US spares Taliban to keep floodgates closed on rebels
Analysis by Paul McGeough
The United States is trying to bomb into shape the new Afghanistan it wants to see emerging from the ashes of this war.
As fighters of the opposition Northern Alliance muster impatiently north of Kabul, the US is refusing to allow its airborne bombing campaign to breach the heavily armed Taliban lines that prevent what could be an immediate march on the capital.
Instead, the US is directing much of its attacks on Taliban troops and machines defending the historic northern border city of Mazar-e-Sharif, which the alliance lost to the Taliban in a brutal battle that cost thousands of lives in 1998.
The US objective is to deny the minority alliance any claim to control of the capital, a development that could spark a bitter new round of ethnic fighting in the country and bickering in the region.
However, by opening the way to Mazar-e-Sharif, the second biggest city in Afghanistan, the US would allow the alliance to control a broad northern sweep of the country. This would be a face-saver for the alliance, which, despite a wall of opposition, still claims for itself a key role in any post-Taliban government.
There would also be a big logistical advantage for the US - Mazar-e-Sharif backs on to the Amu Darya River where it forms the border between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The US has just concluded a defence deal with the Uzbeks under which the US will protect the former Soviet republic in return for the right to station troops there and have the use of its air bases.
Mazar-e-Sharif also has the second biggest airport in the country, which would be invaluable for the US as a staging post in attacks on Taliban strongholds elsewhere in the country.
Yesterday the Northern Alliance claimed to have advanced to within five kilometres of the airport perimeter.
The US is still inclined to back the alliance as the basis of a new government, but parking the often-fractious alliance of four key ethnic groups and their warlords in the northern regions would allow the US to hedge its bets as a new government is formed. Reports from the battlefield tell of alliance commanders busily planning their assault on Kabul and complaining about the US bombers' failure to open the way for them.
When the titular leader of the alliance, President Burhanuddin Rabbani, was told that the US was stalling, he snapped: "We will go into Kabul when we want to go in. This is an internal matter."
Afghan scholars have warned that as the world was drawn into this Central Asian quagmire, a mixture of historic jealousies, hatreds and bitterness would make a nightmare of the diplomatic efforts to form a post-Taliban government.
But that is what the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was doing yesterday in Islamabad, the capital of neighbouring Pakistan.
The structure of the new government is being discussed in late-night meetings at the White House, and the United Nations Security Council in New York will debate it tomorrow.
There is also an endless series of meetings of diplomats, talking among themselves and with exiled Afghan power-brokers from the past, in Tehran, Peshawar and Islamabad, Rome, Doha and Geneva.
Opponents of the Northern Alliance fear a repeat of the horrors of the early 1990s if the alliance were to take Kabul.
Then, Mr Rabbani and the recently assassinated alliance military commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, both Tajiks, brokered a deal with some of the other ethnic groups after the retreat of the Soviet Union, which had occupied Afghanistan over the 1980s.
That was the agreement that made Mr Rabbani president. But the factions that were excluded from the power-sharing deal, in particular the Pashtun majority from which the Taliban subsequently evolved, laid siege to Kabul, killing more than 25,000 people and destroying about half of the buildings in the city.
Now the work of assembling a new government is moving at snail's pace, and the US and its allies are worried that the pace of the military campaign is too fast for the diplomatic and political process to catch up.
pmcgeough at mail.fairfax.com.au