The Story You May Have Missed: Afghanistan

With all the attention to the unfolding events in Mumbai and, to a lesser extent, the manoeuvres in Iraq over the Status of Forces Agreement, here's a development that slipped by:

"Afghan President Hamid Karzai has sharply criticized the United States and NATO, demanding a timeline for the withdrawal of foreign forces."

Yep, withdrawal. What's more, this was not a call for withdrawal after military victory but for withdrawal after political negotiation, even with former and current enemies:

This war has gone on for seven years. The Afghans don't understand anymore how come a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks with 40 countries in Afghanistan, with entire NATO force in Afghanistan, with the entire international community behind them. Still we are not able to defeat the Taliban....

If there is no deadline, we have the right to find another solution for peace and security, which is negotiations.

The Afghan President has been pushing for talks with factions of the Taliban for months. Last month, there appeared to be some US recognition of his position, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates indicated that there might be scope for engagement with "moderate" Taliban.

Then, however, the US headlines were taken over by President-elect Obama's posture that more forces were the way to go. Meanwhile, leading Taliban --- probably believing they could manoeuvre for an even better position --- pointedly rejected Karzai's suggestion. And democracy's clock is ticking: Karzai faces a Presidential election next year.

To my knowledge, only The Washington Post picked up Karzai's speech, made to a visiting UN Security Council delegation. The next day, headlines returned to violence --- 4 killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul --- and unwelcome progress --- "U.N. Reports That Taliban Is Stockpiling Opium".

With respect, folks better start paying attention. It's not Karzai who wants to erase, over a period of time, the US military footprint. Washington may disagree with his assessment, shared by some within the Pakistani Government, that "hard power" is not offering a solution. If President Obama shares that disagreement, however, he needs to recognise that he is proceeding in defiance of --- not with --- his purported ally in what remains of the 2001 "War on Terror".

Fact x Importance = News: Pakistan

There have been a swirl of news stories in the last 72 hours about the conflicts in Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan. Beyond the escalation in bombings and shootings, the most significant may offer clues to future US policy.

These three articles, in particular, raised eyebrows. On Tuesday Antony Loyd in The Times of London and , Ben Farmer in The Daily Telegraph, and Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah in the New York Times reported that they had found "Taliban maps, manuals and propaganda...at training camps in Pakistan showing the sophistication of the insurgent's operations in the country's tribal areas". Perlez and Shah wrote of "tunnels [that] stretched for more than half a mile and were equipped with ventilation systems so that fighters could withstand a long siege. In some places, it took barrages of 500-pound bombs to break the tunnels apart." Loyd's dramatic narrative spoke of a map "which is not the work of a renegade gunman resistant to central authority; it is the assessment of a skilled and experienced fighter, and begins to explain how more than 400 Pakistani soldiers have been killed or wounded since August in Bajaur". It was Farmer, however, who offered the chilling sentence: "Britain and America...believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, has been in Bajaur."

With respect to Perlez/Shah, Loyd, and Farmer, the significance of their reports was not their discovery. It is not surprising, given the porous Afghan-Pakistani border, that Taliban --- many of whose leaders were educated in Pakistani madrassas --- would be in the Northwest Frontier. And it would be a very poor, or foolhardy, fighter who would wander around without a map or a few leaflets to try and win converts to the cause. No, the significance of the stories is in the answer to the question: how did reporters for two British newspapers and the top print outlet in the United States suddenly make the same discovery?

Because all the reporters were taken there by the Pakistani military, who were at hand to emphasise (in the exact same words in the two articles), "There were students here taking notes on bomb-making and guerrilla warfare." Loyd took his piece further with the help of an "eminent Pakistani political figure": "Al-Qaeda and the Taleban...set up a joint headquarters in 2004 as an 'Islamic emirate' in North Waziristan, headed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taleban commander." The tribal areas were "today the same as Afghanistan was before September 11 - controlled by foreign and local militants who fight a war on both sides of the border.”

So the Pakistanis, having lost more than 400 soldiers in fighting in the Northwest Frontier since August, have launched a PR campaign to establish the need for further and, presumably, more aggressive operations. It's not just a question of Pakistani troops, however.

Note Perlez's reference to tunnels which can only be blown apart by 500-pound bombs. The military branch with the majority of those bombs is not the Pakistani Air Force; it's their American counterparts. While it was Pakistanis who took the Western journalists to Bajaur, there should be no doubt: this is also part of an American campaign to justify continuing "hot pursuit" operations into the Northwest Frontier, even at the cost of civilian casualties.

And even at the possible cost to the Pakistani Government. A notable absence in all three stories was any comment from members of the Zardari Administration, unless Loyd's mysterious "eminent political figure" happens to be the Prime Minister in disguise.

Increasingly, it's looking like US forces are working with Pakistani military, who in turn are distinct from the purported political leaders of Pakistan. The implications of that co-operation, and effective internal split in the Pakistani ruling elite, may be far more significant than any more tunnels that intrepid Western journalists happen to "discover".