On the heels of the bloodiest fighting season in Afghanistan since the Taliban was ousted by the U.S.-led Northern Alliance five years ago, Pakistani authorities signed a September truce with tribal elders in the semi-autonomous North Waziristan province. The reaction in the Western press was alarmingly muted, given that a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda militants are known to enjoy safe haven in that Pakistani region as well as other ethnic Pashtun areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border. But the opportunity to chastise arch-rival Pakistan was not lost on Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
During a meeting hosted by President Bush in Washington later that month, Karzai accused Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharraf, whose Inter-Services Intelligence agency is known to tacitly support the Taliban, of making yet another blatant gesture of appeasement in favor of insurgent forces. Musharraf shot back that Pakistan was doing more than its part to tame border badlands, noting the redeployment of thousands of Pakistani troops to the region and the country's record as a key U.S. ally that has nabbed hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects. The general went on to say that 40,000-strong international security forces in Afghanistan needed to adjust their military-intensive strategy so as to avoid fueling grassroots alienation that plays into Taliban hands.
Despite a condition stipulated in September's peace deal that Taliban militants in North Waziristan must lay down arms and refrain from entering Afghanistan, two anti-Taliban tribal leaders were assassinated two days after the deal was signed. In the months since, cross-border attacks have tripled. A December report by the International Crisis Group said Pakistan's army had "virtually retreated to the barracks" in North Waziristan, allowing pro-Taliban groups "a free hand to recruit, train and arm" in order to "launch increasingly severe cross-border attacks on Afghan and international military personnel." The new policy, according to ICG, has enabled militants "to establish a virtual mini-Taliban style state." And Taliban leadership, operating on three fronts along the border with as many as 10,000 fighters, now say they are ready to fight through the winter and for as long it takes to bleed out international "occupiers."
What Karzai and Musharraf cannot concede in public is that the Afghan-Pakistani border is a cartographer's conceit; on the ground it is largely imaginary. The de jure border, known as the Durand Line, stretches 1,500 miles on the Pakistani side from the rugged North West Frontier Province (NWFP) down to the flat scorched earth of Baluchistan province. Along the way military installations are few and far between, and the border itself is a smuggler's paradise. More coercive outposts are those of Pashtun tribal leaders that date back centuries, having outlasted the invading Soviet forces and imperial Britain before them.
Pashtun tribes, one of the largest tribal groups in the world, are predominant in the provinces on both sides of the border, including Afghanistan's Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south and Kunar province in the east. (All are hotbeds of the Taliban-led insurgency.) While regimes and foreign invaders have come and gone, fiercely independent tribesmen have adhered to their own traditional code, Pashtunwali, in which honor and hospitality are paramount. These unwritten laws, used to settle blood feuds and other tit-for-tat crimes such as thievery or kidnapping, are said to date back some 5,000 years. The guarantee of sanctuary to those who ask -- even enemies -- is ironclad to the death. Stories exist of mothers who have harbored their own son's killers.
For the Bush administration's "war on terror," this has been both a gift and a curse. In June 2004, 16 Navy S.E.A.L.s were killed when their helicopter was hit by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade while on a rescue mission to save three ambushed team members in Kunar province. A fourth member was found wounded by a Pashtun villager who, at risk to his own life and family, sheltered him and dressed his wounds before alerting American authorities at a nearby U.S. forward base. The downside is that this same code of hospitality allowed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his inner circle to decamp from their redoubt in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, to Pakistani borderlands when the U.S. bombing campaign began there in December 2001. Bin Laden is said to have been aided by Pashtun tribesmen supplemented with cash and guns, and may be hiding out in the NWFP, 40,000 square miles of mostly mountainous terrain.
Equally inhospitable are the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) which include North and South Waziristan provinces, now used by the Taliban militants under the aegis of veteran mujaheddin leader Jalaluddin Haqqani as a rear base to stage attacks in Afghanistan proper. Neither area has ever been controlled by a foreign power. And one-eyed chief Mullah Omar himself is believed to be based in the city of Quetta, Baluchistan province, which has become an open command center for Taliban activity on the southern border, according to Western military officials.
Today, as the Taliban stages a comeback amid violence that has killed almost 4,000 people -- mostly civilians -- in the last year, Karzai and his Western supporters are faulted for the slow pace of reconstruction, which has been hamstrung by corrupt officials and lopsided military spending. Meanwhile, profits from record drug production in the backcountry have reinforced both the Taliban and an illicit economy that now accounts for some 50 of gross domestic product.
Musharraf, for his part, is charged with not doing enough to bring lawless areas on his side of the border under control. But the general did deploy his army into Waziristan in 2003 under intense pressure from Washington, amassing an 80,000-strong force along the border in a fruitless campaign to flush out militants. Pashtuns in Pakistan saw the move as a sign that Musharraf will answer "how high?" when Washington says "jump." Tensions rose to fever pitch following a late October air strike on a tribal religious school in the Bajaur tribal area, which authorities said killed 80 militants. The strike prompted a retaliatory suicide bombing that claimed 42 army recruits.
