Washington’s Ridiculous Obsession With The Haqqanis

[*Awan*]

Listen to US officials and you would think Afghanistan would turn into a paradise if the Haqqanis were gone. Not so.

EJAZ HAIDER | Tuesday | 20 December 2011 | EXPRESS TRIBUNE
www.PakNationalists.com

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Ernst Stavro Sirajuddin Blofeld Haqqani is now running SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), renamed in Afghanistan as the Haqqani Network.

All the troubles of the US and its allies stem from this reincarnation of SPECTRE. The only entity that can take care of this shadowy organization is Pakistan. The capacity of this organization to trouble America is exclusively owed to its ability to retire to North Waziristan after striking inside Afghanistan, sometime as deep as in Kabul. Its members seem to be able to fly in and out of Afghanistan, undetected, despite the presence there of US, NATO and ISAF troops.

It’s the only entity that is hampering the US from neatening up Afghanistan. Get rid of the Network and Afghanistan will be fine — the government will work, the Taliban will vanish, corruption will end, pluralism will flourish, democracy will take root, Afghan society will enter the 21st century, America will be safe and everyone will live happily ever after.

Am I being reductive? Please read the long report by the Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point which argues that the most “underappreciated dimension” of the Haqqani network is its “global character” and the “central role it has played in the evolution of al-Qa’ida and the global jihadi movement”. Read also the report about the meeting between US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar ,where the “first and last thing” on the agenda was the Haqqani Network and the September 13 Kabul attack.

The fact is that the Afghanistan problem is not just about the Haqqani Network. Afghanistan has multiple problems, most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with the Haqqanis. Even if the Haqqani Network were entirely taken out, Afghanistan would remain largely the same. In fact, if the only stumbling block between an Afghanistan gone bad and an idyllic Afghanistan were the Network, Afghanistan would have been a piece of cake, not the wicked problem it has become.

Secondly, if the insurgency in Afghanistan was only run by the Haqqanis, JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) would not be conducting thousands of night operations for the last year-and-half across all of Afghanistan, operations that are terribly unpopular.

Thirdly, if use of force was the only answer to Afghanistan’s problems, the US would have, by now, brought it under control. But the use of force, by itself, is clearly not enough. As Mr. Abdullah Abdullah told me in April in Washington, what is missing is the ability of the Afghan government to reach out to its people. It is common knowledge that the Afghan governors cannot even survive in their respective vilayats without striking some kind of deal with the Taliban commanders in the area.

Fourthly, the three spectacular attacks in recent weeks, beginning with the downing of a Chinook carrying a SEAL team, the suicide attack that injured 70 US troops, both in Maydan Wardag, and now the September 13 Kabul attack clearly show that the line of communication of the insurgents cannot stretch back to North Waziristan. All these attacks have happened deep inside the Afghan territory and indicate the steady loss of control of territory by the Afghan government and the foreign troops.

If, for the sake of the argument it is conceded that the Taliban line of communication does extend back to North Waziristan, then the ability of the fighters to go deep in and mount attacks makes an utter mockery of the military and intelligence capabilities of the US and its allies despite the tremendous resources at their disposal.

Fifthly, as should be clear from Sirajuddin Haqqani’s interview to Reuters, his fighters are not based in North Waziristan. It makes eminent sense for him to have relocated to the Loya Paktia given the heightened frequency of the drone attacks in North Waziristan and the fact that the Network controls the three provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika. They are also unlikely to be based either in Dande Darpa Khel in North Waziristan or Zambar in Khost, both locations known to intelligence agencies.

Finally, Siraj’s interview dispels the propaganda that the Haqqani Network is Al Qaeda. Instead, Siraj told Reuters that “we would support whatever solution our shura members suggest for the future of Afghanistan”, a clear reference to the Afghan Taliban leadership. Siraj also said that they rejected previous attempts at talks by the US and the Afghan government because those overtures were aimed at “creating divisions” among the Taliban. It is therefore misleading to suggest that the Haqqanis operate outside the overall strategic objectives of the Taliban.

