A shadowy new battlefield

[unhappycamper]

A shadowy new battlefield
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Jan 20, 2011

Events of the past two years suggest that the plans of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to scale down its troop numbers in Afghanistan this year is not the beginning of the end of combat operations. Rather, it's a switch to a new plan that aims to facilitate the broader participation of regoinal allies such as Russia, India and the Central Asian Republics for the defeat of the Islamic militancy.

Already, there has been collaboration in Afghanistan between NATO and Russia's anti-drug operatives, while Uzbek President Islam Karimov's 2008 proposal that Western capitals set up a "6+3" initiative group to tackle problems in Afghanistan has been well received. This would include Central Asian countries, the United States and NATO. Uzbekistan is becoming increasingly involved in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. All of this affirms a roadmap of anti-terror operations involving more allies in Afghanistan following the draw-down of NATO forces starting this year.

The Taliban command council in Helmand province in Afghanistan became aware of this shift to involve regional players and responded by sending some of its top-ranking commanders to northern Afghanistan, where in late 2001 the Taliban had been routed by Northern Alliance militias backed by US forces during the invasion that led to the fall of the Taliban in Kabul. Their destinations included Kunduz, Baghlan and Mazar-i-Sharif.

Al-Qaeda's international wing, Jundallah, has also prepared a strategy for northern Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics to nip in the bud the deeper involvement of regional players.

The militant response thus involves the international strategy of al-Qaeda and indigenous Taliban plans, which stand alone at the moment but at some stage they are expected to fuse. Such a fusion would be similar to what occurred in the tribal areas straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan, where three different anti-American forces - pro-Islamic tribalism, the Taliban and al-Qaeda - initially pulled in different directions before eventually fusing into the neo-Taliban.