On the Afghan side, errant U.S. air strikes have killed innocent villagers on more than one occasion. Such mistakes have only compounded simmering anger towards a weak central government that has failed to deliver security and basic services. But Kabul remains dependent on outside help to rebuild, and is understandably averse to biting the hands that feed. The Pakistani and Afghan governments are thus seen as servile bedfellows of the West by Pashtun and other tribal communities whom they must integrate to disrupt the safe havens that sustain Islamist militancy. The grain of history and culture in the region may in fact preclude this from ever coming about. But if such integration is at all possible, willful ignorance of the tribal problem will ensure it never happens, and that the fountainhead of instability will never run dry.
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To get at the roots of the "problem of the tribes" as mid-twentieth century British diplomat W.K. Fraser-Tyler once put it, one must start with the division of the Pashtun tribes in the early 19th century. The ethnic Pashtun lands comprised the core of the original Afghan state founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani. The fall of this regime coincided with the rise of the British and Russian empires, which faced off in the Great Game to assert dominance across Central Asia. The Durand Line that remains the legal international border between the modern Pakistani and Afghan states was created in 1893 to delineate the outer periphery of what was then British India from Afghanistan. The latter served as a buffer state to imperial Russia's sphere of influence. The British didn't successfully impose the line until after two hard-fought wars against Pashtun tribesmen. The traumatic experience drove home the lesson to the British that even after defeats of tribes in southern Afghanistan, present-day NWFP, FATA, and Baluchistan, military occupation was not to be confused with real control. Among the tribesmen, contempt towards outside forces hardened, as the Soviets learned a century later.
When the British Empire receded, Pakistan inherited the "invisible" Durand Line border and Afghanistan gained independence, enjoying a period of relative stability marked by economic growth and rural development. Progress was interrupted by the Soviets, who orchestrated a coup of Afghan army officers in April 1978 to oust then-Prime Minister Mohammad Daud. In an ill-fated Cold War maneuver, the United States backed fundamentalist mujaheddin to beat back the Russians during the 1979-89 Afghan war, providing arms and expertise to Afghan, Pakistani and foreign jihadis. Not only did the proxy CIA war serve to train and equip Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and a raft of others that now fill the ranks of their movements; the siege climate also further radicalized war-weary Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line, rendering them more sympathetic to those fighting to bring down Western-backed authorities.
Today an estimated 43 million Pashtuns (15 million on the Afghan side, 28 million in Pakistan) united in blood, language, culture, and history continue to reject the Durand Line. Ali Mohammad Jan Orakzai, the native-born governor of NWFP and architect of the controversial truce, insists military strategies on both sides have only piqued centuries-old resistance fervor among Pashtun tribes. "The people have started joining the Taliban. It is snowballing into a nationalist movement if it has not already become one," he recently told an interviewer. "It is becoming a sort of war of resistance."
Unless the roots of historical grievances in the tribal areas are addressed, Taliban and al-Qaeda will always have a sanctuary to retreat to and regroup. And it will remain impossible for the international community to ascribe proper responsibility for the lack of control over insurgent forces and smuggling without a mutually recognized and enforceable border management agreement that upholds the rule of law. Some have suggested a holistic border agreement -- based on the existing Durand Line but signed by Afghanistan, Pakistan, and non-state actors in the tribal areas -- to facilitate a reconciliation process that extends greater civil and political rights to the tribes. This could be reinforced by an overarching peace agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan (and perhaps India, to allay fears in Islamabad of an Afghan-India alliance). The ICG argues that Pakistan must first impose the rule of law on tribal regions, a task easier said than done.
Jirgas, the traditional Pashtun forum for hammering out differences, resolve about 95 percent of disputes in Afghanistan and could be a starting point for reaching consensus. Verdicts still tend to stand up better than formal court judgments thanks to a basis of mutual consent rooted in Pashtunwali. Yet the jihad against the Soviets showed that Pashtun tribes are willing to rally around Islamist militancy, at least temporarily, when confronted with an outside power. Borderland Pashtuns are sure to fill the majority of Taliban ranks and abet al-Qaeda's presence until international forces withdraw from the region, another dim prospect in light of a gathering insurgency.
While accompanying Musharraf on the tense visit to Washington, Governor Orakzai advised President Bush that a wide-ranging peace deal might be struck on both sides of the border through a high-level jirga that assembles tribal leaders on their own terms. After five years, the West's military strategy was making things worse, he told the president, as evidenced by the fact that Bin Laden remains at large and the Taliban grows stronger by the day. But his seasoned advice fell on deaf ears. "Either it is a lack of understanding or a lack of courage to admit their failures," he said. "Like in Iraq … They have admitted them now but at very great cost."
Jason Motlagh is a deputy foreign editor at United Press International in Washington, D.C. He has covered conflicts in Asia and Africa.
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