Source: The Vancouver Sun

Clearly there has been a dramatic upheaval when local people think Afghanistan is a safer haven than Pakistan.

That’s just what happened on Monday when United Nations officials reported 20,000 people fleeing across the border into Afghanistan’s Kunar province from Pakistan’s semi-autonomous Bajaur Agency tribal territory.

And within Bajaur, the most northerly of Pakistan’s seven tribal agencies bordering Afghanistan, about 200,000 people — close to half the population — are reported to have fled their homes.

What has driven this exodus is a sustained offensive by Pakistani forces against Taliban and al-Qaida hideouts in Bajaur from which the militants launch attacks against North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops, including Canadians, trying to bring security to Afghanistan.

Senior Pakistani officers say that since the offensive began in August they have killed between 600 and 1,000 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters while losing only a few dozen of their own troops. These numbers are vociferously disputed by Taliban spokesmen.

The Pakistani offensive comes as Asif Ali Zardari, a man heavily dependent on American support for political survival, has taken over as president in Islamabad. Zardari is a good friend of Afghanistan’s president — and another Washington foster child — Hamid Karzai.

And Tuesday, another Washington client with a strong dislike for the Taliban, Lt.-Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, was appointed head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the national spy agency that in the past created and supported the militants.

Pasha’s appointment was announced by another friend of Washington, the head of Pakistan’s army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

So in theory all the main players are lined up for the co-ordinated political and military campaign on both sides of the border that is necessary for any hope of defeating the Taliban. Taliban militants are drawn mainly from the Pashtun tribe whose members live on both sides of the mountainous border country and who refuse to recognize the Durrand Line drawn by the British in the 19th century to divide the two countries.

Although the Taliban and their al-Qaida allies, whose members are mostly Middle Eastern Arabs or Central Asian Islamic fanatics, operate out of all seven of the border tribal agencies, the Pakistani forces and the Americans see Bajaur Agency as the militants’ “central hub.”

It offers some of the least easily attacked crossing points between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also has access to weapons-smuggling routes from Central Asia. In addition, Bajaur has reasonably direct access to central Pakistan where for months the Taliban have been waging a terrorist campaign against the Islamabad authorities.

So the logic behind concentrating the current offensive on Bajaur is clear.

Meanwhile, there are diplomatic moves under way aimed at undermining the political support for the Taliban insurgency. On Monday, Afghanistan’s Karzai told The New York Times he has asked Saudi Arabia to help persuade the Taliban to join peace negotiations.

The Saudi royal family, of course, is the great unindicted conspirator in the entire rise of al-Qaida and militant, fanatical Islam.

For years the Saudi royal family has been exporting its domestic fundamentalist problem by funding puritanical Muslim teachers to set up schools — madrassas — overseas. Among them are dozens in Pakistan’s tribal regions where the Taliban and adherents to other al-Qaida-linked groups are indoctrinated.

Karzai is not the first to try to lean on the Saudis to staunch the flow of money and religious fanatics that keeps al-Qaida alive.

For several years the British, who have a special relationship with Riyadh because they created Saudi Arabia from among a shambles of Bedouin tribes after the First World War and cater in London to this day to the royal family’s less publicly acceptable passions, have been trying the same thing, but without success.

Even before Karzai revealed his negotiating ploy on Monday, the Taliban knocked it on the head, issuing a statement saying there are no negotiations, will be no negotiations and reports that there are negotiations are only propaganda aimed at spreading disunity among Muslims.

That’s not entirely true. Pakistani officers and intelligence agents who once managed the Taliban are beginning to reach out to their former charges, but there’s a long way to go.

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Tags: afghanistan, attacks, Bajaur, Militants, troops