Siraj’s interview and signalling is in line with Mullah Omar’s Eidul Fitr message, which dealt with three basic points: the Afghanistan-specific focus of the Taliban; their readiness to negotiate meaningfully, and a warning to the neighbours to desist from interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Another important motif running through that message was Taliban’s an inclusive approach to governance. In that, this year’s Eid message is very different from the one Mullah Omar delivered last year which rejected negotiations and called for the trial of President Hamid Karzai and his political coterie.

A few quick points need to be made. The US has come round to talking to the Taliban despite some opposition to this dialogue both in Washington and Kabul. Most leading Afghan experts around the world think this is the only way forward, especially — and this is crucial — if the Taliban accept that they cannot rule Afghanistan to the exclusion of other entities. There are clear indications, and Maulana Fazlur Rehman confirmed it to some of us at a recent SAFMA (South Asian Free Media Association) meeting in Lahore, that they understand and appreciate this. Given this, and given rising opposition by the Afghans, including officials, to the use of force by the US in Afghanistan, Washington should fast track this dialogue instead of asking Pakistan to open another front for itself by going into North Waziristan. The dialogue is where Pakistan needs to play a positive role because that is where its interests must converge with that of the US.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman also backed my argument that any policy needs to make a clear distinction between the Afghan Taliban and the TTP and its affiliates. The time to go into North Waziristan would be after the US-Taliban talks have reached an advanced level. That would help Pakistan greatly in dealing a blow to the TTP network.

For all the right reasons the US and Pakistan need to cooperate rather than getting into a game of brinkmanship.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 21st, 2011.

Washington’s Ridiculous Obsession With The Haqqanis | PakNationalists.com | Home Of Pakistani Nationalists Online


America came in Afghanistan because of 9/11.
Al-qaeda is destroyed and Osama is killed,so a new direction of war appears.
now Americans are fighting with people of land why?
because they want there 6 military bases.and offered taliban recognition in exchange of base at khadhar.

but if Americans plans fail,we are responsible for it.?

 

[SMC]

It's more or less a red herring at this point. It's not like Haqqanis is one of top problems US faces in Afghanistan. Local Taliban are a much bigger enemy. This is a good time for US government to shift blame for their failure in Afghanistan and start their run of the mill conspiracy theories.

 

[Leader]

It's more or less a red herring at this point. It's not like Haqqanis is one of top problems US faces in Afghanistan. Local Taliban are a much bigger enemy. This is a good time for US government to shift blame for their failure in Afghanistan and start their run of the mill conspiracy theories.

yup, they are quitting and they want a scapegoat for media and public consumption....emmm Pak Army/ISI is best to blame... so they are doing it...

 

[muse]

An Interesting piece from the Hindu



Pakistan, U.S. & the immoderate Taliban
Praveen Swami


In 1992, nine full years before 9/11, the Pakistani Islamist politician Fazlur Rahman laid out a road map for the global jihadist magazine. “The Afghan jihad,” he told the Pashto language Manba al-Jihad magazine, “which was spearheaded by Maulana Haqqani and other truthful leaders, defeated the Soviet empire. But now there is another enemy to this jihad. That is America, and its conspiratorial policies that are intended to bring Afghanistan, the centre of jihad, under American attack.”

Fazlur Rahman concluded: “we are absolutely certain that people like Mawlawi Haqqani will give the Americans the same answer they gave to the Russians. And we are sure that people like Haqqani will fuel the flames of jihad worldwide.”

The assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan's former President and principal negotiator for talks with jihadists, has underlined the abiding threat from the immoderate Taliban: Afghan groups closely entwined with the global jihadist movement, hostile to dialogue — and, yet, backed by Pakistan, which sees them as allies in its own battle for survival.

