Captive future: young Afghans have no hope of freedom from Pakistan-based Taliban

It was music to the ears of careerist generals, Afghan-American war profiteers and Hamid Karzai’s crooked cohorts: the war is still going their way. It’s escalating.

But President Barack Obama’s announcement of another surge in troops means something very different for Afghans who yearn for deliverance from the Pakistan-based terrorist and guerrilla networks that have plagued their existence for too long.

The president’s words mark the death of hope, specifically the Afghan people’s desperate hope that Obama’s posture on the crucial issue of Pakistan would diverge from that of his predecessor.

Certainly the president stated that Pakistan became the sanctuary for al Qaeda after the terrorists’ hosts in Afghanistan, the Taliban, fled Kabul in November 2001.

But Obama made no reference to the safe-haven enjoyed by Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban leadership in Pakistan's Baluchistan province.

In fact he didn’t even mention Baluchistan or the one-eyed mullah, whose supreme command and control infrastructure is entirely based on Pakistani soil, where it recruits, finances, arms and directs the guerrilla groups that prey upon Afghan civilians - and American troops and their international allies.

Worse, Obama perpetuated the Bush administration’s misleading semantics regarding the real whereabouts of al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. He referred to “the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan” and said: “they retain their safe-havens along the border.”

In truth, the C.I.A.’s drones would have a field day with targets located within Afghan borders. There’s a simple reason why the pilotless aircraft have not been deployed against Mullah Omar:  he and his shura live and work squarely on Pakistani turf, in Baluchistan.

They do so in close enough proximity to elements of the Pakistan Army that Obama, like Bush before him, has been unwilling to let the C.I.A. pull the triggers of their remote-controlled Hellfire missiles, for fear of inflicting casualties among Pakistani military personnel.

Elsewhere, Obama’s speech verged on blatant deception regarding the Pakistan Army’s recent operations in South Waziristan and Swat. “In Pakistan, that nation's Army has gone on its largest offensive in years,” he stated, while failing to explain that the actions have been directed solely at Pakistan’s domestic Taliban terror fronts.

Obama did not tell Americans that the Pakistan Army has avoided any and all Afghan Taliban groups, including those loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani, based in North Waziristan, who continue to hold hostage an American soldier, Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl.

The president did not explain that much of Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership continues to view the Afghan Taliban as a useful proxy force in Afghanistan. For the Pakistanis, some terrorists are on the hit list, while others are on the payroll.

Mercifully, Obama stopped short of echoing his predecessor’s scurrilous claims that Pakistan is the West’s faithful ally in the war against terror.

But this is modest progress indeed, after eight bloody years of escalating warfare that has seen the work of the U.S.-led Afghan initiative systematically undone by Pakistan’s flourishing terrorist networks. Predictably, a Pakistan-based Taliban spokesman was among the first to respond to the president's speech, vowing to greet the surge with greater resistance.

All of this casts doubt on Obama's determination that Afghans “will ultimately be responsible for their own country.”

The Afghan people have heard those words before - closely followed by the sounds of gold coins jingling in the pockets of the big men who would be their kings.

As for the president's 18-month timeframe to commence the withdrawal of U.S. troops, events in Kabul are already threatening to turn that dream scenario into another Afghan nightmare.

Hamid Karzai, having stolen re-election, is flaunting his first legal requirement to name a cabinet within two weeks of his inauguration, likely because several of his preferred choices are also on his Attorney General’s to-prosecute list for corruption.

By the summer of 2011, there likely will be only one viable entity on Afghanistan’s tortured plain capable of assuming command of the national army and police.

And that’s the terrorist organization whose name and location our leaders dare not speak:  the Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban.