“Damaging the Taliban Brand”

By Robert Mackey, "Mullah Omar Calls for a Taliban Surge" - The New York Times - New York, NYC, USA

Friday, March 6, 2009

The Pakistani newspaper Dawn reports that on Thursday, “the mausoleum of renowned Pashto mystic poet Abdur Rehman Baba was bombed by unidentified miscreants,” outside Peshawar, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Dawn calls the bombing of the shrine to “a 17th century poet, revered for his message of love and peace” part of an “attack on Sufism.”

As the BBC notes, suspicion has turned to the Taliban, “who represent a more purist form of Islam and are opposed to Sufism, preventing people from visiting shrines of Sufi saints in areas they control.” The BBC also says that “No casualties are reported but the poet Rahman Baba’s grave has been destroyed and the shrine building badly damaged.”

According to Dawn:
The shrine’s watchman had received a threat from suspected militants on his cell phone three days ago. He told police that the attack took place to crack down on the tradition of women making pilgrimages to the site.

In spirit, the attack on the Pashtun poet’s shrine in Pakistan seems to echo one of the Afghan Taliban’s most infamous acts of cultural cleansing: the destruction of the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. But, surprisingly, the Taliban leader who ordered the attack on the “idols” at Bamiyan, Mullah Muhammad Omar, might not approve of this bombing in Pakistan, or, for that matter, the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team and its Pakistani police escort in Lahore.

That’s because Mullah Omar, who is believed to be operating from the Pakistani city of Quetta these days, recently issued a letter in which he called on Islamists in Pakistan to stop fighting there. On Tuesday, The Guardian’s Saeed Shah reported that Mullah Omar’s letter reportedly said that:
Attacks on the Pakistani security forces and killing of fellow Muslims by the militants in the tribal areas and elsewhere in Pakistan is bringing a bad name to mujahedeen and harming the war against the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist, wrote in Canada’s Globe and Mail on Saturday that Mullah Omar’s letter “to the commanders of the Pakistani Taliban,” also said that “If anybody really wants to wage jihad, he must fight the occupation forces inside Afghanistan.” According to Mr. Rashid, Mullah Omar’s letter was part of “a strategic attempt by both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban to unify and concentrate their forces for a spring offensive against the expected arrival of 17,000 more U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan.”

Mr. Rashid reported that Mullah Omar “followed up by sending envoys to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) — the tribal belt adjoining Afghanistan — where the Pakistani Taliban leaders are based. His appeal was part of a concerted attempt by al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, calling upon the Pakistani Taliban to unite.”

In an interview on The Guardian’s Web site, Mr. Shah suggested that Mullah Omar was partly worried that attacks inside Pakistan were “damaging the Taliban brand,” but was more concerned about getting reinforcements, to offset the increase of the U.S. force in Afghanistan from 36,000 troops to 53,000, ahead of “the spring fighting season.” (There are also about 30,000 other foreign troops operating in Afghanistan under a NATO-led command.)

Mr. Shah cited estimates that there are about 15,000 Afghan Taliban and perhaps the same number of Pakistani Taliban, predominantly drawn from the Pashtun tribes that live on either side of the colonial-era border that divides the two countries but is almost unmanned and essentially ignored by almost everyone in the region.

While Mr. Shah said that “it is not really a numbers game,” since the Taliban are fighting an asymmetric war, using guerrilla tactics and suicide attacks as what the military call “force multipliers,” the fact that the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan already seems to outnumber the Taliban raises the question of just how many troops it might take to really secure Afghanistan.

Last month Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in The Times that the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, “said that the failed history of the British and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan should not be a predictor of America’s future in the country.”

It is true that times have changed a good bit since 1878, when a British force of 33,500 troops invaded Afghanistan, quickly occupied Kandahar and Kabul and toppled the regime in power (although that force ultimately failed to secure the peace and was forced to withdraw).
But the Soviet effort to control Afghanistan ended just 20 years ago. On February 15, 1989, Bill Keller, reporting “Special to The New York Times,” wrote that the last Soviet soldier had crossed out of Afghanistan.

As Mr. Keller noted at the time:
Today’s final departure is the end of a steady process of withdrawal since last spring, when Moscow says, there were 100,300 Soviet troops in Afghanistan. At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed.
As the Soviets withdrew that day in 1989, the BBC reported that “Kabul is surrounded by a mujahedeen force of around 30,000,” So the size of the Afghan insurgency battling to take control of the capital 20 years ago this month, was just about the same as the combined strength of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban today.

Another way of looking at the great difficulty of the task of securing a country this size militarily is to look at how much larger a force the U.S. military deployed to keep the peace in just the one-quarter of post-war Germany it controlled in 1945. According to a Rand corporation study called “America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq,” the U.S. peacekeeping force in that part of Germany (a region which then had a population of about 17 million people and no active insurgency) was more than 290,000 soldiers and “a constabulary or police-type occupation force” of 38,000.

Looking closer to home, consider that there are nearly 38,000 police officers in New York City, patrolling an area of just 300 square miles, with a population of 8.3 million. Given that, it is no wonder that the U.S.-led coalition is having a hard time policing the mountains and plains of Afghanistan with 66,000 troops. The country covers 250,000 square miles and has 30 million people in it. Even if only 15,000 are insurgents, the fact that they can escape across an international frontier to a sanctuary controlled by their allies makes it nearly impossible to entirely defeat or overwhelm them.

An awareness of this numbers game is perhaps what led General McKiernan to say that, no matter how big a force the U.S. ultimately sends to Afghanistan, “We’re not going to run out of people that either international forces or Afghan forces have to kill or capture.”

Which is why, he stressed, “It’s going to be ultimately a political solution.”

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Picture: A shrine to the Pashto poet Abdur Rehman Baba, damaged in a bombing on Thursday, outside Peshawar in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Photo: Mohammad Sajjad/Associated Press.