Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Afghanistan's Most Wanted


What do the words "Afghanistan" and "insurgency" bring to mind? I expect most would say "Taliban." Nice guess but - no cigar.

It's not your fault. Our political and military leaders have spent the past seven years grooming your mind to go in default, 'Taliban-mode' whenever Afghanistan comes into the conversation.

Would you be surprised to learn that the Afghan insurgency is actually comprised of some fourteen armed camps, organized along ethnic and feudal lines, most of them operating independently of the others? That's fourteen as in one more than thirteen or thirteen more than the Taliban.

In fairness, it wasn't always that way - it just is that way now. And, no, this isn't including al-Qaeda. They're not insurgents which are, by definition, Afghan nationalists. al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization whose interests sometimes, but not always, overlap with the insurgency's.

The CIA has told the Los Angeles Times that the latest "surge" in violence against the Infidel forces is the handiwork of three warlords, all of them from Karzai's Pashtun tribe: Mullah Omar (the old hand), Jalaluddin Haqqani (a former Taliban leader recently returned to fill the bomb-emptied boots of Mullah Dadullah) and, as no anti-Western uprising would be complete without him, the nastiest dog in the Pashtun pack, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a former Taliban rival who's now thrown in with the insurgency to be able to claim his share in the civil war that's bound to resume when we leave).

As though they haven't made stupid blunders before, the Times quotes CIA officials as saying they're making a bid to win over - gulp - Hekmatyar:

"Hekmatyar, who is based north of Peshawar in Pakistan, is the most mercurial of the three. As an engineering student at Kabul University in the 1970s, he was accused of throwing acid in the faces of women who did not wear a veil. He became one of the most effective mujahedin leaders in the war against the Soviets during the 1980s, leading a group that received millions in CIA funding.

The CIA and U.S. special operations teams, hoping to turn him again, have approached Hekmatyar in recent years through intermediaries, according to U.S. sources. Last year, he was also contacted by representatives of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The talks went nowhere, according to Afghan news reports."

Now, to put this in some perspective, Hekmatyar (the pleasant looking chap pictured above) was the obvious Pashtun pick to become Afghan president after the mujahadeen drove out the Soviets and their communist government. He was considered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency much too rabid for the job so they shoehorned in the far more moderate Taliban instead. And now the CIA is trying to recruit this guy?

Tell me again that we're going to win this thing.

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