Last week, in the wake of a terrorist assault targeting the United States Embassy in Kabul, the U.S. held out its most blunt warning yet to Pakistan, the principal patron of Islamist warlord Sirajuddin Haqqani, son and heir apparent to the man Fazlur Rahman hailed. “I think the message they [the Pakistanis] need to know,” said Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, is that “we're going to do everything we can to defend our forces.” In Islamabad and Washington alike, that phrase has been read as a threat to use force inside Pakistan.

For years now, U.S. officials have privately used similar language. The Haqqani network is not just responsible for most major strikes in Kabul — among them, the murderous 2008 attack on the Indian Embassy — but also part of the reason why western efforts to engage purported moderates in the Taliban have gone nowhere. Now, as the U.S. prepares to dramatically scale down its presence in Afghanistan, it needs Pakistan to act against the Haqqanis more than ever.

That, in turn, makes a showdown between the U.S. and the country its former military ruler Muhammad Ayub Khan once described as its “most allied ally” seems evermore likely.

‘The fountainhead of jihad': Born in the early 1950s, Jalaluddin Haqqani hailed from the Zadran tribe of the Pashtun ethnic group. He studied at a seminary in Datta Adam Khel, and would likely have gone on to become a rural cleric — had it not been for a series of dramatic events that transformed Afghanistan, eventually bringing to power a new class of armed clerics who would displace both the traditional tribal élite and the modernising left-wing secularists who had swept them aside.

In 1973, Afghan communists overthrew the decaying monarchy. Even though the new President, Daud Muhammad Khan, was the deposed king's brother-in-law, he declared the country a republic. President Khan presided over a dramatic process of social reform — marked, among other things, by an emphasis on women's rights. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate, fearful that Mr. Khan's nationalist rhetoric would seduce ethnic Pashtuns living on its side of the border, responded by backing an insurgency spearheaded by the Afghan Islamists.

Five years before the crisis that would suck the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani declared war against the Afghan state. Helped by the ISI, he developed sources of funding in the Middle East, using the flow of cash to build an impressive military apparatus.

The ISI, though, wasn't Jalaluddin Haqqani's only source of support. In the wake of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, journalist Steve Coll has revealed, he was cultivated as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset. Charlie Wilson, a right-wing politician who helped funnel tens of millions of dollars to the Afghan jihadists, described Jalaluddin Haqqani as “goodness personified.”

Key figures in the global jihadist movement — among them Osama bin Laden — learned their military skills in camps set up by Jalaluddin Haqqani, and maintained a close relationship with him in the years that followed.

Mustafa al-Hamid, an al-Qaeda linked ideologue and writer who served with Jalaluddin Haqqani's forces, wrote a hagiographic account which was published in the jihadist magazine al-Somud last year. The “majesty in his personality was a model for the great religious scholars of Afghanistan and students of the knowledge of the pure mujahideen, who now stand as an impregnable bulwark against the largest crusader attack upon the Islamic nation.”

From the outset, scholars Don Rassler and Vahid Brown have noted in a seminal paper, that Jalaluddin Haqqani helped shape the global jihadist movement's ideas.

In 1980, for example, Haqqani asserted that Middle Eastern charity to the Afghan campaign did “not absolve the individual Muslim of the duty to offer himself for the jihad.” Abdullah Azzam — bin Laden's mentor, Lashkar-e-Taiba co-founder and ideological patriarch of the global jihadist movement — arrived at the same conclusion four years later, when he declared the Afghan jihad fard ‘ayn, an individual obligation. When bin Laden shifted base to a pink stucco three-storey home in Khartoum in 1991, having fallen out with Saudi Arabia's royal family, Jalaluddin Haqqani used the opportunity to operate on a wider stage. He backed Hasan al-Turabi's Islamist regime in Sudan, and sent volunteers to fight in Bosnia. In 1991, at a meeting in Karachi, he also bragged about his war against India, saying his networks had “trained thousands of Kashmiri mujahideen and have made them ready for the jihad.”

