NEW YORK, Oct. 29 (AScribe Newswire) -- Following is commentary by Jeffrey Laurenti. Laurenti is senior fellow and director of foreign policy programs at The Century Foundation, a New York-based public policy research institute.
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Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents have escalated their attacks on "soft" international targets with a pre-dawn attack October 28 that killed six United Nations staffers and three Afghans. Proclaimed by Taliban spokesmen as a blow against the country's presidential runoff election November 7, it followed lethal attacks on India's embassy that killed seventeen people three weeks earlier, and the surprise attack that killed six Italian peacekeepers and ten Afghan bystanders in September.
The Taliban appear to be drawing from the Iraq playbook, hoping to set off an accelerating exodus of international partners and to leave the floundering Kabul government isolated with just the Americans. But they show their hand also in targets that hint at a regional Great Game as well.
They know that the United Nations had pulled its offices out of Iraq after deadly attacks on its headquarters in Baghdad in 2003, and that later that year the Italians seemed to waver in aiding the U.S. occupation of Iraq after nineteen of their soldiers were slain in supposedly peaceful Nasariyah. But the Taliban will surely be disappointed if they expect a run for the exits, at least for now.
Despite misgivings about whether the effort to stabilize Afghanistan will succeed, the recent attacks will not trigger international flight. In Iraq, the U.N. secretariat had been extremely reluctant to be drawn into Iraq as a seeming handmaiden of what Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged was an "illegal" U.S. invasion; no member state questions the legitimacy of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan. Italian loyalty to U.N. and NATO commitments quickly overcame some politicians' initial wobbly reaction to the Taliban attack on their troops (http://takingnote.tcf.org/2009/09/afghanistan-warning-from-the-italian-job.html) .
This is not to say that the international coalition in Afghanistan is committed to open-ended support of the Kabul government for as long as it takes to secure the country against a Taliban comeback. But the Europeans are not defecting -- not yet.
The attack on the Indian embassy is another matter. Certainly Taliban extremists would be hostile on theological grounds to any encroachment from the pagan polytheism of India's prevailing Hinduism (religiously more reprehensible than the like-minded monotheism of Jews and Christians). But the attacks on Indian targets reflect a far more prosaic settling of political scores. A Pakistan perennially paranoid about encirclement is panicky about a resurgence in Indian influence on its western flank.
Many wondered, three decades ago, why India stood alone in the non-aligned movement in defending the Soviets' intervention to prop up a faltering left-wing government in Kabul. Perhaps they never appreciated New Delhi's own stake in a secularized Afghanistan that would keep Pakistan off balance. To this day, the family of deposed leftist president Najibullah still lives in India, where they took refuge when the Taliban captured, castrated, and killed him in 1996.
(Hard-line American conservatives had confidently predicted the immediate extinction of the Najibullah government as soon as Soviet forces withdrew in early 1989. Najibullah disappointed them by actually strengthening his regime's authority over the years following the Soviet military withdrawal, so long as Soviet subsidies and supplies continued. His regime only unraveled when a new Russian government abruptly cut off fuel supplies in early 1992. The survival of the anti-mujaheddin government so long as it had an outside lifeline may be of more than historical interest to policymakers today.)
The triumph of Pakistan's extremist clients in Kabul led New Delhi to cast around for an alternative, and India made its investment in the Northern Alliance--which is at the core of the current Kabul coalition today. The hard-line elements in the Pakistani security establishment that obsess about Indian malevolence have never abandoned the Taliban, whom they originally bankrolled, notwithstanding General Pervez Musharraf's specious promises to George Bush to halt them. Indeed, for cynical Afghans looking at their political kaleidoscope, the only foreign power to have switched sides over the past two decades would seem to be the United States.
Pakistani intelligence is presumed to be behind the attacks on Indians in Afghanistan -- to say nothing of the heinous slaughter in Mumbai last fall. The intelligence services' immunity to government control is what has prompted the U.S. Congress in recent years to condition American aid to Pakistan on their subordination to civilian control -- a requirement that is suddenly onerous to the security establishment when aid this year to non-military sectors of Pakistani society became substantial, and the new Obama administration seemed likely to actually enforce it.
Indian officials dismiss the Pakistani preoccupation with their surprisingly sizeable assistance program in Afghanistan, emphasizing its benign character. "We're there," deputy foreign minister Shashi Tharoor told credulous listeners in New York in mid-October, "just to do good work for the Afghan people" (http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=EV&pubid=265). Pakistan's security establishment has "absolutely no reason," he added, to worry "that girls are getting an education, that little children are getting meals at school, that there is a hospital that cares for them when they're sick" -- all of which are services that the Pakistani state has proved grossly inadequate at financing for its own citizens.
There are some signs of a Pakistani divorce from the intelligence services' Taliban clients. The country's U.N. representative insists that "the Taliban, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan, is one ... . they're absolutely into that thing together," and that the struggle against them "is a world war."
How success can be achieved in that "war" is at the heart of the debate now raging inside the Obama administration and other capitals. But the Great Game is nowhere near over, and there may yet be a few more hands to be played before the region's players, and the rest of the world, step away from the table.
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NOTE TO EDITORS/PRODUCERS: Jeff Laurenti is available for interviews. Contact Zaina Arafat at arafat@tcf.org or by phone at 212-452-7713 or 347-751-4696. The above editorial is available for free and immediate use. If used, contact Zaina Arafat.
Media Contact: See above.
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