to try to muster opposition to the Taliban among Pashtun tribal leaders. The Taliban captured him south of Kabul and executed him the same day.
Several U.S. officials said they suspect the ISI may have tipped off the Taliban to Mr. Haq's whereabouts. But it is also the case that Mr. Haq had little faith in the CIA or in the U.S. government's approach to Afghanistan.
In recent weeks, Mr. Haq emerged as one of the more determined Pashtun commanders seeking to unseat the Taliban. But efforts to work with the CIA made little progress. He turned down an agency offer of money and a secure satellite phone. "Abdul had pretty much lost faith in the CIA," said Kathryn Cameron Porter, a Haq supporter in Washington. "The CIA talked, but never listened."
-- Ahmed Rashid contributed to this article.