Pakistan, Taliban and Osama

By T. Sreedhar

WITH THE U.S. Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, publicly announcing that the prime suspect in the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington is Osama bin Laden, the first question that arises is: why has he resorted to this ghastly act? Osama comes from a rich Saudi family close to the Saudi royalty. In the mid 1980s he was sent to Afghanistan to supervise the fight against the former Soviet Union's `Red Army'. There he had his initial indoctrination in ``pure'' Islamic thought. After the end of the Afghan war, he moved to Sudan where he is reported to have done some extensive social work to alleviate the sufferings of fellow Muslims. When he shifted to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in May 1996, he had already emerged as a cult figure in the politics of the Islamic world.

His arrival in Afghanistan was accompanied by a subtle shift in the agenda of the nascent Taliban, which was trying to capture power in that country. Osama's first priority was to accelerate the pace of the Taliban's consolidation of power. With his money power he was able to buy off most of the Afghan warlords opposing the Taliban; and successfully overcome the little resistance that was there in Kabul with the assistance of the Pakistani army, as in September 1996. By mid-1998, he succeeded in getting more than 90 per cent of Afghanistan under Taliban control. To cement his relationship on a permanent basis he even married the daughter of the Taliban's supremo, Mullah Omar. Simultaneously, he floated the organisation, A1-Qaeda with the avowed objective of fighting for the resurrection of Islam in the world. ``Our fight will be against the enemies of Islam,'' he is reported to have told his followers. With this message, his organisation started networking with outfits of similar ideas all over the world. By 2000, his networking spread over 60 countries and four continents. By late 1999, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda had become synonymous.

His network's first attack was the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998. In the quick U.S. retaliation, he had a providential escape. Being a fast learner, he realised the vulnerability of using modern gadgets to build his organisation. This made him to switch over to traditional methods of human couriers to spread his network. He tested it in the attack on the USS Cole in Yemeni waters in early January this year in which 12 U.S. military personnel were killed.

Meanwhile, international pressure on the Taliban started increasing considerably. The second round of U.N. sanctions against the Taliban came into effect from January this year. These sanctions, being Taliban-specific, placed the militia at a disadvantage vis-a-vis its opponents. While the Taliban was not allowed to acquire any arms and ammunition, the forces opposed to it headed by Ahmed Shah Masood was rearmed with more effective weapons. The Taliban found it difficult to even acquire weapons in this new situation even clandestinely from countries such as Pakistan. This new situation started affecting the Taliban's fortunes in the battlefield. This July there were even reports that the Taliban was planning to shift its capital from Kabul to Kandahar to avoid Masood's aerial attacks on Kabul.

This automatically sent alarm signals to the Taliban. The carefully-built Taliban empire had come under serious threat for the first time. In this new situation, the first thing Mullah Omar did was to appoint Osama as the commander-in-chief of the Taliban forces. Afterwards, the Taliban retaliated first by arresting eight western aid workers working with the German-based organisation Shelter Now in August. The charge against them was that they were spreading Christianity in Islamic Afghanistan. Subsequently there were reports that the Tabliban offered a swap to the U.S. - the aid workers, for a blind cleric from Egypt undergoing a 30-year prison term in the U.S. for assisting the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. With the U.S. refusing to yield, the Taliban announced that it had never made such an offer.

This was followed by a suicide attack on Ahmed Shah Masood within the Panjsher Valley itself on September 9. This has considerably thrown the anti-Taliban forces into disarray and neutralised the immediate threat to the Taliban from those opposed to it. Two days later Osama's network struck at New York and Washington to demonstrate to the world in which direction they are moving. After the incidents of September 11, Osama issued a statement identical to those issued after the Embassy bombing in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole early this year. ``I am not responsible for these developments, but I thank Allah for inspiring people to do so.'' The next question that arises is whether Pakistan is cooperating with Osama's activities or not. Here, one should get the facts clear. According to the former Pakistani Interior Minister, Maj. Gen. Naseerullah Babbar, he created the Taliban movement to gain control of Afghanistan in mid-1994. Pakistan nurtured this organisation over the years through its intelligence agencies by providing logistic and infrastructural support. The reports prepared by the special representative of the U.N. Secretary-General observed that Pakistani armed forces participated in various Taliban military operations such as the capture of Kabul in 1996 and of Mazar-e- Sharif in 1998. The number of Pakistani soldiers participating in the Taliban's campaigns is estimated to be anything between 3000 and 5000. Pakistan providing infrastructure to the Taliban in terms of training facilities is also a well-documented fact.

A section of the Pakistani establishment is supposed to have been unhappy over the way Osama had hijacked the Taliban movement from them. But still they went along with the Taliban and Osama on the assumption that Islamabad's strategic objectives can be achieved with the help of these people. On this assumption, the pan- Islamic ideology of Taliban-Osama was supported by Islamabad. There were statements in December 1999 and January 2000 from Taliban sympathisers who visited Pakistan that the Pakistan army must be converted into an Islamic army.

Pakistan has always had a grouse against the Islamic world. Though it possesses one of the most professional armies in the Islamic world, it is never taken seriously by them. Even though it is the first country to acquire nuclear weapons, others refused to acknowledge its prominence in the Islamic world. Pakistan, therefore, seems to have thought that it can achieve its objective by acting and cooperating with the Taliban and Osama. In the process, Islamabad championed the cause of the Taliban in various international forums. The events of September 11 show that Pakistan underestimated the intentions of the Taliban-Al-Qaeda combine.

The Taliban's warning to Pakistan on September 14 not to cooperate with the U.S. clearly indicates that it feels it has enough clout in the Pakistani polity; and can retaliate against Islamabad at a very short notice. With the ethnic linkages between the people of the two countries and Islamabad's lopsided policies towards its two provinces, Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan, bordering Afghanistan, this seems possible. The authors of Pakistan's Afghan policy must be a worried lot today. The proposed U.S. action against Afghanistan seems to be more like attacking the roots at the first instance. How it will deal with the vast network built by the Taliban-Al-Qaeda combine spread over 60 countries and four continents afterwards is to be seen. Simultaneously, the U.S. has to ensure that this form of radical politics will not resurface again in the foreseeable future. Will the dealing with Osama's network be left to its allies? Can the allies deal with it as effectively as the U.S. hopes. They are some of the issues that need to be debated in the days to come. Many observers of global terrorism have reservations about the way the U.S. deals with the problem. They feel that terrorism and violence have become instruments of foreign policies for quite a few countries. They cite the example of the failure of the U.N. to evolve a proper definition of what constitutes terrorism.

One can be certain that the international security environment has been caught in an extraordinary situation. How nations will respond is to be seen.

(The writer is Senior Research Associate, Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.)

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