Nizamuddin Haqqani, Jalaluddin Haqqani's deputy, proclaimed in 1991 that the U.S. and Russia were “both infidel forces.”

The resurgent warrior: Bin Laden's close relationship with the Haqqanis helped him act on those ideas during his last, tortured months in Afghanistan — scarred by an increasingly bitter relationship with Taliban chief Mullah Muhammad Omar which saw al-Qaeda's leader confined to the city of Kandahar.

“From that point on,” Dr. Rassler and Dr. Brown record, “al-Qaeda came to increasingly rely on the Haqqani network's autonomy from the Taliban in Loya Paktia as a launching pad for its declarations of war on the West.”

Bin Laden's declaration of jihad against the West — his most sweeping manifesto and ideological keystone of the 9/11 attacks, was critically issued from a Haqqani camp in the Zhawara valley.

Since 9/11, the Haqqani network has survived by using the same geographical advantages that stood it so well during the anti-Soviet jihad: its control of key routes from Pakistan into Afghanistan, and its ability to retreat south across the border. Much of the organisation is now run out of Miranshah, deep inside Pakistan's North Waziristan region. Ever since Sirajuddin Haqqani started taking care of the organisation, it has expanded out of its Loya Paktia strongholds into Nangarhar and Kunar, and southward to Ghazni — even while insisting that it is a part of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban calls itself.

Mullah Omar has often been reported to resentful of the Haqqani network's autonomy — but there is no sign of any friction on the ground. “This,” Dr. Antonio Giustozzi, an academic, pointed out, “is clearly not the reaction one would expect if the Haqqani network was seen by the Taliban leadership in Quetta as a separate, competing organisation.”

Put another way, the power of the Haqqanis suits the broader Taliban. More important, it suits Pakistan, too.

The reasons are none-too-opaque. In return for ISI patronage, it has proved a valuable source of support in Pakistan's north-west — the heartland for jihadists hostile to the state. Sirajuddin Haqqani is believed, for example, to have brokered the February peace deal in Kurram, which brought about a brief cessation of hostilities between Shi'a and Sunni militia. He, along with other “good Taliban” like Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir Ahmad, is also seen as a source of pressure on Tehreek-e-Taliban leaders like Hakimullah Mehsud.

In the long-run, Pakistan's strategic establishment believes that bringing allies like Sirajuddin Haqqani to power in Kabul will help it contain the jihadist threat to its own survival. Increasingly, Pakistan's strategic community is arguing that the Haqqanis' ambitions are local — not a threat to the world.

How well-advised this calculation will prove remains unclear. Ever since 9/11, Dr. Rassler and Dr. Brown have noted, it has changed course, portraying itself “as a local actor preoccupied with local concerns.” This message, though, changed depending on the audience. In the Pashto and Urdu language versions of the journal Nusrat al-Jihad, for example, the role of Arabs in the famous 1991 siege of Khost is ignored. However, the Arabic language version celebrates their contributions.

Key figures in Pakistan's “good Taliban” have been less coy. In an interview this May, for example, the Pakistani army's ally, Nasir Ahmad, announced that he was “a part of al-Qaeda.” He argued that events in the Middle East would “benefit the mujahideen” and promised to despatch jihadists to “join forces with the Arabs.” It takes little to see that Pakistan's jihadist allies could precipitate precisely the same kind of problems that created the crisis it is now fighting.

This we know for certain: the U.S. has spent years pressing Pakistan to act, without effect. In diplomatic cables obtained by the WikiLeaks, there is a graphic account of a July 29, 2008, meeting between top U.S. officials and Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani. Anne Patterson, Washington's Ambassador to Islamabad, hit out at Pakistan's claims that it had no knowledge of Sirajuddin Haqqani's whereabouts. She asserted that the ISI was in “constant touch” with him, and that the seminary from where he conducted business was clearly visible from a Pakistani military base.

Now though, as the U.S. prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan, it no longer has the luxury of time — and that means Pakistan could soon be faced with hard decisions, each with murderous consequences.

