Northern Alliance rearms as Afghan government negotiates with Taliban

Former commanders from Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance told the The Sunday Telegraph that non-Pashtun warlords were rearming their militias in response to U.S.-brokered negotiations between Pashtun Taliban leaders and the Karzai government in Kabul, for fear their old enemies might return to power. 

Earlier this week NATO allegedly helped arrange safe passage to Kabul for key insurgent leaders from their sanctuaries in Pakistan to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s 68-member peace council, which had been mandated to secure a potential power-sharing deal to end the 10-year old war. 

The former Northern Alliance consists primarily of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who had partnered with the US-led coalition to help defeat the Taliban during the post-9/11 takedown.  The Taliban ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 and were infamous for its brutal repression of ethnic and religious minority groups. 

Although Mr Karzai appointed senior northern leaders to the peace council it has failed to ease fears of Taliban resurgence and a Pashtun power grab.  Tajik commander Naqubullah believes the current peace process is a devious plot by Mr. Karzai - himself a Pashtun - to extend Pashtun influence. 

"My own opinion is it is not a peace process, it is a private deal," he said. "The Karzai family are like a mafia.”

Mr. Karzai’s cozying to Pakistan is also disconcerting to Northerners considering the Taliban are seen as an invention and puppet of the Pakistani state and its intelligence agency.  The Taliban were able to run roughshod through Afghanistan in the mid-1990s due to funds, ideology, recruits, training, arms and physical support from Islamabad. 

In July Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California, led a delegation of US congressmen who met with Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek leaders in Berlin to discuss their desires for a more federal Afghanistan. Mr. Rohrabacher told The Sunday Telegraph that northern Afghans were not going to just sit by as authority is given to the Taliban to basically control their lives.  Rohrabacher had said: 

"If Karzai tries to bring the Taliban back into the government and our Pakistani friends start trying to muscle their way into a position of dominance in Afghanistan, then I think there will have to be acceptance that the Northern Alliance will try to protect themselves."

Adding to the confusion is the question over exactly who Karzai will be negotiating with because the Quetta Shura has denied that its senior council members are even involved in these discussions.  And supposedly Karzai has cut Mullah Omar and Pakistani leadership out of this particular round altogether. 

The U.S. and NATO have attempted a two pronged strategy to demoralize the Taliban by decapitating its leadership through military means and by playing Taliban elements off one another at the negotiating table.  The assumption is that the Taliban have been especially weakened by recent offensives in Helmand and Kandahar. 

However, although body count-wise General Petraeus has made notable progress since he took command July 4th by executing 1,500 raids that have killed 332 Taliban leaders and 929 fighters and have captured 2,217 insurgents, the General himself knows the U.S. cannot capture and kill its way to victory.  The bottom line is that, according to the New York Daily News, the Taliban held a firm grip over 90% of Afghanistan before the U.S. took Kabul, but NATO and Afghan forces now barely control any turf - even with 100,000 GIs on the ground. 

Some experts believe this strategy could even backfire by providing the insurgency with stronger motivation and more recruits.  In fact, according to the L.A. Times, many Taliban leaders feel they’ve made significant gains, both in territorial terms and their ability to bloody U.S.-led forces. They point with satisfaction to rising Western combat deaths, which are running at their highest levels since the start of the war, and the fact that they have been able to push into more parts of the country during the last two years, even as the Western force was doubling in size.

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