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As frontline forces of the American-led coalition suffer record losses in Afghanistan, their political masters continue to duck responsibility for failing to put pressure on the leadership of the Afghan Taliban where it matters most, their safe havens in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, bordering the battlefields of Helmand and Kandahar.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has spoken of a “patriotic duty” to defend the U.K. from terrorism, despite the killing by Taliban forces of 15 British soldiers in ten days. But he and other Western leaders shrink from addressing the greatest perversity of the war, namely that the Afghan Taliban’s haunts in Baluchistan seem immune from assault, by either political or military means.
As more and more British, Canadian and U.S. soldiers lay down their lives, their enemy’s stronghold just across the Pakistani border is a comparative oasis of calm and security – at least for the Taliban leadership.
Further to the north and east, the C.I.A.’s drones rain Hellfire missiles on Pakistan’s home-grown Talib militants and their al Qaeda allies, who the Pakistan government has declared fair game in its own domestic war against terrorism.
It’s a different story for the Afghan Taliban leadership council – the Quetta shura led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, so named for its headquarters in and around Baluchistan’s capital city.
All available evidence shows that Omar’s council, the head of the Taliban snake, continues to enjoy sanctuary and support from elements of the Pakistan Army. In return, Omar is reportedly aiding Pakistan’s ruthless crackdown on Baluch nationalists.
The extent of this clandestine alliance is such that neither missiles nor political missives from the U.S.-led coalition have put so much as a dent in the Afghan Taliban’s war effort. To date, the coalition’s covert and conventional forces have been constrained by their political masters from mounting a single offensive action against Omar’s shura, or his fighters’ training camps, weapons dumps and transit points in Baluchistan.
Pakistan is determined, as has been the case since the early 1990’s, to maintain Mullah Omar’s guerrillas as a proxy force in Afghanistan, a tool to destabilize a potential regional competitor and ally of the dreaded arch-enemy, India.
The West’s disgraceful record in countering this tendency condemns coalition forces to a cruel attrition. For eight years, Gordon Brown and his predecessor, Tony Blair, together with other NATO leaders, stood by while the Bush administration pumped $2 billion per year into the Pakistan Army’s coffers.
This failed attempt to purchase Pakistan’s support against the Taliban was grossly counter-productive, as evidenced by the mounting intensity of the insurgencies in both countries.
Absurdly, Brown and his foreign minister have this weekend appealed to the British public to support the critically-flawed Afghan mission as a means to prevent further terrorist outrages in Britain, such as the July 7, 2005 attack on London's tube and buses. That the 7/7 bombings had roots in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, goes unmentioned.
Equally dubious is the notion, now being floated through Whitehall, that another 2,000 British troops should be dispatched to join the fray in Helmand. Clearly, as was the case in the parliamentary expenses melodrama, London's leading suits are hard pressed to do the math.
History records the tough numbers of the Great Game. The Soviet Army, as it was coming undone in Afghanistan twenty years ago, had 30,000 troops manning the posts, batteries and fire bases that formed Kabul province's three concentric security rings.
With fewer than half that deployment, U.S.-led NATO forces are trying to penetrate and secure the entire Helmand river valley, an area at least ten times the size of the Red Army’s safety zone around the Afghan capital.
The West’s politicians and generals can protest all they wish about “real progress” in the Afghan campaign. In reality, it is delusion, deception and death that stalk the tortured landscape, foreshadowing defeat.