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

These are nothing more then , "catch phrases" to blackmail nations into submiting to US



Turkey - Blackmail pill is Armenian Genocide
Pakistan - Haqqani network , before it was Talibans - Kashmir
Saudia - Bin Ladin finances
Libya - it was the Airplane bombing (This was aparently used in end to satisfy invasion)
Russia - interference in Europe and threat to NATO nations
North Korea - Threat to Japan pill and kidnapping of Japanese citizens
Japan - World war 2 crimes it regularly kicks out pro japan leaders to bring in pro us leaders
China - Currency prices , Tiwan , Now vietnam
Egypt - Muslim Brother hood blackmail
Valenzuela - Arming up neighbors with weapons to oust their leader
Iran - Revolution and nuclear ambitions
India - Kashmir / connection to Russia

 

[VCheng]

These are nothing more then , "catch phrases" to blackmail nations into submiting to US



Turkey - Blackmail pill is Armenian Genocide
Pakistan - Haqqani network , before it was Talibans - Kashmir
Saudia - Bin Ladin finances
Libya - it was the Airplane bombing (This was aparently used in end to satisfy invasion)
Russia - interference in Europe and threat to NATO nations
North Korea - Threat to Japan pill and kidnapping of Japanese citizens
Japan - World war 2 crimes it regularly kicks out pro japan leaders to bring in pro us leaders
China - Currency prices , Tiwan , Now vietnam
Egypt - Muslim Brother hood blackmail
Valenzuela - Arming up neighbors with weapons to oust their leader
Iran - Revolution and nuclear ambitions
India - Kashmir / connection to Russia

Well, ALL those examples were successful in serving US national interests, weren't they?

 

[RazPaK]

Well, ALL those examples were successful in serving US national interests, weren't they?

So you support US false propaganda?

 

[Bhairava]

India - Kashmir / connection to Russia

Dont understand this part though.

Was the US blackmail that caused Richard Holbrooke to swallow his own words on Kashmir and deal only with what he was mandated - the five letter word ?

 

[VCheng]

So you support US false propaganda?

No, all I am saying is that the record of successful pursuit of national interests by the US speaks for itself, and that it will continue.

 

[RazPaK]

No, all I am saying is that the record of successful pursuit of national interests by the US speaks for itself, and that it will continue.

Using bullying tactics hasn't helped US gain respect or influence in the world. It seems they make more enemies wherever they go due to their polices and attitude.

 

[VCheng]

Using bullying tactics hasn't helped US gain respect or influence in the world. It seems they make more enemies wherever they go due to their polices and attitude.

Look around the world, and you will see the degree of US influence at work just about everywhere and very successfully too. "Respect" is a useless concept in international geopolitics, just like "loyalty" and "sincerity".

 

[great]

Using bullying tactics hasn't helped US gain respect or influence in the world. It seems they make more enemies wherever they go due to their polices and attitude.

Except for North Korea, China and Pakistan US is respected and admired at every place else. Come out of Pakistan prism.

 

[Bhairava]

Look around the world, and you will see the degree of US influence at work just about everywhere and very successfully too. "Respect" is a useless concept in international geopolitics, just like "loyalty" and "sincerity".

You dont need to be respected when you are feared.

Fits aptly for US.

Whether a country respects US or not, it fears it.

 

[EastWest]

Look around the world, and you will see the degree of US influence at work just about everywhere and very successfully too. "Respect" is a useless concept in international geopolitics, just like "loyalty" and "sincerity".

There is nothing called loyalty and Sincerity in international politics..what u have is one question "What is good for me/my country?"...

Every country from USA to India to even China knows that and follows that policy...

 

[T90TankGuy]

If one is to talk about obsession , then i could raise several cases where a lot of Pakistani members here think if America withdraws or Israel ceases to exist , the problems in the Muslim world would end .

everything is relative . may i suggest we take this article for what it is and not get embroiled in a needless debate.